Man-Thing (2005) From Comic Book to Screen

One of the great mysteries in the history of film is how and why Marvel put into production a film based on the comic book monster Man-Thing, a character with almost no name recognition – outside of comic book fans that is – and as a title it hadn’t been in publication for years, but even more mysterious was in the way they went about making the film. With the success of Bryan Singer’s X-Men movies and Sam Raimi’s Spiderman films, it seems strange that Marvel Entertainment would have teamed up with Artisan Entertainment (which was purchased by Lionsgate) to crank out a bunch of live-action films, television series, and direct-to-video films based on their comic book properties, as previous low budget adaptations such as the 1989 Dolph Lundgren led Punisher film and the 1990 Matt Salinger Captain America bombed so badly that they ended up being released as direct-to-video. So did anybody at Marvel expect this film to be any good?

Created by Editor Stan Lee, and writer Roy Thomas, in the early 70s Man-Thing was one of those weird creations that were more in the vein of the horror tales of EC Comics than what was filling up the pages of most Marvel comics of the time.  Man-Thing wasn’t wearing tights or fighting costumed villains, and it even took a while for him to get his own comic as he spent his early years appearing in such titles as Savage Tales, Astonishing Tales, and Adventure Into Fear, but Man-Thing would occasionally bump into likes of Kazar, Daredevil and Iron Man, yet The Man-Thing comic was about as far from its superhero brethren as one could be.

In Savage Tales #1, we are introduced to scientist Ted Sallis, who was working in the Florida Everglades on a secret government project to replicate the super soldier formula that turned Steve Rogers into Captain America, unfortunately, Ted’s choice of girlfriends was rather poor, and she ratted him out to agents of the criminal organization known as A.I.M (Advanced Idea Mechanics). Ted managed to destroy his notes and flee with the only sample of his serum, but after injecting himself with the serum, in the hopes that this would result in turning him into a superhero, and help him survive against the A.I.M agents, instead, he just crashed his car into the swamp. The combination of the serum, the swamp, and the magical forces inherent in the area transformed Ted Sallis into the shambling monstrosity known as the Man-Thing.

If some of that origin sounds vaguely familiar it’s probably because you either saw the movie Swamp Thing or read the comics based on it, and back in the day there were rumblings about a lawsuit between Marvel and Swamp Thing owner DC comics, but being both Swamp Thing and Man-Thing also share similarities with a 1940s comic book called The Heap neither company thought it worth getting into a pissing match over. And aside from their swamp-based origins, the two characters are quite dissimilar, while Swamp Thing retained the intellect of Alec Holland, Man-Thing, on the other hand, is an almost mindless creature, one that only occasionally has flashbacks of his former life as Ted Sallis, and where Swamp Thing travelled the world fighting villains and arcane forces Man-Thing mostly hung around his swamp, with the odd trip to other dimensions.

“Whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing’s touch!”

As superpowers go Man-Thing has easily one of the weirdest and darkest of powers.  Man-Thing is an empathetic creature and strong emotions like rage, anger, hatred, and fear, cause him great discomfort, and he relieves this discomfort by reaching out and taking hold of the offender in a very unpleasant manner, and it turns out that his body secretes highly concentrated acid that can burn human beings to ashes within a matter of seconds, so now whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing’s touch. One important thing to understand is that he isn’t completely deprived of intellect, he once saved a baby that was tossed off a bridge by bringing it to a local doctor, but you won’t find him trading quips with any supervillains as he is completely mute. His only real “job” is that of protecting this particular portion of the Everglades, which just so happens to be the Nexus of all Realities, and how much awareness of this job exists in his muck-filled head is up for debate, but more than likely it’s an instinctual thing created in him at the time of his transformation.

Man-Thing sits alongside Swamp Thing as one of my favourite comic book creations, but where I could see a Swamp Thing movie working (if handled properly) the idea of translating the pages of Man-Thing to a live-action movie seemed all but inconceivable. How do you take a mute and somewhat mindless title character and then hang a major motion picture on him? Well clearly giving a notoriously cheap production house a $30 million dollar budget, and letting them run off to Australia to shoot it, was not the way to go.

Like 1982’s Swamp Thing, the 2005 adaptation of Man-Thing was another case of a comic book movie being made where the filmmakers may have briefly glanced at the source material, throwing in a few names and references to placate the fans, but then they’d completely abandoned almost every other aspect of its comic book origins. Now I know that a one-for-one translation of a comic book to the screen is impossible, they are two different mediums after all, but in this case director Brett Leonard and screenwriter Hans Rodionoff unmistakably threw out the baby with the bathwater. How bad and how far does this go off the mark? Well, the film opens after a brief shot of something monstrous rising out of the swamp, with a bunch of teenagers partying around a campfire, a boy and girl running off to have sex in a canoe, and then Man-Thing brutally murders the dude mid-coitus. And we are left wondering, is this a comic book movie or a slasher film?

“KI KI KI, MA MA MA…MAN-THING, MAN-THING.”

I will not dispute the fact that at its core the Man-Thing comic book is more horror based than anything else but in this movie, he may as well just be wearing a bloody hockey mask. The film’s 97-minute running time mostly consists of people wandering around the swamp until they bump into Man-Thing, who then viciously murders them, and due to this standard formula, the movie gives us a large roster of characters to knock off. We have evil oil tycoon Fred Schist (Jack Thompson), who is drilling on ground sacred to the local Native Americans, his idiot son Jake (Patrick Thompson), who is in charge of security, Steve Gerber (William Zappa) as Jake’s racist underling, Wayne and Rodney Thibodeaux (John Batchelor/Ian Bliss) as alligator hunting rednecks who look like rejects from Deliverance, and then there is Mike Ploog (Robert Mammone), a photographer/bigfoot hunter who thinks this swamp monster is his big break. And in what manner exactly does this Man-Thing dispatch his prey? It seems that he uses his writhing vine/tentacles to explode his victims from within.

It’s messy but very effective.

The problem I have with this part of the movie is that, and not put too fine a point on it, where the fuck is the “Whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing’s touch” aspect of the character? Anyone with even the slightest notion of who Man-Thing is knows that he kills by burning his prey, not exploding them from within via plant attacks. This is a complete failure in translating a character’s most notable trait, that’s like making a Batman movie and having the caped crusader murdering people with gunfire, it’s patently ridiculous. The interesting thing here is that there is a swamp-based creature that uses that type of attack, which would be bloody Swamp Thing!

Did the filmmakers pick up the wrong comic?

In the mid-80s writer Alan Moore was brought onto the then-failing Swamp Thing series, and with his story “The Anatomy Lesson” he shook the foundation of the character by revealing that Alec Holland actually died back in that fiery lab explosion and that Swamp Thing was a creature birthed when the local swamp vegetation had absorbed Alec’s mind, knowledge, memories, and skills and created a new sentient being that only believed itself to be Alec Holland. With this new knowledge, and no longer bound by human morality, Swamp Thing went on a revenge-fueled rampage, where those responsible for his “death” met rather horrifying fates.  In one instance a guy ate a BLT and Swamp Thing made the lettuce explode to tree size from within the dude’s stomach. So yeah, this movie version of Man-Thing not only dropped the key ability he was known for but lifted a completely different one from his competitor.  I’m only surprised that Alan Moore didn’t sue them, but then again I guess he’s kind of gotten used to being screwed over in the movies.

“You got a purty lawsuit there, boy.”

So just what is the plot of this movie you ask? Well, as far as plots go this film doesn’t have much of one.  Kyle Williams (Matthew Le Nevez) arrives in town as the new sheriff, the previous one having gone missing in the swamp, and his first task is to handle the environmental protestors over at Schist Petroleum, and it’s there that he meets Teri Richards (Rachael Taylor), a school teacher/environmental activist, and who is also this movie’s completely unnecessary and useless love interest. Between making witty banter with Teri and dealing with the redneck locals the new sheriff has to track down Rene LaRoque (Steve Bastoni), an eco-terrorist who just may be responsible for Schist getting his mitts on the Native American land, but he’s also pretty bad at eco-terrorism.

Blowing up an oil rig in the middle of your sacred swamp seems like a bad idea.

But what about scientist Ted Sallis, the one who is tragically transformed into the monstrous Man-Thing? Well, the origin story from the comic book is completely jettisoned in favour of turning Ted Sallis into the local shaman, a Seminole chieftain who we learn disappeared sometime before the movie started, and he is accused of selling the sacred land to Schist and then running off with the money. Of course, it turns out that LaRoque was responsible for the sale, and that Schist murdered Sallis for trying to stop the deal, but now LaRoque is all about sabotaging Schist’s company because the Guardian Spirit of the Swamp will keep on murdering until Schist stops desecrating the sacred swamp.

That someone handed this script in and was paid for it has to be the most startling thing about this whole production, as there isn’t a single believable character in this movie, they are either two-dimensional stereotypes or simply too idiotic for us viewers to care about.

That these two survive is the biggest insult.

Not only is this movie a complete departure from the source material, and even if you ignore everything they got wrong (which is pretty much everything) the film is still guilty of being incredibly boring, as most of the film’s running time has us stuck with these group of morons as they wander and paddle endlessly through the swamp in the fucking dark. Visually it’s about as exciting as camping in your backyard and the gory action that was added to get this thing an “R” rating only highlights how little this film has to offer.  When the film eventually comes to its stultifying conclusion we are only grateful that we can now do our best to forget we ever saw it.

“Whatever knows despair burns at the viewing of this movie.”

Stray Thoughts:

• The two teens who exit the campfire to fool around is an obvious and sad nod to the opening scene in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
• This new sheriff decides that his best option for finding LaRoque is to hunt for him at night in the swamp, which no sane person would ever do.
• Man-Thing kills innocent as well as guilty people in this movie, so they took a tortured complex creature from the comics and just made him into a moss-covered Jason Vorhees.
• One character is named after Man-Thing writer Steve Gerber, and another after artist Mike Ploog, but neither of these characters is all that flattering to these comic book legends.
• Most of the swamp locations are sets that look about as convincing as a high school production of Deliverance.

I’m not sure where that $30 million dollar budget went but certainly not here.