← Back to Reviews
in
#5 - Italian Spiderman
Dario Russo, 2008
Italian Spiderman is an affectionate parody of old-school exploitation films that follows the titular superhero as he becomes embroiled in an adventure that involves a powerful meteorite and the suited-up luchadore villain who intends to use the meteorite for evil.
That GIF above has become an infamous reaction image in its own right, but its quality (or lack thereof) says a lot about what kind of film you're getting into when you watch Italian Spiderman. While technically a ten-episode web series edited together into a single video, the resulting compilation should qualify as a short film anyway and has its own IMDb entry listing it as such so I'm counting it. I watched this because I've recently started watching the spy-themed comedy Danger 5, so I figured I'd given Dario Russo's breakthrough hit a chance as well. Italian Spiderman is a lovingly-crafted homage to foreign '60s exploitation films that rip off popular Western characters and are very obviously shot on shoestring budgets. If you have any familiarity whatsoever with movies of that nature then you can easily spot all the various tropes being mocked here. Bad dubbing, dramatic zoom-in shots, visible puppet-strings - it's all here. You can't deny there's attention to "craftsmanship" here, but then there's the real question - is the humour actually funny?
Deliberately parodying works of entertainment that already qualified as "so-bad-it's-good" is a tough balancing act to get right. When you go to this much effort in order to make a deliberately bad movie, have you really just ended up making a bad movie? The more subtle the distinction between knowing mockery and actual incompetence, the less clever it seems. Quite the paradox, really. Italian Spiderman gets the vibe of the film right, but never seems to do anything worthwhile with it. Having the film be dubbed into Italian with the occasional snippet of gratuitous English may be true to the subject matter but there's nothing particularly funny about it - an overly hammy dub is usually funny, but here it just becomes tiresome and not even deliberately poor subtitles make up for that. I can't even imagine this film's dialogue being any funnier if it was dubbed into English instead, but at least it would make the film slightly easier to follow. The lead character is the kind of self-absorbed, amoral protagonist that exploitation films tend to feature that are generally terrible people from an objective standpoint, but even the gags designed to mock his unheroic nature don't work. The best example is when he punches a man and tells him to respect women only to end up punching a woman and telling her to make him coffee only seconds later. Heroes of other parody movies such as Austin Powers and Frank Drebin are called out on their glaring personality flaws and undergo at least some character development over the course of their movies, but that just doesn't happen with Italian Spiderman and it makes for some frustrating viewing.
Tying in with the (deliberately?) poor handling of Italian Spiderman as a character, the film's origin as a series of short videos makes the full version feel very fragmented and thus emphasises ludicrous action sequences over any decent character or narrative development (even within the context of a Z-grade parody). The film clocks in at just under forty minutes, but you quickly become very used to the deliberately awful filmmaking on display. Every noticeable use of green-screen, every glaringly fake animal puppet, every logical inconsistency, every excessively violent and bloody death...after a while it does become about as tedious as many actual exploitation movies. While I can sort of appreciate the effort (or lack thereof) that went into simulating the exact look and sound of bad old movies (right down to shooting the whole thing on 16mm), it doesn't matter if I don't get any laughs out of it. I'll at least concede that it's the work of a first-time filmmaker, but if the nicest thing I can say about the film is "Hey, at least it looks awful" then you probably haven't done too well. At least that GIF will live on in infamy.
Dario Russo, 2008
Italian Spiderman is an affectionate parody of old-school exploitation films that follows the titular superhero as he becomes embroiled in an adventure that involves a powerful meteorite and the suited-up luchadore villain who intends to use the meteorite for evil.
That GIF above has become an infamous reaction image in its own right, but its quality (or lack thereof) says a lot about what kind of film you're getting into when you watch Italian Spiderman. While technically a ten-episode web series edited together into a single video, the resulting compilation should qualify as a short film anyway and has its own IMDb entry listing it as such so I'm counting it. I watched this because I've recently started watching the spy-themed comedy Danger 5, so I figured I'd given Dario Russo's breakthrough hit a chance as well. Italian Spiderman is a lovingly-crafted homage to foreign '60s exploitation films that rip off popular Western characters and are very obviously shot on shoestring budgets. If you have any familiarity whatsoever with movies of that nature then you can easily spot all the various tropes being mocked here. Bad dubbing, dramatic zoom-in shots, visible puppet-strings - it's all here. You can't deny there's attention to "craftsmanship" here, but then there's the real question - is the humour actually funny?
Deliberately parodying works of entertainment that already qualified as "so-bad-it's-good" is a tough balancing act to get right. When you go to this much effort in order to make a deliberately bad movie, have you really just ended up making a bad movie? The more subtle the distinction between knowing mockery and actual incompetence, the less clever it seems. Quite the paradox, really. Italian Spiderman gets the vibe of the film right, but never seems to do anything worthwhile with it. Having the film be dubbed into Italian with the occasional snippet of gratuitous English may be true to the subject matter but there's nothing particularly funny about it - an overly hammy dub is usually funny, but here it just becomes tiresome and not even deliberately poor subtitles make up for that. I can't even imagine this film's dialogue being any funnier if it was dubbed into English instead, but at least it would make the film slightly easier to follow. The lead character is the kind of self-absorbed, amoral protagonist that exploitation films tend to feature that are generally terrible people from an objective standpoint, but even the gags designed to mock his unheroic nature don't work. The best example is when he punches a man and tells him to respect women only to end up punching a woman and telling her to make him coffee only seconds later. Heroes of other parody movies such as Austin Powers and Frank Drebin are called out on their glaring personality flaws and undergo at least some character development over the course of their movies, but that just doesn't happen with Italian Spiderman and it makes for some frustrating viewing.
Tying in with the (deliberately?) poor handling of Italian Spiderman as a character, the film's origin as a series of short videos makes the full version feel very fragmented and thus emphasises ludicrous action sequences over any decent character or narrative development (even within the context of a Z-grade parody). The film clocks in at just under forty minutes, but you quickly become very used to the deliberately awful filmmaking on display. Every noticeable use of green-screen, every glaringly fake animal puppet, every logical inconsistency, every excessively violent and bloody death...after a while it does become about as tedious as many actual exploitation movies. While I can sort of appreciate the effort (or lack thereof) that went into simulating the exact look and sound of bad old movies (right down to shooting the whole thing on 16mm), it doesn't matter if I don't get any laughs out of it. I'll at least concede that it's the work of a first-time filmmaker, but if the nicest thing I can say about the film is "Hey, at least it looks awful" then you probably haven't done too well. At least that GIF will live on in infamy.