Writing about imitation and homage in adult films and it’s led me down a rabbit hole of ‘90s take-offs, including… Splatman (1992), a rather charming and inventive take-off on Batman Returns which makes lots of callbacks to the Batman TV series. Madison carries the movie as the Catwoman stand-in, but I also have to give props to the late Cal Jammer as… Bruce Stain/Splatman. And I’m not gonna lie — I remember seeing the box cover for this one in the video stores back in the day, so call me curious.
Take-offs were there at the dawn of the Golden Age. Radley Metzger had already adapted Camille and Carmen into Camille 2000 and Carmen, Baby, and Roberta Findlay held close to her literary inspirations — Fantasex being a take-off on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The list goes on. Both Cecil Howard’s Illusion of Love (1975) and Roger Watkins Midnight Heat (1983) borrow liberally from Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève (1938).
The ‘80s brought us Paul Vatelli’s work, some of the best ever made (Bodies in Heat, Stiff Competition, Beverly Hills Cox), but the video era ushered in an excessive amount of take-offs, most of them awful. The golden age had its share of lazy cash-ins, but the box-cover era took it to a whole new level.
