Welcome to another installment of the TRASH BIN, where we watch the worst movies Hollywood has to offer,
according to the critics, and give you our thoughts, good or bad. Over the
course of this month we’ve been talking a lot of horror, and earlier this month
we had a Trash Bin on a different horror film. This week, we’re going to
superhero horror with the abomination of a film...SPAWN.
Spawn is the 1997 bringing
to the big-screen of the 1990s Seth McFarlane comic book anti-hero Spawn. This
film is about an assassin/soldier who gets burned to death, sent to hell, and turned
into a hell-spawn who chooses to be an antihero using his powers to get revenge
and help stop nefarious plans afoot in the film. This film was directed by Mark
A.Z. Dippé. It stars Michael Jai White as Spawn and features John Leguizamo,
Martin Sheen, Theresa Randle, Nicol Williamson, D.B. Sweeney, and Melinda
Clarke in supporting roles. My description of this film as an abomination was
not in jest, it is terrible.
There is really not much this film does right. There are a
couple shots where we see Spawn in full costume which, as a casual fan, was
cool to see. Martin Sheen has a couple well delivered lines. The fact they
brought a character as bold as Spawn to screen is impressive? I’m really
stretching here.
Now, for negatives… those are aplenty. The biggest negative
(because it permeates the entirety of the film) are the horrifyingly bad visual
effects. For the time these were probably bold and interesting (as Roger Ebert
seemed to think) but they were very much in the early period of computer
effects and they look terrible. Dippé is well known in the special effects
world (especially in early computer effects) with the outstanding work he did
in the visual effects departments on Jurassic
Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Instead of using the computer visuals that were limited at the time to specific
things and doing them expertly, he took his knowledge and power as the director
to go whole hog and use tonnes of computer effects throughout this film. The sheer
volume coupled with the limitations of the time lead to a film filled to the
brim with awful and totally unrealistic shots that take you totally out of it
and make the dark disturbing story that Spawn should have into something
laughable.
 |
| Yes, this is a real shot from the movie. And the movement is as bad as you think it would be. |
In addition to the laughably bad visuals, it has laughably
bad performances. They are all over the top and lack any of the emotional depth
they seek to convey. Many of the supporting performances are very bland and
uninteresting and the lead performances are painful in their own ways. White is
consistently overacting things through his prosthesis throughout and we lose
the emotional layers in the character due to the general over-the-top-ness of
it all. Martin Sheen has a good moment or two, but is mostly a moustache
twirling villain (even if he isn’t the films main antagonist). And then there
is John Leguizamo as the Clown (or SPOILERS
the Violator). This is the most ridiculous performance in this film and it was
on-screen torture for me every moment he was there until the very end of the
film. He’s a clown so he’s creepy to begin with, but then he adds performance
layers to it that just don’t fit with that image or the overall demonic
aesthetic of the film. His performance elicited several eye-rolls and when he SPOILERS ends up serving as a main
villain in the film it became extremely, extremely frustrating to see. This is
one of the worst performances in a superhero movie and just put me well off
from the film.
Finally, this film just fails at the basic task of being an interesting
film or good adaptation of the original material. The basic plotline really
centers around this emotional drama that we couldn’t connect with because of
the bad acting and the film failed to incorporate the badassery that was Spawn
in the comic books. The film has action scenes it certainly thinks are cool,
but as a viewer they most definitely weren’t. We didn’t see him wasting fools
in an interesting way or doing anything interesting at all. This is the most grievous
failure for a film and it is definitely committed in Spawn.
This is definitely an interesting historical artifact and it’s
easy to see where people might have thought the comic book movie genre would
die in the late 1990s. This film is a black mark on the genre to be sure (and
on Spawn for that matter, unfortunately). If you want to watch this for
posterity, go for it. Just be ready for terrible visuals, potentially even
worse acting, and the total failure to be interesting and/or a good adaptation
of any of the source material. I really don’t like this film and it deserves to
be in the Trash Bin.
CRITICS' SCORES:
Rotten Tomatoes: 19%
Metacritic: 34
Roger Ebert: 3.5/4
IMDb: 5.2/10
RYAN'S SCORE: 1/10
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