Review by Ben Bussey
Well alright. It’s time to dust off that old phrase that we so seldom find use for these days: I can honestly say I’ve never seen a movie quite like this before.
Oh, we’ve seen these kind of characters, we’ve been told this kind of story: but have we seen it realised in a microbudget style more typically associated with grubby, formulaic slasher/torture flicks? Writer/director/star Jason Trost has taken a fairly classic comic book story set-up, brought it to life in an unusually straight-laced and decidedly non-family friendly fashion – and then sold it first and foremost to the horror crowd who, after all, are considerably more welcoming (or at least more accustomed) to super-cheap fare than the comic book movie crowd. In so doing, Trost has made a film which just might genuinely break new ground, both for microbudget horror and superhero movies.
Is it 100% successful? Perhaps not – but, as every superhero tale of note from the past three decades has gone out of its way to remind us, even the mightiest have their frailties.
All Superheroes Must Die (originally entitled Vs. – presumably changed to avoid confusion with Ryûhei Kitamura’s breakthrough movie, and/or to be more search engine friendly) opens on four curiously dressed individuals waking up in various locations around a small town in the dead of night. These, we soon learn, are Charge (Trost), Cutthroat (Lucas Till), Shadow (Sophie Merkley) and The Wall (Lee Valmassy). Bit by bit they come to their senses, none of them knowing how they wound up where they are, or why they all have small, oozing needle marks on their wrists. Soon enough they find one another – evidently the team have not seen one another for some time, and didn’t necessarily part on the best terms. Not long thereafter they realise that all but one of them has completely lost their powers. Not long after that they find themselves seeing the face of one of their old enemies, Rickshaw (the time-honoured badass that is James Remar), who with classic supervillain flair informs them the entire town and all its inhabitants are rigged to explode, and that if the now-mostly powerless superteam want to save all those innocents, they’re going to have to play a special game.
From that synopsis alone, it’s not hard to see why this has been sold as the Saw of supehero movies (waking up in a strange place with memory loss, being forced to play along with a sadistic maniac’s orders). However, All Superheroes Must Die encapsulates the comic book reading experience better than almost any other recent superhero movie I can think of. Anyone who’s ever read comics will surely recall many instances of that strange moment when you pick up an unfamiliar title for the first time. Jumping in in the middle of a story, you don’t know who the characters are, what their powers are, what their history is, what’s going on or why; the circumstances seem profoundly unlikely, and the characters look fairly ridiculous (I think it’s to the film’s credit that they use traditional superhero costumes, as opposed to black leather or street clothes as might have seemed cooler).
And yet at once, there’s an immediate sense of familiarity to these strangers; and despite the glaring absurdity of everything around, you find yourself accepting these as part and parcel of this story world, and just go with it. That’s what’s so nice about the set-up here; there’s almost no preamble, and very little in the way of backstory. As much as I love a good superhero movie, the deluge of origin stories has long since gotten tedious, and so few of them are courageous enough to just drop you in the deep end. Hell, even Dredd had a two minute voiceover intro.
And in common with Dredd, what puts All Superheroes Must Die most closely in tune with the bulk of post-80s comics is its harsh, not-for-kids content: superheroes who swear, have sex, have a fairly relaxed attitude toward killing, and invariably find harsh reality intruding on their garish dreamworld. Innocent blood will not be spared, and nor will the mental and physical well-being of our heroes. Some might question what the point is of introducing a group of superheroes only to immediately strip them of their superpowers, but this in its own way is another time-honoured convention of superhero storytelling, one which this year’s Iron Man 3 tackled to great effect: if you take away the super, how does the hero stand up on his own?
And hey, if you’re going to have a psychotic super-villain putting your team through their paces, it might as well be James Remar. An actor with his charisma, not to mention his level of cult appeal, is no doubt a godsend when the budget isn’t there to fully realise physical threat on a practical scale. Given the classic bad guy duty of delivering ominous monologues direct to camera, the seasoned actor brings exactly the gravitas needed to convey the sense of real danger facing the protagonists.
Naturally, more of a question mark might hang over how well his young cast mates hold up by comparison. Happily, for the most part they prove more than up to the job, despite their youth. Trost manages fine as both director and ostensible lead, bringing a classic square-jaw good guy feel. Lucas Till, who brings a bit of superhero cred given he was in X-Men: First Class the same year he made this, also brings a weight that defies his years as the more on-edge Cutthroat. Sadly, the one real weak link proves to be Sophie Merkley: while Trost’s script gives her just as much to do, she just doesn’t bring the same level of gusto.
Ultimately, it’s doubtful All Superheroes Must Die will win over a large audience; those more accustomed to megabudget fare will most likely complain of its low production values. This is a shame, though, as I daresay a lot of mainstream comic book movies could stand to learn a few lessons from it. So, for that matter, can the microbudget scene: it’s rare that we see a production as low budget as this take on such potentially silly material and have the balls to play it dead straight, rather than lapsing into self-parody as so many do. This is the first film I’ve seen from Jason Trost, and I look forward to seeing more from him in the future – including but not limited to A World Without Superheroes, the sequel set for next year.
This DVD from Monster has some nice extras, including an intro from Trost, and footage from the post-screening Q&A at the film’s premiere at TIFF 2011.
All Superheroes Must Die comes to Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray on 7th October 2013, from Monster Pictures.