Donkey: Whether it’s East Coast and West Coast rappers dueling to reach new heights of misogyny, the Yankees and the Red Sox slugging it out to achieve new heights of complete and utter boredom, or the Insane Clown Posse struggling with their intellectual magnetic overlords in a losing battle of fucktarded asshattery, it’s always fun to sit back and watch a true rivalry play itself out. For its part the geek world is no exception, with colossal battles fueled by fanboy nerdgasms at every turn. Who can forget the glorious “Nintendo VS Sega” days of old, the forerunner to its the less than thrilling modern replacements in the form of “Microsoft VS Bootable Hardware”, “Nintendo VS The Dignity Of Any Gamer Who Isn’t In Grade School Or A Housewife”, and “Sony VS Innovation Of Any Kind”? But ask any geek and they’ll tell you that one of the most iconic clashes to ever curry their socially-inept/Dorito-stained favor comes in the form of comic book juggernaut Marvel Comic and their hated nemesis, DC. Their merciless war has been fought on countless fronts over the years as comic books have permeated into more and more mediums, with the most recent blitzkrieg being the comic book cartoon movie. Cheaper and faster to produce than their Hollywood blockbuster cousins, these films have been sprouting up faster than open sores at a Poison reunion tour, and being undeniable geeks, we’ve been there, armed only with our Valtrex prescriptions and a smile.

This week we’ll examine the works of Marvel and their stable of thoroughly inbred heroes. Arguably the more ridiculous of the two competitors, their comics always seemed to concentrate more on squeezing ridiculously muscular men into tighter and tighter pajamas than it ever did on maintaining even the slightest grip on reality. As a matter of fact, if anyone had ever stopped to look at things from a far enough gaze, they’d notice that for anyone not fortunate enough to have survived some kind of radioactive trauma with the gift of super powers instead of the usual cancer the world according to Marvel would be a horrible, horrible place. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

The Invincible Iron Man

Our first tentative step into the tear, urine, and for some reason strawberry milk-soaked abyss awaiting us came in the form of the classically uninteresting character known as Iron Man and I’ll be honest; I met the challenge with all the enthusiasm and excitement that’s usually palpable in a dentist’s waiting room. I never knew much of anything about the character as a child, as for reasons that I’ll never be able to truly explain a triple bypass patient flying around in an iron lung with a few ray guns strapped to it somehow never really seemed to capture my attention. I know: call me crazy. But I tried to keep the welling cynicism at bay for a few hours, drawing hope from the fact that – at the very least – modern versions of the character had been cleaned up enough that he didn’t look like he was wearing an old-timey scuba suit that would require four stout men to work the bellows. And besides, we had already sat through a movie featuring a silver dong on a surf board that rockets through the galaxy playing Paul Revere to a planet-consuming vaginal belch, so at this point I was up for pretty much anything.

For those of you who have read the comics or seen the vastly superior and shockingly outstanding Robert Downey Jr movie, you won’t find anything new here. Like its blockbuster counterpart, this movie once again tells the character’s origin story, recounting the events that lead Tony Stark, an arrogant billionaire weapons manufacturer, to suffer near-fatal heart damage after being taken hostage. To simultaneously break free of his captors and stay alive, Tony uses his own technology supplied to him to construct a rudimentary life-supporting/dong-punching suit of armor and fulfills his destiny in becoming the hero known as Iron Man. However, apart from this very basic outline, there is actually very little else that’s similar between this tale and the recent Hollywood picture. First off, instead of selling arms to the US Army in the Middle East, Stark is instead raising an ancient city in China that belonged to the dynasty of the Mandarin, whose leader and namesake I’m told is the classic arch-nemesis of the series. And instead of being captured by a group of power hungry terrorists who are after his weapons technology, he is instead captured by a group of warrior monks known as the Jade Dragons who have sworn to keep the Mandarin Dynasty buried and demand only that he undo his actions after he successfully raises the city. But most importantly, instead of battling against an unscrupulous mentor and business partner who doesn’t share Tony’s new found social conscience, Iron Man instead is forced to battle the Four Elementals – ancient Chinese spirits who spring to life and inhabit stone statues to wreak havoc on the world while facilitating the resurrection of their Mandarin master by gathering his four lost rings of power.

That leads us to my favorite aspect of this movie by far. Tony Stark is like the Marvel version of Bruce Wayne – a rich playboy with no super powers to speak of unless you consider extraordinary intelligence or a mint-sized trust fund to be super – with the difference being that Iron Man is the most genuinely charming and hilarious fully-armored syphilis dispenser the world has ever known, whereas Batman is more of a bad-ass that prefers brooding in the dark and, for reasons I’ll never understand, occasionally hanging out with boys so young that even your creepy mustache-sporting uncle would drop his Tootsie Rolls and chloroform just long enough to utter, “what the fuck?”. With that in mind, if your story is based on the fairly grounded reality of a nerd in a suit with an over-sized bank roll, why in Wilfred Brimley’s sweet face pubes would you match him up against supernatural beings? That seems completely goddamn backwards to me. I don’t even understand how a battle in that universe is supposed to go down. “The Serpent Ghost of Blackbeard’s Ballsack? Shit…it’s a good thing I opted for the AK47 over the Stinger missiles or his crippling Mind-Control Rays from the Phantom Zone might have made me look like a total asshole!” Seriously, this concept is nothing short of shit-headed, but if you need further proof, just try to flip that scenario around and watch someone fight real threats with only the power of abstract concepts. Picture some bag of dicks in a cape trying to stop a nuclear weapon with a combination of phat beats, the love of a good woman, and a plucky can-do spirit and you’ll see what I mean.

The Verdict:

Donkey: Despite featuring a character that I had long ago dismissed as less captivating than having a yeast infection so advanced that you could start leasing out your crotch as a Wonderbread factory, this movie is still probably one of the best of these cartoon adventures available out there. But keep in mind that’s pretty much like saying that taking a baseball bat to the knees is better than having your scrotum in a bench vice; either way you end up sorry that you ever took Gary Busey up on that dinner invitation. I give it three handsome mustaches out of five Chinese plagues.

Dr Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme

Have you ever drank so much that you’ve blacked out for 3 days, only to wake up in a dumpster with a chapped asshole, a mouthful of Flintstones chewable vitamins for kids, and Communications degree from the University of Phoenix in your hands? Me neither, but I imagine it would incur a level of confusion very similar to how I feel whenever I try to remember anything about this movie. I know that it’s the origin story of some dude whom, judging by the cover of this movie has an entirely unhealthy obsession for leveling up his World Of Warcraft avatar’s “Disco Dancing” attribute, but that’s about all I’ve got. Past that, I’m afraid that I’d have an easier time recounting my days of potty training than saying anything else about this movie. And really, who can remember all the way to last week?

The Verdict:

Donkey: Wait, what are we talking about? Just let me take a look at the movie’s cover to remind myself. Right…got it: Liberace impersonators at pride parades. Don’t even worry about the haters. I say, “You go, girlfriend!” I give this movie one rainbow flag out of five yawning, black oblivions.

Ultimate Avengers

Moving away from one of the most forgettable characters in comic book history, we instead change gears and charge head first into one of the most awesomely ill-conceived concepts in comic history: the super group. While this premise can work on rare occasions when it features characters whose powers are lame enough that left to their own devices they’d serve as little more than the opening act to a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new Burger King in Fresno, the fundamental problem with this idea is that when you put a bunch of genuine super heroes together, you usually create a force that’s nigh impossible to stop. That might sound great if you’re choosing your team in an attempt to make your quarter last as long as humanly possible while playing Capcom Vs Marvel in an arcade, but it doesn’t quite work in a narrative. The point being that when you assemble the Harlem Globetrotters, you’re going to have to throw something a hell of a lot more threatening than the Washington Generals at them or we all know how that game is going to end before it ever starts. Our heroes might as well be solving the movie’s conflict as a side note on their way to the dry cleaners at that point. But while comic book writers have the propensity to be exceptionally lazy, they’re not stupid, so being well aware of this problem their natural reaction to compensate and salvage some shred of a plot is almost always to create a conflict that’s so goddamn ridiculously immense that it’s firmly based in the ludicrous, causing the whole damn story to jump the shark. And just as you may have guessed, this flick is no exception.

The film begins by focusing on of what has already been documented as one of my most hated characters of all time, Captain America, as we return to World War II and once again witness his rise to closeted pedophile prominence. The astute reader will remember that we actually did a full review of the live-action turd based on this douche knuckle, but you’ll be relieved to hear that the origin story here is not a carbon copy of that rectal secretion. Sure it’s an equally retarded version instead, but it’s different nonetheless. Rather than being strapped to a missile by the Red Skull and fired at the White House only to drastically alter that missile’s course with a few half-assed heel kicks that send him crashing into the icy plains of Alaska, Captain Dick Stick instead discovers that the Nazis are actually aliens just before voluntarily jumping onto the missile that they fire at the US, fighting off an alien attacker (yes, while on the side of a missile slicing through the stratosphere), and blowing it up with a grenade as he plummets into the ocean below where he ends up entombed in an iceberg. I know that’s a lot to take in, so let’s just stop and look at the two finer points of this idiocy. First, this movie is suggesting that the Nazis were in fact lead by aliens. I’ll take a minute to let that sink in. Aliens. No shit. Feel like your skull just limped away from being the involuntary guest of honor at a five-alarm cluster fuck? Well it doesn’t stop there. The second major problem with this entire scenario is his Ziploc Sandwich Bag preservation. Freezing on solid ground in Alaska is dumb enough, but there’s no conceivable way to be encased in a goddamn iceberg as you’re sinking into the depths of the ocean without having long since drowned. That shit is going to take more than 15 seconds, so unless we’re talking about Aquaman, this motherfucker should be nothing more than a long-deceased monument to failure when they find him decades later.

But of course when people do end up finding him, Captain Ball Sweat most certainly isn’t dead. Instead he’s pulled from his icy tomb by Nick Fury and revived for the express purpose of extracting the Super Serum that gave him his questionable and unremarkable powers, all with the intent to manufacture more incredibly expensive soldiers that will follow in his footsteps, undoubtedly meaning that they’ll take themselves out of action for generations to come during their first battle. Great plan! But this doesn’t exactly work out since the scientist forced to be in charge of the process is a captive Dr David Banner, aka The Hulk, who instead secretly uses the serum to try to cure his own spaz-based affliction. So with Plan A in the shitter and the re-emergence of the same Nazi alien threat from WWII, Nick Fury instead decides to recruit Captain Shit Stain and a few fellow superheroes to create the ultimate boy-band…The Avengers! Who else is on this team of glory and scrotal rug burn, you might ask? Only the best of the best, baby: Thor (insufferable son of the god Odin), Iron Man (whose likability quotient soars compared to the rest of these turds), Giant-Man (aptly named as he’s a giant douche), and Wasp (the world’s most powerful co-dependant).

Once these collective talents, ranging from the fantastic to the utterly obscure, finally join forces, they prove themselves to be truly unstoppable. And by unstoppable, I mean entirely stoppable. It turns out that they manage to defeat the alien threat only to immediately get their collective asses handed to them by an escaped and quite enraged Hulk, who is only subdued when his girlfriend, Betty Ross, talks him out of his fiery blood-lust with what I have to assume is gentle promises of Cleveland Steamers later that night. Yes, an entire team of supposed elite heroes got slapped down by one dude. So…yeah…go team!

The Verdict:

Donkey: This movie is about a group composed mostly of clown shoes, but as I alluded to before, they still happen to be powerful enough clown shoes that they should be able to topple any foe. Just look at Thor alone. He’s a fucking god. I mean, really think about that. Unlike some other assholes we know, he’s not just a shield-wielding ball of cock vomit managing to make the already hollow institution of patriotism even more sickening, but an actual god. So if he has all the powers of a god, exactly what force could stand even the remotest chance of defeating him, other than possibly logic and critical thinking? Nazi aliens and a green steroid abuser, apparently. I give this sweet ball of failure three and a half missile jockeys out of five Nazi aliens. Seriously, by the end of it, I felt like I had just steam-cleaned the floor of a porn theater with my tongue, which made it all the more baffling as to why I ever agreed to watch…

Ultimate Avengers 2

Yep, they’re back again and this time they have assembled to face the terrible, unimaginable menace of…the exact same thing from the first fucking movie. Seriously? We’re not even trying anymore, are we boys?

Our tale begins when my beloved Captain Cock Snot and his pitching life-partner, Nick Fury, are approached by the Black Panther, the king of a fictional colony of Africans who recently ascended to the throne after the brutal murder of his father. He asks for their exceptionally incompetent help, explaining that the same Nazi aliens from the first movie are now back and attempting to subjugate his people so they can mine a fictional metal called vibranium, the vital component in all their alien weapons. Itching for any fight that will keep their minds from contemplating how incredibly useless they are, the Avengers assemble and agree to take the case for a mere 25 cents plus expenses. Time to Encyclopedia Brown this bitch! After traveling to that faraway land of Africa our team combines the help of a device designed by the now captive Dr. Banner and the power of blatant mediocrity to eventually save the day and defeat the alien horde once again. The story is so unremarkable that I can honestly say that the only moment where it manages to even slightly redeem itself is when Giant-Man has the decency to die. I could describe the killing blow, but I’d prefer to remember it my own way: as a simple matter of him realizing that no matter how large he could morph his body, it would never be truly equal to what a massive douche he is. But regardless of how you choose to savor the moment, good fucking riddance.

The Verdict:

Donkey: The longer this series goes on, the more it just proves that it never should have existed in the first place. This slapped together garbage feels like a Holodeck episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which means that I’ll give it three Picards dressed like Robin Hood out of five sexually functional robots pretending to be Sherlock Holmes. I honestly didn’t know how much worse it can get…

Next Avengers: Heroes Of Tomorrow

This is how much worse it can get:

The third installment in this junk-touching series rockets us all the way forward into the year 20XX where we meet up not with hardened heroes of might and majestic pants that we have come to expect, but with – as you may have guessed from the ridiculous DVD cover pictured – a pack of goddamn brats that have been spat from their loins. Serving as appropriately shallow remnants of the quite mediocre legacy of the Avengers, these kids are collectively orphaned after their parents meet their doom at the hands of the villain known as Ultron. But as annoying as they prove to be within seconds of gracing Blombo’s television, I have to hand it to these kids; at the very least they have the decency to showcase how quickly comics are to piss in the face of the slightest chance for original thought. How, you ask? They’re all carbon copies of their parents, making this less a reinvention of the series and more like the third worst episode of The Muppet Babies ever conceived, ranking only slightly higher than the one where Gonzo reveals that he hates Jews and the episode where Skeeter deals with her recent abortion through the healing power of song. As such, Kid Captain Cum Dumpster, Little Girl Thor, Mini Giant-Douche-Man, Wee Pimpin’ Black Panther, and Hawkeye Junior are all pretty much exactly what you would expect if you pictured the byproducts of their parents having sex with an exceptionally unattractive couch cushion. But regardless, after being safely hidden from the wrath of Ultron by the still swinging bachelor (read: genital crab farm) Iron Man, the children begin the story by promptly negating his efforts when their own idiocy accidentally gives away their location and provokes an immediate attack by their parents’ killer.

After escaping from their impending doom only to be left out in the real world completely alone for the first time, the bed-wetters are forced to learn valuable life lessons about sharing, co-operation, and the health risks of going ass to mouth in order to work together and stop a set of animatronic replicas of their parents that have been reprogrammed and sent after them by the diabolical Ultron. Let me just say for the record that seeing as how well thought out comics seem to be in general, I’m betting that this supposed “reprogramming” consisted of flipping an internal switch from “protect” to “kill”. But even after conquering their pack of murderous Disneyland Hall Of Presidents-style rivals, the kids are still left facing the ultimate test in the villainous Ultron, whom I might remind you, was able to destroy their much older and only slightly less diaper-wearing parents. Their solution? They lure him out to a desert plain where he is forced to face an aging and solitude-seeking Bruce “The Hulk” Banner, setting the stage for a battle that ultimately results in the destruction of this dastardly villain. So once again all of those keeping track will notice that the punch line to yet another goddamn Avengers movie is any time the Hulk is let off his leash for even a few minutes, he is quite capable of defeating whatever threat you manage to dream up thus making every other supposed “hero” in the story utterly irrelevant.

Beyond my natural distaste for almost any movie that predominantly features the inane antics of children, this cinematic tumor rots away at the ball sack of entertainment by representing another staple of comic book storytelling, and like so many of the others, it’s one that couldn’t be much more offensive if it was being delivered at the Apollo Theater as a tribute to the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by George W. Bush in black face. I’m talking about the concept of alternate realities, wherein the story being told is so outlandish that it might or might not be based in a different reality from that which the characters traditionally occupy, meaning that it’s “what could happen” rather than “what does happen”. That’s about as fucking stupid as reading a book where you get half way through only to stumble across “Chapter 7: None of the Shit in the First Six Chapters Actually Happened…Suck On That, Bitches”. But even if you’re going to tell a story based on a concept this tiresome, the least that you can do is make it entertaining. Might I suggest starting with one where Thor and Captain Turd Ripple end up being sexually molested by the Norse god of condoms covered in broken glass?

The Verdict:

Donkey: Super hero babies are one thing, but stuffing them into the same film as super hero robots? That kind of unbridled awesome makes any viewing of this film grounds for applying an Alabama rape kit, which if I’m remembering correctly is just a stern backhand and more rape. I give it two Muppet Babies out of five life long reminders that you should have had a vasectomy. Next up…

Planet Hulk

It’s about goddamn time. Having watched the Hulk repeatedly save the Avengers from fates of suffering and despair so excruciating that they could only be replicated by actually watching any one of their own movies, it seemed long overdue that we turn our attention to a film based solely on his character alone. It’s kind of like waiting for the most talented member of a shitty to band to realize how much better he is than the turd farm playing around him and strike out on a solo career. But sadly, rather than being treated to a Thriller in this case, Marvel decided that it would once again kick us in the collective man-seed dispensers and dish up a steaming pile of Chinese Democracy instead.

The film opens with the Hulk reaping exactly what he deserves for saving his comrades as he rockets through the cosmos, imprisoned inside a space shuttle by his own teammates so that he might be banished to a barren but inhabitable planet where he can live out the rest of his life without harming another living creature. This concept is so astounding that I am compelled to say it one more time. The Avengers, in their collective wisdom, decided that the most fitting gift that they could give the one person who had saved all their asses on several occasions was a one way trip into the depths of space to end up in a place where he would quite literally do nothing else but die alone. Fuck, that’s way worse than just sneaking up behind him one day and killing him. And these are supposed to be heroes, kids. But of course, their plan is all for naught as the Hulk, whose condition has apparently been lowered from “thermonuclear rage” to “cold shower cranky” just eliminating the need to revert back to the form of Bruce Banner and instead stay in his massive green form permanently, manages to use his massive strength to break free of his bonds. But apparently the monster didn’t retain any of Dr Banner’s intelligence, as he decides that the best thing to do while hurtling through the cold vacuum of space is to smash the shit out of the inside of the shuttle he’s occupying. But amazingly enough, instead resulting in the Hulk being sucked into oblivion, his tantrum only manages to throw the craft off course, causing it to crash on a planet that he was never intended to visit.

Rather than falling victim to the truly staggering odds that his new destination is one that cannot sustain any form of human life, the Hulk instead emerges from his crash site only to find himself being taken prisoner by a race of local beings called the Sakaar who force him to take part in gladiator battles for their amusement. After finding solace in the company of a small group of fellow combatants, our ornery green hero ends up reluctantly joining a resistance movement which he eventually leads against the Sakaar. And after defeating their leader, the Red King, which simultaneously fulfills a convenient prophecy, the Hulk ends the film by taking his place as the defacto ruler of the entire planet.

Entertainment value aside – or more specifically, the very considerable lack of – the single greatest point of shittiness with this movie is the main character himself. As much as I love the Hulk from growing up and watching the Fugitive-esque 70s television show, that seems to be the only context in which I can find the character even remotely entertaining, with the exception of the recent Edward Norton movie that had a very similar theme. The essential problem is that the comic book vision of the Hulk is simply too powerful, to the point of which he simply becomes goddamn boring. After all, the basic concept behind the Hulk in all of these movies is that the angrier he gets, the more powerful he becomes with no limit to that power to be seen. So no matter what you do to try to kill him, he just gets more pissed off and comes back at you even harder, like a porn star that you’re trying to fight off with an elaborate series of blow jobs. The result is that watching this movie is a lot like watching a 3 round title fight between a newborn kitten and a particularly surly anvil that just found out his wife is cheating on him: the fight is never in any doubt, so why the hell even bother watching it?

The Verdict:

Donkey: It’s kind of like watching Gladiator in space, if Gladiator happened to have absolutely nothing remarkable or entertaining about it save the fact that it features the only character in the known universe that has as bad a temper as Russell Crowe. I give this one two and a half raging cases of small cox out of five unspeakably terrible betrayals.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Comics have taught me that consistency is not only unnecessary, but downright cool refreshing taste of Dr Pepper. Sure the tight controls, compelling story, and unspeakably cool atmosphere of Bioshock kept me from putting down the controller until the end of the game. That’s a given. But in the end, I just don’t think that the New Orleans Saints have what it takes to win another Super Bowl. At least not if Rudy and Theo Huxtable have anything to say about it. And I totally mean that shit.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: The second half of our exploration into geek hell as we cross the aisle and join DC Comics for part 2 of…THE COMIC BOOK MOVIE PARADE OF PAIN.

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