Tag: comic books

Keanu Goes to the Devil

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Keanu Goes to the Devil

I’ve mentioned the movie “Constantine” tangentially while discussing comic book movies and some other topics that occupied me back a few years ago.  This 2005 movie stars Keanu Reeves as a Los Angeles based exorcist and general enemy of demonic forces.  He’s a sort of angsty noir character who is angry at heaven since he is doomed to hell because he attempted suicide as a teenager over the horror he experienced as a psychic.

The movie follows a “logic” about the rules in place for angels and demons that makes absolutely no sense but allows for the plot devices that move the story along its arc.  And much of the action is plodding and mechanical.  And yet I find myself watching this turkey (or parts of it) over and over again.  Why?

Well, the two aspects of the movie that stand out in my head are two very different things.  The first item is the visualization of Hell.  You could say this is just a special effects technique but it really is a rich imagining of the underworld.  The idea of Hell as our own world but turned into a burned-out husk makes for a vivid background.  And then the demons as these mutilated corpses with the tops of their heads sheared off is bizarrely fitting.

But the second item is, I think, the more compelling.  It is the representation of Lucifer during his arrival to harvest the soul of Constantine.  As promised in the country song, the devil wears a white suit.  As played by Peter Stormare, Lucifer is a witty, amiable fellow who enjoys chatting with his old acquaintance Constantine prior to bringing him back to Hell where he claims he has “a whole theme park full of red delights” for Constantine to “enjoy.”  He even helps Constantine light his cigarette when the exorcist can’t manage his lighter because of the cut finger tendons incurred when he slit his own wrists in order to summon up Lucifer.  Of course, the devil can’t help pulling the flame away two or three times just for fun.  It’s this pettiness and banality that adds interest to the part.  It’s contrasted with the menace that shows through whenever Lucifer’s plans are challenged either by demon, angel or divine law itself.  But it’s the human face of evil that makes Lucifer compelling.  His vindictiveness, cruelty and pride show up as the proof that angels, devils and man are all creations of the same maker.  We all have the same stamp.  We’ve been given free will and we can use it to reach a higher ground or fall off the mountain.

So that’s why I guess I enjoy watching this silly movie (or at least parts of it).  Not for the absurd plot or the goofy take on Christian theology as it relates to Hell.  I guess I just like to think about Satan being this provincial, bureaucratic apparatchik fighting with humans and God to protect his turf and cause as much mischief as he can.  It just seems to fit what I’ve seen of human nature.  At least some of it.

Dredd (2012) – A Fantasy Movie Review

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Okay, let’s start with the basics.  This is a comic book hero film.  That’s the excuse for an action movie.  The “universe” this takes place in has a city stretching from the Boston locale to where Washington D.C. was and is called very poetically, “Mega-City One.”  It is walled in and surrounded by an irradiated desert.  There must have been a nuclear war or something.  Somehow it supports 800 million inhabitants and most of them seem to be third world refugees living awful lives surrounded by drugs, gangs and general depravity.

Law and order are in the hands of the “judges.”  They are law enforcement officers who also can dispense justice as judge, jury and executioner at their own discretion.  They ride around on motorcycles and have weapons that can dispense munitions ranging from standard bullets, to armor piercing rounds, to gas rounds to incendiary devices.  They tend to kill a lot of criminals in the course of their work.

In this story a judge named Dredd is bringing a female rookie named Cassandra Anderson on a trial assignment.  She also happens to be a psychic.  This seems to be linked to her parents having died from the effects of radiation.  She doesn’t wear her armored helmet the way Dredd does because it interferes with her psychic ability but mostly because we wouldn’t be able to see her blonde hair.

The gist of the story is that Dredd and Anderson have captured a member of the Ma-Ma Madrigal gang.  Anderson can tell that he’s guilty of some recent murders so he’s being brought in for interrogation.  But Ma-Ma knows that he would end up spilling the truth about her involvement in the deadly “slo-mo” drug distribution.  So, they lock down the 200-story housing complex where she resides and traps the two judges inside.  The rest of the story is Dredd’s fight to stay alive until help can arrive from outside.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Alright, the spoiler alert is kind of silly.  This is a comic book movie.  Judge Dredd kills all his adversaries and ends the movie virtually the same as it begins, walking off to fight crime in Mega-City One.  In between we meet Ma-Ma, her henchmen and a few of the hopelessly oppressed residents of Mega-City One.  At the end of the movie Dredd approves Anderson’s probationary service.  But when she hands in her shield at the end of her probation I couldn’t tell if she still wanted to do the work.  Oh, and at the climax Dredd throws Ma-Ma Madrigal off the 200-story building to her death.  Of course he did.

Alright, who is this movie for.  Well, it’s for comic book movie fans.  I guess most action movie fans will enjoy it.  People who don’t like gratuitous gun violence probably won’t.  By and large I’ll say I enjoyed it.  It was mindless fun.  A little crude and full of the usual vulgar language so not for kids but no harm for grownups.  Your milage may vary.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 14MAY2025 – Review – Watchmen (2009)

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So the original story is by Alan Moore. He was fairly famous in the comic book industry in the 1980’s when this was originally published. Take a moment and find a picture of Alan Moore on the internet, I’ll wait… Are you back? Given that image you will likely be unsurprised to find out he is a notorious and unrepentant anarchist and rather unhinged (even for an anarchist). Other efforts by him include V is for Vendetta and Batman: The Killing Joke. The Watchmen Series was a 12 issue mini-series from DC published in 1986-1987 set in an alternate history where the US has Dr. Manhattan (who is more overpowered than even say super man, his abilities verge on the godlike).
It was rather cutting edge for its period with its serious antihero vibe.

The movie came much later in 2009 after many years of wandering into development hell. In many ways its cinematography and dialogue come straight from the comic series art by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s dialogue. It does skip/compress several subplots, and change the method of the ending though not its source (Ozymandias/Veidt) nor its intent (forestall or avoid WWIII). It was one of the first R rated comic book movies (previous having limited themselves to PG-13/PG) and also one of the first to release in the late February slot to take advantage of College spring break.

As a fan of the original comics I thought it rose to slightly above meh say 6/10. It loses much of the complexity of the original, which given the size of the 12 issue series was somewhat unavoidable even with its bloated 3 hr+ run time. As Chemist notes if you don’t already know some of the plot points it is going to be a whirlwind. Heck as the original comic book doled out over a year it was confusing until the last few comics at the end where all the threads got tied together and many of the hints in the original lurk in the subplots that were excised.

There is an animated retelling done by DC Animation scripted by J. Michael Straczynski and Dave Gibbons from the original It is split into 2 90 minute subsections. It does a better job at keeping more of the necessary beats to help you see the solution and keeps to the original ending. It is maybe a 7.5/10.

Honestly, if you like comics, find a perfect bound version of the original comic books is available this is available for ~$20 the price of 4-5 fancy coffees. It is less than the $24 I paid in 1986-87 for the original comics. Do not try to go buy these at a comic book store (except for the perfect bound single volume version). They’re moderate collector items at $20-30 a each for even poorish quality copies and the first the last and (potential Spoiler) the one where they break Rorschach out of prison run for probably twice that each. As much as a crazy tinfoil hat wearing jerk as Alan Moore can be this is easily in the top 5 of comic series I have read in 50 years of reading comics and is probably better than 90% of most comic/SciFi writing.

Watchmen (2009) – A Science Fiction-Fantasy Movie Review

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Watchmen is a movie based on a DC Comics comic book series from the 1980s written by Alan Moore and directed by Zack Snyder.  Moore is a self-identified “anarchist” (read weirdo) and the fictional world of this story reflects his hatred of anything conservative (read normal).

The story takes place in an alternate reality of 1985 where Richard Nixon is in his fifth term and a band of “superheroes” called the Watchmen have been disbanded after they were used for such actions as winning the Vietnam War for the Americans.  Apparently, people became afraid of their impact on society.  The movie starts with one of these retired heroes; the Comedian being murdered by another extremely powerful masked individual.  He is thrown through the window of a Manhattan skyscraper.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

We are introduced to the former heroes.  By the way I recognized none of the actors.  I’m sure some of them would be familiar to anyone who has gone to the movies much in the last fifteen years.

Except for Doctor Manhattan who is some kind of god-like being with psychic abilities and atomic power that can destroy cities, the rest of the heroes are just humans who are strong and trained as fighters.  Doctor Manhattan got these powers while he was working in the American nuclear weapons industry.  He is able to become enormously large, teleport to Mars at will and able to invent whole new power sources for Earth’s future.

When the Comedian is murdered the other Watchmen suspect that someone is trying to kill all of them.  When an assassin tries to kill another one; Adrian Veidt (AKA: Ozymandias) they get the gang back together and look for the killer.  There’s all kinds of action and adventure.  But in the final act we find out that Ozymandias is responsible.  He stages an atomic attack on New York City, London and a couple of other cities and the leaders of the world assume it was Doctor Manhattan that did it as a warning against nuclear states (like the US and the USSR) threatening nuclear war.  This brings the countries of the world together out of a sense of common defense against Doctor Manhattan.  And Doctor Manhattan approves of the peaceful result of the hoax so the secret is maintained.  But one Watchman; Rorschach objects and has to be killed by Doctor Manhattan to keep the secret.  Rorschach’s friends are angry but agree to keep the secret for the sake of world peace.  At the end of the movie, it appears that Rorschach was able to leak the secret before he was killed.

Okay, so what did I think of this movie?  To start off we have Richard Nixon in his fifth term pretty much as evil incarnate.  So, there’s that.  The movie has a dose of sex and violence so this isn’t a kid’s superhero movie.  So, there’s that.  The story itself and the characters have interesting moments.  The question comes down to, is it worth the time to watch it?  I’ll have to qualify this.  If you like comic book stories there is a decent chance you’ll like this movie.  The effects and the acting aren’t bad.  The plot isn’t reasonable but it is clever.  If you don’t like comic book stories, you won’t like this movie.

Arkhaven Comics – A Review

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Vox Day is an idiosyncratic guy who will be remembered, if for no other reason, because he waged the hilarious Rabid Puppies War against the pink science fiction doofuses of WorldCon in 2015 and 2016.  But he is also the proprietor of a book publishing company, Castalia House and recently he has branched into comics with a company called Arkhaven.

Last month Arkhaven started up a comic site that publishes the various stories on-line for free at  https://www.arkhaven.com/  .  I’ve never been a comic book guy.  I did watch a few of the Marvel tv shows when I was a kid and I did bring my grandsons to watch the Marvel movies until they started getting too woke.

But there are at least a couple of comics on this site that I can appreciate.  One is Ben Garrison’s Editorial Cartoons.  Ben’s editorials are from the right and his drawings are clever.

The other that I just started following is a dark fantasy (supernatural) comic called Chicago Typewriter.  It’s very well drawn and the story so far is entertaining.

Anyway, if you have any interest in comics, check out Vox’s site.  I think he should be congratulated for jumping into a field that up till now has been more than dominated by woke publishers who have made their former readers unwelcome.  I hope this venture is a great success and Vox makes a pile of cash.  Vox is one of the few people on our side who has walked the walk and built his own platform.  Kudos to him.

Chuck Dixon’s Avalon #1 – The Street Rules – A Science Fiction & Fantasy Review

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I’ve never been a comic book guy.  My thing was always science fiction books.  My closest approach to comics was the Marvel and DC tv shows I saw as a kid.  So, I never really had a reason to buy any.  But my policy on right wing artistic and commercial endeavors is to always give them the benefit of the doubt when they compete on the Left’s turf.  I decided to pick up Avalon #1 to see if I could understand what it was all about.  A comic book is like a book chapter with pictures.  You tell a piece of a story and try to hook the reader in for the next installment.  The story and the art work are of equal importance.  Well, to me they are.  I guess if you’re really more of an art lover then the pictures might be the main attraction.  But I don’t think that would work for me.  There’s got to be a story I want to hear.

I’ll make this short because I don’t have the background to talk any nuance about comic books.  The story is introducing a world where people with superpowers are a fact of life and not all of them are good and not all of them are heroes.  We meet a small cross section as we are primarily introduced to King Ace and Fazer.  They are close to the classic vigilante super hero like Batman or Superman.  They fight crime outside of the prescribed legal framework that superheroes adhere to in this world.  They do it according to their code.  Well, for the most part.  Some hints of a less selfless motive do show up in the book.  The story is good.  It’s set up as Fazer telling his story to a reporter but the action bounces back and forth between narrated action and other events that give additional information on other characters and other plot lines.  I like the art work but I will not claim I know much or even anything about the state of the art in comic book aesthetics.

Long story, short I think it’s good.  I look forward to the next installment.  I won’t say I’m hooked but I’m interested enough to want to see where this all goes.  Bravo Chuck Dixon and good for Vox Day for venturing into enemy territory.