Well, for the fourth month this year, I've ended up watching a Ray Harryhausen film, though I swear I didn't even realize this going in! Mystery Science Theater 3000 S01E13: The Black Scorpion (1957). While the film was certainly lousy in most respects, and even the MST3K commentary wasn't all that good, this was actually one of Harryhausen's strongest efforts. I was really surprised by how lifelike and almost chilling the enormous scorpion fight scenes were. The film cuts corners left and right, but when they finally let Harryhausen do his stuff late in the film, it's well worth the wait!

I was a big fan of the games growing up and the cartoon was pretty good so I was excited for this movie when I first saw ads for it but when it came out...not so much. It's not a terrible film per say, the effects are decent and the actors are fine but the plot is seriously unrefined. There's a world beyond the events of the film that are referenced regularly...but are not elaborated upon leaving the audience feeling like they walked into the film half way through. Still, the action is decent so it's not a bad popcorn flick to watch if you have time to kill.

Hard to know how bad a film will be until you see it. I'm trusting reviews and internet ratings and recording anything I watched with a good faith belief that it wouldn't be very good. Taking the opportunity to catch up on some superhero films.

Supergirl was a decent enough film. Some moments of her flying were quite good. The plot makes little sense. She is supposed to be on a desperate mission to find the power source that will save her dying world and time is running out. With flight, superspeed and a tracking device that can lead her to it, this should be straightforward. Yet she decides to create a secret identity and literally ignore the tracker telling her the power source is close in order to protect this identity. The villains were odd, the plot was odd. Really, everything was just off. But it wasn't that bad.

Howard the Duck. More Mantlo than Gerber. Erratic in tone. Poorly conceived battle to save the world thrown in there with odd jumps from clunky interspecies romance to superheroing to a rock concert. But decent enough.

Judge Dredd I had seen before. But not in years. It is a guilty pleasure, as I really love the way Stallone delivers all his lines about the law. "I never broke the law! I am the law!" I paired it with the modern Dredd, a truly great film I won't include in this list. Like Supergirl and Howard, Judge Dredd got some things right, but ultimately collapsed under the weight of plot.

Laserblast. My nonsuperhero entry for the month. It had been on a list I found online of "50 best sci/fi films of the 1970s". So I added it to my list of sci/fi films to watch. Watched it this month as it was one of the lowest-rated films on the list. A teenager finds a laser gun that seems to possess him and goes around blowing things up. There is essentially nothing more to the plot, and it's worse than it sounds.

Catwoman. This film fascinates me. I would love to read a behind-the-scenes on why it got made. My completely made-up speculation is this. Superheroes were starting to do well. WB wanted to get in the game. They'd already been working on Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. And wanted to do those right. They wanted something else they could get into production faster, but that would have brand name recognition. Hence Catwoman. But they didn't want a cat burglar story. They wanted a superhero story. So they found an existing script for something else, and adapted it into a Catwoman film.

My best guess. The character bears no resemblance to the comic. It is a pretty generic superhero flick. The plot may as well have been copied from The Crow or Darkman. She is killed by an evil cosmetics company so she won't expose their ignoring federal health regulations in their beauty products. She is resurrected and given cat-powers by a cat, and so gets revenge. A side-effect of the beauty product the company has developed is that it gives frequent users superpowers. And thus Sharon Stone becomes a supervillain.

Sorry for the spoiler.

It is a strange, strange film. The story of its making I suspect would be a great film.

Scratch all that. It's too new for this list, but I watched the 2008 The Spirit. Frank Miller's parody of... something.

There is no contender. This is the worst superhero film of all time.

...I liked the Spirit.

Very different from the comic but I really liked the visuals and the actors involved.

I thought they were more stylized than the look of Sin City, especially the scenes with the Octopus.

Still not quite certain what the line is for bad films. I watched two pretty-good-as-bad-films go superhero films, The Shadow (1994) and Spawn.

Spawn is actually surprisingly good given the source material it had to work with. And on the progessive side of superhero films, featuring a black lead superhero and an interracial couple. And he's got a cool cape.

The Shadow film was, well, not entirely without merit.

Guess I'll count 'em.

My intention is to watch Plan 9 from Outer Space for the first time tonight. We will see if I get to (and through) it.