::A Geek in Korea::

Remember when the Batman franchise started off the “gritty comic book remake” genre?  Following the “Superman” model of progressively shitty sequels, there was Batman Returns, then Batman Forever, then finally, in 1997, a Batman movie so bad it took a very long time before anyone was willing to reboot the franchise again. Batman & Robin was a movie that almost killed the superhero movie genre for a time until Spiderman came out. (Speaking of which, Spiderman itself had a several crappy sequels too.)

Rifftrax, headed up by Mike Nelson, did me a great service by making fun of Batman & Robin. I remember hearing  news about that movie when I was in high school. Being a former comic book reading fan, I felt it was my duty to find out all sorts of information about movies based on characters I liked.

I had a faint hope that somehow that movie would be good. I even saw it in the theater. The only repressed memory that remains of the experience is when the film ended, with the three “Bat” characters ran in front of a spot light and then the music faded out to some terrible Smashing Pumpkins song I thought was cool at the time.

What sets this Rifftrax apart is that the script came from fans, not the actors themselves. Usually the Rifftrax crew is responsible for watching the movies dozens of times and coming up with jokes to ease the pain. Instead, the Rifftrax forums put it upon themselves to write the script and then edit it for the performers. Sadly, I didn’t know about this, because I would have been willing to watch that film multiple times just for the chance that one of my jokes would be spoken by Mike Nelson himself.

Anyway, the fact that this is a fan production is evident as the movie goes on. While the jokes were funny, and sometimes hilariously funny, there are more gaps in Batman & Robin than any other rifftrax I’ve watched. Even Mike, riffing entirely alone, would talk more during Roadhouse than in the last 30 minutes of Batman & Robin. There are minutes without dialog from the performers. I’d rather have silence than a lame joke, and it’s clear that most people didn’t make it through the entire movie when they had donated their scripts. There were a lot of missed opportunities in the last few ridiculous minutes of the movie that desperately needed to be heckled.

I’m not sure if the writing process will always produce a “front loaded” script, or that people just give up when they realize they have to watch a crappy movie over and over to write something funny. However, if given the opportunity to ever participate in any future events of this kind, my strategy for writing a joke to get into a script would be to start with the last thirty minutes of a movie and heckle everything I saw. Something would stick, and then I’d be immortalized in Internet geekdom by being able to say I heckled with the best.