This Clay Was Not in the Oven Long Enough

            James Gunn is now four films in with his D.C. Universe, although, he has only directed two of them, and honestly, it does not look great. It is not terrible, but I am not looking forward to the continuation of his reign. Over the weekend, the newest D.C release came out, Clayface, and it did okay at the box office. It won the weekend, beating out You Can See Everything, but honestly, it does not compare in quality to that.

            Clayface follows Matt Hagen, who is an A list actor. He is at the top of the game, and he has just been put up for an Oscar, but then he finds himself in bed with someone he should not be, literally. He sleeps with a mob boss’s girlfriend, and he wakes up with the mobsters in his room. They punish him by slicing up his face. Not only did they mutilate him, but the girl also came out and said that she was drugged, so they dragged his name through the mud. So now he is totally unemployable.

            Hagen finds himself penniless, and he ends up back in the slums of Gotham, although the presentation of Gotham makes the whole place look like a slum. The apartment is total trash, and Hagen will do anything to get out of it and back to acting, so he finds a doctor, who has an experimental procedure that involves putting microbots into a person’s blood stream to mimic healthy cells, so hopefully these cells could help to heal his face. Reluctantly, Dr. Corr agrees, and the treatment starts.

            It takes a while, but slowly but surely his face starts to look normal, and eventually he is cured, but when he decides to go to a premiere for a play he was supposed to star in, he has a stress reaction, and his face starts to droop. So he calls the doctor, and they rush in to see what is going on, but while she is working on a solution, Hagen just doses himself with all of the altered cells, and it works!

            Of course, there is more to it than that. He tries to go back to a normal life, but his face and body start to do unusual things. Now his face can morph into someone else’s face than his own. He uses this trick to get revenge on the people that had wronged him, so he turns from a sympathetic figure to a vengeful villain. He even ruins his relationship with the doctor because he tries to turn it romantic despite knowing that she is engaged, and now the walls are closing on him, and the police are hot on his trail.

            Before I harp mostly negatively about this movie, let’s mention some of the positives. This movie does have some solid scenes depicting body horror. My favorite was the one in the bathroom on the plane. Clayface has had another stress reaction, and his face has started to melt, but it is his eyes. His eyelids look like they started to melt together. The plane is experiencing turbulence, and he is trying to cut his eye back open with grooming scissors. It made me grip the edge of my seat, just waiting for him to stab his eye out.

            Now the bad! So this movie takes place in Gotham, and obviously, Gotham is not a real place, but in other Batman movies, they film in Chicago or New York or even Europe, but not this film. They would show these large sweeping shots of the Gotham skyline, and it was just CGI slop. Like there is no need to create a fake city just to make the movie look worse. On top of that, it looks like Gotham is in the middle of the industrial revolution. There is fire and smoke everywhere.

            Gotham is traditionally a grimy place, and it typically gets filmed as such, but whatever camera they used to film this just did not work. It was so clear. Like the atmosphere for this movie would have been so much better if it had been shot on film and had a grainy look to it. The clarity from this camera just did not match the vibe.

            This film was directed by James Watkins, but it was written by Mike Flanagan. This is a true tragedy. Flanagan makes some amazing horror, and he has made some seriously spooky TV shows, so when I saw his name attached to this project, I was super excited, but I guess it is like reading a book and then seeing the movie: it was just not what I was expecting. I bet Flanagan would say the same thing: when he wrote it, his vision was something completely different than what came out.

            The final most damning thing I have to say about the movie is that I did not care. This movie could not make me care about the tragedy that Hagen went through. I did not care that he had his face cut open so that I could see his nasal passages. I did not care that he turned into mud (clay?) and was washed into the sewer. I just was ready for it to be over. His revenge over the mob bosses meant nothing and his destruction of his doctor’s relationship was the only mildly interesting thing about a story that should have been interesting and fun.

            I am not really sure where they went wrong with this film, but I was hoping for so much more from this superhero adjacent horror movie. It seems like a weird swing for one of the first few movies in the James Gunn universe, but it also seems like the weird thing he would do. I just cannot get behind his vision. I gave this movie 2 Stars, which someone said on Letterboxd was a little harsh, but the more I sit with it, the more I stand by it.