by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Next up was an oddity called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along
Blog, the product of writer-director Joss
Whedon from 2008, when faced with a writers’ strike decided to whip up this
weird little spoof of superhero stories with his friends Neil Patrick Harris,
Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day. Harris plays a lovable if rather pathetic nerd
named Billy, who washes his clothes at the same laundromat as Penny (Felicia
Day), whom he’s got a crush on but can’t bring himself to talk to. Only Billy
has a secret identity as Dr. Horrible, a wanna-be super-villain who’s applying for membership in the Evil League of
Evil (ELE) but needs to do something really terrible to prove that he’s worthy.
He’s also got an even nerdier evil sidekick named Moist (Simon Helberg) whose
superpower is making people feel wet and clammy — it’s not much of a superpower
but then these supposedly dastardly evil people aren’t much of a threat to
normal humanity either. Billy invents a freeze-ray (a device previously used in
René Clair’s 1923 science-fiction comedy short The Crazy Ray and the 1947 film Dick Tracy Meets
Gruesome) — a prop Whedon borrowed from his
previous film Firefly and had
Harris hold upside-down — and intends to use it to wreak havoc on an
opening-day dedication in which the city’s mayor is going to unveil a statue
honoring superheroes in general and one superhero, Captain Hammer (Nathan
Fillion), in particular.
Captain Hammer comes off as a total super-boor,
egomaniacal, sluttish and so yucky he comes off like Elvis Presley trying to
play Superman — so we end up rooting for Dr. Horrible even though eventually
the head of ELE, Bad Horse (he’s called “The Thoroughbred of Evil” and we never
see him but we get the impression he’s not only the most feared super-villain
of all time, he really is a horse
— the big line from his theme song is that if you cause him trouble, “I’ll make
you my mare”), makes it clear that the only way Dr. Horrible is going to have
of getting in the ELE is to commit murder. Also in the plot mix are Penny’s
participation in a drive to requisition an unused city building as a homeless
shelter rather than see it torn down for a parking lot. Dr. Horrible heists an
armored van for the supply of the secret element he needs to get his Freeze Ray
to work (he turns it into a Death Ray midway through the movie after Bad
Horse’s minions inform him that the only way he’s going to get into ELE is to
kill someone). but the remote control device he puts onto the van gets
short-circuited when Captain Hammer steps on it. He later pushes Penny into a
pile of garbage so the van won’t run over her, and as a result Penny falls
immediately in love — or at least in lust — with him. Captain Hammer likes her
enough he wonders whether, for the first time in his life, he’ll actually have
sex with the same woman more than once.
It all comes to a head (so to speak)
when the Mayor hosts the opening ceremony for the homeless shelter Captain
Hammer got him to agree to build as a favor to Penny, only Dr. Horrible brings
his death ray and kills … not Captain Hammer but Penny, thereby leaving himself
triumphant (he’s managed to expose Captain Hammer as a coward) but broken. The
film is also periodically broken up by deliberately dorky interludes in which
the characters express their innermost thoughts by breaking into song — the
songs are by Joss Whedon’s brother Jed and they’re a lot of fun — indeed, the
DVD gives you the option of a sing-along version with the lyrics of the songs
flashed on screen, but we decided not to use that because most people at our
screening hadn’t seen the movie and therefore didn’t know the songs. (Let’s
face it: The Sound of Music this
isn’t.) The songs are so devastatingly tacky I found myself wishing the Whedons
would make their next project a spoof of La La Land, though in fact this film is so old that its listing
on imdb.com includes a link to its MySpace page!
