Word: slasher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Darkman wants to be Batman. Its hero, a scientist (Liam Neeson) scarred in body and soul after being left for dead by venal thugs, is a cloaked crusader bent more on vengeance than on justice. Director Sam Raimi, whose cheapo slasher film The Evil Dead achieved cult status, mines familiar comic-book terrain with a plucky heroine (Frances McDormand), a couple of corporate villains -- one slick (Colin Friels), the other slimy (Larry Drake) -- and plenty of explosive violence that virtually reads KA-BOOM! in block letters across the screen...
...their speed, technical wizardry, surface brilliance and cheerful cynicism, dyna-movies are the ideal art form for the MTV generation. Zapped for a decade by the lightning impulses of rock videos, inured to slaughter by campy slasher films, kids have become scarily sophisticated; they are connoisseurs of carnage. They know that in a blood ballet like Total Recall everybody gets killed but nobody gets hurt -- because the characters aren't human beings but ciphers, cyborgs, stunt people and stunted characters, no more real than the creatures vaporized in Nintendo games...