Gruff action star and hardman Liam Neeson stars in Sam Raimi's
Darkman as Peyton Westlake, an up-and-coming scientist on the verge of creating 3D printable replacement skin.
Unfortunately, Peyton's lab - with him in it - gets trashed and torched by a gang of mobsters looking for an incriminating memorandum that his attorney girlfriend, Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand), has acquired.
Presumed dead, Peyton's body is fished out the river and given an experimental treatment, administered by - of all people - a surprise, and uncredited, cameo appearance by the lovely Jenny Agutter.
This grants the disfigured scientist increased strength and makes him immune to pain, but also means he's prone to fits of berserk anger.
Waking up, Peyton breaks free and returns to the ruins of his lab, where he somehow salvages enough equipment to resume his experiments in replacement skin growth.
With his new abilities, he begins to exact his revenge on the mobsters, who are led by the iconic figure of the late Larry Drake as Robert G Durant.
Durant happens to work for Julie's boss, Louis Strack Jr. (Colin Friels), a corrupt property developer looking to transform the city into his own vision of the 'city of tomorrow'.
Peyton's lab-made skin can only last 99 minutes in sunlight, but he realises that as well as helping to rebuild his own face, he can now impersonate anyone he chooses... as long as he has enough photographs of them to build up a 3D image in his computer.
Before he plunged headfirst into the world of superhero movies with his classic
Spider-Man trilogy in the early 2000s, Sam Raimi tested the waters in 1990 with
Darkman, his inspired horror spin on the pulp antihero,
The Shadow.
However,
Darkman also blends in elements of classic, tragic creations from the black-and-white era of creature features, such as
The Invisible Man,
The Phantom of The Opera,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and
Frankenstein's monster.
There's even sprinklings of
The Incredible Hulk in the mix, with the stylised sequences of the scientist's raging anger and then his sad farewell to Julie at the end when he finally adopts the moniker of Darkman, merging into the crowd wearing the face of Bruce Campbell (
another great cameo in a film loaded with them).
Based on Raimi's own story, with a script he helped co-write with Chuck Pfarrer, Ivan Raimi (
Sam's brother), Daniel Goldin, and Joshua Goldin, director Sam Raimi created a visually-striking 'superhero' in Darkman, who operates intelligently from the shadows, resorting only to violence in the action-packed grand finale of the 96-minute movie.
While not quite as inventive - or gonzo - as his game-changing
Evil Dead movies,
Darkman still manages to capture Raimi's delightfully twisted sense of humour.
The "experimental treatment" Peyton receives as a near-dead John Doe is a bit random and never really explained (or revisited), but then again once you accept the weird science of Peyton's DIY replacement skin you know you're in for a wild, pulpy ride where things don't have to make 100 per cent sense to be fun and entertaining.
Two direct-to-video sequels came out in the mid-90s - Darkman II: The Return of Durant and Darkman III: Die Darkman Die - although it will surprise no one that Neeson didn't return as the titular hero, being replaced by The Mummy's Arnold Vosloo, and Sam Raimi took a producing role, leaving the directing to TV director Bradford May.
I will, of course, now be tracking them down (there's a Blu-Ray box set on Amazon with the full trilogy).
