After last week’s car repairs, I took myself out to some movies.
The first, Lisa Frankenstein, a collaboration of Zelda Williams as director and Diablo Cody as writer was an interesting if uneven venture. I really wanted the film to lean more into the “we’re building a new boyfriend from the broken around us in the living” to more extremes than the film was willing to go, but Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse in horror comedies always tend to work for me. It was a film I did enjoy and was sad to see didn’t fare that well at the box office, as Cody’s script has enough moments of true humor that shine in the piece.
The second was “Madame Web.” I knew going in that film was likely going to be a bad movie. The kind as you’re watching you see the decisions being made and can’t look away because of the trainwreck that had millions of dollars spent on it, and the reviews were not favorable.
Yet I had a cathartic viewing experience, cackling at parts they did not mean to make funny, grousing over plot elements that with some little changes could have made for a better movie. Things like a main character making a choice to not open a soda can after picking one up from a vending machine and waving it around willy-nilly as they talk is a pressure moment of “oh, that is going to explode the second they get in the next room. Wish we would see that!”
One area I was surprised with was how much it was willing to lean into the horror of a superpowered individual stalking four mostly normal people. Those segments in the second act are the areas where the film really is at it’s best, where it pulls on films like “Final Destination” and “Brightburn” combined, however fleeting, to get across how utterly scary that villain was.
But we pair that with three future Spider-Women we don’t get to know as characters the way we should. If you’re going to make a “Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man” and throw in three Spider-Women from the comics, at least make it so they have their known powers and costumes for more than a few scenes of the film or build to them finally getting their powers, instead of just being damsels in distress for most of the run time…
Still, I laughed throughout the screening for real catharsis on screen. Would I recommend others seek this out in theaters? Probably not. But when it pops up on streaming somewhere it is worth taking a spin with it.