The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Any story that has a hero or heroine usually has a villain of some type. There are many memorable examples of these but not all villains are Super-Villains. Super-Villains are regular villains turned up to 15 on the dial.
Super-Villains are not just criminal masterminds but are criminal geniuses. They will frequently run empires of crime, plan world domination plots, harness Advanced Weaponry and secrets of super-science or even are Mad Scientists. They can have Hypnotism and Mind Control abilities and in Superhero Films they almost invariably have superpowers. They will often wear a costume or hide their identity behind a mask and in comic-book are often known by some motif or take a title. They are sometimes disfigured or mutated and driven by a desire for Revenge.
The first Super-Villain was Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Pulp fiction was alive with evil masterminds like the Chinese super-villain Fu Manchu or silent cinema’s Dr Mabuse. More exotic super-villains featuring some costuming quirk or facial deformity appeared in the Dick Tracy comic-books and this idea was taken up soon after by the Batman comic-book to memorable effect. The comic-book has taken to the super-villain like no other and created a lengthy line of super-powered villains
Super-villains sporadically appeared in the Serials of the 1930s and 40s and in the superhero tv series of the 1950s, although most of these were just mundane criminals. The first major screen super-villains were the nemeses fought by James Bond in the Spy Films of the 1960s and the colourful pantheon of over-acting guest stars on tv’s Batman (1966-8).
The comic-book super-villain gained strength with the maturation of the superhero film in the 1970s and 80s and have regularly appeared on screen since. By the 2000s and 10s, we had even seen a number of films devoted to the villains alone with The Joker, Cat Woman, Harley Quinn and Venom all getting standalone works. There have even been works about super-villain teams like Suicide Squad, not to mention spoof efforts like the Despicable Me films.
Ninth and weakest of the James Bond films. Ian Fleming created a great nemesis in the assassin Scaramanga and the film casts it with Christopher Lee – only to fail to write the role interesting enough for Lee to fill
A cheap Spanish-made copy of the first Christopher Reeve Superman film
Tim Burton’s superlative duo of Batman films were wrecked after Joel Schumacher took up the director’s chair and turned the films into giant camp fests. Here he allows a madly overacting Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones loose as the villains
The seventh James Bond film where Sean Connery was inveigled back to the role with a heft salary increase. However, the result is the worst of all the Connery Bonds with an incoherent plot and uneven action scenes
This reboot of the pop culture icons of 80s/90s is an ugly failure on almost every level. The Turtles I remember were hip, funky and bubbled with boyish enthusiasm; these Turtles seem sinister oversized creations, while the film’s adrenalised over-production and emphasis on grit seems to have missed the essential element of fun
Another of Sony’s films spun off from Spider-Man supporting characters. In the comics, Kraven is a Spider-Man super-villain with a big game hunter motif but here is turned into a superhero
The Asylum made Avengers Grimm as a copycat of The Avengers films, featuring a team-up of fairytale heroines, and so for the release of Suicide Squad they made this sequel featuring a team-up of fairytale villains. Both films are utterly incomprehensible and require you to essentially ignore the originals
SF/action film with a ludicrous premise about a future prison where criminals are turned into holograms. Joe Lara is one lone cop facing an escaped inmate in a hologram body
Shoddy low-budget Canadian-made attempt to jump aboard the Star Wars fad, this promotes itself as a bogus sequel to the H.G. Wells classic
A bad movie classic. As the title explains, we get a revived mummy pitted against an actor in a ridiculously clunky tin man suit. Third in the Mexican-made Aztec Mummy series, the biggest ripoff is that 3/4 of the film consist of footage recycled from the preceding films
Painfully bad attempt to incarnate the comic-book team as live-action tv pilot where the characters are played for comedy in an attempt to mimic the then success of Friends
Prolific bad movie director Mark Polonia offers his own no-budget take on the Transformers films where the Transformers are two men in bulky costume who wrestle one another
This was the eighth of the Carry On films. The popular British comedy series turn their bawdy sights to conducting a spoof the James Bond film during the height of the spy movie fad
This is surely one of the great exploitation titles of all time. Another Mexican wrestling superhero film where a duo of woman wrestlers take on the Aztec Mummy from another Mexican horror series
Possibly the worst film ever made on a big studio budget, Joel Schumacher’s follow-up to Tim Buton’s standout Batman films where he turns everything into an absurd Day Glo realm with a script for two year-olds, campy puns and badly overacting super-villains
Italian-made sequel to the campy Vincent Price starring Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. Directed by the usually great Mario Bava and overrun by the buffoonish clowning of Italian comics Franco and Ciccio
A video-released sequel to the live-action Matthew Broderick film starring French Stewart. This is played as much more of a cartoon and amped to a maximum level of slapstick inanity
A strong contender for Worst Film Ever. Rather than create any effects, it has simply uplifted footage from Star Wars, while the score is a mismash taken from popular films of the era. The dialogue is so bizarrely surreal it makes the brain hurt trying to understand it
The Avengers was the height of 1960s chic. Amid the 90s/00s fad for big screen remakes of tv shows, this was a miscalculated disaster that gets everything about the original wrong from the casting to the droll humour