#darkman

-The actors playing the villains are trying their best, they're hamming it up, but they don't have the charisma Larry Drake had playing Robert G Durant, so it all falls kind of flat.

-It's interesting it kind of soft retcons the first movie - Westlake is retconned to have looked like Vosloo before the accident rather than Neeson, they reshoot scenes from the first Darkman to have Vosloo in the role of Westlake when he was mutilated.

When I saw Darkman II, I thought the idea was that Vosloo's face was a disguise Westlake was wearing to distance himself from his original identity, but it looks like apparently now that's meant to be what he looked like all along.

A shame - because that would have been a clever way to get around the recasting.

-The guy who played the mobster bad guy of this movie looked so much like John Travolta to me. am i just face blind?

The Travolta comparisons occurred to me because this movie has some of the strongest similarities to Face/Off in any of these films - Westlake, in one of his more unhinged moments, disguises himself as Rooker and begins to fall in love with Rooker's neglected wife. Very similar to the situation in Face/Off, if you'll recall - the shadiness of the 'shapeshifting into the person's lover' thing.

-There are some good gruesome bits in this I won't spoil - the pliers, the industrial shredder at the climax, I thought those were both good.

-Rooker's plot in this is to steal Darkman's super-adrenal DNA and sell it on the street as a steroid - he's also out to get the soon-to-be-elected DA who's on the verge of shutting his operation down.

So when he and his scientist ally figure out Darkman's adrenal fluids and put them in four presumably disposable thugs, their plan is, I shit you not, to have the thugs tear the DA apart on stage as he's giving his acceptance speech after the election. It obviously goes poorly - they never even touch Mitchell! The cops shoot two of them dead on the spot, I think without even a single one dying?

-There are a couple of logical leaps and inconsistencies I won't get into - this movie isn't that long, and there's nothing in here I can really get mad at, but I can't think of anyone I'd really recommend this to - without Durant, this franchise loses a lot of its sauce, and this movie's plot specifically, you can find done better in Face/Off.

Hilariously, scrolling the Wikipedia page, this was apparently a (possibly unintentional) prototype or sounding board for Face/Off before its release. Darkman already reminded me of Face/Off mixed with the Shadow and RoboCop, this just cements the comparison in my head. Darkman 90 and Face/Off might make a perfect double feature.

-I'd say my recommendation is: definitely check out Darkman 90 no matter what, check out Darkman II if you liked that and you're already into pulp hero style stuff, but probably skip this one.

The plot of the movie revolves around Durant coming back on the scene after the events of the last movie - he decides the best way to do this is to break a particle beam weapon scientist out of an insane asylum, sell those particle beams for a hundred million bucks to a neo-Nazi sympathizing Texan plutocrat, let him kill all the rival gangs in the city that popped up in his absence, wait for his batteries to run out, and then kill him and take back his spot. Darkman's gotta stop him.

-Liam Neeson had better things to do than be in these direct to video remakes, so they found a new guy to play Peyton Westlake. He's fine. Inscrutable accent. I like that the face Darkman chose looks like just some guy, like Stabler from Law and Order if he was more generic. (That would be pre-bald Stabler, when he had the receding hairline.)

I found out after watching the movie that the faint sense of recognition I got from Vosloo, Neeson's replacement, was because he was Imhotep in the Mummy movies. Who knew?

-The female characters in this are underwhelming, unfortunately - the men get these incredible over-the-top performances to do but the women are restricted to fairly dull archetypes you've seen before, not really even good performances, but hard to blame them because there's not much to work with.

-The actor playing Robert G. Durant, Darkman's arch nemesis, is back in this movie, and he's the best part - his performance is incredible - he's a perfect pulp villain. Has to be seen to be appreciated. The movie does not bother to explain why Durant is still in the picture, he just is - it's a perfect homage to old school pulp serial logic. Don't worry, he was just fine when that happened at the end of the first movie.

-I have to give plaudits to Ivan Druganov, the ex-KGB special forces operative who finds himself working for Durant. They give him so many excellent lines. They ask him if the plutonium cells they're using for the particle beam weapons are stable. He responds - "These cells were manufactured by technicians in workers' paradise of Eastern Uzbekistan. Only finest Yugoslavian materials were used in their engineering. They are reliable as your Ford Pinto."

-Perkins, the plutocrat mentioned in my plot outline above, is a great performance - lovely pulp side antagonist, excellent.

Perkins: You've revolutionized the right to bear arms in this country!

Durant: More like the far right to bear arms.

-I could quote like five more one-liners that made me laugh out loud, but I'll spare you all.

(I couldn't find a working download for this movie so I had to settle for a dailymotion upload without subtitles. I hate dailymotion, it's got a lot of lag and that stupid pause screen stays up for way too long whenever you move the cursor. So minor technical difficulties, but nothing that really inhibited the watchthrough.)

I had a good time with this movie, but it doesn't have the emotional pathos of Darkman 90. It's a lot siller, it's a good pulp hero movie but that's about its ceiling. If you like over the top pulp hero violence, this movie is for you. If you like that some pulp heroes never use guns and just go with insanely convoluted means of disposing of bad guys, boy will you love this movie.

Part of the plot towards the climax is that Darkman plans to kill Durant through a means of poisoning that seems doomed to failure from the start, instead of just sneaking in and shooting him or something. I know your brain was broken when they severed your nervous system, but come on man lol.

Only thing that really fuzzes it for me are a few occasionally iffy performances here and there, but it's nothing that really ruins the movie. Super atmospheric, a complete blast.

Darkman is an excellent pulp hero archetype - scary, unpredictable, passionate, driven - a version of the Shadow that the audience finds almost as monstrous as the villains.

Darkman's gimmick is, that after thugs give him chemical burns that melt the skin off his face and arms, he's found floating in the river by an unethical research firm, who sever part of his nervous system so that he doesn't feel pain from the horrific chemical burns, but because the brain lacks that stimulus of sensation from the face and arms, his emotions are more passionate, felt more strongly, he produces more adrenaline (Just go with it, it's pulp science).

And, as it so happens, Darkman was a scientist named Peyton Westlake studying 3D-printed synthetic skin, whose big stopping block was that, after around 99 minutes of exposure to the light, melts. So many good gimmicks and limitations on this character. Everything about Darkman's design and writing is genius. (I love his fucked up jury-rigged laboratory in an abandoned factory, too.)

Darkman is very clearly taking influence from old Shadow pulps in this. The masks and disguise element lovingly borrowed from the Shadow and repurposed - Darkman spends more time sneakily maneuvering in this than engaging in classic pulp hero fisticuffs.

Critically, Darkman is not that good a fighter. Like, he can throw a punch. But that is not his preferred way of dealing with people. His preferred way is insane sadistic mind games.

Neeson does a great job portraying Darkman in this - his relationship with Julia, his pre-accident girlfriend is so obviously doomed to failure, she's cagey about committing, she says 'it depends' when asked if she would still love him with scars, and Westlake's desperate single mindedness to save it is so ominous and offputting, you have no idea where his passions and rage will lead him. I was glad they went where they did in the climax.

The villains in this are also phenomenal - Durant is compelling and cool from the jump, but his boss, Shrack, was a pleasant surprise - I figured they were going to go for 'real estate yuppie in over his head outmaneuvered by criminal sociopath', but uh, well. Watch the movie and find out, he was an unexpectedly great component of the film.

so I could put it on a shirt for personal use.

Darkman (1990)

Director: Sam Raimi

Cinematographer: Bill Pope

Tech Specs:

— Aspect Ratio: 1.85: 1

— Cameras: Arriflex Cameras and Lenses

— Negative Format: 35 mm

'Darkman' by Ben Turner.

Officially licensed 24" x 36" lithograph print, in a numbered limited edition of 160 for £39.99.

A brilliant scientist (Liam Neeson) left for dead returns to exact revenge on the people who burned him alive.

Director: Sam Raimi.

Screenplay by Sam Raimi, Chuck Pfarrer, Ivan Raimi, Daniel Goldin and Joshua Goldin.

Producers: Rob Tagert and Daryl Kass.

Composer: Danny Elfman.