“50 Essential Comic Book Movies with Edgar Wright”

Okay, so we’re going to have to deal with the fact that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is not going to be a box office hit”. My guess is it will do really well in its ‘afterlife’ and become a beyond-cult-favorite. And in honor of that future potential, here is a nifty feature from TimeOut wherein SPVTW’s director and co-screenwriter Edgar Wright gives us his view of 50 essential comic book movies. Here are 5 of them:

50. Howard the Duck (1986)
Directed by Willard Huyck
Movie most fowl
The original example of ‘No, but the comic book was, like, really good and subversive and clever!’, ‘Howard the Duck’ was the film which, single-handedly and over night, transformed our collective image of George Lucas. But is it really that bad? After 24 years of gags, worst-ever polls and mountainous critical opprobrium, could anything really be that bad? Well, it’s about a duck from space who knows Quack-fu and falls in love with a synth-punk rock chick whose band he decides to manage. And it cost $36 million. So yes. TH
Watch this so, so, so, so, so, so wrong clip

49. Largo Winch (2008)
Directed by Jérôme Salle
L’homme indestructible
Considering how many comic books the French and Belgians pumped out in the 1960s and ’70s, it’s remarkable how few of them made it to the big screen. In the wake of ‘Largo Winch’ that seems to be changing, with new adaptations of ‘Tintin’, ‘The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec’ and, um, ‘The Smurfs’, all in the pipeline. In updating Philippe Francq and Jean Van Hamme’s series of corporate espionage thrillers, director Jérôme Salle seemed to have stumbled upon a natural winner, updating the guns, girls and gadgets glamour of Bond with a more relatable and globally anti-establishment ethos. But the film doesn’t really work, in part because we’ve kind of seen it all before, in part because the action sequences don’t have much vim, and in large part because the hero, Largo himself, is just a bit of a prat. TH Watch the trailer here

48. Judge Dredd (1995)
Directed by Danny Cannon
Judge not, lest ye be judged…
For the comisphere, Danny Cannon’s interpretation of one the subtlest, most mischievous satires ever to be rendered in pen and ink ranks somewhere between Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ and the Munich Agreement, and not in a good way. Taking as its cue Dredd’s epic, 15-issue ‘2000 AD’ strip ‘The Cursed Earth’, the movie cuts out the best characters, including grenade-toting punk Spikes Harvey Rotten, and ditches inspired but actionable storylines like the brutal Burger Wars between Ronald MacDonald’s (sic) paramilitaries and The Burger King’s death squads. In their place, we get a dull rehash of Stallone’s already lumbering ‘Demolition Man’ from a couple of years earlier, with a polystyrene sound stage standing in for the sprawling Mega City One and a bit of Orange County quad-bike track for the vast, radioactive desert of the Cursed Earth. What should have been an easy translation — the Dredd strip, after all, has its roots in the ‘Dirty Harry’ films — comes off like a turbocharged episode of ‘Space Precinct’ minus the narrative peril. It’s hard to overstate the lack of ambition and ready compromise stinking up the show here and, moreover, its almost impossible to discuss the movie’s vast array of faults without mentioning the whole ‘taking off the helmet’ issue. And that just makes you sound like the worst pantywaist fanboy. Gah! PF Watch scenes from the film’s premiere (which looks like it was more exciting than the feature presentation)

47. Supergirl (1984)
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc
‘Is it a bird..?’ (Honk!)
Oof! With budgets on the Superman movies getting tighter than the Man of Steel’s undercrackers, little was expected from this lightweight spin-off, but nothing could prepare audiences for the barrage of cut-price offal that eventually splattered across the screen. The effects look as if they were salvaged from some experimental late-’60s sci-fi mood-mare, the sets look pillaged, the low-grade film stock makes all the outdoor scenes look like they were shot on Walton Mountain and the cast — especially Peter O’Toole — look utterly befuddled. Helen Slater does a fine job as Ms Supes and Faye Dunaway looks like she’s having a ball on baddie duties, but the general level of quality on show is such that — as you can see below — the producers had real trouble in even stitching together a two-minute trailer. ALD
Watch the trailer here

46. Dennis the Menace (1993)
Directed by Nick Castle
Gnasher! Sick balls!
The British Dennis the Menace was an amoral, softy-bashing hoodlum who ruled his neighbourhood with an iron fist and a pumped-up attack dog. Had he been given his own big-screen workout, it might have been a cross between ‘Romper Stomper’ and ‘The Tin Drum’. Alas, it was not to be. His identically named though slightly less demented US cousin, however, snagged himself this saccharine John Hughes-produced vehicle that exists as little more than an excuse for Walter Matthau — as his crusty but ultimately benign neighbour, Mr Wilson — to bellow “Why, you little..!!!” about once every three or four minutes while he inches his way towards that inevitable heart attack. Tee-hee, indeed, eh, readers? ALD
Watch the trailer here

What would you consider to be the most essential comic books?

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