I wasn’t sure if I was going to see the new DC horror movie Clayface or not. It’s an R-rated body horror movie, not generally my thing. I mean, I still haven’t seen The Substance for a reason. However, the movie did get certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and even if I wasn’t exactly dying to see a movie about lesser-known Batman foe Clayface, I could appreciate the fact that James Gunn and Peter Safran would actually OK a mid-budget horror movie starring a lesser-known Batman foe simply on the basis of a strong script. It gives me some hope that maybe I can write a great script for an obscure DC character like Dr. Thirteen and get it made.
Of course, the original script came from horror maestro Mike Flanagan. He knows a bit more about what he’s doing there than I do. Also, I decided to see the movie anyway.
Actor Matt Hagan (Tom Rhys Harries) grew up poor on the mean streets of Gotham City, but he managed to get out and became something big. After getting an Oscar nomination, he heads back to Gotham to do a talk show and ends up hitting a club afterwards with a good friend. When an attractive woman (Joana Ribeiro) shows a lot of interest in him, he has a one-night stand despite a warning as to who this woman is: the girlfriend of vicious mob boss Markos Szabo (David Dencik). Matt wakes up the next day to find Szarbo there with some goons and a switchblade. Despite being the victim here, Matt loses everything during a civil trial, and now, his face disfigured, his money and apartment gone, and his career in shambles, what is there for him to do?
As fate would have it, he finds out about a doctor, Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), who has an experimental nanite treatment that might, just might, repair Matt’s face. Caitlyn, hesitant to consider it due to her own situation, opts to give Matt the treatment, and it works. Or perhaps it works a little too well. Matt soon finds out how much people he trusted and depended on might have set him up, and his face isn’t the only thing reacting strangely from the nanites. His body not only seems to be repairing itself within seconds, but he can even perhaps change his appearance to look like other people. With his life’s work seemingly gone forever, what route is there for a man like this aside from revenge?
So, bottom line, I actually wasn’t that bothered by the body horror here. In point of fact, the thing that made me wince the most was a pre-nanite scene. As it is, the shapeshifting effects work well here for the most part, but they come in service to a story that is doing what it can to delve into the psychology of a character that will be a new supervillain in Gotham City. Like a number of Batman’s classic foes, Clayface is the way he is because his life took a bad turn, and he did not react well to that. Rhys Harries plays Matt as a man who’s body and mind may be warping at the same time. The nice guy actor from the beginning of the movie gradually disappears to a lonely, vengeful man who may not know when to quit, and given how corrupt Gotham is–there seems to be one honest cop in the entire movie–it is hard to say Matt’s actions aren’t at least a little justified. The final act features Matt going on a fairly creative rampage through Szarbo’s nightclub, one that allows the character to make full use of his shapeshifting to devastating effect against guys who probably have it coming but also are in no way prepared to deal with the man they are trying to take down.
That said, I wouldn’t say the movie grabbed me. It was a movie without any real flaws but also without anything that made me really care for Matt, Caitlyn, or anyone else in the movie. I think the closest I might come to describing it may be like one of the old Universal horror movies where Frankenstein or the Wolf-Man showed up, killed, sometimes in something like self-defense, but ultimately were defeated because they had to be, and keep in mind, I really like those old movies. Here, while I found Matt’s story interesting enough, it also felt very familiar, like the movie is basically just a competently-told story that I had seen before. I have no regrets seeing Clayface. I would hope that Gunn and Safran would be inclined to have more of these lesser-known characters get these mid-budget movies to really make the new DC cinematic universe a truly unique place where all kinds of stories can appear and flourish, and while I liked it more than this year’s Supergirl, I also don’t know that I need more of Clayface right about now.
Grade: C+
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