Sam the Man - Pt. I

[Clankenbeard]

I've seen all of these and enjoyed each. (All have Bruce Campbell in the credits.) The campiness of Evil Dead II is what got me hooked on Sam Raimi. While the populous may not always embrace "his way" (see Drag Me to Hell), I find "his way" to be very very entertaining.

The '73 Olds Delta 88 makes an appearance in Evil Dead 2013 for those of you who may be wondering. I understand the engine block is part of Oz's machinery in OtG&P.

 

[Darth_Payn]

Wait, wait, what do you mean by "ashamed" of their source material? And looking back on his Spider-Man trilogy, the campiness does get kind of grating.

Really simple example: go look at the costumes for the X-Men films. Notice the way they did away with the bright colors in favor of "realistic" black leather? Now go look at what everyone is wearing in The Avengers. That's not just trashing the movies based on the costumes, though. The costumes are a sign of a much deeper disdain for the source material, as are most of the other little changes, like the web shooters and the mopey Peter/Spiderman from the Raimi trilogy. He's supposed to be a wisecracking genius, not some average guy with spider powers. Heck, having the web shooters be something he cooked up himself with a chemistry set instead of a part of his powers goes a long way to showing that genius. Even in Spiderman 2, where we got to see him getting a little bit of his scientist on, he didn't come off as particularly intelligent. It was more like the plot demanded that he be a scientist, so he was, whether he was smart enough for the job or not.

The Raimi Spiderman films (at least the first two, I've never seen the third) just had that disdain running through the whole project, making fun of or ignoring a lot of what makes superheroes different from your average 80's action heroes, as did the Nolan Batman trilogy, minus Rises, which is actually my favorite of the three because of that. I'd never argue that the Nolan movies are bad movies (to the contrary, they're absolute masterwork quality action films, I'd even grant that as an example of how to turn the genre into something snobby film critics and the average Joe alike will gush over, the first two are a cut above the third), they're just not good batman movies. And I don't know about you, but when I go to see an entry in an established franchise, I'm not looking for a completely different one with some of the characters sharing names. Star Trek '09, I'm looking at you.

P.S.: Did we watch the same movies? Because I don't remember the Spiderman movies being campy. Not in that awesome Sam Raimi way where you know it's on purpose, anyway. Unintentional campiness, on the other hand...

Oh, Ok, I get what you mean now. And when I said campiness earlier, I think I mistook it for something else. It may have been schmaltziness or melodrama.