When you put James Gunn in charge of your universe, you are going to end up with something far less rigid than what we’ve seen out of Marvel, for better or worse. We’ve gotten cartoon brides of Frankenstein, hopecore Super-movies and beat detective Green Lanterns. Now, we have Clayface, a bloody R-rated body horror movie that would make the MCU vomit on sight. And it works, it really does. Audiences have given it a sky-high 94% review score on Rotten Tomatoes and an A- Cinemascore, and I’d argue that’s well deserved. As those scores indicates, yes, this really is one of the best superhero movies of the past few years.
Despite the fact that making the third movie in the entire DCU about the eighth most popular Batman villain seemed like a questionable idea, that ends up not mattering at all. Clayfaceis great, and frankly, one of the best comic book andhorror movies I’ve seen in some time, harkening back to the terror I still remember to this day when in Batman: The Animated Series, Clayface ate Batman, and we heard his heartbeat slow down inside the clay body until it stopped. I was six. I am still scarred. Now, he’s back, and not played for laughs the way he was in Creature Commandosor the Harley Quinn series.
This is Matt Hagen iteration of the character, who first appeared in the comics in 1961. Here, the A-list, Oscar-nominated actor is played by relatively unknown Tom Rhys Harries, who is absolutely fantastic in the role, a shining star one minute and a despondent psychopath the next. After his face is destroyed in the wake of one bad decision, the actor loses everything until he finds Naomi Ackie’s Dr. Caitlyn Corr, experimenting with a kind of gooey healing tech that is able to regenerate any damaged tissue. His face is miraculously fixed, and he begins a Hollywood comeback, but you might imagine what happens next. When his face begins dripping off his skull like Nickelodeon slime, he discovers both that the miracle cure has some issues, but the power he discovers it gives him allows him to start a massacre of those who wronged him.
There’s a lot of talk about how this “budget” superhero universe movie was made for just $44 million, a pittance compared to most blockbuster productions, and there are some great decisions to make that happen here. VFX is often replaced by believable-looking practical effects, but the movie decides to abandon the idea that there needs to be some sort of CGI morph effect every time Hagen changes shape to a new character, which is frequently. It’s just an instant cut, which may start a bit jarring, but it works fine, and a scene where Hagen flips between himself, friends, foes and random civilians in the closest thing the film has to an action sequence is the highlight of the film.
The revenge arc here, based on a story and early script draft by horror legend Mike Flanagan (with the final draft the work of Hossein Amini) is as good as you could craft for a movie like this, and you will believe that Hagen may be going down the “antihero” route as many villains do these days. The film could have chickened out and done that, but by the end, Hagen pushes so far, you find that yes, he’s really that dude who’s going to try to eat Batman. If Clayfacedoes have any issues, the structure of the plot can end up a bit choppy and it does seem like there have been some editing mishaps that cut out a few key parts of the story.
Everyone involved here, Gunn, Flanagan, Amini, director James Watkins (of Speak No EvilandEden Lake) treating this movie as nothing but a pure body horror feature with the comic connections as an afterthought took exactly the right path. When you focus on story and characterization rather than universe linking and purely perfect comic lore, it can produce a result like this. I would never have thought Clatyfacewould rise this far past other attempts at comic book villain features, but it’s the best of them all, and deserving of its audience score, without question. Go see it, whether you’re a horror fan, DC fan, or both.
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This article was originally published onForbes.com
