Sam Raimi can turn up Danny Elfman’s pounding orchestral score as loud as he wants, but I know a B-movie when I see one and that’s exactly what this is—and God bless him for it. Raimi goes Hollywood here, but this is just low-budget enough that he doesn’t lose ALL of his old Evil Dead nastiness. This is a post-Batman dark superhero movie, but it’s also a monster movie. Liam Neeson is a scientist who gets dipped in acid by some gangsters and then left to die in an explosion. Lucky for Liam Neeson, he secretly survives and somehow ends up impervious to pain. UNLUCKY for Liam Neeson, he fixes up his face with experimental skin grafts that are so sensitive to light that when he gets his revenge, he’s got to mostly do it under a bunch of bandages and a black cloak and hat. He’s basically The Phantom of the Opera, but he’s also The Invisible Man in that the chemicals he’s working with are slowly frying up his brain and turning him unnaturally aggressive and violent. Along the way, we get an amazing action sequence in which our hero dangles from a helicopter that flies all over the city, lots of gun-toting bad guys with bad aim, a climax that’s set on the 650-foot high steel girders of an unfinished building for no reason, and cameos from John Landis, Jenny Agutter, and, of course, Bruce Campbell. Fun movie.