Another scary, but not intentional, film

My second installment of this moth's scary bad.

Spawn is a comic that I only read the first ten issues and it still holds some memory. Sadly, it was not the story I have memories of, it was the artwork. This was a looking comic more than a reading comic for me. Sure there was a tale of loss, love and revenge all set against a backdrop of demons and Hell. I should have been all over this, but I just wasn't.

Well this comic created a movie, like many do. It was the typical origin story of Al Simmons and his whirlwind life of black ops stuff that eventually gets him killed and has make a deal with the devil (or one of Hell’s higher level functionaries) to return to his beloved wife Wanda. Along the way the deal goes akimbo and Al Simmons is now a soldier in the army of Hell. This once again should be right in my wheel house, but the movie application was so awful it left me with chills and nightmares. How could something based on pretty pictures, demons and a tale of revenge fail so badly?

First, it was a PG-13 movie. It takes a certain kind of person to take material that should be R rated and make a descent PG-13 movie out of it. The source material does not translate well when it has to be watered down for the “Let’s get those kids in here!” rating. However, even if this was rated R, like it should have been, it probably would not have saved the film

Second, is the acting is pretty abysmal. Spawn/Al Simmons (played by Michael Jai White) attempt at broody and angry is over the top laughable bad. Martin Sheen, who is supposed to be a good actor, is just awful as a villain. John Leguizamo is just how you expect him to be; big, loud and flamboyant. He might be the high point as Violator/Clown, but is that just because everything else around him sucks so bad? Everyone else is sadly forgettable much like this movie.

Third we have problems with pacing and plot. The movie runs break neck and slams to a halt a few times. That makes it hard to watch. The origin story stuff had to be thrown in to get the majority of the audience to understand who Spawn is. I get that. The side story about Spawn getting his dog back. What? The heart bomb to stop people from killing you. Um....we all die sometime. Who does this? Cogliostro is in the film and kind of a waste as Spawn's mentor. Why bother with him? Then the ending has him atop a roof ala Batman looking to defend the town. What is that about? He is no caped crusader!

Last  is the horrible computer animation. This stuff was just incredibly bad. The signature Spawn cape looked awful. The textbook hellspawn chains looked ridiculous. The giant fight scenes with Violator and Spawn looked bad and were even recycled during  the movie. The scenes in Hell were atrocious, just lots of fire and some sort of walkway made of meat or something. Malebolgia was badly animated and seems to have a case of lockjaw. Hell’s army looked like a crowd background from an early PlayStation sports or WWF game or maybe a mosh pit gone wrong. You get the idea. The computer effects ,even for the this time , were bad and a complete mess.

The concept of Spawn was descent the delivery was frighteningly terrible and worthy of the title of scary, but not intentional, film.