![]() ![]() And 1940 was a particularly bloody year for Batman: he impaled a Chinese swordsman, threw an American disguised as a Chinese swordsman out of a window and crushed a crowd of Mongols with a Buddha-esque statue. In his very first solo issue, Batman gunned-down a henchman with a machine gun, threw another off a building and hanged another from his Batplane (“He’s better off this way,” Batman says). (Notice the slight furling of his lips into an insinuation of a wicked smile as he puts a ticking time bomb in a clown’s pants.) But back in the 1940s, Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s Batman did kill people. But the biggest issue people had with the movie is that Batman kills people - and he even seems to like it. their issue with the Man Bat), while the Penguin’s ploy to become Mayor is lifted from an episode of the Adam West show. But Batman Returns is very much a Batman movie: the gothic monster movie vibe harks back to the run of titles written by Dennis O’Neil and drawn by Neal Adams in the ’70s (e.g. (The film opens with two upper-crust parents tossing their baby carriage into a stream as the bundle of joy squawks.) There was a lot of talk when it came out that it wasn’t in the real spirit of Batman, that Burton betrayed a beloved character by making the film so lugubrious. Children! Isn’t that so much better?īatman Returns is a mean bastard of a movie. Compare this insidious infanticide scheme to the perpetual threat of annihilation in the Marvel and DC films, where the stakes are so absurdly high they cease to inspire any kind of awe. The ghoulish Penguin, a monstrous mutant rather than the eloquent bird-obsessed burglar of the comics, plans to kidnap and kill all of Gotham’s first-born sons and drown them in sewage. Burton’s film is a wonderfully dark monster flick, really nasty stuff. ![]() (This hostile reaction is why we consequently got Joel Schumacher’s flamboyant, family-friendly films.) But time has been kind to the film, which is, I think, still the apogee of the genre, a rare example of what a comic-book movie can be in the hands of a daring filmmaker. They wanted something friendlier, something “for kids,” perhaps, and parents ran pearl-clutching out of the theaters. Thirty years ago, Tim Burton ‘s Batman Returns - a brooding, batty, bizarre melange of grand guignol horror and slapstick cartoonish ridiculousness - was released upon eager moviegoers, who, in typical mainstream moviegoer foolishness, just didn’t get it. America, this sad and silly country, has become an oligarchy ruled by comic-book nerds and profit-hungry producers for the last 15 years, we’ve been force-fed a bland pâté of the same old stuff, a constant deluge of movies rife with muscular, attractive and utterly, unwaveringly valorous saviors clashing with a litany of increasingly listless bad guys threatening to destroy the computer-generated universe. ![]()
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