Darkman (1990)

Sam Raimi has directed a number of movies. If I were a journalist or interested in the least little bit of research, I could tell you how many but I'm not. (All right, all right, 18 films he directed. What am I, IMDB.com?)

I can tell you which movies he's done that I love. Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness. Love love love. He also did the Spiderman movies, but we're not going to dwell on those because I was not a fan. Vent your hatred about that in the comments.

Darkman is a stellar B-movie. Despite the A-list casting of Liam Neeson and Frances McDormand, there is no mistaking this for anything but a B-movie. The scene where Neeson freaks out on a carny pretty much seals the deal. That fact shouldn't put you off seeing it, however, because Raimi excels at directing B-movies. He handles it with a wry humor that elevates what would otherwise be complete dreck.

Now don't think I'm going all warm and fuzzy for it, though. It is definitely a candidate for the WTF Files, rivaled only by Chan-wook Park's vengeance trilogy and the 1966 Batman movie.

On a side note, there is a drinking game that goes with Batman: The Movie but you shouldn't play unless your liver is a professional. Don't try this at home, kids! Simply, every time something in the movie makes your brain hurt you take a drink. To this day, I have no idea what happens past the 30 minute mark.

Back to Darkman. The story works as a superhero origin tale on the surface. Brilliant scientist mutilated in a lab explosion by gangsters, thought to be dead, comes back to kill the bad guys and get the girl. Pretty straightforward. But that's where it starts to come off the rails like that mine cart in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Suddenly, you're careening off the walls from 'Improbable' to 'Definitely Would Have Caused Death'.

There's some Weird Science type shenanigans where he feeds pictures into a computer to make replicas of other people's faces he can wear as disguises. When he is just a humble scientist (with the uber-comic book name of Peyton Westlake) he discovers his skin compound is only stable in the darkness, under direct light it can only hold its shape for 99 minutes before melting. Post-explosion and having taken the moniker Darkman, you would think that he would use his inexhaustible supply of perfect masks and penchant for mimicry to wreak nocturnal havoc among the criminals that messed up his face and stole his woman from him instead of trying to cram all his vengeance into hour and a half intervals.

You would think. And you would be wrong.

So Darkman runs around in the daylight capping gangstas and re-wooing his lady love, Julie. He has to put the rush on everything, though, because he only has 99 minutes until he goes back to looking like the love child of The Phantom of the Opera and The Elephant Man. He fears that seeing his messed-up grill will turn his sweetie's stomach and he's probably on the money, considering that he wasn't cold in the grave before she started dating her boss. In fact, she's really only giving him a second chance because she feels guilty that her finding evidence of her boss' graft (yes, the boss she starts sleeping with after her boyfriend is declared dead) is what got him blown the fuck up to begin with.

Don't even get me started on the burn unit doctor he gets when he's found floating in the river after being barbecued past recognition. Who did she do her residency under? Dr. Mengele? She brags to a bunch of Scrubs-esque interns that severing the nerves in her John Doe's brain stem allows him to recover from the 40% third-degree burns covering him without feeling any pain, even jabbing him with a needle to make her point. "Hello, Hippocratic Oath? Yeah, you can take the day off. We won't be needing you. What? No, Human Experimentation is going to fill in."

I could spend hours talking about what doesn't make sense in this movie. But, you know what? I'm going to buy it anyway. It's fun and, as any three-year-old can tell you, fun doesn't have to make sense. That's why it's fun. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make popcorn and watch Darkman again.