Man-Thing (2005)
Possibly the turd in the punch bowl for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is a shame. I quite liked the Man-Thing comic books I read as a child. But I had a rather unique experience there: I was introduced to Man-Thing first through some pretty fantastic episodes in the comic books, where the muck monster goes on a quest with Dakimh the Enchanter, Korreck the barbarian, Jennifer Kale the witch-girl, and even Howard the Duck as they go on a dimension hopping mission to save the Nexus of Realities.
I didn't know that the Man-Thing used to be the scientist Ted Sallis, who was working with the same super-soldier serum that produced Captain America and the Red Skull. I didn't know that the combination of sabotage and an accident with the serum, interacting with the energies of the swamp where he was working, turned Sallis into the mindless but empathic half-plant creature that he is. I had very little idea then of the cultural and ecological themes that drove most of the series.
There is more of that sort of thing in the movie, but used oh-so-poorly, and the production values suck. Riddled with B-movie tropes, Man-Thing here is mostly a haunting presence, with no convincing or gripping backstory, filmed like some sort of evasive Bigfoot-like creature, mainly, I suspect, to avoid showing the poor quality of the creature effects. He is only a guest appearance in his own movie, which is mainly concerned with the heroes trying to foil a big corporation from devastating the swamp.
Well, the used DVD copy of Man-Thing that I bought and watched has sunk back into the bog whence it came. I have since got the two big volumes of the Marvel Essential Man-Thing, and have a better grasp of the original 'saga' as a whole than I conceived from the few errant issues I read as a boy. The movie, while unfortunate, did not taint the waters of memory there. I also have a very good action figure from 2004 in the Marvel Legends Series VIII.
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