Spawn (1997) - any opinions?

Richard Dower

From what i remember it was a big budget (flop) comic book movie, very dark and weird. The clown midget dude was well creepy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41hdM3YRIGw

The CGI, for the time, was quite good.

Wiki says it made a profit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_%28film%29

S.M.B.

I remember having massive expectations when I went to see it in the cinema. I then remember having them shattered as it was a torturous film to sit through.

I still somehow ended up buying the DVD though, one of my first to buy. Think it was 'cause of my fondness for the soundtrack.

Duggy747

As far as I can remember the CGI was pretty high-end for it's time considering they had tried a lot of new techniques with it.

The only good thing about this film, though, was John Leguizamo as the clown. He had to go through some serious amounts of make-up everyday for that part.

I didn't realise for ages that Gambol from The Dark Knight was Spawn :pac:

pixelburp

The only thing I can recall from that movie is Martin Sheen chewing the scenary like he hadn't eaten in weeks.

Perhaps it flopped because mainstream audiences hadn't yet acquired a taste for dark comic book movies yet.

stateofflux

good solid film, dark....i liked it

Lamper.sffc

I rememeber thinking it looked quite cool after seeing the trailer. Especially liked how his cloak thingy looked


I also remember thinking once was enough after seeing it.

constitutionus

it was bizarre.

i read the comic and its not a patch on that despite the bloke behind that having alot of imput into the film.

IIRC it actually wasnt meant to have that much of a budget at all as it was running scared from another summer film that everyone expected to do brilliantly but ****ed up big time.

ive a sneaking suspicion it was batman and robin but im not certain.

eitherway when it tanked they therw a shed load of money at it for post production special effects. most notable on the cape that wasnt meant to have that many, that and the whole battle in hell at the end.

to be honest it still feels more like a B movie than anything else, but still not bad for a time when hollywood didnt have a clue how to do a decent superhero flim.

IMO we didnt start to get them till BLADE came on the scene the following year so you have to give it some credit for not looking like some tim burton ripp off.

the whole year inn

why was I thinking this was Billy Zane?

Mickeroo

Duggy747 wrote: »

I didn't realise for ages that Gambol from The Dark Knight was Spawn :pac:

I prefer to think of him as Black Dynamite

gob_smacked wrote: »

why was I thinking this was Billy Zane?

You're thinking of The Phantom: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117331/

When Spawn came out I was dying to see it, I liked it at the time but having sen it since i's not all that good but it's definitely not the disaster it's regarded as. It's not very much like the comics which were much more sombre in tone and slightly disturbing. There's been talk ever since this came out of a sequel that going for a similar tone to Se7en which concentrates on the two police detectives from the comic with Spawn having less of a central role and more of a "boogie man" type presence which was the case in a few of the books.

The Spawn animated series is worth checking out.

constitutionus

meant to say it was laudable how faithfull they were to the original designs.

violator in particular looked great.

Warper

Saw a trailer for this in the cinema and thought WOW. It looked really cool and dark and the scene that looked like Hell was spectacular. I went to the cinema to see it and it turned out to be absolute garbage. Its basically a crap kids film.