You know the film. It’s a film you have never heard of. The cast might be composed of actors you know and love or complete unknowns. You stumble across it on streaming and wonder if it will be worth two hours of your time. This series will be devoted to reviewing films like these, the strange items that pop up when you are looking for a flick on the streaming service of your choice. This is “We Found It On Streaming”
FILM: Avenging Force: The Scarab
Release Date: April 26, 2010
Run Time: 85 Minutes.
Streaming Service(s): Tubi
Rating: Not Rated.
The Public Domain. Where the characters we know and love go to when their rights expire. The Man Who Laughs, the cinematic inspiration for DC Comics Joker is entering the Public Domain this year, Even bigger, Mickey Mouse, or at least the “Steamboat Willie” and “Plane Crazy” version of him, is in the Public Domain as well. Winnie the Pooh is there too, which is why you are seeing all those horror movies featuring the character.
There are number of comic book superheroes in the Public Domain. Usually, they are characters from the 1930s and 1940s whose parent companies went out of business without assigning their rights to another holder. With the popularity of comic book movies, you’d expect that some of these characters would be picked up by filmmakers and brought to the big screen. Well, some of them are, but they aren’t brought to life by creators the likes of Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino, they are brought to life by a man who also brought us films like Raiders of the Lost Shark and My Fair Zombie.
Avenging Force: The Scarab (a.k.a. Avenging Guardians, Agent Scarab, and Dark Skies) is the work of Canadian filmmaker Brett Kelly and is a superhero adventure featuring characters pulled mostly from the Nedor Publishing Company. Nedor was the sister company of Better Publications and both were subsidiaries of Standard Comics. They were known for characters such as Black Terror, The Scarab, Miss Masque and Fighting Yank. Standard was established in 1936 and went out of business in 1956.
The Nedor characters have enjoyed an eventful life in the public domain, with A-list comic book creators such as Alan Moore and Alex Ross providing their takes on the Nedor heroes and villains for Wildstorm and Dynamite respecively. This rose their profiles a bit in the comic book community and introduced these characters to a new generation of comic book reader. That’s probably why Kelly chose the characters for his film. And what a film it is.
The film opens with Professor Peter Ward (Mark Courneyea) who is visited by his colleague, Professor Joab (Jurgen Vollrath). Joab had picked up several alien artifacts from a trip to South America. Before Joab could show Peter the artifacts, he is kidnapped and assaulted by minions of The Sphinx (Jody Haucke), who want to use the artifacts’ powers to take over the world. When Peter finds one of the artifacts, a blue rock that looks like a scarab, the rock exposes Peter to a supernatural force turns him into the superhuman Scarab. The Scarab joins forces with the crimefighting organization N.E.D.O.R. to try and stop the Sphinx’s plans.
Before you write this film off as a lame ripoff of Blue Beetle and The Avengers, realize that this film premiered two years before that later film. That might be one of the few things the film has going for it.
The film is ultra-low budget. And, a lot of times, the film does well with its shoestring budget. But every so often, the cracks start to show. Take the Scarab costume. It looks very well made, with its sculpted headpiece. However, when you see the cowl separate from the rest of the costume in long shots, the illusion is ruined. As it is when you realize the bad guys’ hang out is a mattress storage warehouse. Like, a real warehouse where they store mattresses. I guess they were allowed to shoot there as long as they didn’t damage the product.
The acting mostly consists of the actors delivering stilted dialogue awkwardly. The baseline performance is that of a group of community theater actors standing still and delivering their lines. The better actors range from general competence to scenery chewing. The worst sound like they are reading directly from cue cards they are seeing for the first time. Not many of the characters have believable conversations. The actors can’t really pull that off to good effect as the pauses in their delivery doesn’t make the conversations flow.
The cinematography by Amber Peters varies from somewhat inventive to somewhat out of focus. The costuming by Lance Coulter ranges from very good to something that would be weak comic con cosplay. That is one of the main qualities of the film. It seems like the film ran out of time and/or money, and the quality declines accordingly.
The script takes liberties with the original concepts. For instance, The Sphinx was a hero in the comics but is a gang leader here. And Kelly adds in some public domain heroes from other companies, most notably MLJ’s Madam Satan and Lev Gleason”s Daredevil, which the film renames Double Dare for obvious reasons. But since any fans these characters had are probably dead by this point, there isn’t much point in arguing about their fealty.
It should be obvious that the film isn’t very good. So, the question is: does the film slip into the “so bad its good” category? I think it does. There are several silly moments that make the film fun to watch, like when Terror runs out of bullets in his gun, he pulls another loaded gun out of his trench coat pocket or when Red (Alix Pasquet) takes her coat off when she fights a tough opponent but takes her coat AND gloves off when the bad guys are really, really tough.
Stumbling upon this film opened up a whole world of low budget films based on public domain comic book characters. A lot that flew under the radar when I was writing my History of the Comic Book Film column. I feel I have failed the readers of that column. And for that, I apologize.
Avenging Force: The Scarab is not a good movie, but you might be interested in it if you are interested in public domain comic book characters and how they are adapted for modern audiences or if you are in the mood for a mockworthy bad film to watch with your friends.
Have you found a film on streaming that you’d like us to look at? Leave it in the comments and it might appear in a future installment of this feature.
