Darkman

Reduce Darkman to its broadest strokes and you have a film that sounds very much like Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop: a hideously disfigured man attempts to reconnect with his humanity whilst battling corporate executives (drunk on dreams of skyscrapers as far as the eye can see) and the criminals in their employ. In terms of execution though, director Sam Raimi trades the Motor City madness for a much more deliberately screwy tone that combines the chilly portent of radio crime dramas and Universal monster movies of the 1930s with the rubbery physicality of a Tex Avery cartoon. Roughed up and left for dead after his fiancée leaves the wrong coffee-stained document in his possession, Liam Neeson's Dr Peyton Westlake finds himself raging in the shadows. His face has been burnt down to a chattering skull; his hands zapped until they are unfeeling bone. 

This deranged doctor, now wrapped up in gauze like James Whale's The Invisible Man, uses what remains of the artificial skin experiments he had been trialling to trick and deceive the heavies who detonated his life. Although lumbered with adult certificates on its original release, Darkman seems tame even when compared to Tim Burton's much more leniently sanctioned Batman from the previous year. Despite a disparity in exhibition notice that does not favour Darkman, there's nothing in Raimi's film as purely distressing as Jerry Hall's tranquilised turn as a melted moll in Burton's blockbuster. Presumably, the reticence to go lower with the film's age rating has more to do with Bill Pope's deliberately manic visual language or Bud S Smith and David Stiven's harried editing style? A trip to a funfair, once Westlake has perfected a facsimile of his own pre-scourging face and reconnected with his grieving girlfriend, lurches with the anxieties and irritations of forced festivity long before Neeson's Doc finds himself wailing in torment because his fabricated face has begun to bubble.