[.ca] Batman the Movie 35th

From Amazon.com:
Holy camp site, Batman! After a fabulously successful season on TV, the campy comic book adventure hit the big screen, complete with painful puns, outrageous supervillains, and fights punctuated with word balloons sporting such onomatopoeic syllables as "Pow!," "Thud!," and "Blammo!" Adam West's wooden Batman is the cowled vigilante alter ego of straight-arrow millionaire Bruce Wayne and Bruce Ward's Robin (a.k.a. Dick Grayson, Bruce's young collegiate protégé) his overeager sidekick in hot pants. Together they battle an unholy alliance of Gotham City's greatest criminals: the Joker (Cesar Romero, whooping up a storm), the Riddler (giggling Frank Gorshin), the Penguin (cackling Burgess Meredith), and the purr-fectly sexy Catwoman (Lee Meriwether slinking in a skin-tight black bodysuit). The criminals are, naturally, out to conquer the world, but with a little help from their unending supply of utility belt devices (bat shark repellent, anyone?), our dynamic duo thwarts their nefarious plans at every turn. Since the TV show ran under 30 minutes an episode (with commercials), the 105-minute film runs a little thin--a little camp goes a long way--but fans of the small-screen show will enjoy the spoofing tone throughout. Leslie H. Martinson directs Lorenzo Semple's screenplay like a big-budget TV episode minus the cliffhanger endings. --Sean Axmaker

Missing the Point?:
I think a few of the above reviews are really missing the point regarding Batman - The Movie. Is it campy? Of course it is! Is it cheap? Yes! Why were these particular people cast? If you don't know, read on and learn. Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, was a TV series which ran for like 3 years, twice a week, from 1966 to 1968. After the 1st pretty successful season on American TV, a movie was produced, using the same actors, screenwriters, sets, music, etc. The reason the movie was made was to pre-sell the TV series to the European market. They wanted to make a feature length movie using the same talent and if the movie did well in Europe, they'd be able to sell the series. That's the whole reason this movie was made. Obviously, the producers couldn't make the movie using other actors, cars, etc. It had to fit into the existing very campy, very funny TV series. The movie is slow at times, the acting IS over the top (most all TV acting was over the top in the 60s and 70s), the plot silly. None of this stuff really matters, because of (and one reviewer has already pointed this out) the sincerity of Adam West and Burt Ward in their roles as the Caped Crusaders. This isn't something they do to keep from spending time with Aunt Harriet. This was deadly serious to them and they showed it. To me the funniest sequence in the movie is the scene where Batman is trying to get a cartoon-type bomb away from various groups of wandering people before the bomb blows up. He runs all around the docks where the scene is set, holding what is obviously a prop bomb with a sparkler attached to it for a burning fuse. He runs to this side of the dock, there's a small group of Salvation Army people, to that side, young lovers, or a family of ducks in the water, etc. All of course, olivious to the bomb or the sight of this crazed man in grey spandex running around WITH a bomb. "Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!" Anyway, the whole idea of this movie was to cash in on what was considered a flash in the pan TV series. As ratings sagged, they brought in Batgirl, and as sexy as Yvonne Craig was in skintight purple leather, she wasn't enough to hold the US TV audience's attention, and the series folded. Over the years, I've caught this movie on TV and usually tuned in, as I remembered enjoying the TV series. When the movie came out on DVD, I bought it immediately, and was very pleasently surprised to hear Messers West and Ward giving background commentary during the movie. Also, the DVD menus and features are fascinating, but you HAVE to remember, ALL of this was based on the original TV series (which had the second-coolest Batmobile ever, but the absolute coolest theme music). I hope this helped some of you who may feel ripped off or were expecting a more "Dark Knight" flavor to your Batman experience. This was the original, and it kept extremely true to its (very budget conscious) television roots. This is what we had back in the 60s to watch on TV, this or Lawrence Welk.

This shows that Batman is over-rated....:
They have done a ton of both animation and live action films on Batman, but the character must have a streak of bad story ideas that come with every film. This film was to put it mildly, very campy. The casting or West and Ward was terrible. They tell jokes that are not funny and wear long underwear costumes that make them look like they escaped from a mental hostpital. The villians casting of familar actors was not much better, they read the same corny dialoge from a script that clearly needed a real writer to make this work, but the film makers never bothered with that. The effects work is mostly cheap animation shots done and put on film and it looks like they used a cheap film projector to do that. There was no art direction to speak of in this movie, just a lot of fake sets that had fake machines with lights on them. There are a hundred other things wrong with this movie to speak of, but the main points have already been made...This was a bad movie period.

Good sober, but better in other states of consciousness:
Watch it stoned, it will not disappoint, OR it will disappoint so much that you will be impresseed. Also I've never seen such lazy script-writing in all my years of yore.

Funny movie!:
Okay this movie is very different form the Batman movies that younger audiences may be familiar with but it's still a very good movie altogether. Batman along with his sidekick Robin team up to fight an alliance of criminals The Joker, Catwoman, Two-Face, and Penguin and they must stop them from terrorizing Gotham City. This moive is so incredibly funny! Nothing like the darkness of 1989's "Batman" 1992's "Batman Returns" or even Forever but while it's certianly cheesy, the cheese factor on here is far better than on 1997's horrible "Batman and Robin"! This movie is a must-have but mostly for bat-o-philes.

A real good movie:
This is a pretty good movie. Nice to catch all the wild ideosynchrosies of Batman's greatest villains. Boffo Acting is really bizaar. This has the greatest commentary by Batman and Robin themselves telling and joking about what they think about the whole thing.