All Superheroes Must Die: Super Educational

All Superheroes Must Die is the directorial debut of Jason Trost, who also wrote and starred in it. It is apparently also being releases under the title Vs. This movie, and I hate to say this because it’s going to come off as super-mean but I am totally serious now and sorry in advance to poor Jason Trost, but this movie is an excellent learning tool in how not to write movies. It is one of those bad films that should be studied by future filmmakers so they understand the pitfalls that they should avoid.

At first I thought that the entire movie sucked, but I narrowed it down as the film minutes slowly, ever so slowly, ticked away. The sets were pretty lame but they weren’t that much worse than various low budget horror or indie movies that have entertained loads of people, so it wasn’t that. The same thing goes for the costumes. I mean, I am still confused as to why the henchmen (who we only see once or twice) are all dressed in mascot costumes, and why all the victims are covered in white sheets, but those are random details that are easily over looked. The soundtrack was also pretty rough—hello generic 80s synth—but it wasn’t a fatal flaw. No, the music and production value, though mediocre at best, are not the reasons why this movie was bad.

Looking to further define this movie’s badness, I thought I might find luck in singling out the acting. You see, Jason Trost does this whole David Caruso shtick which is pretty distracting—seriously, the hair, the sunglasses, the weird overly serious voice, it’s uncanny.

Another problem is the “trying to be cool” issue. I once heard John Favreau talking about acting in the disaster movie Deep Impact. Favreau, along with several other up and coming actors, was cast as an astronaut. Favreau thought he’d “play it cool.” But that is not really a character choice, it is instead an empty and uninteresting affectation that lacks motivation and in the end goes nowhere. The other up and coming actors who were also cast as astronauts made the same choice according to Favreau, and they all ended up looking like lame-asses once Robert Duval entered in on the scene. Duval had been hired to play the lead astronaut. He had actually prepared and had much more to offer than “playing it cool.” In any case, the young actors in All Superheroes Must Die do not have a lot of decent material to go on in the first place, and then the “playing it cool” aspect is added, it’s just annoying. That was probably a directing choice though, since there are varying degrees of mediocre to good acting throughout this movie.

But aside from this the acting really wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it wasn’t terrible. There were a few over the top moments I could have done without (or that could have been ramped up and added to in order to create consistency in hyperbolic villainy), but each actor seemed to be competent enough to be considered acceptable.

That leaves direction, production, and writing. And I think the failures of this film lie in all three of these filmmaking aspects. But if the script had been good enough, it would have shone through. Because it didn’t AT ALL, I wholeheartedly blame the script. The story was cliché, contrived, un-introduced, the back story was established after the fact, and it seems like the question “why?” (a writers most important tool) was only asked as a token courtesy and only answered in the most boring and peripheral of ways.

Let’s delve a little more deeply into these flaws. In indie filmmaking there’s a rule that you write for what you have. You may only have 200 bucks, a gorilla costume, and a hardware store. Great! Write a scene using those things. But don’t make your scenes so boring and pointless that the audience knows for a fact that that is the only reason you wrote that scene in the first place.  There were scenes in this movie that gave me the distinct impression of the above. This is bad writing. Things that exist in a movie (even if just for the sake of weirdness) should be able to be accepted by the audience. And this acceptance is created through good writing that establishes that things seem to be flowing smoothly on a through line. Even Memento, as choppy and backwards as that film was, had its own through line, and the audience would have felt it and criticized the film had it deviated from that path.

Another writing issue was that these characters were barely built, and the flaws that they had seemed obvious, contrived, or inapplicable. There was a twinkle of character building at the very end of the movie, but the ship had already sunk at that point and I just couldn’t muster up the energy to care.

Also, this movie came off as if it was the very first draft of Jason Trost’s very first screenplay. Everything seems thrown together. The levels of blatant exposition are obscene. If something wasn’t mentioned or crafted into the script earlier, a black and white flash back was slapped in as a patch for the lack of forethought and writing ability. It’s as if every screenwriting rule was intentionally ignored. Blatant exposition without a plausible reason for it to be occurring? Check. Flashbacks instead of foreshadowing and organic story development? Check. Gruff voices and overly-cool attitudes pasted over a total lack of character distinction? Check. (There was more character development in The Toxic Avenger or Cube than there was in this thing.)

Even the simple rule of starting off an action adventure or thriller movie with a snippet of the tail end of the previous adventure was ignored. That rule exists so that the viewers can become acclimated to the type of stakes that are involved in the main characters life (i.e., Indiana Jones runs for his life from a giant spherical boulder, and from angry natives with poison darts, etc.). Then there is a tiny bit of slowness, or introduction, so that we know who the major players are (villains, good guys, what we’re rooting for, etc). This doesn’t have to be very long, but it orients the audience to what the hell is going on so you don’t have to resort to hideous flashbacks that distract from your story.

Now, I really hate discouraging fresh baby filmmakers, especially when they’ve done something so monumental as to actually get an entire feature film through production and post production. That’s a huge accomplishment. But I cannot forgive the writing. The writing of this film was yucky, and the yuckiness was due to ridiculously obvious errors that EVERY SIGNLE SCREENWRITING HOW-TO BOOK explains in excruciating detail with on why these errors should never be made.

So go out and watch this movie. You should see for yourself why it fails. You might become so bored as to have an urge to do your own taxes instead of watching the rest of this film, but push through that. Really observe here. This is a learning experience that is definitely worth having, even though it’s unpleasant.