“Clayface” is and enjoyable body horror film.
That sounds sadistic, hear me out. There’s no over the top sadism here.
There’s some Gotham gangster shit, which you should know going in simply out of the fact that this is a Clayface origin story set in Gotham. And now that Marvel has polluted the phrase “origin story”, this is, and should remain, a one and done.
Sure, go ahead and do a Pantheon of Batman villain compendium films or some shit.
But this film stands up on its own. The closest you get to Batman is that this is set in Gotham, and that Clayface is a Batman villain. It’d be like if you had a standalone movie of Jimmy Olsen, please don’t do that. That would be terrible. What I’m saying is, there’s some squeamish stuff, and you see most of it in the trailer, faces melting, some blood splashing around, some gangster punishment cutting, some testing out of what are these nanobot stem cells doing, nothing excessively weird or particularly gruesome or uncalled for. I’m not saying bring Little Timmy. I’m saying that if you can handle procedural medical shows, you should be okay.
There is a humorous jab at method actors, connected to the aforementioned nanobot stem cells. There was also possibly a more subtle embodiment of this when our main character assumes the image of somebody that he just took out. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which seen that is, you should be able to get it.
Also, I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but there was one quick detail that should tell the audience to doubt everything that you see from here on out. A character knocks on an apartment door, and it is apartment 7B. The apartment across the hall from 7B is apartment 611. For those of you not familiar with traditional numbering in American apartment buildings, apartment 7B should not be across the hall from apartment 611. With the shapeshifting of Clayface, this should clue you in as to the rest of the film. Not a spoiler.
Decently acted.
There’s a humorous dance club dance routine, although brief and perhaps just my sense of humor.
It was very nice to hear Goldfrapp make it into the soundtrack.