Happy Thanksgiving Weekend, Enemaniacs!

And oh boy does B-Movie Enema have a feast for you this week. Yeah… Let’s hop into our little real-world time machine and allow me to take us back to Valentine’s Day 2024. Just, what, nine months ago? Oh god… Is this the baby that was conceived by my slutty indulgence in taking in a double feature at the AMC Indianapolis 17? No wonder my tummy got bigger and this week’s review feels like I’m giving birth to a butt baby. I AM giving birth to a butt baby!

Where was I? This review is already fucking off the rails. Anyway, back then, I took myself on a double feature date to the theater and left disappointed, but in different ways. This week’s review is focused on the first of the two movies I watched because the Bob Marley movie was just kinda bland and not at all like the movie being discussed today… Madame Web.

Alright… Let’s be serious for a moment. There have been A LOT of discussions over the last nine months since this movie’s been in the public eye. There are reactionary knobs who profited off the movie’s failings claiming that the female-led cast and female director and co-writer, S.J. Clarkson, were to blame. That’s utterly bullshit. Those people are not serious critics or, well, serious people in general. They are financially motivated by a mostly young and/or emotionally immature audience to stoke weird, and, yes, right-wing, sexism and bigotry because this lowbrow, knee-jerk, base shittiness is, somehow, profitable and completely unchecked on various tube or social media sites.

On the other hand, there have been real media critics who know exactly what they are talking about and are not motivated by the allure of appealing to disaffected and immature white boys to make their living who have made wonderful breakdowns and essay-esque videos explaining where things went down. I hope to basically be in that camp. I don’t want to dogpile this movie. It’s easy to do. I get it. This is a very bad, and very poorly-made movie.

But, as a comic book enthusiast, someone who has read comics (and specifically and nearly exclusively Marvel Comics) for 40 years, I feel I have a good grasp of what makes characters interesting, engaging, and important. I also feel like I have a fair understanding of why characters become lead characters in their own stories. While I don’t currently read the line, I have read A LOT of Spider-Man over the years. That’s the corner of the Marvel Universe where Madame Web and her three Spider-Women proteges are coming from for this movie.

I also have a little bit of a grasp of Sony’s hawkish desire to mine the murky depths of the characters related to ol’ Webhead.

So… Where do we start? Instead of talking about our stars, our first-time director (because I just did right there, there’s not much more to say about S.J. Clarkson’s career), or fawning over Sydney Sweeney and her magnificent… um… form, let’s start by just digging into the movie and as we continue through the movie, I’ll provide context based on the source material. Then, where appropriate, I’ll talk about where things get silly or fall off the rails.

The movie begins in the Peruvian Amazon in 1973. Understand this movie’s primary plot takes place in 2003. Why 2003? Beats the holy fuck out of me, but that’s what we got. Here we meet two characters, Constance Webb, an arachnologist who is looking for a very specific, hard-to-find species of spider that has amazing qualities that could be used to help cure diseases. With her is her personal bodyguard, Ezekiel Sims. Sims was hired as her personal security dude because the Amazon is scary, yo.

There are mythical “Spider People” in the Amazon called Los Aranas. The myth is that they were bitten by the spiders to be given special abilities. Legend also has it that they are extremely protective and territorial of this area. As Constance continues searching, Ezekiel goes back to the camp and begins taking pictures with his little spy camera of the notes Constance kept about her research. When she returns to the camp, she’s elated to reveal that she’s found a live specimen of the spider she’s been looking for. Immediately, Ezekiel starts shooting guys demanding she give him the spider.

When a struggle ensues, Constance is accidentally shot. Ezekiel takes off with the spider as the mythical ingenious people of his part of the Amazon show up. One in particular finds Constance and picks her up to take her back to the tribe’s cave. There, he uses a spider to bite her to help her give birth to her daughter, but there is nothing that can be done to save Constance. The bite from the spider passed special abilities onto baby Cassandra Webb. The guy says she’ll return when she’s ready to learn about those cool-ass abilities and how to use them properly.

One thing that I find almost irritatingly frustrating about this opening scene is that Ezekiel Sims is a bad guy. We knew going in that he was the bad guy of the movie. No problem. I can handle that. The problem is we are never told who he works for, what he wanted with the special spider, or, barring he is working entirely for himself, why he has a little spy camera to take pictures of Constance’s journal AND his villain turn when she found the spider. For all we know, he knows of a local legend, but has no reason to really believe the spider will give him super powers so… Why’s he doing this? Doesn’t matter, and no one cared. The movie just barrels on.

Thirty years later, Cassie, played by Dakota Johnson, is an ambulance driver for the FDNY. Her partner paramedic is named Ben… Parker. Yeah, this is Spidey’s Uncle Ben. You know, the “with great power” guy? In this, he’s played by Adam Scott. One of the immediate reactions to this movie that I had was to call the movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Day Peter Parker Was Born. This movie has a major, climatic moment in this movie that deals with Peter’s mother Mary being taken to the hospital to give birth to the lil’ webslinger. Why? Because Sony wants to entrench Madame Web into a fabric of the future to try to make things seem like it’s all connected, but it never really fully commits to this… because Sony can’t. Sure, Peter Parker, Ben Parker, Mary Parker, etc… But they can’t tie to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe to show a young Tony Stark or mention him or have a History Channel special about Captain America get advertised. They don’t have the rights to do that. So why even try to wink so hard at Peter Parker?

Now, let’s back some things up here… Uh… Even more. I promised I’d give context as needed and, boy howdy, I’m doing it. Let’s talk about who the character Madame Web was in the comic book world. One, her mother was not an arachnologist who gave birth to her after being bitten by a very special spider with superpowers. She was an old lady who had a very specific disease that made her blind and paralyzed her. Her husband was a scientist who designed a very specific chair for her that doubled as her life support system. It just so happened this unique system looked like she sat in the middle of a spider web. Now, Cassandra indeed had precognitive powers. That’s because she was a mutant. But uh oh Spidey-O’s, Sony can’t use mutants. That’s uniquely a Marvel and 20th Century Studios thing. So they had to concoct that whole thing about her birth… Hold that thought on what I said about her origin for a later tidbit.

Madame Web first appeared in the comics in 1980 in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man #210. She occasionally would pop back up here and there. Most of the time she was using her unique powers to help Peter Parker with answers to situations. She was hardly a lead character, nor was she all that popular of a character. More recently, like over the last 20 years, she had started appearing more often because of the whole Spider Totem storyline that would eventually tie to the Spider-verse. You probably know what that is with Miles Morales and all those variations of Spider-Man? Yeah, that was a big comic thing.

That was also where Ezekiel Sims comes into the Spider-Man mythos. Ezekiel figured out Peter Parker was Spider-Man and then tried to prepare Peter for the whole revelation of these totems which was just a way to say some people find themselves on these totems because they took on the abilities or the attitudes of various animals. Peter was a spider totem. That also means that he was a target of a guy named Morlun who would hop around the various multiverses and consume spider people. It was true that Ezekiel Sims would turn out to be a foe, not a friend. Cassandra Webb, her mother, and Ezekiel Sims had no prior connection to one another. They were all separate aspects of the Spider-Man corner of the Marvel Comics Universe. Got it? Good. Let’s get back to the movie.

Cassie in this movie is a peculiarly cold person. I guess that kind of fits the comic character. Madame Web was hardly the friendliest of characters. In the Marvel Universe, pretty much only Aunt May Parker can be a nice old lady. Pretty much all other old ladies are cold. Agatha Harkness, Cassandra Webb, probably some other old ladies… you get it. Anyway, the patient they were rushing to the hospital turned out to be fine. The doctor tells Cassie and Ben and Cassie’s like, “Who? What? Why are you telling me this?” That’s because the patient’s little boy drew her a thank you picture to give to her which she does not want to accept until Ben forces her to.

Ultimately, Cassie’s coldness does not really play into this movie or make a huge impact on her character at all. It kind of comes across as a remnant of a former version of the script maybe, or something tossed in in the final version of the script to make Cassie kind of unlikable for… some… reason? Why make your leading character kind of unlikable? Again, yes, Madame Web is hardly the nicest of Spidey’s associates, but she serves a purpose. She’s now the star of her own goddamn movie. She kind of needs to not be an asshole.

ANYway… In these few minutes between being introduced to Cassie and then finding out she’s an ice queen, we’ve encountered two other important characters. On the way to the hospital, Cassie nearly hits Mattie Franklin, a disaffected youth who gets pissy at Cassie for her having the fucking nerve to drive her ambulance into the way of Mattie skateboarding to school. Mattie is played by Celeste O’Connor, and I don’t mean to be snide about Mattie’s reaction to her darting out in front of an ambulance and then flipping it off, but that is a problem with the script and how it characterizes a couple of the main characters of this movie. The other character we meet is Julia Cornwall who is the stepdaughter of the patient they brought in. In the comics, this character is better known as Julia Carpenter. But in this movie, she’s a redheaded Sydney Sweeney and the only thing wrong about this is that she’s playing a teenager and not an adult so get your minds out of the gutters, jerkasses.

Who are these two characters? Well, Julia Carpenter was the second person to take on the name Spider-Woman. You see, in the late 70s, Stan Lee wanted Spider-Woman and She-Hulk to be taken off the market in terms of trademarks so that no other comic company could try to use those names for characters. The original Spider-Woman was Jessica Drew. She was around for a hefty 50 issues or so in her original comic series, but by the mid-80s, Marvel decided to pass the mantle off to a new character, Julia Carpenter. She was from Denver and got mixed up in the whole Battleworld business in the original Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars limited series. It was later explained how she got her powers, but she had a very similar power set to Peter Parker. Julia would even become an Avenger as part of their West Coast team. Today, Julia is the new Madame Web after Cassandra died.

Mattie Franklin became the third woman to take the mantle of Spider-Woman some 25 years ago. She was a girl who had a pretty unfortunate life and found out her widowed father was participating in some shady business with one Norman Osborn. Mattie went to this clandestine meeting she found out about instead of her father to save him from getting mixed up in the bad stuff. She ended up getting powers that were, again, similar to Spider-Man’s but she also could grow these spider legs for advanced agility. She later would get badly mistreated in some other comics that involved her being exploited for the production of a particular drug in the Marvel U called Mutant Growth Hormone, and she ended up being put into prostitution… It took a while for comics to not immediately go exploitation-y with some of the female characters in order to give them pathos. The key as to why Mattie Franklin is given a spot in this movie, though, is because she would be tutored in her early days as a hero by the original Spider-Woman Jessica Drew and… Madame Web.

Ben and Cassie apparently used to have a relationship. He tells her that he has met someone. That will be May, but he also wants Cassie to come to a thing that is going on for his pregnant sister-in-law Mary. She’s married to his brother Richard. So that’s your Peter Parker family tree for you. Ben has met May. Richard and Mary are expecting Peter’s birth.

When Cassie comes home, she sees the landlord trying to talk to the father of one of her downstairs neighbors, Anya Corazon. Anya tells the landlord that her father isn’t available and to come back later. Apparently, the landlord is trying to collect rent and they are behind. Anya in the comics originally went by the name Araña but later took on the name Spider-Girl. I don’t know too much about Araña because I didn’t pick up those issues of Amazing Fantasy that were resurrected to give her a place to appear. I do know I always liked her more utilitarian costume as Araña, but her current costume is much more inspired by the costume worn by Julia Carpenter’s Spider-Woman where she is now filling that void due to Julia taking on the Madame Web thing.

The day that changes Cassie’s life is when she and Ben are sent to help a guy who overturned his car on a bridge over the river. When she cuts him free and Ben pulls the guy out of the car, the car tips over and Cassie falls into the river. She hits her head on the windshield creating a spider-web-like image. She begins hearing voices and sees flashes of things and images. Soon, after Ben pulls her out of the water, she starts experiencing some of what she heard in the water and even experiences moments multiple times. She just wants to go home and ignores Ben’s advice to get checked out by a doctor.

Elsewhere, Ezekiel Sims, not looking too much older than he was thirty years earlier, goes to an opera. He sits next to a beautiful woman whom he ends up romancing and bringing back to his place. His apartment has a huge terrarium in the middle of his living room. In that terrarium is that spider that gave Cassie her abilities and has given him superpowers too. He sleeps with the beautiful woman but has a nightmare of a vision that he is haunted by – three women with spider-like powers that took his spider and then killed him by throwing him out of a window. Ezekiel is obsessed with finding these three girls and changing his fate before they can be the end of him.

To avoid his own murder, he specifically sought out that woman at the opera. She works for the NSA. She has access to facial recognition software. He wants to get access to that too. Part of his powers is to deliver a toxin that poisons people. He says if she gives him her password, he will stop the toxin. She gives it to him. He does not make good on his end of the bargain.

Cassie is dragged to Mary Parker’s baby shower. She starts to experience more deja vu. She thinks the party is pranking her when she gets into one of her loops but she’s called away with other members of the FDNY to respond to a big fire at, I’m not kidding, a fireworks warehouse. Amazing. I don’t know why that cracks me up, but it does. I think one of the Naked Gun movies had a fire at a fireworks place that was hilarious. Maybe that’s why. Anyway, her precognition is helpful in some ways, but when she sees an accident that kills her boss, she’s unable to stop him from driving away.

Some of these scenes in this portion of the movie aren’t that bad. Cassie’s deja vu is an interesting way to portray someone who has precognitive abilities… especially when she’s not sure how to use the powers. I like Adam Scott and the Ezekiel Sims character is dark and dangerous and there’s something there that if we get behind what he is trying to do, it can help this movie, but, again, we don’t have too much of the why when it comes to Ezekiel’s villainy. Yes, it was widely reported that there was a TON of looping done to help in some of the post-production rewrites the story went through. Apparently, the whole thing was a mess, so you can see a whole bunch of moments in the movie in which characters are delivering lines or exposition without actually seeing their mouths match up with the dialog being heard. And, yes, it is very obvious in the scene with Ezekiel telling the NSA lady he seduced about his vision that stuff has changed. It’s audibly different how actor Tahar Rahim sounds when those lines are spoken versus what you know was from the original takes. I can accept some of that. If we just simply talk about the first 40 or 45 minutes of this movie, it’s not great, but it’s not terrible.

I remember telling myself that the entire movie looked and felt like it was made in 2003, the year the movie was set. In some ways, I applaud the attempt. There are movies that are enhanced when you see the filmmakers are making an earnest effort to make a film look and feel like the time period it was set in. In 2024 alone, there are at least three or four other movies that followed that idea with I Saw the TV Glow and Longlegs being the most successful at that strategy. The problem is that it does look and feel like a movie that is 20 years out of date. Trying to make the movie look like that is okay for authenticity, but it doesn’t make the movie better. It reminds me of a time when I didn’t like movies as much because that era wasn’t my favorite era in my lifetime and whenever you look at a movie from that timeframe, they feel very outdated.

Still, I can’t say that this first half of the movie is all that bad. Bland? Sure. Bad? Not really. It’s easy to follow at this stage. Cassie Webb has precognitive powers that kicked in when she was in a life or death situation like mutant powers tend to do, and there’s this other guy who is also seeing visions of his own murder by three girls with spider powers and he wants to find them and kill them before they kill him. Got it. It’s a plot, alright. Hell! I’ll even say that Cassie has gotten a little more likable when she tries using her powers to save her Captain but fails. She feels helpless at that point because she can’t reconcile her powers with trying to realistically warn people of their impending doom.

Ezekiel has a computer lady who opens up Pandora’s box of those NSA surveillance capabilities. She uses descriptions of the women in his dream to get an idea of what they look like today. She’s, at first, uncomfortable that they are basically hunting teens. Ezekiel doesn’t care. He’s not going to let them get their powers and kill him after all he’s built and all he’s gained in life.

What he’s gained and built, I don’t know because it’s never really explored.

While avoiding her Captain’s funeral, she starts playing around with her powers. While watching Scrooge, her microwave popcorn finishes and she drops it which causes the glass popcorn bowl to fall to the floor and shatter. Just after that, she is startled by a pigeon smashing into her window and dying. She wonders if she can change the visions she sees by doing different things. She doubts it but opens the window. The pigeon flies in instead of hitting the window and dying.

Cassie decides to take a train to Poughkeepsie to go to the funeral. It turns out that Mattie, Julia, and Anya are also at the train station. She begins having a vision of Ezekiel boarding the train, attacking the girls, and killing them. When she starts to spot triggers that lead directly to the next event, which is Ezekiel boarding and attacking, she knows when to act to save the girls. When she sees Ezekiel heading toward their car, she tells Mattie, Julia, and Anya to get off the train immediately. Trying to figure out if this weirdo woman is trying to abduct them, she sees a man dressed in all black crawling across the ceiling and tells them that’s the reason why she wanted them to get off the train.

At this point, I thought this movie might actually be a surprise. This scene is effectively creepy and full of pretty good tension. This guy is not able to be reasoned with. He WILL kill these girls if he catches them. This movie has a horror element to it. Another movie that was also kind of treated poorly by audiences was The New Mutants. Remember that movie? It was essentially the final Fox X-Men movie. It was straight-up edited to be a horror movie after lots of problems getting the movie released. This movie feels like it was intended to include a thriller element.

It’s about this time in which the movie starts to fall off the rails. I like the idea that if we’re going to literally use Madame Web as this character in the center of a web that ties the fates of a bunch of characters together, then Ezekiel figures that it might actually be someone who is the fateful person bringing the characters together. It’s not a coincidence they are all at the train station at the same time. It’s not something he did wrong that they were able to escape with the help of this mysterious fourth person. After all, they were supposed to be ahead of these girls at every possible step. All of this makes sense to this point.

HOWEVER… Boy, this is something that drove me nuts. The three girls do not like each other. They bicker. They rip on each other. They are so goddamn annoying that it makes every other character annoying from this point forward. I do chuckle when Cassie tells them all to shut up because their voices are like nails in her skull. That is hilarious. But Anya 1) trusts in science and 2) is poor. Therefore she dislikes Mattie because 1) she doesn’t care about logic or figuring anything out that can help them all and 2) she has a cell phone so that makes her privileged. Julia is 1) always talking and trying to explain and apologize for the things she does and 2) is a goody-two-shoes. They hate each other and Cassie can’t stand any of them either. On top of that, no one really saw Ezekiel so they can’t really clear Cassie of the attack on the cops and the perceived kidnapping of the three girls, so she’s stuck with them.

The girls start to realize they all know Cassie. Cassie saved Julia’s stepmom. Anya lives in Cassie’s building and everyone hates her because she leaves her junk mail in the lobby for everyone to clean up. Of course, Mattie nearly skateboarded into her ambulance and blamed her for it. She tries to explain her visions but they don’t really believe her. However, when Anya says the guy was not walking on the ceiling, he was crawling, Julia says he was like a spider… person. That gives Cassie something to ponder to try to find answers. Her mother was studying a very special spider so that must be what’s going on here!

So, Cassie tells the girls two things. First, stay in the woods while she goes for a couple hours to do some research. Second, she tells them to don’t do stupid things. She gets home to go through all the stuff in her memory box of her mom’s stuff. She reads about the Los Aranas. They are fast. They are super strong. They can climb on walls. Cassie ponders how would someone know if they can or can’t climb on walls if they never tried. She tries. She falls. Another important thing she learns about this tribe is that they possess a sixth sense. It’s as if they can peer into the future.

Then, a picture of her mother and Ezekiel falls out of the journal.

Meanwhile, back at the idiot brigade, Mattie says she is hungry so let’s go to the diner that is not in the woods and brings them out into the open where someone is trying to hunt them and kill them. So, sure! Let’s go to the diner for food and ignore the whole thing that Cassie was telling them to keep them safe. They get to the diner and Anya tries to advise that they should only talk to someone to order food and it’s not smart to make eye contact. Mattie ignores this and says she should talk to EVERYONE!

They should ESPECIALLY talk to the fuck boys in the corner booth who are checking them out. Mattie says they should go over to the boys and talk to them. Anya is emphatic that this is a bad idea… which it is. But Mattie is a fucking idiot asshole in this entire movie and insists to stand out as much as possible. One, they are identified by a trucker who sees their picture in the Daily Bugle which gets them found out by Ezekiel. Two, She sexes Julia up by tying her shirt up above her belly button. Three, the girls begin dancing on the table for the boys’ entertainment.

At this point, I was sitting in the theater with my goddamn head in my hands. This is so nonsensical and stupid for the characters to do. It makes no sense to have a scene like this in the movie. It makes the three girls come across like idiots. They are more interested in entertaining the boys than saving their own lives. It’s amazing a woman director would do this. Now, I don’t want anyone to think I’m this hyper-woke soy boy or anything (I mean, I totally am, but whatevs), but let’s think about this for a moment. You have a movie led by four female comic book characters, three of whom will be superheroines of their own esteem for the better part of the last 20-40 years. You enlist a female director to bring this to life. What happens in the movie? We need to make sure the three young and pretty actresses are doing something sexy to the point of nonsensical and pointless to the importance of the plot.

Sure, it brings Ezekiel back to them, but there are a million other ways to do that than to have the girls fail the Bechdel Test for a table of fuck boys while Britney Spears’ “Toxic” blares over the radio. And, no, don’t fucking tell me that “at least Sydney Sweeney is dressed like a school girl while she’s doing incredibly stupid things in this movie.” That is nice, yes, but it is a stupid scene in a movie that wasn’t great to begin with but failed beyond the point of return at this exact moment.

I was pretty sure from this point forward, the movie was doomed to never recover and sink to the bottom of the ocean as if it was tied to a boulder.

When Cassie figures out where the girls went, she goes to get them before Ezekiel shows up, but he shows up, kills Julia and Mattie, and stabs Cassie. She realizes this is a vision and she needs to figure out another approach. This second time going to the diner would be to arrive just after Ezekiel and crash the taxi she stole earlier to help them escape into the diner and into Ezekiel. As they pile into the taxi, Ezekiel grabs Cassie’s arm and poisons her with his spider venom. Cassie yells at the three girls and tells them they only think for themselves and they are impulsive and entitled. Yes. Yes, they are. She tells them she saw what could have happened to them and they are lucky she could.

Ezekiel says something stupid when he calls his computer girl. The computer girl, whose name I have failed to learn two times while watching this movie, tells Ezekiel she has a match on the woman with the three girls. He tells her that he doesn’t care about this mysterious fourth woman. Um… dude? She foiled you twice now. You don’t care about her? He only cares about her when he learns she is the daughter of Constance Webb.

Anyway… Cassie takes the girls to a motel and tells them she’ll take them home in the morning so their parents can deal with this. Julia says her mom is in a psych ward after divorcing her father and her father and his new family don’t want her around. Mattie’s parents are in China. Anya’s dad was deported six months ago so until she’s 18, she can’t really exist. They beg Cassie to help them. After they go to sleep, Cassie dips out and plans to abandon them, but stops at the diner she wrecked. There, she communicates with Ezekiel. He tells her what will become of the girls and how they will kill him.

I’m not sure it was a good idea for him to tell Cassie that the girls will get powers in the future because that ends up settling the situation and instead of leaving them behind, she stays with the girls and starts to plan a way to help them stay alive. She teaches the girls how to do CPR to prevent them from dying from the toxin that he can release into their systems if he touches them. She also explains the connection between her mother and Ezekiel. She’s got the journal about the Peruvian tribe who have spider powers. Cassie decides to leave the girls with Ben Parker while she goes to Peru to find out more about these powers and what they can do and what’s up with Ezekiel.

This is another point in the movie that makes zero sense and seems as though this is a rewrite. I get that Cassie needs to know more about everything going on. I get that her mother is dead so asking her is no damn good. I get that the answers are with that tribe or someone who knows about those spiders as much as Constance and Ezekiel know. Having her take a sojourn for a whole ass week to get these answers while Ezekiel is bearing down on these girls at every possible turn, AND it could get her best friend killed, seems like a logical misstep in this plot. Why not have the tribe guy who promised to answer all of Cassie’s questions go to New York?

I get that you need to have some avenue to give Cassie her powers. You want to connect this to Spider-Man to the point of having a spider deliver the powers to her by biting her dying mother while she was giving birth to her. In a way, that also sort of connects to Ezekiel’s revelation to Peter Parker that the spider that bit him was passing the traits onto him naturally and by way of this supernatural totem thing instead of the powers being gained through the spider being irradiated. However, the movie was written into a corner from moment one of the plot. Having the whole Peruvian Amazon part of the movie forces Cassie to go, like 3500 miles to get answers in the middle of some pretty heavy shit. It’s irresponsible for Cassie to leave these girls in the care of Ben. Although, I guess you could say this is Ben’s lot in life to care for abandoned kids as he and May will be caring for baby Peter when his parents are killed. So… I guess you got me there, movie.

I dunno. I just think this movie needed to twist itself into logical knots to try to deliver and explain Cassie’s powers and that gives this movie a very shaky ground to build from.

AND THOSE GODDAMN GIRLS DANCED ON A TABLE IN A DINER WHILE THEY WERE BEING HUNTED BY A KILLER.

Sorry. Sorry… I’m sorry. I just can’t get over that part of the movie. It’s… It’s okay. I’ll move on.

Anyway, Cassie meets the guy who delivered her when her mother died. He does this thing with her that looks an awful lot like that thing the Ancient One did to Bruce Banner when he asked for the Infinity Stone in Endgame. You know what I’m talking about… He pushes her and her astral form comes flying out of her. She sees what happened the day her mother died and she was born. She also finds out that her mother discovered that Cassie was going to have myasthenia gravis and that life expectancy was going to be hard to predict. Comic book Madame Web has this exact disease. That’s why Constance went to the Amazon to find the spider so she could cure her. That’s why Cassie has always been pretty dang healthy. The tribe dude explains that she didn’t get the greater physical powers, but knowing the future is pretty great. Once she can master her powers, she will even be able to appear in multiple places at once. The mind powers she has are nearly limitless.

A week has passed, Ezekiel is pissed and Ben is about at his limit with watching the girls. However, little Peter Parker has to go and fuck things up… You see, Mary isn’t due for four weeks, but her water broke and Ben has to get her to the hospital so she can give birth. Driving to the hospital, Mattie’s face is picked up on a camera which gives Ezekiel his chance to find them. The good news, though, is Cassie is back and not too far away. And… oh hey! It’s Spider-Man in that spiffy black suit of his…

Oh… wait. That’s… That’s the bad guy. However, Cassie is coming to the rescue in an ambulance she’s hijacked to stop him from blowing up the car killing three Spider-Women, a Spider-Man, and two people who were going to ultimately die anyway. She tells Ben to get Mary away from her and the girls so Ezekiel won’t care about them.

In the ambulance, Cassie shows off that she’s got some spiffy new abilities to control her powers. She has Anya use the heart shocker paddle things to shock Ezekiel when he lands on top of the ambulance. The ambulance breaks down, so it gives Cassie a chance to look into the future to figure out what the next move is. She calls for an airlift at the docks, but they have to get to the docks first. The girls put a bunch of flares into crates at the fireworks warehouse next to the docks. The flares will set off the fireworks in the crates. This slows Ezekiel enough for them to get to the roof but the fireworks are a bit more unpredictable so it causes them to have to work out some other way to get to the helicopter that’s waiting for them. Not sure how Madame Web didn’t see that coming, but I digress.

The helicopter gets taken out when a big firework launches toward Julia and Ezekiel but Ezekiel knocks it toward the helicopter causing it to explode and crash. Ezekiel attacks Cassie and the girls try to help her but he basically makes it so each of them is in peril. Cassie figures out how to do the “be in more than one place at a time” thing to save them. Ezekiel focuses on trying to stop Cassie first so he can then kill the girls more easily, but she lures him to a portion of the roof of the warehouse where he’s eventually thrown from the roof and crushed by a giant Pepsi sign (this is Sony after all, so, of course, there will be a product placement thing happening in the big finale).

Cassie also falls into the harbor and she’s struck in the face by a firework. Julia dives in and gets her and the girls all use the CPR Cassie taught them to revive her. She revives, but she’s blind from the fireball to the fucking face she took like a champ. Ezekiel is dead. The girls are alive. Cassie is now fully Madame Web… except for the old thing. And Peter Parker is born. Everything’s coming up Spider-verse! Well, except for Mary and Ben Parker both dying in the somewhat near future.

After getting released from the hospital, Cassie lives her life as a blind and paralyzed… oh yeah, I guess she also got paralyzed… surrogate mother of the three girls. She peers into he future to see the girls become the heroes they were meant to be. Even Madame Web has a really cheap-looking red catsuit and bitchin’ shades to cover her blinded eyes to do hero shit in. She says no matter what the future holds, they will be ready to take it head-on in however many sequels this movie will spawn…

There will be no sequels. That’s a future even Madame Web herself can’t change.

You know… When I first saw this movie, I had two prevailing thoughts running through my head. First, this was a pretty solid choice if you wanted to add it to your bad movie night with your buds. Second, I thought that because it felt as though the script was so stupid, so wildly inconsistent with tone and how things were meant to be delivered this was what it must have been like to have AI write a whole movie. I was wrong. On both accounts.

One, this movie isn’t the product of AI writing it. It’s the product of multiple writers trying to figure out how to make this movie anything worth a shit. There are technically two concepts for movies here. You have Madame Web and you have the three Spider-Women. The movie is stuck somewhere in between with neither concept fleshed out enough to carry the full concept. That means that this movie went through what’s likely to be copious re-writes and adjustments and reshoots and dubbing here and there. Then, add to it this sense of it being made like a movie from 2003 instead of what would have originally been 2023, this is a recipe for a chocolate cake that is really just dog turds with a little icing on top. That icing? The subplot of Peter Parker being born. So, no, this isn’t a movie entirely written by ChatGPT. It’s a movie that’s been sent through the wringer wayyy too many times and it creates this slop.

Second, no, don’t include this in your bad movie night. After watching it a second time, it’s actually kind of dull and drab from start to finish. In fact, it’s so dull, that’s what really makes this the bad movie it is. Scratch that… Between it’s dullness and the cheapness of how it looks even down to the worst offense of cheapness of them all, Madame Web’s “hero” costume, it just makes for a sadsack of a movie. You almost pity it because I don’t really think anyone in the movie realized they were making the movie that it turned out to be. They were either naive to think that just because it was a superhero movie and Marvel was tangentially involved with its production that it was going to be a hit or they thought what they were doing on set was going to translate to the finished product. It achieved neither. We just got a bad movie out of it. That’s all.

Again, look at this final shot of Madame Web in her hero garb… It really does look cheap or just… offputting. The below image doesn’t even include the leather gloves with the spider crawling around on them that just doesn’t look right. None of this movie looks right, guys!

What I wonder is if this movie should have been a movie about Jessica Drew, the original Spider-Woman. She’s obviously absent in this movie’s lineup of lady spider-people. Julia Carpenter has been around now for 40 years. She’s worthy of a chance to be in a movie. The most recently added character in this lineup is Anya Corazon who has been around for 20 years now. These aren’t new characters, but the Spider-Women are legacy characters of Jessica Drew’s character. It would kind of make sense for an older Spider-Woman to mentor three younger Spider-Women.

Okay, sure… Madame Web is connected to Mattie Franklin and helped mentor her when she first became Spider-Woman. And, yes, Julia Carpenter is now Madame Web. Okay, fine. I guess that makes sense for this movie, but I do wonder if that Julia Carpenter thing happened BECAUSE this movie was coming out and featuring both characters. I can’t help but go back to Jessica Drew though.

Here, take a look at what Jessica Drew looks like…

Wouldn’t Dakota Johnson be right for Jessica Drew? Both have dark hair. Both have an attitude. Both are, uh… women. Yeah! That’s confirmation they would be a match! Maybe Jessica Drew was taken off the table because the character was featured in Across the Spider-Verse in 2023. Considering they went with a version of Drew that was a black woman (and pregnant), I suppose it’s possible that Sony nixed the idea of featuring her in a movie in which she would be a white lady.

Still… Some plotlines would add up. Drew’s original origin was that the was a woman who evolved from a spider (no shit that was the actual origin Archie Goodwin wanted). She isolated herself from others. As a child, she was gravely ill until her father injected her with stuff from irradiated spiders. However, in a later version of her origin that retconned that original mad scientist plot thing, she got her powers while in the womb. Her mother was hit with a ray that had all these different spider abilities mixed into it. Doesn’t that sound kind of familiar? I really do wonder if this was originally written to be a Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman story, but plans changed so they went with Madame Web and then wanted to keep some Spider-Women around so they brought in the legacy character versions.

You can easily see how things went off the rails from there, right? You write a movie with one character in mind, but then have to shoehorn another character into that origin. But then you’re told to not totally remove the original element so you have to now shoehorn other characters into the movie. It would explain why Madame Web’s origin is what it is in this movie and why there is no origin for Julia, Anya, or Mattie. We just know that in the future, they are Spider-Women. So from moment one of this movie’s actual production, it was doomed.

And worse yet, it is bland. It’s not necessarily boring as it does keep moving with few places where it slows down once the original exposition is out of the way. After all, this is a movie in which characters are being hunted so they better keep moving. But the movie’s effects, the sets, the general look and feel just feel so… generic. That’s why it does feel like a movie made in that 2003 time frame in which it’s set. It just feels like another average to below average movie that came out 20 years ago. Maybe that’s this movie’s greatest sin of them all… just failing to engage with the audience.

But the blame shouldn’t be on director Clarkson or star Johnson or even any other individual who touched this movie in the scripting, production, or post-production stages of the movie. The blame has to go all the way to the top. Sony is desperate to hold onto the Spider-Man side of the Marvel Universe multimedia rights. They can’t make a Spider-Man movie every year or two. Tom Holland will only want to do that for so much longer. You can’t animate Spider-Verse movies fast enough. So they keep mining these characters and just pumping out this slop. The first Venom movie was okay. The sequel was a mess. Morbius was a mess. I wrote this in advance of the movie coming out but I’m guessing that I saw Kraven The Hunter and it was slop. They will keep pulling these obscure characters or the ones that are not really able to carry movies on their own. They will keep making these movies. They will keep failing at the box office, with fans, and with critics. They HAVE to keep doing this.

Why? Because if they keep working on the slop, that gives them extensions on their rights they can keep squatting on until Marvel Studios comes along to make another live-action Spider-Man movie. They’ll get another Miles Morales movie out. The latter is beloved by audiences AND critics. Hell, both of the movies were nominees for Oscars! The first one won Best Animated Feature. That’s a big deal. But until they can get those movies made, they will continue to squat because they have to until those other opportunities come along. So here comes Morbius. Here comes Madame Web. Here comes Kraven The Hunter. If they can finally get their, sigh, Sinister Six movie made, they’ll fuckin’ do it! There’s nothing we can do about it either. They’ll write it off as a tax shelter failure and keep making the next one. God, I hope we finally get that Sin-Eater movie I’m sure negative three people have been yearning for since he first debuted in 1986!

If I was asked by someone if they should watch Madame Web, I’d first make sure they weren’t going to spend money on it. It’s on Netflix. Just watch it there or any other place it might be streaming as part of your regular service. Don’t spend money on it to watch it. I’d then ask if the person really cares about superhero movies. If it’s one of my nerd buddies, I’d say skip it. If it’s someone who doesn’t particularly care about superhero movies, I’d say skip it. I’d maybe say to a normie that they might find some value in it. I’d say I didn’t like it but that it just wasn’t my cup of tea. I wouldn’t go on a tirade about why someone SHOULDN’T watch it in any scenario. But I’d know the exact people who would be less than impressed or thrilled with it and it’s not really a fun bad movie. So I guess the only thing I could say is to watch it at your own risk.

Okay, that’s it. I’m done for this week. That… That was a long one, wasn’t it, Enemaniacs? Next week, we enter December and start to bring this year in for a landing. To do so, we’re gonna start with a sci-fi horror flick from the early 80s that was made on a whole hell of a lot less money than Madame Web was on, and over 40 years later, people will still bring it up on a random occasion. Join me next time for 1983’s The Deadly Spawn!

Until then, keep looking to the future and watch out for a crazy guy with spider powers trying to kill you while you dance on a table for fuck boys in a diner.

I still can’t believe that shit was in this movie.