Everything old is new again. “Clayface” is the third feature film in the new, rebooted DC Universe, and on the surface it looks like a novelty. Instead of a big budget film about one of the comic book company’s many name-brand superheroes, it’s a relatively inexpensive R-rated horror movie about a monstrous supervillain who runs amok with no heroes to stop him. After repeated, failed attempts to turn comic book rogues into mainstream antiheroes with flops like “Morbius,” “Kraven the Hunter” and “Black Adam,” James Watkins’ new film doubles down on the idea that the Batman villain Clayface is — in spite of his (arguably) sympathetic origin story — a frightening, despicable murderer.
If only there was a name for movies about scary supervillains who do unforgivably evil things. Oh wait, I forgot, they’re called monster movies. Comic book trappings aside, “Clayface” is just another horror movie about a person who transforms into a disturbing creature. It owes its existence to classic horror movies, particularly the synthetic flesh masterpiece “Doctor X” and the Claude Rains version of “The Phantom of the Opera.” And of course to “Batman: The Animated Series,” which introduced the definitive versions of many supervillains — including Clayface — by using those old monster movies as a template.
“Clayface” is an effective, though hardly brilliant, gross-out horror film. Tom Rhys Harries stars as Matt Hagen, a rising star in Coast City, which is DC’s fictional version of Hollywood. He’s handsome, and we keep hearing he’s talented even though “Clayface” chickens out of actually showing him act. Hagen was just nominated for an Oscar, and perhaps the weirdest thing about the DC Universe is that the nominees aren’t listed in alphabetical order. (A shapeshifting clay monster I can accept. Tossing names out willy-nilly is a bridge too far.)
Hagen celebrates the good news by clubbing in Gotham City, which seems like a bad place to do that, or to do anything at all. When he sleeps with a notorious gangster’s girlfriend, Markos Szabo (David Dencik) mutilates the actor’s face. Hagen tries to seek justice but a series of bad decisions — like giving his manager power of attorney — leaves him penniless and despondent, until he learns about an experimental medical procedure from an old issue of “Plot Convenience Monthly,” which regularly features puff pieces about handsome movie stars and in-depth reporting on nanotechnology.
Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomie Ackie) invented microscopic AI robots that automatically repair a person’s damaged tissue, which sounds like a good thing except for the “AI” part. Hagen volunteers to be her guinea pig and the treatment miraculously works. He’s handsome again, until his whole face starts sliding off of his skull. In a panic, Hagen overdoses on the nanobots and gains the ability to transform into anyone who pisses him off, and he uses this ability to exact revenge on the a-holes who wrecked his life, in schemes directly inspired by Sam Raimi’s “Darkman.”
Harries plays Hagen more like a model than a serious actor. He’s obsessed with his looks, which makes sense in his line of work, but he also thinks of himself as an artist and “Clayface” doesn’t delve into that. It feels like a missed opportunity. Hagen may not get his career back but he does get to act his head off, impersonating gangsters and shady Hollywood types, and yet that brings him no joy. It’s easy to imagine Vincent Price in this role, playing Hagen as a glorious ham. Then again he already did in “Theatre of Blood,” but I digress.
Everyone else in “Clayface” is fine, merely fine. The real star here is the glop. It’s usually CGI, because of course it is, but Watkins — working with a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini — concocts a lot of ways to make it conceptually gross. When Hagen’s eyelids melt together on an airplane he rushes to the restroom an starts cutting away with a pair of scissors, in the middle of serious turbulence. And while some of Hagen’s murders are silly, like bludgeoning a guy to death with a cartoonishly large mace made out of his own flesh, others are gloriously repugnant. There’s a thing “Clayface” does with blood that I’ve never seen before in a movie, and every horror movie gets bonus points if it comes up with a brand new gag.
“Clayface” comes dangerously close to having a point before it backs all the way off. When Hagen’s career hits the skids he’s accused to mistreating women in his past, which he insists is a lie. But although Watkins’ film goes out of its way to reveal who betrayed his trust and how, it never actually proves he wasn’t a creep. The women Hagen allegedly hurt are dismissed, not because they’re untrustworthy, but because they seem to actually be telling the truth.
Hagen doesn’t kill them — and thank goodness, because that’s a level of dark “Clayface” couldn’t come back from — but the film never engages with what that means about his character. We’re supposed to sympathize with his plight and feel bad that he was turned into a monster, but the movie offers evidence he was a monster all along, which you’d think would be kind of a big deal. Or at least addressed somewhat.
So it’s not a great film. At least it’s a decent monster movie, with all the straightforward entertainment value that comes with telling a story about a wet pile of gelatinous flesh that kills people. It reinvents nothing, and is unlikely to change the fate of the DC Universe as we know it, but it’s moderately successful in a crowd full of people simultaneously screaming “Ew!” and “Yikes!” and, in the inexplicable case of the guy shouting behind me, “Boinggggg!”
Boing to you too, my good sir. Boing to you, too.
