Episode 259 Reviews for: You Can See Everything -- Clayface -- Wildwood

Clayface faces two big problems for me.

The fact that most of the good scenes are in the trailer with nothing more that the movie presents other than what we see in the trailer.

And number two, the movie doesn't know what it really wants to be when it comes to horror or tragedy or even both.

Clayface reminded me of 1986's The Fly that did this strategy extremely well.

You have horror, you have tragedy, you have a love story.

This feels like a watered-down version of that, that takes tragedy with horror elements with a love interest thrown in to give purpose to a story.

Clayface takes one of Batman's more unusual adversaries and places him at the center of a body horror story.

Written by Mike Flanagan and directed by James Watkins.

The film follows Matt Hagen, played by Tom Rhys-Harris, an actor whose life is at its peak that becomes entangled with physical transformation, identity, and terrifying consequences of losing control over his own body.

After he gets entangled in a one-night stand with the wife of a mobster, it's a premise with lots of potential, especially for a comic book adaption willing to embrace the darker corners of its source material that we saw from 2019's The Joker.

Clayface had an opportunity to really be something special, surrounding the horror elements but also deliver something more deep in the terms of obsession with beauty and vanity.

Clayfix doesn't deliver on either, especially as we patiently wait to see how the movie expands some of the more tense moments we see from the trailer.

Spoiler alert, the movie doesn't really expand anything that we saw from the trailer.

What we saw is what we get.

Now, there are some mildly uncomfortable scenes where we see Matt realize he can suffocate one of his victims while shoving his fist in somebody's mouth while the clay, if you will, suffocates his victims.

But as it stands, Clayface doesn't earn its R rating and gives us more of a ho-hum amount of shocks.

Even when we see special effects in their entirety, it feels a little like a letdown.

Now, the film tries again to separate itself from the superhero feeling.

But at times, I wish it brought us into a lingering feeling of Gotham, even if it's a gentle reminder, something that gives us a hint that the movie is trying to be innovative.

While our director, James Walken, nails a lot of the fantastic lighting and does have some fantastic shots in the film, our Speak No Evil director almost forgets that this is based on a Batman villain.

We need motive.

We need purpose.

We have the motive of revenge here.

I'll get into that in just a second.

But by the end of it, we fully don't understand what happens for Matt after revenge.