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Enda80
Preeminent Apostolic Prelate of the Discipleship of Jabootu
108 Posts |
 Posted - 05/11/2011 : 5:14:06 PM
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Saw this comment on the Superman IV review
"Thus such spoofy, and failed, pictures as the Schumacher Batmans, The Shadow and Mystery Men".
Did the Shadow play things as much as a spoof as the recent Fantastic Four films did? I have heard people starting to say that the Shadow played it straight and flopped. They also say that the Spirit played it straight and flopped.
http://Jabootu.net/?p=637 |
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Greenhornet
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
1791 Posts |
Posted - 05/11/2011 : 7:30:51 PM
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The Shadow had some good scenes and ideas, but was over all too campy for it's own good. It was not played straight, but as an "EVERYBODY KNOWS what these things are like" half-baked movie.
With the Green Hornet fiasco and Johnny Dep's proposed politicly correct Lone Ranger idea --which seems like a copy of the "noble minority being oppressed by THE WHITE MAN" crud that was the recent Green Hornet disappointment-- I doubt that we'll see another X-Men-style movie soon.
"The Queen is testing poisons." CLEOPATRA, 1935 |
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Ken HPoJ
Supreme Potentate
USA
1530 Posts |
Posted - 05/12/2011 : 07:07:06 AM
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As I recall (I haven't seen the movie since it came out), the film started pretty straight, and then went into a dire comic direction. The straight action was pretty good, like a nifty shootout on a bridge. However, the increasingly spoofy tone was awful. The end, which I vaguely recall involved a ZANY sequence with a big round atomic bomb rolling around, was horrendous.
Hank Hill, perusing a waiting room magazine: "I'll tell you what, this Goofus fella is a dumbass."
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Greenhornet
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
1791 Posts |
Posted - 05/12/2011 : 7:15:07 PM
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I kind of cringe when some movie scientist BY HIMSELF makes an atomic bomb before WWII. And it's always too small! In the Shadow, it was a little bigger than a basketball; the real things weighed 9500 and 10000 pounds!
"The Queen is testing poisons." CLEOPATRA, 1935 |
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Enda80
Preeminent Apostolic Prelate of the Discipleship of Jabootu
108 Posts |
Posted - 05/13/2011 : 5:14:43 PM
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http://Jabootu.net/?p=637
KB replied:
PB — The problem with The Shadow is that they didn’t play it down the middle, like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Instead they swung from one extreme to another. The stuff played straight was actually pretty good. The ‘funny’ stuff–which dominated as the movie went along–was all too reminiscent of the George Pal Doc Savage movie.
However, both The Rocketeer and The Phantom were markedly better, and neither of those made money either.
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I guess they took the approach they did with the Shadow due to the backlash against Batman Returns.
I wonder if they tweaked the script after they heard about McDonald's canceling their toy tie-ins to Batman Returns due to complaints from parents. (Parents complained about Tim Burton's Gothic direction. Many people found BR too much Tim Burton unleashed. McDonald's would not produce tie-ins to PG-13 films till almost twenty years later.) The Shadow did have tie-in toy line, by the way, produced by Kenner.
http://monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com/reply/652768/30-s-HEROES-IN-A-90-S-WORLD#reply-652768
Interesting that the 1990's film versions of the Shadow, the Phantom, the Rocketeer (actually an original property set in the 1930's but first in print in the 1980's) and Dick Tracy, as well as the 2004 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow did not produce sequels. (Beatty did win a lawsuit to produce DIck Tracy sequels recently, though.) Despite the backlash against the George Pal Doc Savage film, the success of the Indiana Jones films should have indicated a market for 1930's to 1940's era period piece adventure films.
Possibly, the roughly ten years between these films and the first Indiana Jones film make a big difference; in the early 1980's, your average moviegoer under 25 would have been exposed to the old movies,and to a lesser degree, the pulp fiction, that inspired RAIDERS (remember, there was a bit of a nostalgia craze in the 1970's, and although it was focused on the Fifties, there was also some renewed interest in the Thirties, with films like THE STING and reprints of guys like Robert E. Howard). By the 1990's, reruns of black-and-white movies were almost non-existant, and the whole CONCEPT of "nostalgia" had been co-opted. Infomercials started taking aware airtime from rerun of old films.
Come to think of it, the 1997 version of The Saint did not produce a sequel, but it came closer to having a domestic gross equaling its budget than some of the other films noted. This version of the Saint updated the story to the 1990's.
The Mummy films did reach a trilogy recently. One wonders who Captain America will do. |
Edited by - Enda80 on 05/13/2011 5:26:41 PM |
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The Bog Man
Minister of the Sacraments of Jabootu
45 Posts |
Posted - 05/14/2011 : 9:07:23 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Enda80 The Mummy films did reach a trilogy recently.
Don't remind me.
Yes, my vote on Shadow too would be that it was too campy, but filmed so flatly that even the "dark" parts were silly. (I'd go on another rant about the director, but just remember that he also did Highlander 2 and leave it at that)
www.hauntedbog.com
That is not dead which can eternal lie, I'm just not a morning person. |
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