Brilliant black comedy about what happens when a sad sack (Rainn Wilson) loses his wife to drug dealers (she’s a longtime addict) so he decides to become a costumed crimefighter and save her. He calls himself The Crimson Bolt, his weapon is a heavy wrench and he has no idea what he’s doing. Harsh violence and many laughs follow. Even with its comic exaggerations, it’s still the most realistic superhero movie ever made because it addresses something that none of the other ones do: If a guy showed up on the streets in a crazy superhero outfit, people would laugh at him. He wouldn’t be scary and he wouldn’t even be especially fascinating. He’d be a curiosity and little more. It all adds up to a film that’s too sad and gory to appeal to the mainstream, but too tasteless and funny to be considered an art film. So, into the cult movie bin it goes with rest of the misfit toys.
Writer/director James Gunn got his start working for Troma and Super is most the well-made and well-written film to ever carry on the Troma sensibility (don’t miss the Lloyd Kaufman cameo), in which comedy meets horror movie-style gore and gross-outs. When Rainn Wilson beats someone with his wrench (for everything from dealing drugs to child molestation to cutting in line at a movie theater), Gunn takes time to show us the resulting blood and gashes. And when someone gets shot in the head, we get to see their shattered skull and dripping brains.
This film also reminds us of what a huge influence Todd Solondz has turned out to be. Like Solondz’s best work, Super has a big, dark heart. Gunn shows his main character’s misery without mercy. The sadder things get, the funnier Gunn finds them to be. And when he shows us something beautiful (such as Ellen Page, loopy as Carole Lombard ever was, as the fangirl who eventually becomes Wilson’s sidekick and discovers her inner psychopath), he’s got to shatter it.