In the Flesh: Spider Man 2 (2004) (Patreon)

While Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) hurled bags of gold bullion at Spider Man (Toby McGuire) after the latter, in his civilian life as Peter Parker, failed to help his elderly aunt May (Rosemary Harris) secure financial aid to help her pay her mortgage, I kept thinking of a quote from Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace: “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” Spider Man 2 is safe from any such accusations. Raimi’s second outing with the cash-strapped Queens native and his colorful rogues gallery is a huge movie, big and loud and blunt about its messaging. We watch Peter try and fail to juggle a personal life, work, school, and his one-man crusade against crime. We soar above and through the streets of New York at lunatic speed and plummet just as quickly off apartment rooftops as Peter’s inner turmoil causes his powers to ebb and flow from moment to moment. It’s kinetic and exciting and fun, a movie clearly aimed at tweens and teenagers and respectful of their acumen.

As in the first film, speed is Raimi’s greatest ally. Speed conceals what CGI can’t quite cover, glossing over Spider Man 2’s fakest moments — the full CGI Doc Ock doesn’t always work — and imbuing its action scenes with a real sense of weight and consequence. Every one of the movie’s big set pieces is something special, from the bonkers cartoon hijinks of the vertical-is-horizontal clocktower fight to the knock-down drag-out brutality of the train sequence and the straight-up Hellraiser-brand horror of the scene in which medical professionals attempt to remove Octavius’s extra arms. Hellraiser permeates a good deal of Raimi’s film, actually. Elements of the score were licensed for the movie, and there’s no other way to read the gleeful squelch of cybernetic needles sliding into Octavius’s spine or the line of rashy, irritated flesh above where the girdle that braces his arms encircles his stomach.

The hospital scene is where the film really lets Raimi’s horror chops and love of the genre take the wheel, and a wonderful showcase for Spider Man 2’s loving set design and dressing. The mechanical arms draped in surgical plastic make a ghoulish tableaux, the doctor’s blackly funny “Anyone here take shop class?” one-liner before the carnage starts breaks the ice at the exact wrong moment, and within seconds the whole thing is a genuine nightmare. Bodies flying, close-ups with dramatic shadows on the walls and Old Hollywood glamor screams; a doctor dragged into the shadows under a table so quickly that her nails dig furrows in the linoleum — it’s a rapid-fire showcase of horror’s greatest hits, complete with serpentine Raimi-cam and artful splashes of blood. Imagine releasing a bunch of circular saws mounted on roombas into a room full of raw meat and you’ll have an idea of the tone. For my money, it’s the single most exciting and hilarious scene in any superhero movie, bar none.