Retro Film Review: Darkman – Sam Raimi’s Unhinged Love Letter to the Pulps

---

I was fourteen years old when Darkman hit theatres in the summer of 1990. Fourteen. Let that sink in for a second. Tim Burton’s Batman had detonated the previous year, and suddenly every studio in Hollywood was scrambling to find the next dark, brooding superhero property to throw money at. And here comes Sam Raimi—the guy who made The Evil Dead in a cabin in Tennessee with roughly twelve dollars and a truckload of fake blood—pitching his own original superhero movie to Universal Pictures. Not Batman. Not The Shadow (that would come later, and… well, we’ll talk about that some other time). Something brand new. Something weird.

And God, was it weird.

For those who somehow missed it—or forgot, which is criminal—Darkman stars Liam Neeson as Dr. Peyton Westlake, a scientist working on synthetic skin who gets horrifically disfigured by mobsters, left for dead, and comes back as a bandaged, psychologically unraveling vigilante who can disguise himself as anyone for 99 minutes at a time before his fake faces melt off. That premise alone! It’s got pulp serials written all over it. The Shadow. The Spirit. A dash of The Phantom of the Opera. Raimi knew exactly what he was doing—he wanted to make a comic book movie without an existing comic book, and he essentially reverse-engineered the DNA of every great masked avenger from the 1930s and ’40s and jammed them into a blender with his own manic visual style.

The result? Pure, uncut Raimi.

I remember sitting in the theatre, probably in a seat that smelled vaguely of stale popcorn and spilled Coke, and just being floored by what I was seeing. The camera moves—those insane, swooping, tilted-angle shots that would later become his signature on the Spider-Man trilogy—were already fully formed here. There’s a sequence where Westlake, hidden in the shadows of his destroyed lab, rages against his condition, and Raimi shoots it like a gothic horror painting come to life. Shadows eating half the frame. Dutch angles that would make Carol Reed proud. And Danny Elfman’s score—bombastic, tragic, swelling with this operatic grandeur that the movie absolutely earns.

(Side note: Elfman in the late ’80s and early ’90s was on a tear that I don’t think gets enough credit. Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Darkman—back to back to back. The man was composing like his life depended on it.)

But here’s the thing about Darkman that I think people miss when they revisit it now, if they revisit it at all: it’s funny. Not in a winking, self-aware, modern-superhero-quip way. In a Raimi way. There’s a scene—you know the one—where Westlake is at a carnival trying to win a stuffed elephant for Julie (Frances McDormand, no less, slumming it beautifully), and the carny rips him off, and Westlake just… snaps. Grabs the guy’s finger and breaks it. “I’m learning to live with a lot of things,” he snarls. It’s horrifying. It’s hilarious. It’s both at the same time. Classic Raimi. That tonal tightrope between Grand Guignol horror and slapstick comedy that he’d been walking since Evil Dead II—he brings it all here, and it works.

Neeson is phenomenal in this, by the way. This was before he became Liam Neeson: Action Star™ with Taken and its seventeen sequels. Here he’s raw. Vulnerable. Genuinely tragic. When he’s under the bandages, ranting and screaming in his lab, you feel every ounce of that pain. And when he’s wearing someone else’s face, there’s this quiet desperation—the knowledge that he’s running out of time, that the mask is going to dissolve, that he can never really be himself again. It’s a superhero origin story, sure, but it’s also a monster movie. Frankenstein by way of Republic Pictures serials.

Was it perfect? No. Frances McDormand deserved more to do than play the concerned girlfriend (she’d win her first Oscar six years later for Fargo—imagine what Raimi could’ve done with that McDormand). The villains—Larry Drake as Robert Durant is delightfully unhinged, collecting fingers like baseball cards—are a bit one-dimensional. And the third act gets a little… let’s say structurally enthusiastic, with a helicopter fight that feels like Raimi ran out of story and just decided to blow things up.

In spite of these minor flaws I don’t really care about – the movie still delivers. Because Darkman has something that most modern superhero movies have completely abandoned: sincerity. It’s not embarrassed to be what it is. It’s not deconstructing the genre or commenting on it or subverting expectations for the sake of subversion. It’s a guy in a trench coat and bandages swinging between buildings and screaming into the void, and the movie loves him for it. Raimi loved this character. You can feel it in every unhinged camera move, every melodramatic musical cue, every scene where Neeson chews the scenery like it owes him money.

I think about that fourteen-year-old kid sometimes. Sitting in the dark. Watching a mad scientist become a monster become a hero become… something else entirely. Something that didn’t fit neatly into any box.

Thirty-six years later, it still doesn’t.

And I still love it for that…

Bonus: Oh, and before I forget… there’s also a cameo by Logan’s Run American Werewolf in London beauty Jenny Agutter! SCORE!!

Sooooo… a big whopping 4 out of 5 stars from me for this one.

---

---

Thanks for reading, weirdos! If you enjoyed the article, share it far and wide. Or, if you’re feeling generous and want to help me continue to write about The WEIRD and do what I love, you can buy me a coffee.