It takes guts to make a low-budget superhero film. Superhero movies with massive budgets can often look ridiculous — Batman and Robin cost over $100 million and look how that turned out — so attempting a superhero movie on a budget could end up looking terrible. With that in mind, the costumes in All Superheroes Must Die, the newest film from The FP writer/director Jason Trost, leave a lot to be desired, and the production values as a whole are basement-budget. Major plot points are glossed over, like what powers each of the superheroes have and why there are four superheroes protecting a town as small as Pine Mountain. But if you can look past that, All Superheroes Must Die tells a story that really hasn’t been done in superhero movies before: what happens when the bad guy has the superheroes by the throat?
Years ago four superheroes — Charge (Trost), Cutthroat (Lucas Till, X-Men: First Class), Shadow (Sophie Merkley), and The Wall (Lee Valmassy) — defeated their arch-nemesis Rickshaw (James Remar, TV’s Dexter). But one night all four wake up in different places of Pine Mountain and discover that not only has Rickshaw returned, but he has placed bombs all over the city. Rickshaw communicates to the heroes over televisions and gives them sadistic challenges that they must complete or he will blow up the city. These increasingly violent challenges soon put the heroes against each other, and not all of them survive.
It’s a pretty clever plot because the superheroes are on the defensive for the entire 78 minutes of the movie. However, it’s obvious that budget limitations prevented the plot from being realized to its full potential (along with limiting it to its ultra-short length). The Blu-ray box art demonstrates this — while the movie was shot in Los Angeles, there are no exploding buildings or helicopters with spotlights as depicted on the cover. It’s clear that Trost bit off a lot more than he could chew at this juncture in his career. While that is admirable on one level, this was probably an idea he should have held onto until he was a more established director who could drum up a larger budget. Curiously, the acting is quite good and all of the superheroes play it straight despite wearing costumes that aren’t even as good as those of cosplayers at your local Comic-Con (I mean, The Wall is wearing a baseball catcher’s chest protector). But most impressive is Remar in a surprisingly Joker-like performance, but acting alone can’t carry the performance.
I guess the best way to describe All Superheroes Must Die is that it is a lot like seeing a cheap production of a classic play, with Remar as the token “name” to sell a few extra tickets. The clever ideas are there, and so is the acting, but the presentation as a whole is lacking.
The Disc
No features are included on the Blu-ray, which isn’t surprising considering the low-budget release. Still, I would’ve liked to have heard from the filmmakers about the production and how budget issues affected the shoot.
Movie Rating: The potential is all there, but this cool concept needed a bigger budget to reach its potential (3/10).
Disc Rating: Since there are no special features, if you’re a superhero movie fan check it out when it hits NetFlix rather than buying it (1/10).
All Superheroes Must Die is now available on VOD and will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on January 29.
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