Top Seven Non-Comic Book Superhero Movies

Superheroes have been fighting bank robbers, aliens and supervillains on the silver screen pretty much as long as there have been superheroes and/or a silver screen, starting with the Batman, Superman and sundry other Golden Age serials, and stretching through several modern Hollywood boom-and-bust cycles.

 

There was the initial boom, set off by the original, 1978 Superman film, one of the earliest big, popcorn movies in the new post-Star Wars blockbuster mold, a boom that relatively was small and saw more superheroes appearing on TV and in cartoons than in actual movies.

 

Then there was the second one, set off by 1989’s Tim Burton directed Batman, which saw not only a string of sequels, but a slew of similar heroes getting big screen adaptations—The Shadow, Dick Tracy, The Phantom—before 1997's Batman and Robin made live action superheroics thoroughly embarrassing.

 

The current boom seemed to originate with 2001's X-Men (after '98's Blade saw that the coast was clear for Marvel heroes), and has yet to wane. The longevity of Hollywood's current fascination with superheroes can probably be attributed to a confluence of factors—computer imagery has become so cheap and ubiquitous that special effects can render in live-action just about anything a comic book artist could on paper; ballooning budgets make studios more risk adverse, and characters with decades' worth of name recognition are generally relatively safe bets; and media consolidation means that some of the same corporations that own Hollywood studios also own comic book publishers these days, making cross-media adaptations easier.

 

As for the reach of the boom, one need look no farther than the fact that superhero films are becoming less an oddity than a genre unto themselves. They're becoming so common in fact, that some don't even bother buying up the rights to REAL comic book superheroes but just go ahead and make up their own versions. As more and more name-brand superhero films see release, they're followed by more and more off-brand ones, both good and bad.

 

First, the good:

 

 

7. Sky High

 

This 2005 live action family ‘dramedy’ played like a poor man's version of The Incredibles, but considering how incredible ‘The Incredibles’ is, even a poor man's version of it can be worth a watch.

 

Young Will Stronghold is the son of Steve Stronghold and Josie Stronghold, the secret identities of red white and blue superheroes The Commander (Kurt Russel, finally getting to play an actual superhero after years of superheroic roles) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston). And he's got a big problem: Though he's the son of the world's greatest superheroes, he lacks superpowers, and is more likely to grow up into Alfred than Batman (or even Batgirl). He keeps the fact that he's yet to hit power puberty from his parents, as he goes to the titular school where the next generations of superheroes train.

 

Cynical comic book fans can divert themselves by matching the superpowers the many characters exhibit to actual comic book superpowers, and enjoy the long string of stunt casting, which includes Bruce Campbell as a gym teacher, a couple of Kids In the Hall as teachers, and former Wonder Woman Lynda Carter as the principal.

 

 

6. Zebraman

 

Gonzo Japanese director Takashi Miike's as prolific a director as he is a nutty one, so it was only a matter of time before he got around to the superhero genre. This 2004 film had a superhero with perhaps the least superheroic animal theme of all—the zebra. Hell, even the Tick was based on an animal that could, like, suck your blood and annoy you. What's a zebra got going for it, other than a kicking color scheme?

 

In the film, Zebraman is the star of an Ultraman-like Japanese TV show, which gets tragically cancelled early in its life. Its biggest fan is Shinichi, a hen-pecked husband and highly disrespected schoolteacher for whom fantasies of the black and white striped superhero are the only escape from his terrible reality. He's either going insane where he actually thinks he’s Zebraman or in a Grant Morrison-esque meta-fiction mindfuck.

 

 

5. Black Mask

 

This 1996 Hong Kong actioner made it to the U.S. in an edited, dubbed version, based on star Jet Li's burgeoning popularity here. Li's character was an escapee from a super-soldier program who tried to live a nice, normal, quiet life as a mild-mannered librarian. When his policeman friend becomes involved in a series of crimes that points to the super-soldier program that gave him his skills, Li's character decides to start moonlighting as a kung fu-powered superhero. His unimaginative codename comes from his chosen disguise—a simple black mask. The film did well enough in the U.S. to generate a Western sequel by Hong Kong uber-producer Tsui Hark, but Li pulled a Michael Keaton and went on to other projects, which might explain why we never saw a Black Mask 3.

 

 

4. Orgazmo

 

Nowhere near as successful as writer/director/star Trey Parker's South Park, and yet not nearly as embarrassing as he and partner Matt Stone's Baseketball, this pornography parody centered around a pure, virginal Mormon missionary finding/stumbling into the porn industry. So where's the superhero come in?

 

Our protagonist, played by Parker, makes porn films about a superhero named Orgazmo, who fights crime with a powerful weapon—a gun capable of bringing it's victims to instant orgasm (don't laugh; you try finishing off a bank robbery and climax at the same time). When the actor playing Orgazmo's sidekick Chodaboy develops a real version of the gun however, the superhero game becomes very real.

 

 

3. Darkman

 

Before Sam Raimi would get control of the biggest name brand superhero franchise of them all, he'd prove he knew how to tell a story in the genre with this tiny, cheap 1990 film about a scientist who loses his face—and mind—in an attack by gangsters, and adopts a series of disguises to exact his vengeance.

 

What Raimi lacked in production value, he more than made up for with exploitive tone, dark aesthetic and creepy atmosphere. While Darkman may have become something of a footnote in Raimi's career, a bridge between his splatter-stick roots and his respectable Hollywood career, it's gained enough cult cache to earn two direct-to-video sequels and, perhaps the ultimate compliment a not-based-on-a-comic-book superhero film can get—a comic book adaptation.

 

 

2. Unbreakable

 

In 2000, M. Night Shyamalan still seemed like he might live up to all that hype about being "The Next Spielberg," and this follow up to the Sixth Sense did nothing to diminish his rep as a solid storyteller (nor did it give any clues that he'd eventually lose his mind and make movies as insane as Lady in the Water). [Editor’s Note: I thought it was decent, if not a little pretentious.]

 

Unbreakable saw release the same year as X-Men, and was thus rather forward thinking—it anticipated the coming Hollywood superhero boom that X-Men and Spider-Man kicked off. And yet it's a superhero movie in a very loose sense of the word, as Shyamalan teased us throughout with ‘is-he-or-isn't-he’ plot about Bruce Willis' superpowers. Ultimately, it's more of a supervillain movie than a superhero one, but it approaches both comic book-style heroes and villains with a skillful, stately style, viewing them through a realistic prism. In the real world, this is what superheroes might be like, if there were such a thing, and what supervillains are like.

 

 

1. The Incredibles

 

This 2004 Pixar animated feature may go down in history as the greatest superhero movie of all time, which ought to bring a sense of enduring shame to the creators of name-brand superhero films, since so many of the details that The Incredibles prods, tweaks and plays with come from familiar Marvel and DC superheroes.

 

Writer/director Brad Bird crafted a big action movie that was the perfect definition of all-ages, pleasing kids and parents just as easily as us jaded cynical adult superhero fans. At the same time, he managed to deliver a movie that thoroughly explored the outsider theme that is at the core of so many superhero films and comics and made a strong argument for the importance of family—messages you felt rather than heard, seeing as you're so distracted by the giant robot battle.

 

You're forgiven if you walked out of the following year's Fantastic Four movie feeling as if the best Fantastic Four movie was the one that didn't even feature the actual Fantastic Four.