Five Great Guilty Pleasure Movies Based on Comics

You ever just love a movie, even though you objectively know it’s kind of terrible?

…Yeah, us too. And now we’re going to share some great ideas for movies you can sit around — perhaps with an adult beverage in-hand — and enjoy both watching and making fun of.

Below are our pick for the five most decadent “guilty pleasure” comic book movies we can think of.

To count on this list, the movie can’t be widely considered a classic — so nothing in the top 25 best comic book movies of all time, according to ComicBook.com users in our movie database.

They’re not going to be awful, either. We didn’t cut ourselves off from the bottom 25 or anything, but the truth be told, our balance here is that it has to be more fun than it is bad…as long as it’s not actually great.

It’s a balancing act, we know, but check out our list and if we missed one that makes your list, hit us up on Twitter @comicbook to make the suggestion!

MYSTERY MEN

Featuring an all-star cast with some of the best comedians and comic actors of its generation, Mystery Men feels like it just fell between the cracks a little bit.

The wild, zany humor of the film feels like it really came into mainstream popularity when the manic energy of Adult Swim started taking over the comedy world — but this movie came before that.

Meanwhile, the brightly-colored, campy visual style of the film — inspired by the music videos and advertisements that director Kinka Usher had done before taking on the movie — evoked the then-recent failure of Batman and Robin, something that undoubtedly hurt its chances with audiences.

The end result is that the strange and surreal humor may have been a few years ahead of its time, while the visual aesthetic was a few years behind, leaving much of the audience to feel like, more than anything else, the movie was made for an audience that didn’t yet exist.

The movie has always had a small but dedicated audience, though, and it has aged particularly well since the humor on display in Mystery Men is more in line with some of the most popular comedies in the mainstream culture.

The hippest cast in history has united to become the funniest superhero team ever. Ben Stiller, Janeane Garafaolo, Hank Azaria, William H. Macy, Greg Kenner, Geoffrey Rush, and Paul Reubens join forces in this wild, funny and thoroughly original misadventure.

When Captain Amazing, Champion City’s legendary superhero, falls into the hands of the evil madman Casanova Frankenstein and his disco-dancing henchmen, there’s suddenly a chance for the aspiring superheroes to show what they can do.

They’re the Mystery Men…a ragtag team of superhero wannabes featuring: Mr. Furious, whose power comes from his boundless rage; The Shoveler, a father who shovels “better than anyone;” The Blue Raja, a fork-flinging mama’s boy; The Bowler, who fights crime with the help of her father’s skull; The Spleen, whose power is pure flatulence; Invisible Boy, who’s only invisible when no one’s watching and The Sphinx, a cliche-spewing philosopher.

With its outrageous adventure, incredible cast and hip alternative humor, Mystery Men is so irresistibly funny and appealing, seeing it just once will never be enough.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR (1994)

First of all, let’s be honest: This is the best Doctor Doom that there’s ever been in live action.

The first-ever live-action adaptation of Marvel’s The Fantastic Four is notoriously bad…right?

Well, for a campy sci-fi schlock movie made for a million bucks, it’s actually a lot of fun.

Not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, no, but let’s be honest: it was produced by Roger Corman. Really, what are the odds of that anyway?

“For the people who were involved in the production of it, they put their hearts and souls into this, and really got shit on,” Marty Langford, who directed the documentary Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four told ComicBook.com. “They were robbed of their residuals, they were unable to capitalize on whatever heat that the movie would have given them back then.”

It’s a ton of fun, which is really all that one could have asked for with such a thing, and the subpar offerings that have been made with much bigger budgets by mainstream studios later have taken the love of the movie that fans were cultivating in the ’90s and transformed it into something less ironic and more pure.

No official synopsis, as the film was never commercially released.

JUDGE DREDD

First thing’s first: This is obviously the second-best Judge Dredd adaptation yet — an likely to quickly become the third-best when the third adaptation makes its way to TV soon.

It’s not by any stretch a good movie, but it’s the kind of thing that you can love in spite of itself.

First of all, many of the more absurd elements — from Rob Schneider’s insufferable Fergee to the Angels and Dredd’s evil “brother” Rico — were actually drawn from the comics. As ridiculous as they were handled in the film, then, it’s hard to really blame the script. 

The overacting is the kind of thing that makes it incredibly fun to make fun of, and this movie — like so many ’90s comic book movies — is best enjoyed in that way. But it is enjoyable.

Big-screen superstar Sylvester Stallone powers this non-stop action hit that’s loaded with amazing special effects! In a time when all-powerful and coldly efficient “Judges” act with the supreme authority of both the police force and legal system, Judge Dredd (Stallone) is the most feared law enforcer of them all.

But when a former Judge (Armand Assante – Hoffa) hatches a sinister plot to overthrow the government and eliminate the Judges, Dredd is framed for murder! Get ready for an explosive action-adventure thrill-ride as Dredd does whatever it takes to restore justice!

 

SPAWN

The first Image Comics property to come to live action, 1997’s Spawn was also one of the earlier attempts to do a “mature” comic book movie (the director’s cut, a big hit on video, was rated R), and to do a superhero movie that reached outside of the safe confines of what people understood them to be after the commercial successes of Superman and Batman.

While the visual effects are inredibly dodgy, that’s in part because they were doing something new and cool, and being on the front lines of movie technology generally guarantees that it won’t age well.

The biggest weakness for this film is that it’s thin on plot and relies heavily on those cutting-edge visual effects…but if you like the world Todd McFarlane has created in Spawn, it’s a really enjoyable film.

Michael Jai White stars as Al Simmons, a corrupt assassin betrayed and murdered by his evil government supervisor Jason Wynn (Martin Sheen). Sent to Hell, Simmons is offered a chance to return to earth if he will become a “Hellspawn,” one of many super-powered creatures assigned to encourage living souls along the path to damnation.

Simmons hastily agrees to this deal and becomes a twisted, scarred version of his former self, living in a dingy alleyway, with no hope of regaining his life. Despite the best efforts of his mentor, a demonic clown (John Leguizamo), Spawn performs mostly heroic acts, though he is not above seeking revenge on Wynn.

 

TANK GIRL

The ultimate so-bad-it’s-good comic book movie probably has to be Tank Girl.

From director Rachel Talalay, who would go on to find more fan-love directing episodes of Doctor Who, The Flash, Supergirl, and Supernatural, the film is so insane and over-the-top that it’s kind of like if Mystery Men and Judge Dredd had a love child…

…y’know. If that love child involved mutant kangaroos and the most truly and absurdly over-the-top performance of Malcolm McDowell’s decades-long career.

This movie is full of insane visuals, limitless ambition, animation sequences, and just a never-ending parade of awesome ideas that pile up and twist around each other, creating a unique, bizarre, and enjoyable movie even if it’s easy to argue that it’s not objectively a good film.

If you’re into in-your-face visuals, outrageous action sequences and non-stop explosive laughs, this is your “rip-roaring power surge of a movie” (L.A. Weekly).

The year’s 2033 and since a humongous meteor hit earth, the world just hasn’t been the same. No movies. No cable TV, NO WATER!!! A mega-villain, Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell), the leader of Water & Power, holds the world in his grasp since he controls all the H2O down to the last drop…or so he thinks. Two colossal enemies stand in his way: (1) The Rippers – an army of half-men/half kangaroo people whose sole purpose is to bring down the W&P, and (2) a chick with a tank and tons of attitude — a.k.a. Tank Girl (Lori Petty). Kessler had better get a grip on reality and his water jugs because not even a run in her stocking is going to stop her from saving the planet.