By Erin Free
DEFENDOR (2009) (pictured above)
As sad and quietly heartbreaking as it is exciting, funny and edifying, this low budget indie boasts a brilliant turn from the great Woody Harrelson as Arthur Poppington, a simple, innocent – but slightly unhinged – dreamer who gets caught up with dirty cops, criminals, and a teenage prostitute (Thor’s Kat Dennings) when he takes to the streets as the superhero, Defendor, sporting a video camera-decked helmet, a baseball bat, a bag of marbles, and an all-black ensemble cheaply emblazoned by gaffer tape with the letter, D. A strong and original take on the superhero genre, Defendor sadly failed to make a major impact upon release, but has quietly built up a small but appreciative on DVD and streaming services.
THE HEBREW HAMMER (2003)
You think that Thor is the only superhero associated with hammers? Well, think again! An oddball cult curio, The Hebrew Hammer – the gut-busting debut from writer/director, Jonathan Kesselman – is a wildly funny spoof that takes aim at everything: midgets, African Americans, and Santa Claus, but particularly Jews. Adam Goldberg (Saving Private Ryan) plays Mordechai Jefferson Carver, a badass equal parts Hasidic Jew, Blaxploitation hard man, and kinda sorta superhero standing up for the rights of his Jewish brethren as The Hebrew Hammer. Filled with biting, satirical humour (Santa Claus and his evil son are the villains), and a nobody-is-safe brand of comedic daring, The Hebrew Hammer is one of the best – and strangest – superhero movies that you’ve never seen.
GRIFF THE INVISIBLE (2011)
In 2011, Australia finally got its own real superhero movie with the comedy drama, Griff The Invisible, and to nobody’s surprise, it wasn’t exactly Spider-Man. Ryan Kwanten’s eponymous bullied-office-worker-by-day-superhero-by-night has more in common with Ryan Gosling’s deluded romantic in Lars And The Real Girl than he does with fellow Aussie, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor. When he’s not roaming Sydney’s dark streets protecting the innocent, Griff is busy designing an invisibility apparatus in his apartment to aid him on his crusades. Increasingly concerned by Griff’s behaviour, his brother (Patrick Brammall) attempts to draw him back into the real world, while the lovely but wholly eccentric Melody (Maeve Dermody) implores Griff to remain true to his own strange superhero philosophies.
SUPER (2010)
Writer/director, James Gunn’s movie prior to his smash hit, Guardians Of The Galaxy, was 2010’s Super, which provided an early glimpse of the director’s gloriously unconventional take on the world of masked crime fighters. In one of the most brutal, unsettling, but ultimately deeply moving takes on the superhero subgenre, Gunn basically shows that any standard-issue person who would get dressed up to fight crime – in this case, Rainn Wilson’s Frank, who reinvents himself as wrench-wielding masked vigilante, The Crimson Bolt, who comes complete with a psycho sidekick (Elle Page) – has to be, well, totally deranged. “Super is about the morality and insanity of what it takes to actually be a superhero,” James Gunn told Ain’t It Cool News.
SPECIAL (2006)
This deliriously odd indie takes the superhero-with-no-real-powers concept to its logical end point, positing that a man who dons a suit and fights crime would have to be purely delusional. Michael Rappaport plays Les Franken, a lonely, big-hearted, but not-so-bright comic book fan-boy who enrolls in a clinical trial for an experimental anti-depressant drug, and then develops powers like levitation, ESP, and the ability to pass through walls…or so he thinks. All that Les has really developed are delusional visions (we see him swimming on the floor when he thinks that he’s floating above it), but it’s enough to inspire him to don a home-made superhero costume, and then throw himself in the way of would-be shoplifters and stick-up men.
