Touches You

Fantastic!

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

I was pleasantly surprised. This movie is from a little known production company that isn't too unlike the 90s direct to video attempts by BBV (The Stranger, The Airzone Solution). Shot on video and on a very low budget. But it works in a nostalgic sense. There are no expensive visual effects or CGIs to fall back on. And it clocks in on a nice lean 79 minutes. I do remember when the average genre film had production values no different from The Superhero. But that was back when a movie ticket and popcorn cost no more than about four dollars. This was probably an extension of a student film project, given that the actor playing the doctor looked no older than our young protagonist Luke, who was probably in his early twenties. But some of the performances do stand out. The very kindly Reverend Mary Stone is definitely the most stand out performance. The other, amusingly, being the newscaster, who subtly chews the scene in what is usually a forgettable minor role in any movie. The animation in the film is clearly done on software that is available to the average person who wants to be an amateur animator. It could have been Anime Studio, Photoshop, or one of the various freeware open source packages out there such as Synfig. If anything, the filmmaker deserves kudos for actually improving on an idea that actually originated in a much earlier, equally low budget film: J.R. Bookwater's Robot Ninja. The fight scenes are interspersed with comic book art, but this time it's animated and in color. Also, the artwork is by a more competent artist. And Luke Lang is way more sympathetic than Robot Ninja's protagonist. The limited animation is really more of what some call "animatic". Movement is accomplished with pans, zooms, and sliding frames. But then again, much television animation from the sixties and seventies was like that.For us Americans, the accents can be a little hard to understand, sometimes. They talk the way average, working class UK folks talk. No midatlantic or theatrical RP accents here. The average Joe Brit does not sound like Patrick Stewart.If you approach this film as a low budget art film, you will be pleased and maybe, if you're a certain age, nostalgic. If you're expecting something like a low budget version of The Marvel Studios films, you're in for a big disappointment. Despite the name of the film, this is not an escapist comic book romp with heroes and villains. It's very character oriented and the "superhero" aspect is actually downplayed in favor of some down to earth themes, such as drugs, HIV, and family responsibility. Highly recommended as a change from the usual and a reminder that a film's enjoyability has nothing to do with how much it cost to make.

You should be able to sue someone if you rent The Superhero because there's something definitely larcenous about passing this thing off as a legitimate movie. It's really a D minus student film with actors who can't act and a writer/director who can neither write nor direct.Set in the city of Manchester, England, The Superhero is about Luke Lang (Damien Hannaway), a broken down boxer separated from his pregnant wife. With no apparent job or anything else to do, Luke starts dressing up in a costume and beating up criminals as the vigilante dubbed by the media, "The Boxer". There's also a villain terrorizing the city named "The Needler" (David Platt), who pricks people with HIV infected needles. That's all the time and energy I'm going to spend explaining what the movie is about, because doing so is like describing a runny bowel movement. Sure, there are always certain details you could focus on but it's still just splattered feces.8 year olds playing Cowboys and Indians give better performances than this cast. The dialog is about a half-step better than "See Spot Run". Writer/director Adam Simcox does know how to film the exterior of a building, so perhaps he has a future as a cameraman on architectural documentaries. When he trains his lens on anything else, Simcox demonstrates that all he can do is mindlessly and shoddily imitate what he's seen in other movies. He's sort of like a stupid parrot with a camera phone taped to its head. The story is as obvious and uninspired as a year's worth of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.Worst of all, Simcox apparently felt that an incompetent and worthless live-action movie wasn't enough for his deluded ambitions. So in addition to poorly written, poorly shot and poorly acted scenes in the real world, every so often the movie switches over to comic book images. These crudely drawn interludes are usually when The Boxer is in battle and I guess Simcox thought they would look better than his own pathetic attempts to film a fight scene. He was wrong. These are comic book pages sooooooo awful, even Rob Liefeld would point at them and laugh.The Superhero is such an offense that the people who made it, the people who put it on DVD and the people who shipped it to video stores should all be gathered up, taken to a desert island and left there until they're so starved and dehydrated they actually think Lost makes sense. If you try and rent this DVD, someone should shoot you in the leg.

I just watched this film and going in I had no idea what to expect. It's a story of real-life people, and then mixes in moving still-shots of animation to provide a comic-book feel to certain scenes which I found to be very effective. There is a vigilante that is fighting a drug ring, and then there is a story of a young man and his wife expecting a baby. The two stories intertwine as the young man starts to believe that he cannot be hurt, and at one point refers to himself as a Superhero - hence the name of the film. The film clearly had a low-budget, and some of the change of scenes are clumsy, but it didn't take anything away from me being engaged in the story and looking forward to how it was going to turn out. The music by Matthew Gidlow was quite good in my humble opinion. I liked this movie and would actually not hesitate to see it again with friends.