“Sometimes I wake up at night and wonder… Is this hell?”

In the final days of the dark ages of comic book movies a renaissance was brewing. Soon, superheroes would no longer be laughable wacky characters in tight bright lycra suits. Soon, Hollywood would no longer consider them a niche product, made solely for men who still live with their grandparents. Soon, the zeitgeist would explode – kindled by the first strong performances comic movies ever made: Blade, X-Men, and Unbreakable. Then finally, in 2002, Sam Raimi’s Spider-man would change everything, making the superhero film wildly successful. The time before the dawn of the superhero golden age would be just a faint memory.

Unfortunately for us, someone invented Netflix.

Five years earlier, in 1997, as the last sentinel of a dying age, stands Spawn. Not only one of the worst superhero films ever made, but one of the worst movies ever made, period. This film is an utter embarrassment for everyone involved and acts as a perfect showcase for what Hollywood thought of the comic book genre. It becomes immediately apparent while watching Spawn that no one gave a shit what the film was about, how it looked, or how the actors performed. Someone was tasked with delivering 90 minutes of superhero bullshit and they did just that. To the produces, and Hollywood in general, it didn’t matter. The film would play to the $50 million dollars worth of audience that every comic book movie of the 90’s played to*. It was a safe bet with little work required. VERY LITTLE WORK.

*The exception here being the Batman franchise of the 90’s. These films are also horrid messes, but the audience appeal was wider than a typical comic film.

The film starts with a pretty terrible assassination scene. Spawn, or Al Simmons at this point is a mercenary. Jason Bourne doesn’t exist yet, so he is naturally the tight black leather suit wearing kind of mercenary. He shoots a missile (real discreet) at a plane full of Arab badies and the plane falls apart like it was rendered in MS PAINT.

Then the screen bursts into flames, for what can only be described as 5 minutes of that kid from high school with long hair’s favorite music video. It is seriously endless strobing with a Korn song playing (I’m not sure if it is actually Korn, and I sure as hell am not looking it up). My eyes literally started to hurt while I was watching it… The only thing I can think is that director Mark A.Z. Dippé was trying to recreate the eternal nature of hell. In that case, bravo!

So Al gets all mad that no one told him civilians were on that plane they made him blow up; even though it was a commercial airliner. He’s a mercenary with a heart of gold, people! So he goes to the West Wing to let Martin Sheen know just how mad he is. Martin Sheen plays his character so Machiavellian that it is cringe inducing. He is fucking terrible in this movie, it is totally unexplainable how bad he is. But just in case the viewer didn’t catch that he is evil, he has a dish of live scorpions on his desk. Oh yea, and for some reason there is another main character whose name I’m not going to look up sitting in his office with a gun sticking out of her skirt. Also, she just kind of appears in the room. Oh, and then a tarantula appears in her hands, because you know… EVIL. This happens a lot throughout Spawn, characters just appear wherever they need to be, with whatever props they need, because why bother with any sort of plot.

I need to take a moment to explain how horrible Michael Jai White (Al Simmons/Spawn himself) is in this scene (and the whole movie). He plays the entire film like it’s an SNL skit, looking out of the top of his eyes and reading his lines really deliberately. The best part of the film comes at the end of this scene where Sheen convinces Spawn to go on one last mercenary mission, and it is so obvious to everyone except Al that it is a suicide mission. Michael Jai White looks at the camera and says “Lets get it over with.”

Exactly what everyone else is thinking.

So Simmons gets killed by Sheen and Tarantula lady in North Korea. This scene is about as ridiculous as that last sentence sounds. Then he wakes up all Spawned out in an alley somewhere from The Great Depression. This alley set feels more at home in a Ninja Turtles movie… Actually, the whole film has a really bad 80’s Ninja Turtles vibe to it.

The Clown shows up, who is for some reason also able to be anywhere at any time. The plot also starts to really get convoluted here. The devil needed Sheen to kill Spawn to lead his armageddon army, but now the devil wants Spawn to kill Sheen – in order for armageddon to start… I really wasn’t paying attention.

John Leguizamo plays Clown, who at first, made me want to pull my hair out with how terrible his performance was, but slowly he started getting more bearable just because everyone else on screen is so much worse. He is just an ongoing mess of one liners, popping up on screen rambling bits from his stand up. My personal favorite being when he holds up a cream donut, squeezes it and says “Hey whats this remind you of?”

Here watch that scene in German, it’s better that way.

He also slyly turns to Martin Sheen and awkwardly says “ I want you to start the apocalypse now!” HEY! See what they did there? Well, incase you missed it later he exclaims: “I love the smell of burning asphalt in the morning!” And then after that everyone sits down and watches Apocalypse Now instead of this piece of shit movie.

There are also about seven flashbacks in the first 20 minutes of the movie, which always means you are dealing with an ace screenwriter. Or perhaps you let a guy who makes toys for a living write your movie? Either way, I chuckled to myself when Clown turns to Spawn and says “Hang on! These flashbacks can be killers” … Is anyone else seeing this?

The special effects in this movie are inexcusably bad. This movie premiered 20 months before The Matrix, and there is not even a slight hint of that technology in here. The scenes that take place in hell look like someone ported over screenshots from Doom II. While the special effects on earth are just constantly glowing green to hide how bad they are.

Ok, I’ll wrap this up, because most of the movie beyond this point is nonsense. There must be a bad screenwriting book somewhere in Hollywood, because when all else fails Spawn gets on a motorcycle and rides that bad boy around for no reason. Then things get real crazy. Spawn fights Clown in an alley. The relationship these two have is such a cluster-fuck that when a little kid looks up at Spawn and says: “Sometimes… I wonder… is this hell?”

It made me scream: “THIS IS HELL!”

Everything culminates at Spawn’s old family house for some reason, no one really cares at this point. Neither did I, because after the Clown licked Spawn’s wife and said “Tastes like chicken”, I fast forwarded to the end of the movie. In that blur of fast forwarding I saw some punching and some flames. It really made me wish I had just watched the whole thing that way.

A major part of the Spawn comic revolves around the ambiguity between life in hell and life on earth, and here instead of subtly playing that theme they beat you over the face with it again and again. Spawn could be great source material, but here it is just cartoony and lifeless (in a bad way).

I can’t imagine what the hell the late Roger Ebert was thinking when he claimed: “As a visual experience, Spawn is unforgettable.” He was right though; somethings you want to forget and can’t.

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