Darkman: No Lips, Bad Sex

In 1989, Sam Raimi made an inventively demented superhero movie called Darkman. It was his first really big-budget film, not that it was all THAT big-budget; to put this in context, Frances McDormand, who he cast as the female lead, was at the time still sharing a house with Raimi and the Coen brothers (who were then preparing to release Blood Simple, her major film debut) and paying her share of the rent by working as a word-processor for a company that answered Kiss fanmail. But nevertheless, Raimi managed to cobble together what became a surprising summer hit, casting a then not-well-known Liam Neeson as his titular character--and though his "American" accent is pretty weird, and he walks through most of the film hidden under ten pounds of makeup, but his establishing and later "masked" sequences as scientist turned vigilante freak Peyton Westlake emphasize the rangy, sorrowful ex-boxer charm that had him being passed around Hollywood's female contingent like a sexy meat lollipop at this phase of his career.

The plot goes like this: Julie (McDormand) is a high-powered corporate lawyer and Peyton (Neeson) a hard-working, geeky dude obsessed with creating synthetic skin, but when we first meet them, he has a problem...the skin will only hold stable for 99 minutes, after which its photosensitivity causes it to smoke and decay, so facial prosthetic applications seem dubious. Unfortnately, before he can crack a solution, Julie accidentally finds a memo she shouldn't have which implicates her boss, industrialist Larry Strack Jnr. (Colin Friel, essentially playing an Ayn Rand "hero," as I realized when I notice a series of set-ups cribbed from The Fountainhead), in a zoning bribery scandal. Strack sends his right-hand thus, Robert G. Durant (Larry Blake), to get the memo back, and Durant ends up destroying hapless Peyton's lab, with him inside.

In prime Raimi style, Peyton is literally blown through the roof while on fire, screaming like a cartoon character, only to plunge into a disgusting industrial river nearby; nothing's left behind but an ear, which JUlie buries and mourns over. Cut to a local hospital, where there's a giant, gauze-wrapped figure restrained in the burnt unit. A doctor explains that they've cut the nerves between his spine and brain that interpret pain signals, to keep him from screaming for the rest of his life, but the side-effects might be lack of sense of touch, adrenal spikes and wild hallucinations. Inside Peyton's brain, meanwhile, he's already having one of the latter, watching himself dance on a stage like some horrible puppet. He freaks out and runs off into the night, ripping free of his restraints with rage-fueled super strength. But outside sucks just as bad: it's raining torrentially, all he can find to wear is a weird opera cloak from a theatre dumpster, and when he approaches Julie on the street she runs from him like he's a leper, just because he's covered in rotting bandages!

One thing I love about Darkman, amidst many, is that during a lot of it, Peyton is either genuinely insane--stretched wll beyond the boundaries of "normal" behaviour by his overwhelming traumas, weeping and moaning and screaming to God, laughing while his naked teeth click together like creepy castanets--or sort of understandably horrified by himself. "I'm a scientist..." he repeats, at one point, trying to calm himself down. "A scientist...be objective, analyze, analyze..." But five minutes later he sets his own hand on fire and doesn't notice 'til he has to put it out, which makes him stick a funnel on his head like "a funny little hat!" and caper around his abandoned factory lab while berating a nearby feral cat, snarling: "Just five bucks! See the FREAK! SEEE THE FUNNNNY FREEEEEAAAAAK!"

Eventually, he manages to make a mask of his own face and take Julie on a couple of dates, one to an amusement park (bad idea), where he breaks a guy's fingers for tapping his chest (again, a classic Raimi moment--the guy screams, swish-panning to Peyton screaming even louder, swish-panning to Julie screaming EVEN LOUDER--and then grabs the biggest, fluffiest midway toy he can find, yelling a Julie: "Take the fucking elephant! Take it!" Then his face melts, and he's forced to run away. She follows him, thus becoming the first superhero girlfriend in history to crack the mystery of someone's secret identity within the first half-hour of an origin film.

(McDorman's great, obviously--Julie is an actual feminist, someone who hesitates when Peyton asks her to marry him not because she doesn't love him or want to sleep with him the rest of her life (hell, she still seems attracted to him after seeing what his face really looks like, at least going by body language), but because she isn't sure how this will impact what she wants to do with her professional life. When Strack comforts her she sleeps with him, and after she figures out he was behind Peyton's "accident" she's absolutely repulsed, understandably terrified, but indomitable. "If you're not gonna kill me, then...I have things to do," she says, turns her back on him, and walks off.)

Peyton uses his skin masks and his nutbaggery to get revenge, but it changes him, and though he can live with it, he assumes Julie won't be able to. I think he's wrong, but we never get to find that out--McDorman didn't return for the next two straight to video instalments, in which Peyton was played by Arnold Vosloo. But the palpable love between she and Neeson adds a real air of tragedy to the general craziness, which is one of the best things about Darkman as a whole. (I also like that Durant, the baddest ass in this bunch, is pretty obviously gay, specifically for a handsome, geeky young minion of his played by "Theodore" Raimi who Peyton decapitates by pushing his head up into traffic through a sewer manhole--believe it or not, that went right past me on first viewing. Weird.)

Okay, shower, then haircut. For real, this time.