Have you ever found yourself standing on the edge of some precipice - the wuthering hatch of a skydiving plane, perhaps - and wondered how on Earth you came to be there? Such were my emotions when wonko pressed ‘Bat-Movie’ on the menu of the ‘Holy Special Edition, Batman!’ version of Batman: The Movie. Perhaps it was Adam West’s voice saying, “Quickly, Robin, to the Batcave! There isn’t a minute to lose!” that made me quail. Perhaps it was my better angels giving me pause. Whatever the happy thought that tried to stay me, I heeded it not. I watched.

I had ‘seen’ Batman: The Movie before; the DVD was on random shuffle, muted, to the accompaniment of some rapper or other, at a poetry professor’s semester-end party. I’m not sure that it made terribly more sense viewed as Nature, or whatever force gave it birth, intended.

Batman: The Movie, as any student of pop-art precursor popcorn cinema will tell you, treats of Bruce Wayne and his youthful ward Dick Grayson, who don totally dorky outfits to foil the United Underworld of “[An Italian guy in bad clown makeup and an avuncular expression|text|The Joker]”, “The Riddler,” “[A portly millionaire as obsessed with gadgets as Batman|text|The Penguin]”, and “[A pretty lady in a tight outfit with a cat and a bag of bad puns|text|Catwoman]”. This may lead to all sorts of confusion, because many of us are familiar with a TOTALLY OTHER Universe in which Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson don kickass costumes to battle competent villains with very similar names. This can be attributed to parallel evolution, if your mind is bendy; or can cause you to weep interminably, if your mind insists the two are somehow related. At any rate, in the movie, the United Underworld is going to take over the world by turning the United Nations (sorry, United World) Security Council into colored dust with a gadget stolen from a whisky tycoon. First they have to kill Batman, preferably with exploding marine animals.

It’s obvious that people aren’t lying when they say Batman KNEW itself to be bad, and was in fact a deliberate masterpiece of camp. It’s obvious because there is no way anyone actually wrote the riddle “What weighs 6 ounces, and is totally lethal?” with the answer, “Obviously, a sparrow in a tree with a machine gun, Batman!” and thought it was obvious. Although it was 1966, so conceivably drugs could make it make sense. But seriously, that’s a good sample of the kind of thing this movie does - it tries to make the totally illogical and irrational ‘obvious’ and elementary, while the totally obvious (The beautiful woman who says ‘Purrrrr-fect’ is PROBABLY Catwoman in surprise, Batman!) is obscured. Perhaps this is meant to be some fundamentally upsetting artistic statement that turns our staid conceptions of logic and reality upside-down - perhaps it is just meant to make us laugh.

And the movie DOES make us laugh, even if we want to cry, even if we protest that it “hurts like burning” (which it does.) However much I love the Caped Crusader, and burn with indignation at the undignified, surprised-eyebrow, press-conference-having antics of his brightly-colored shadow, it’s funny. A submarine with flipper feet is funny. A shark hanging tenaciously onto a man hanging tenaciously onto the Bat-copter’s Bat Ladder is funny. It grieves me, but it is so.

The other thing the movie has going for it is that it’s fast-paced—one of the only ways to be a good bad movie. There’s no time for you to wonder why you’re wasting your life on this drivel, because you’re too busy being whisked along to the next completely incomprehensible clue or totally ridiculous gadget.

It’s painful for one such as myself, a lover of the dark places of the Batman myth, gorged on the dark beauty and angst of the post-Frank Miller Batverse, to take this four-color lunacy. It’s hard to believe that somehow, in the infinite diversity of human endeavor, the chap that got broken across Bane’s knee is the same one who has four kinds of Bat Aquatic Life Repellant and that the urban legend of the DCU, only recently upgraded to ‘GCPD shoots on sight’, can call up the Coast Guard and issue orders. It twists my continuity-lovin’ brain into a horrible garish pretzel. And don’t EVEN get me started on their ‘Joker’.

I did not like this movie. I did not dislike this movie. It planted a seed of horror in my brain that will grow and destroy everything. That seed of horror tastes like lemon candy. Bottom Line: Spoo out of 10. IT MAKES NO SENSE AND MAKES THE BABY BATGIRL CRY but somehow, you just have to look.