Superhero Media: Dragon Ball Z - Return of Cooler

Return of Cooler has a reputation for being one of the cheapest looking Dragon Ball productions ever, and whilst it's visually not great, I certainly have seen far worse back in the dim days of the 1990s, where we grabbed whatever anime we could find at the back of the video store. When New Namek is attacked by the hilariously named Big Ghetty Star, a call is put out to Earth and soon the Z Fighters arrive to discover an army of robots lead by none other than Cooler! Who is now also a robot and called "Meta Cooler" because anime. Aside from the Androids and some other Red Ribbon stuff, DB doesn't feature a great deal of people fighting robots, so Return of Cooler gets points for at least having some unique moments of action and an enemy that can't be overcome with the character's usual tactics. Seeing the team with bruised and torn hands from punching metal makes me wonder why there aren't more robots kicking around the franchise. 

Much as with the previous film, it's the antagonist of Return of Cooler that I find the most interesting, not simply Cooler himself, but the whole package of the Big Ghetty Star, which has a fun mix of Borg, Skynet and Galactus. Born of an "Intelligent Computer Chip" that began to assimilate all around it, the Big Ghetty Star became a major threat when it found the remains of Cooler floating through the void, and added physical power to it's machine abilities. That's a pretty solid villain origin right there, and I could easily see the Guardians of the Galaxy or Green Lantern Corps taking on something like that with minimal modifications. The Big Ghetty Star consumes all in its path, using biological matter of all kinds to fuel itself, throwing it in the Galactus/Unicron ballpark pretty handily, and I can see there may be a possible connection to DBGT's planet M-2 and the Machine Mutants, if you like that kind of thing. 

Is Return of Cooler the first piece of DB media where Goku and Vegeta have to team up to win? I honestly much prefer it to either fighting alone for the thousandth time, even if they have a habit of taking turns rather than actually working together. The ending is pretty unsatisfying, with Goku and Vegeta suddenly being too powerful for Cooler and the Big Ghetty Star to handle, despite almost being dead, and the rotting, Borg-esque, "Core Cooler" seems like a waste of a really cool design. That said, Return of Cooler is probably better than most give it credit for, even with the dodgy animation and rather bland story, because at least there is some variation in theme and look over the normal DBZ fare. I have to say that I was pretty tired of these films, but Return of Cooler has given me a little boost that will at least get me through the next few.

Thinking Out Loud: Serial Killer "Heroes"

After the success of serial killers as villains in 1980s and '90s comics, where was there left to go? Naturally, make some of them into heroes. Now, I'm not talking about The Punisher here, Frank is pretty much never represented as a sociopath or psychopath and his approach is pragmatic, not psychosexual in any way. What about Venom? Certainly some publications featuring the character as a protagonist lean in heavy on the murder and mayhem, but I want to go even deeper. I was actually watching the second season of Hannibal, when a man in a pneumatically-powered, cave bear-themed murder suit was jumping through a window, and my first thought was, "Wait, shouldn't this guy be fighting Spider-Man instead?" After doing some quick thinking about how to make an appropriate miniature, I went to considering the titular Hannibal's plan to create a "team" of serial killers and how that may work in comics. After a minute or two, I dismissed the idea as being pretty terrible and generally the kind of thing an adolescent would think up. 

Thankfully, I'm not one of those Psych graduates who has an intense interest in psychopaths, sociopaths and serial killers (despite The Silence of the Lambs being my favourite film), so I'm not likely to look at a murderous antihero like Kaine or Red Hood (Jason Todd) and be instantly enthralled. However, if I was the only kind of comics fan, basically the entire industry would be Invincible, Marvel NOW! Hawkeye and Atomic Robo, so maybe that's a good thing? Anyway, thanks to the "success" of the Venom film, as well as people misinterpreting why the Deadpool[s] and Logan were so good, a resurgence of the "Killer" superhero is happening in comics, television and film, leaving me sighing quite a bit as supposedly grown men get excited about Carnage being on the big screen. Hell, don't get me started on Joker, I'm actually glad that the COVID-19 pandemic canceled PAX Melbourne 2020 just so I didn't have to see 200 guys dressed like sad clowns while they complained about Captain Marvel not having a masculine narrative structure. Ok, this one's getting a bit off-topic, sorry. 

The serial killer is a fascinating bogeyman for audiences because they look so much like us but are so different in many ways. Pretty much everyone has indulged in a brief fantasy of murdering an overbearing manager, frustrating customer or significant other of our object of desire, but killing as a sexual release is utterly alien to us. Hannibal Lecter, Zodiac and Joker are fascinating and engaging villains because they are unknowable in terms of motivation (Joker less so as writers keep going back to the well of diminishing returns that is his origin). Heroes, on the other hand, even antiheroes, have pretty clear motivations, be they guilt (Spider-Man), duty (Captain America), altruism (Superman) or even revenge (Batman); but turning that to "getting my rocks off with violence" only worked in Watchmen. And Watchmen, just to reiterate for those still in denial about this, is not intended to glorify its characters. As interesting as they are to think about, Hooded Justice, The Comedian and Rorschach aren't heroes for the ages, and don't really need their own series or films to "fill out", as there's not that much there to begin with.

Superhero Media: V for Vendetta (2006)

It's been quite a while since I reviewed the graphic novel, so I really probably left V for Vendetta a little long, but by Odin's beard, this is a great film. Dropping some of the more absurd elements of the comic, condensing the story and updating it, V for Vendetta is slick, fun and still manages to be really smart in a lot of places. As an anarchist myself, I definitely identify more with the V of the film than the comics, as there is a lot more focus on the people of England coming around to a more humanistic point of view and deciding to change, rather than being forced. Not that I'd recommend V for Vendetta, in any form as a grounding text for contemporary anarchist thought, check out The Accidental Anarchist for that. Back to this amazing film, how good is the cast? Rather than populating the leads with Hollywood actors, only Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman aren't major fixtures of British film and television, and both manage their accents and mannerisms perfectly. Hell, just how good is Weaving to get all that emotion through a mask and gloves for the entire film? 

There is a reliance on style and theme in V for Vendetta that can weaken the impact on subsequent viewings, for example, V's plan depends on everything going exactly the way he predicted, but I feel that viewing it as some kind of "grounded thriller" is missing the point. V for Vendetta needs to be at least somewhat "over the top", as telling a straight story about violently resisting fascism gets weirdly ignored, just like in real life, where people seem to think ANTIFA is a terrorist organisation, despite being anti-terror and not really an organisation in the political sense. Sorry about that, but I stumbled across a Hard-Right reading of V for Vendetta whilst researching it online and I'm both baffled and furious that V, who is a minority put into a death camp by a fascist military dictatorship and carves an inverted Anarchism symbol into a propaganda poster, is somehow resonating with morons who think universal health care is communism. Maybe we do need a humanist revolution after all... 

Probably my favourite part of V for Vendetta that people seem to forget is the Stephen Fry sequence where he's hosting a campy variety show and they run a little pantomime number with both Hugo Weaving and John Hurt. This is the kind of fun that doesn't seem to make it into too many American action films, even factoring in the lack of a panto tradition in the USA. I think those who didn't grow up with the level of exported British television that I did aren't always aware that essentially every British actor has done some combination of Shakespeare, Pantomime, Doctor Who and/or Midsummer Murders; it's actually a fun drinking game to take a shot every time an actor in a new programme has been killed in Midsummer Murders. That V for Vendetta is destined for Cult Classic status is obvious, but I think it deserves more than that, as a film, it's slick, smart and carries a humanist message that is pretty rare for big blockbusters.

Even More Superhero Movies that Never Happened

This should really be the last of these for a while, especially as none of these films ever made it out of pre-production, with a bit of the casting being wish-lists and scripts never finished. With only one exception, I'm pretty glad that none of these never got up, as none of them sounded too interesting or that capable of being good. Ok, maybe two? But the second one is more about seeing what the director would have done than it being a decent film in its own right.


Spider-Man 4 

There is a lot of conflicting information online as to what a potential 4th Sam Rami Spider-Man outing could have looked like, with just about every Spidey antagonist, from Black Cat to Scorpion, but the main lead seems to be around Curtis Conners (as played by Dylan Baker) becoming The Lizard. Seriously, just about every internet film site has a different "leaked script" to work from, and all of them claim to have the real deal. After seeing how the conflict between Rami and the studio affected Spider-Man 3, I think not getting this one is more like dodging a bullet than missing out on anything.

Hellboy III 

Yes, I really wanted this one, and I maintain it's a shame that it never materialised. However, after the smaller return on Hellboy II, and with the plan being an end-of-the-world story with a downer ending, Hollywood just would have never gotten there. Sometimes what's good and what's going to make the studio a bunch of money just aren't close and we get a mediocre reboot rather than the finale of a unique series in the Superhero genre. Think about it, in the "Demonic Superhero" film sub-sub-genre, Hellboy is the ONLY worthwhile entry, being great even factoring in that the competition is Spawn and Faust Love of the Damned. How would this have gone? I'm not sure, but given how amazing the previous two outings were, this one really does feel like a loss.

Justice League Mortal

The idea of what Justice League Mortal could have been, especially in the wake of the 2017 version being disappointing, has become a flag for diehard DC fans to flock to, but my interest in it is more from a construction standpoint. As it stands, the intended director of this film would have been Australian legend, George Miller of Mad Max fame, and seeing him taking a swing at a Justice League inspired by both the Bruce Timm DCAU and Mark Waid comics version. I'm not sure that Miller would have been a good choice for the tone, and I maintain that John Stewart is too thin a character to carry anything grander than a cartoon, but there was potential there and had it been made, perhaps the face of the DC films would have been vastly different.


That Shitty James Cameron Spider-Man 

Not only could this have been a terrible film in it's own right, it may well have been so bad that it could have conceivably scuppered the entire Superhero Film industry for years. Featuring none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger as Doctor Octopus (who is calling himself "Spider-Man" for some reason), Peter Parker would have been a student of Doc Ock before getting his powers, and the two would have battled, along with a giant robot spider on top of the World Trade Center. Cameron is a decent director, no doubt about that, even if I'm not really a big fan myself, but the details that have leaked about this project leave little room for favorable interpretation. Much like former entries, YouTube is full of little documentaries about this that go into far more detail than I can really do here, if that's of interest to you. 

Superhero Media: Captain Britain and MI13

Been a long time since I ran my SuperSystem RPG campaign based on this comic (and Alan Moore's run on "Captain Britain"), but if you haven't heard of it, Captain Britain and MI13 may well be one of the best comics you've never read. Written by Paul Cornell, decent Doctor Who novel writer, poor Doctor Who television writer and reasonable comics writer, Captain Britain and MI13 starts in the middle of the Secret Invasion crossover event, as British heroes battle the Skrulls for the control of Earth's magic. Answering the call are Captain Britain, Union Jack, Spitfire, Black Knight and Pete Wisdom, having to battle the Skrulls in their midst as well as the invading forces, before Avalon and the Fae realms fall to the enemy. Through the death of Captain Britain, the freeing for Merlin from the dark realms and Brian Braddock being reborn more powerful than ever before, and wielding Excalibur, Britain is saved from the Skrulls and a new team is born, MI13. 

Union Jack makes his own way with MI5, but pops up in the story here and there, with Dr Faiza Hussein joining the team as the new wielder of Excalibur and Blade, yes, the Daywalker, signing on as well, because he's actually British, believe it or not. In the second volume the team takes on obscure magical foe Doctor Polkta, a Duke of Hell and Master of the Mindless Ones, who has taken over a Birmingham block of flats, before the dial gets turned to eleven and the team battle Dracula himself, with his army of vampires invading England from the Moon. No, I didn't make any of that up. In a smaller title like Captain Britain, Paul Cornell is free to go nuts in a way a writer never could in a more popular book, which is great, but the only thing better than Captain Britain punching Dracula in the face, is that the whole series is actually well-written, with compelling characters and good moments of humour. 

Naturally, this series, sadly canceled early, is way up the top of my list for properties I want adapted into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, there are a lot of great Captain Britain stories, and it would be great to see the Corps and The Fury show up, but Captain Britain and MI13 is almost perfectly set up for a big screen trilogy already. The first adventure need not be tied into the "Secret Invasion" plot, but could piggyback onto any big Avengers moment, then the next two films follow on into "Hell Comes to Birmingham" and "Vampire State". The cast is already reasonably diverse, a little fiddling of the Meggan elements is needed, but even dropping her and bringing Faiza and Black Knight's relationship more into the fore is a reasonable possibility. Sadly, the three volumes of Captain Britain and MI13 aren't all that easy to get your hands on, with the print runs of all but the first volume being pretty small and not in the typical Marvel covers, but if you can find it, it's a great series that I go back to again and again. Hopefully, Cornell will get another run at the team one day, but what is there is great.

Thinking Out Loud: Serial Killer Villians

In the grim and dark reality of 1990s comics, a new kind of villain emerged, edgier and more dangerous that what had come before it; the Serial Killer. Murderous villains had been a thing since the Golden Age, of course, with even The Owl and Egghead racking up the odd kill, but with the change in tone and market that came with the Dark/Iron Age, things changed. Suddenly, rather than taking on costumed criminals or mob bosses, Daredevil and Batman were fighting The Surgeon General and Mr Zsasz. Now, a superhero fighting a murderer isn't the worst thing in the world, especially for the more detective style characters like Batman and Daredevil, but how about someone more lighthearted in tone, like Spider-Man? So I, personally, find Venom to be a pretty uninteresting villain, but much of his original run is good and as the "glass darkly" version of Spider-Man, he does well enough. Naturally, Venom wasn't hardcore enough for the 1990s, so along came Carnage. 

Not only was Carnage even "worse" than Venom, his first host was a serial killer (Cletus Cassidy), he was red, and his super powers let him make nasty bladed weapons. Yawn. Sure, there have been a couple of decent Carnage stories, I remember one where the symbiote was hopping people to escape attention that was a fun mystery, but "edgier Venom" can never be that interesting when Venom is just "edgier Spider-Man". But back to Mister Zsasz, who immediately gets points for having a palindrome name, he's enjoyed something of an upswell in fans thanks to his appearances in Arkham City and Birds of Prey, and I actually don't mind him as an antagonist; most of the time. In the tie-in issues for Batman: No Man's Land, there's a story where Dr Leslie Thompson elects to treat an injured and unconscious Zsasz despite the danger; it's an interesting story with some ethical dilemma and is a nice break from the main story. That is, unit Zsasz starts killing people in his sleep. Yes, he's so deadly, he murders people whilst unconscious. Odin's beard is that dumb. 

So what am I getting at will all this complaining? Well, the 1990s were not a great time for comics, though I maintain there was plenty of gold if you looked, but it's still pretty much all stuff that happened, and comics love keeping track of stuff that has happened. So now, when we look back and go, "man, Maximum Carnage is really pretty bad", it kind of doesn't matter because Carnage is still here, he never went away. In fact, pretty much all of the Serial Killer Super Villains are still with us, and will now be forever. What's bugging me about that is how much I see the trope pop up in indy comics, even when it doesn't really fit. Hell, as great as it is, Invincible is already pretty violent, so did Conquest really add anything as a character or was it just a fun fight? I know when we homebrew our settings, we want a Joker or a Venom, but does that really fit? Hell, is it at least interesting? What does Zodiac or BTK in a colourful costume add to your story other than an excuse for buckets of blood? Think on that and we'll examine the flip-side of the coin later down the track.

Superhero Media: Man-Thing (2005)

If you want deep cuts, I hope you know to come here, as today we'll be covering the 2005 Man-Thing film adaptation by Marvel Studios and Lions Gate Films. Filmed in Australia, for tax reasons, the two biggest names in the piece are Jack Thompson, Aussie screen legend, and Rachael Taylor, Patsy Walker from Jessica Jones, but Steve Gerber, creator of Man-Thing and Howard the Duck, has a decent role as a racist security guard. When Kyle Williams, the new Sheriff, is transferred to a small bayou town, he is confronted by a corrupt Oil Baron, a well-meaning schoolteacher, enigmatic natives and the Man-Thing. Rather than drawing too much on the esoteric underground comics that made Gerber and Man-Thing popular in the first place, Man-Thing uses the titular monster as a generic antagonist for a by-the-numbers horror outing set in the Dirty South. Honestly, that was probably a sound decision, as much as I love classic "Man-Thing" comics, they're fucking weird and would not make a good film. 

For what it is, Man-Thing is reasonable, if cliched, with many of the actors, Thompson especially, giving the script the best they have and the practical effects are nice. Being, partially, a Film Australia joint, I found a wealth of material on Man-Thing in the Australian Film Archive, and it's shocking just how much effort went into a film this poor. Way back in my review of Constantine, I spoke about the brilliant work that went into the props for the film, and much the same happened in Man-Thing, with the cadavers being especially well-made, but Man-Thing himself is disappointingly too often cheap CGI. It feels like the art department understood that Man-Thing was a living creature of swamp debris, but only had issues of "Swamp Thing", as Ted Slais' iconic face roots are nowhere to be seen. Although the words, "All those who fear burn at the Man-Thing's touch" are used a couple of times in the film, the titular character is not really a major feature of what's going on, more just turning up to murder people when needed. 

I had to get a friend who runs a rare DVD import business to track down my copy of Man-Thing, though a quick look online tells me that it's not all that hard to find, especially if you don't mind getting a French copy. It's interesting to watch this film, even if it isn't great and really isn't a true adaptation of any "Man-Thing" comics. Again, I think a Man-Thing film that adheres closely to the comics would be difficult to realise, though adding the character to something like a Howard the Duck film, or perhaps Doctor Strange could work, much how he ended up in Werewolf By Night. One of the best Man-Thing related things I have read was in a Hulk comic, where Salis's empathy powers bond him to a serial killer and Professor Hulk has to chase both down across the Delta. There's something to this concept, and whilst a misstep, Man-Thing is at least an attempt to get a more obscure character onto the big screen.

Ultimate Alliance Annihilation - Prelude I

The chromed gleam of Ulysses' iconic skull helmet was reflected in the view window of the bathyspheroid as he gazed out onto the edge of a nearby universe. A relic of an adventure long-past, the bathyspheroid was a unique, alchemically-powered machine that enabled a small crew to "dive" through multiversal boundaries and peer into a reality without entering it fully. The size of an average caravan, with only a kitchenette and marine style bathroom, the bathyspheroid was designed for two people at most, but today, five were standing in it's brass-heavy, but tastefully understated interior, taking in the sight through the view window. Made of a section of a massive, flawless diamond, the technology of the bathyspheroid placed a molecules-thick sliver of the window into the "target" reality, allowing observation and only risking being spotted by those with microscopic vision. 

Joining Ulysses on the bathyspheriod was a small collection of his most loyal advisors, drawn from both his Hussars and Cataphractii; he had brought them here to witness the beginning of the end. Though most realities were finite in nature, few had an edge or boundary in the way most imagined it, the current example of "The Crunch" being a typical example; a scar of energy across empty space where another universe pushed into this one. Built around this event horizon was The Kyln, an impossibly ancient and cyclopean structure of unknown origin and purpose, currently used as combination power generator and prison for the inhabitants of the Andromeda galaxy. Ulysses raised one hand, palm up, his suit generating a holographic display buzzing with information and analytics, but dominated by a countdown, implying that something was only minutes away from beginning.

At a verbal command from Ulysses, a retrofitted databank began to record the scene outside the view window. The mood inside the bathyspheriod shifted from tense anticipation to muted horror as the Kyln was ripped apart by an explosion the size of a solar system. Though sound did not travel through the vacuum of space, the view window vibrated slightly as the reality they watched trembled, almost as in anticipation, or revulsion. Even at the cosmic distance Ulysses and his companions were from the Crunch, they could see the change that came over it as something ripped through from another reality. The amorphous blob of sickly green that pushed through the multiversal boundary slowly resolved as it spread into the invaded reality, revealing billions of living ships, devouring all in their path. 

"It comes, and there is no escape," Ulysses broke the silence, "he has come, the Living Death That Walks. Annihilus is here."