By Debbie Schlussel
**** UPDATE, 03/05/09: Watchmen Derangement Syndrome Takes Hold; Movie Continues to Be Marketed to Kids ****
If you take your kids to see “Watchmen,” you’re a moron.
If you see it yourself, you’re also probably a moron and a vapid, indecent human being. The movie arrives in theaters at Midnight, Thursday Night. It’s rated “R”–which should kinda sorta be a hint–but it really deserves an “NC-17,” at the very least. And plenty of clueless parents brought their young kids and kept them there for the entire almost three hour “experience” at the screening I attended.
Yes, I know, it’s being heavily marketed as a superhero movie, with action figures for your kids. But that–and the heroic-looking movie trailer–are a big, fat lie. And that’s where real parenting comes in . . . like actually investigating the movie before you take or send your kids to see this garbage.
In fact, as a movie critic who sees most new releases, I haven’t seen a more violent, depraved movie in years (not to mention a longer, more boring movie with a more preposterous and silly plot). This movie makes the graphic bloodshed of the recently released “Friday the 13th” look like “Cinderella.”

This really isn’t a superhero movie at all. In fact, there was little “superheroing” until after the second hour of this nearly three-hour exercise on defining deviancy down. Some on the right are claiming this is a conservative movie because it’s made by some of the same people as “300” (read my review). But this is no “300.” (And that wasn’t for kids either, but this is far much less so.) A few lines of dialogue by the character “Rorschach” deriding “liberals and intellectuals” doesn’t excuse the nearly three hours of poison here. In fact, the movie kind of has a peacenik-themed ending and “message” regarding nuclear weapons. If this move is “conservative,” who the heck needs liberal?
There were so many disgusting, violent, morbid, grisly scenes and acts of killing, I had to start writing them down, lest I forget. And that’s in addition to the rape scene between superheroes (complete with violent beating of a female superhero) and an explicit sex scene between two other superheroes. Oh, and don’t forget another superhero’s swinging computer-generated penis frequently in your face on-screen.
In just the opening credits of this mindless celluloid claptrap, there’s a lesbian take-off on the famous photo of a woman kissing a sailor in Manhattan who is returning victorious from World War II. The lesbian make-out scene, featuring a “superhero,” is bad enough. But then, we see cops looking over their naked, bloodied, dead bodies on a bed, with the words “LESBIAN WHORES,” written in blood on the wall.
Mommy, mommy, what’s a lesbian? What’s a whore? And remember, this is just the opening credits.
The “plot” of this movie–if you can call it a plot–is that there were costumed superheroes in the ’40s and beyond. They grew old, but some of them didn’t. Then a new crop of costumed superheroes with special powers cropped up, some of whom were related to the older ones and some who still remained from the older group. But they all retired. Now, a superhero known as “The Comedian”–who is also a rapist and shot a Vietnamese woman who was pregnant with his kid (all of which we see depicted on-screen)–is murdered, and some of the superheroes, the “Watchmen,” get back together to find out who did it.
At the same time, the Soviets are about to nuke America. It’s 1985 and Nixon is President. We’ve won in Vietnam. Oh, and Henry Kissinger has a Russian accent. And Ronald Reagan is thinking of running for President in 1988. Wow, isn’t that cool that they got it wrong on purpose? I’m so amazed at this “high-brow art” of deliberately getting dates and timelines wrong, you know, just to be “artistic,” and get the drooling of the critics. That is sooooo genius. Like way totally cool.
Maybe if I make a movie about how Eisenhower was President in 1972, we “lost” World War II, and Bin Laden was gonna bomb the World Trade Center then, I’ll be cool, too. . . so long as it’s “dark” and I include a bunch of rape, torture, explicit sex scenes, and extremely graphic killings, and oh, write a “graphic novel” a/k/a comic book about it, first.
In the midst of this stupid story, we’re treated to the following:
* Dogs fighting over, tearing apart, and eating a six-year-old girl–we’re shown them chowing down on and tearing apart the remaining leg and leg bone, with the sock and shoe still on the bone as the dogs wrestle over it;
* A close up of man repeatedly getting an axe-blade driven through his skull while he’s being butchered;
* At least two very graphic scenes of naked superhero “Dr. Manhattan” vaporizing people to just blood, limbs, and guts hanging from the ceiling or spread in the snow;
* Many scenes of Dr. Manhattan’s computer generated penis swinging about;
* A kid biting a giant, bloody chunk of flesh out of another kid’s face–he grows up to be “Rorschach,” one of the superheroes’ compatriots;
* A man’s hands and arms being sawed off with an electric saw–we’re shown the bloody stumps and the bloody sawed off limbs in close up shots;
* A man with vat of hot french fry oil deliberately thrown over his head–we literally see him fry, and he ultimately dies, we’re told (no kidding);
* Many, many scenes of people’s hands, arms, fingers being broken in half or crunched by the “superheroes”;
* Cops being set on fire and burning to death by superhero compatriot “Rorschach;”
* Superhero “The Comedian” (a bad Robert Downey, Jr. look-alike) brutally beating and raping another superhero–tis movie concludes that the rape was a good thing b/c the slutty superhero had a slutty superhero daughter from him;
* Superhero “The Comedian” shooting and killing a Vietnamese woman because she’s pregnant with his kid;
* Superhero “The Comedian” being thrown off a roof of a tall building–we see his body hit the ground and the blood flow out;
* Two superheroes have an explicit sex scene in a spaceship–she’s on top, then he’s on top, awesome–you can teach your young kids multiple sexual positions before they even reach puberty, by taking them to see this (there’s a less explicit sex scene between the slutty superheroine and another superhero not long before that).
And these are just the highlights, plus superheroes hurling obscenities–great for the kiddies. There’s so much more–along with horrible make-up, bad acting, and terrible computer generated images (including the penis). Not to mention, a bad, extremely slow, and boring script.
Yup, this is the garbage that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox and Warner Brothers and Paramount are marketing toward your kids. All of these studios have a piece in this movie. And even thought the budget was just $100 to $125 million, because of a long legal battler between WB and Fox, the legal fees and pay-out make it such that they must recoup at least $200 or 300 million and make a profit. To do so, they are pimping the movie to all niches, especially your young kids.
But just because shameless whores and crack dealers of Hollywood deal this stuff out, doesn’t mean you have to buy it and poison your kids’ minds with it.
Remember the morons I told you about who took their kids to see the latest “Friday the 13th,” last month? Well, they were back with their kids at a Monday Night screening of this horribly depraved, whacked out movie.
Remember the White single mother who told me her ten-year-old son could see it because “he knows it’s not real and he knows the difference between right and wrong”? Well, she was back with her ten-year-old, and they waited in line for at least two hours with their free pass to get in to this screening, I’m told. I saw them walking out at the end.
Her son is going to grow up to be messed up. Don’t do the same to your kid.
And do yourself a favor, too. Save the ten bucks and the three hours of your life you’ll never get back. And the nightmares of some guy’s bloody, sawed-off arms and hands still clinging to the doors of a jail cell.
I don’t just worry that this is the new superhero movie being marketed to your kids today. I worry about the ones that will be even more depraved a decade from now.
G-d help this country (minus Hollywood).
FOUR MARXES PLUS