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by Sanjay Shah
This is a review piece about the fan films out there. Low budget films which are made by fans for the fans all for the love of the characters. Yep I’ll be sifting through and watching a lot of this crap so you don’t have to.
As it’s currently bat season at the films, I thought I’d start off by looking at some Bat related fan flicks. I don’t expect them to be anywhere as good as the new (and expensive) film as I understand raising funds for these things is difficult – that could’ve been money spent on monthly comics and toy figure haul of any self-respecting bat fan but if I have to sit through watching someone with a mommy made costume pretending their garage is the Bat-cave, they will be getting a D for effort.
A short film that presupposes the death of the Dark Knight. Does he finally get laugh-gassed to death by his long standing adversary the Joker? Or is it one of the many other criminals in his freak show of rogues? Maybe even clubbed into an aneurysm with a tea tray by a long suffering Alfred? Nope some hood takes him out in some sort of badly lit warehouse. It could be good?
Bat Entrance: Walks in amid smoke and back lit, impressive enough so far.
Costume: It looks good. It’s the rubber style suit, no bat-nipples and Batman looks like he can move his neck in this.
Action: No physical fights, which is pretty poor seeing as the scene goes from Batman entering the warehouse to him being chained up by a gun pointing thug. Surely if someone is as good at Batman we need to see how a regular hood got the advantage over him.
Dialogue: Most of this is the banter between a tied up Batman and his captor:
Hood: (points gun at Bat-head) You think you know who I am, well you know nothing.
Batman: Do it.
Hood: You killed my dreams.
Batman: Do it!
Hood: Sure, I’m just another bad guy, another notch in your belt.
Batman: DO IT!
It all seems like an elaborate homoerotic cry for help by the film-maker.
Conclusion: The music is wrist-slashingly depressive, well to be fair Batman is about to buy it and I suppose this should emphasise this, although I can almost hear Radiohead on a particulary down day telling the filmaker to lighten up.
The expositional news reports fail to work convincingly and when the director decides to occasionally depart from the scene to do a 24 style multiple shots of action, it’s utterly redundant as there’s nothing going on.
Boringly slow, it really needs much tighter editing. The two characters were as interesting as floor polishing day at Wayne Manor. If anyone ever finds themselves having accidentally ingested Red Bull, speed, coke and various uppers, watch this for immediate effectiveness for a good night’s sleep.
Verdict; I'd rather eat the contents of the bat belt than watch this again.
Stars: 3 out of ten.
This was a CGI Lego short made by students of the 2004 graduating class of The Digital Animation and Visual Effects school and they somehow roped Adam West (Batman), Mark Hamill (Joker), Courtney Thorne Smith (Catwoman) and Dick Van Dyke (Commissioner Gordon) to do the voices.
It’s New Years Eve, The Joker and Harley Quinn have something special planned for the citizens of Gotham.
Bat Entrance: A small montage of Bruce Wayne putting the costume on ending with the mask. Classic and it works.
Costumes: Lego Batman, black and grey with charmingly drawn on looking chest and abs (definitely no bat-nips, here). He moves around the best way a Lego figure can. The other characters look good too, the Joker in particular.
Action: A great car chase sequence with the batmobile, a Harley Quinn hijacked armoured car and Gotham PD. Also Batman taking on Catwoman on a Joker-copter is done well.
Dialogue: It’s all enjoyable in the vein of what we expect of animated Batman shows.
Conclusion: It starts off as a tracking shot from the entrance of Wayne Manor all the way through it and onto a back balcony where a disguised Catwoman is standing and it gets better from there.
A fun little piece, some of the CGI is a bit over ambitious but the whole thing is entertaining enough and there are some nice bat-moments there as they certainly understand the characters.
Stars: 8 out of 10
Batman versus the Joker versus Alien versus Predator.
Bat Entrance: Typical montage of Wayne costume changing but we see the full costume when he’s sitting on a roof top at night with the rain pouring down. It looks great.
Costumes: Not fully the rubber variety and it's a good bat costume, very manoeuvrable and the lighting and rain around him makes Batman look intimidating enough. There's a great shot of him rising up from the ground and the leathery looking bat-cape lifting up around him almost morphed out from the ground itself.
The look of The Joker seems to have been influenced by Dave McKean’s interpretation from Arkham Asylum, the red tinged eyes with the stark white skin; they almost pull it off, good effort there. The Alien and Predator costumes are very good and I'd be interested to know where they got them from.
Action: Some nice action, although it is confined to one alleyway, they seem to have taken their time and choreographed this well enough.
Dialogue: Very minimal, most of it is by the cackling Joker. He does get a bit whiney here and they both start going into a 'you created me' - 'no you created me' pissing contest which didn't work for me.
A lot of fan filmmakers seem to think that the ingredients to playing the Joker means copious amounts of grinning like a stoned asshole with the odd dash of the hoo hoo hee hees and overdoing it with the facial talcum powder. These guys have definitely done better than most here though.
Conclusion: For a short film they've put too many elements into this. If they kept it a bit simpler than it would’ve been more satisfying and as a result the ending could’ve been much stronger. They certainly know how to make the darkness, rain and single light sources work for them and there's a good use of various soundtrack music too. For a fan film Dead End is certainly watchable.
Stars: 8 out of 10
According to the promo blurb it is:
"'Batman: Fanboy' is a fanfilm that is dedicated to all Bat-Fans out there. It's not a normal movie that shows Batman in action. It shows the real world of the Batman fan."
Interesting I thought, maybe a short in the style of Trekkies . Maybe we might see some comicbook creators or filmmakers who worked on the official films being interviewed. Or maybe it's some amusing piece on a guy who like to dress up as a badly costumed bat on the weekend as part of his hobby.
No. I gave this far far too much credit.
It's some grainy black and white short of the day in the life of some German guy. He gets up listening to some bad German rock, he has breakfast, goes to school, peruses a comicshop (I think. By the way the camera was drunkenly moving about I couldn't tell). He comes home to do his schoolwork and browses the net for a while. We cap it all off by a minute of looking at graphic novels on his bookshelves and we watch him reading a comic where it all goes to color for a minute.
No costumes (apart from his bedclothes which we are inflicted to), no Batman (apart from badly filmed comicbook pages) no action, (unless you call doing math homework any type of action), no dialogue (apart from the music of some German band in the background rambling about something of which I'm happy I don't understand). Only a feeble message of how comics color up his usual dreary life.
I've drunkenly thrown up in back alleys and upon viewing the upchuck through my inebriated vision I've seen better short films than this utter mess.
Stars: 1 out of 10 (and that's just because I was so thankful it ended quicker than I thought it would)
Posted by YourMomsBasement at June 21, 2005 03:47 PM
