Talk:Darkman

Trivia

None of the trivia has been sourced so I'm moving it here for the time being until it can be integrated into other sections. --J.D. 16:09, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Trivia

• Sam Raimi's long time friends Joel Coen (husband of Frances McDormand) and Ethan Coen make a brief appearance in Darkman. They are driving a 1973 Oldsmobile, dubbed "the Classic", which has appeared in most of Raimi's films.

• During a scene in the movie Darkman, Peyton/Darkman cries out, "Julie!" This is actually voiced by Bruce Campbell, good friend of director Sam Raimi and from Evil Dead/Army of Darkness fame. He also appears at the end of the movie as Darkman's last incarnation, taking one last look at his girlfriend before disappearing into a crowd.

• Ted Raimi, the director's brother, played Durant's bespectacled henchman Rick, who meets with an untimely end by way of an open manhole and a semi. In an interview, Raimi claimed that he tried to make his character subtly homosexual, which may explain why Durant appears to particularly care for this henchman.

• A sound bite from this film is mixed into the Velvet Acid Christ song Futile (Nazi Bastard).

• In one scene, there is a closeup of a pupil constricting in reaction to a large explosion. A similar Sam Raimi shot is seen in the climax of Spider Man, when the Green Goblin hurls a Pumpkin Bomb that explodes point-blank in Spidey's face.

slogan?

I vaguely remember a slogan for this movie, which was, I believe "What evil lurks in the hearts of men?", it was on posters and what-not. Maybe this deserves a mention if someone can attest to it? 67.5.156.62 (talk) 11:43, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

"What evil lurks in the hearts of men" was the slogan for the 1994 film The Shadow (1994 film). All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 06:59, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Comics

All of this info is unsourced and goes into waaay too much detail. This article is about the film not the comic book. I'm stashing this section here until it can sourced and edited down to a reasonable summary-type size.--J.D. (talk) 18:03, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

With the movie’s release in 1990, Marvel Comics published a 3 issue adaptation of Darkman in color along with a larger black and white magazine size adaptation consisting of all three issues.

In 1993, Darkman returned in a 6 issue mini-series also published by Marvel Comics.

Written by Kurt Busiek, the mini-series picks up right after the end of the first movie within a few months or less. Darkman refuses to accept Durant’s death and continues his shake down of the criminal community in the hopes of satisfying his need for revenge. During this shakedown, the city’s new criminal empire structure in Strack and Durant’s absence is revealed. The Metropolitan Club, an exclusive male’s club consisting of the city’s most prestigious elite, now coordinates all illegal activities with the police commissioner as its chairman. Undermining the chairman is a scientist with unclear connections with Durant named Claude Bellasarious. Though aiding the Metropolitan Club in their quest for power (like outfitting Eddie Black with new cybernetic ammunition hands to help him take back the water front), Bellasarious is actually working on different ideas for reviving Durant who’s severely burnt body is hiding out in a hospital as a comatose John Doe. At this same hospital, Darkman’s girlfriend, Julie, gets a job within the legal department where she slowly develops a relationship with a doctor named Don who reminds her of Westlake before the accident.

As the story unfolds through the issues, the police commissioner turns out to be a dabbler in the darker side of psychological exercises, reverting himself to a dangerous personality from a past life; this past life identity being Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General of England. Responsible for several deaths of homeless people he burned for being witches, the commissioner’s misdeeds were finally brought to the public’s attention by Darkman, and he was taken to prison where he committed suicide before he could stand trial. With his death, Bellasarious became the new chairman of the Metropolitan Club and moved Durant’s resurrection into motion.

Bringing one of the victims of the commissioner’s witch burning to the hospital for treatment, Darkman runs into Julie and sees her distant affections for Don. Wanting her to be happy, Darkman sneaks into Don’s home late one night and encourages him to court her. With affections for Julie as well, Don takes the initiative and begins building a romantic relationship with her. Possibly the mini-series’ strongest moment in Darkman’s character development, Darkman becomes obsessed with the idea of using his synthetic flesh technology to disguise himself as the doctor to be closer with Julie. After fighting the urge for so long, he finally succumbs and manages to see Julie as Don a few times without her ever suspecting foul play. The innocent charade comes to a disturbing end, however, when Darkman’s Don mask melts off in front of Julie, leaving him to flee in shame and embarrassment.

In the meantime, a doctor has finally figured out how to revive Durant much to Bellasarious’ delight. Combining genetics and robotics, they grew a massive steroid pumped clone body and then attached Durant’s head. Through robotics, Durant’s head could detach from the shoulders on mechanical spider legs and control the body via remote from a distance. More physically empowered than ever, Durant reclaims his role in the criminal empire and makes examples of enemies by collecting their arms now instead of fingers.

With Darkman still alive and on the streets, Durant sets out to exact revenge for his explosive death. Kidnapping Julie from the hospital, Darkman tracks Durant to the same unfinished skyscraper Strack had held Julie captive in the movie. After a long ensuing fight that leads from the Strack tower to the river shores of a homeless shanty town, Darkman defeats Durant’s powerful new body but loses the head which scurried to safety. With the whereabouts of Durant’s head unknown, Darkman visits Bellasarious’ home with threats against his criminal operations, letting him know he wouldn’t stand for whatever he and Durant have planned. As for Julie, Don asks her to transfer with him to another city, but she declines the offer in favor of needing more time to work things out between her and Darkman’s situation.

In 2006, Dynamite Entertainment published a cross over that pitted Darkman against Sam Raimi’s popular Army of Darkness franchise.

Darkman’s ex-girlfriend Julie has come in possession of the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis which her assistant, Brynne, translates and unwittingly unleashes the forces of the undead. Watching from afar, Darkman rushes to Julie’s safety but finds she’s become host to a demon calling itself the Queen of Darkness. With the whole city becoming over run with the undead (aka deadites), Darkman and Brynne find out the Queen of Darkness needs the Necronomicon to fulfill a sinister plan and must keep it from her at all cost. Brynne then finds a translation that speaks of summoning a hero in time of great need. This hero turns out to be Ash J. Williams who comes through a time tunnel with his chainsaw, sawed off double barrel shotgun, and Oldsmobile. Once Darkman makes it clear he wants to save Julie without destroying her, the two heroes work together to save the world without much conflict between the two of them. While Ash just blows the deadites away or cuts them to pieces, Darkman takes a more stealthy approach using his synthetic skin technology to disguise him self as a deadite and walk among them without any problem. They eventually learn the Queen of Darkness has deadites building a temple over Strack’s unfinished skyscrapers which will be used in their plot for world domination once they have the Necronomicon. To help her retrieve the book, she resurrects Durant from his grave to act as general over the deadites. Still possessing all his memories and sinister wits, Durant takes pleasure in the undead legion he’s become apart of and awaits his chance to get revenge on Darkman for killing him twice. After finding a reverse spell in the Necronomicon, Ash, Darkman, and Brynne sneak into the temple and come face to face with mobs of deadites, Durant and the Queen of Darkness at the center of it all. Despite all odds, they manage to recite the reverse spell and vanquish the undead back into the Necronomicon. With his services no longer needed, Ash returns to his dimension, and Darkman sulks as he watches a restored Julie fall into the arms of her most recent lover.

Homosexuality

There are several hints during the movie that suggest Durant is either bisexual or homosexual. I think this is worthy of mention in the character descriptions.

Cast descriptions

Under the cast and characters section, three of the four primary actors have casting notes next to their names, while the forth has a character summary. Does this seem inconsistent and sloppy to anyone else? Klopek007 (talk) 07:35, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Dynamite Solo Series

I cannot find anything to indicate that a Darkman series was produced following the notice of such tagged as forthcomming in 2007. Had the series been pushed back or simply cancelled? --Redknight (talk) 14:54, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Split

I removed the split tag because the section is not ready for splitting. When you have some references to establish notability then it would be quite reasonable to create a new article using the existing material and leave a summary here, i.e. be bold and do it. Until then, the sequels are properly sub chapters in this article. Op47 (talk) 14:38, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

The Shadow

The mention of The Shadow in the first section links to the 1994 film, which came out 4 years after Darkman. Shouldn't it link to the character's page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.195.7.38 (talk) 23:00, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Someone wants to resynchronize it?

Use a vocoder to imitate the doctor's voice at the hospital scene and then synchronize and mix it with an audio editor. In the German translation, the sentence goes like: "Wir durchtrennen die Nerven im Striato-Thalamus-Trakt... er hat keine körperlichen Empfindungen mehr... zehrt bloß noch von seinen Emotionen... ich persönlich würde ihm nicht so viele Chancen geben, ha ha!" Find a fitting sentence that goes like: "We did a micro-invasive prefontal lobotomy to make him indifferent to his pain sensations. For his skin lesions as well as for the closure of his skull we use human dura mater transplants that will be resorbed and transformed into body collagen during the healing process. The FDA just sent us a mail that one of our charges was contaminated. Chances are that he will contract CJD and end up as a complete zombie during the next years, he he!". This will perhaps add some dramaturgy. Also, someone should edit Jesus from Montreal and cut the Lyodura picture into the transplantation sequence towards the end. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.201.2.27 (talk) 15:32, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

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Cult film

Maybe this is a cult film and maybe someone can improve the article with sources to prove it but I have removed that claim from the article because it was not properly supported by sources. There are two significant problems:

1. The AV Club does not at any point actually call it a cult film.[1] The reviewer instead calls it a key transitional film, so I rephrased the article to more closely paraphrase what the source actually says.
2. WP:WEASEL "is regarded by some as a cult film" but only one source (the aforementioned source that does not call it a cult film) was provided not two sources, not some sources.

Both problems show a need for more sources and for those sources to actually call it a cult film. Please do not restore unsourced claims. -- 109.79.91.51 (talk) 21:30, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Anniversary

To mark the 30th Anniversary of the film The Hollywood Reporter has put together detailed article on The making of Darkman. Right in the subtitle of that article Ryan Parker calls it a "cult classic" (see above) but more importantly the article is a detailed source than can be used to improve the article in various ways. I hope editors will be careful to use The Hollywood Reporter as a source and to avoid using others (such as Collider.com ) who are merely recycling the story. -- 109.77.200.76 (talk) 20:51, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Xnfhcds

The x c 're Rd Over Inset We've U 82.38.79.35 (talk) 19:34, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

"Batman" connection dubious at best

A repeated factoid on this article mentions a connection between director Sam Raimi and Batman: "Raimi sought out the rights to Batman; unable to secure them, he created Darkman" – this is mentioned in the lede and in the "production" section. However, I suspect this isn't true – or at least is not verifiable by reliable sources.

This claim has appeared on Wikipedia since 2006: "[Raimi] had pursued and failed to secure the rights to both The Shadow and Batman," added without a source. (The next sentence was accurately sourced to The Evil Dead Companion; later revisions made this a footnote which may have given readers the impression that the Companion supported Raimi pursuing the rights to Batman, which it does not). I cannot find mention of Raimi pursuing the rights to Batman in a source that predates this 2006 Wikipedia edit. This factoid has only started to consistently appear in third-party articles over the last five years or so, long after the production of Darkman, which makes me concerned that recent writers have been simply assuming the Wikipedia article is fact.

First off, primary and secondary sources that discuss Raimi's directorial career and/or the production of Darkman only mention Raimi seeking The Shadow before Darkman:

• Interviewed by frequent collaborator Bruce Campbell about Darkman, Raimi states "I really wanted to make The Shadow. But Universal Studios wouldn’t give me the rights to that."[2]
• Darkman producer Rob Tapert recalls that Raimi "tried very hard to make a movie about The Shadow, but that proved impossible..."[3]

Second, although Batman has occasionally been mentioned in relation to Raimi, it has never been in the context of Raimi having pursued a Batman movie in the 80s:

• The Evil Dead Companion quotes Raimi stating that Darkman "has a lot of elements of pictures that and stories that have gone before," as he offhandly lists Batman alongside The Phantom of The Opera and The Elephant Man,[4] though Raimi makes no mention of an attempt to make his own Batman film.
• The THR oral history remarks that "the enormous success Warner Bros. had with Tim Burton’s Batman" was a factor in Universal greenlighting Darkman, but draws no further connection between Batman and Raimi.
• In a 2022 interview with Empire, Raimi remarks that "I’ve always loved Batman. If I ever saw the Batsignal up in the air, I’d come running [to direct],"[5] but again makes no mention of having pursued such a movie.

(As an aside, a consistent online legend claims that Raimi was briefly considered to direct Batman Forever and citations of this fact are occasionally used w/r/t Darkman. Whether this is true or not (and I suspect it isn't) is irrelevant here: Darkman was released before filming had begun on Batman Returns, and therefore long before Burton's departure from the series.)

Finally, articles that do mention this connection only do so in a very vague manner that does not make them robust enough to support the claim on their own:

• Usually the idea is only mentioned in passing, lumped in with The Shadow ("Raimi had wanted to make a movie about Batman or The Shadow...") and with zero detail on when or how this was done (did he approach DC? Uslan? WB? etc.).
  • In cases where The Shadow is mentioned, the writer notably may go into detail about Raimi's interest in that property but cannot provide any additional detail or context about Batman e.g., [6]
• Articles featuring this claim are usually from marginally-reliable, perennially-questioned sites like CBR (post-2016) and Screen Rant, in low-quality listicle or reddit-comment-recap articles like "10 Unrealized Sam Raimi Projects Redditors Want To See The Most" that are likely to have just pulled up a Wikipedia article to pad the word count rather than researching Hollywood history.

In conclusion:

• I cannot find any primary or secondary source that states Raimi had pursued the rights to Batman prior to the production of Darkman.
• The sources that have been offered for this claim are typically low-quality and can only obliquely mention the Raimi-Batman connection, providing no detail beyond the one-liner in Wikipedia.
• The production of Batman (1989) is high-profile and well-documented. Raimi has gone unmentioned among any histories of its production (and was occupied with The Evil Dead or Crimewave for much of the time between Uslan's acquisition of the rights and WB's hiring of Burton); if he had sought such a high-profile directorial role so early in his career, this would be surprising or apparently important and therefore should require multiple high-quality sources.

Although it's nearly impossible to prove a negative (short of an interview with Raimi where he states point-blank "no, I didn't try to get the rights to Batman") there's more than a reasonable doubt to the verifiability of this fact. Mashed Potate Jones (talk) 19:28, 22 July 2024 (UTC)