Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

I feel like I just said this about Justice League: Gods and Monsters, but it’s nice to know that here at about the halfway point of this project, I can still be surprised. Despite having a pretty basic title that promises little more than two teams being thrown at one another like action figures, Justice League vs. Teen Titans breaks out of its role as just another smash-’em-up in this interconnected narrative. You also wouldn’t think it from the very generic promo images that are associated with the film either, but this is a horror movie, and despite being animated, it manages to be a pretty effective one. 

Damian’s up to his normal shenanigans, again. Some second stringers like Weather Wizard are causing a ruckus, and the League is there to pound everyone into submission like it’s gear night and the lights are about to come on. Damian’s on crowd control duty, which means he’s standing in a single place and pointing in the direction that fleeing people should use to evacuate. Understandably bored at being given the superhero job equivalent of holding the sign that says “SLOW” on one side and “STOP” on the other at a road construction site, he gets involved when he sees the opportunity to go after the aforementioned climate-based villain. Unbeknownst to the boy, the Weather Wizard is possessed by some four-eyed space demon, and Damian’s brutal takedown forces the demon vapor out of his body, leaving no one to question. Bruce has, once again, had it up the metaphorical here, so Nightwing takes the kid to stay with the Titans, a team run by his ladyfriend, Starfire (Kari Wahlgren). She’s playing den mother to: Jaime Reyes (Jake T. Austin), aka Blue Beetle, a kid with an alien “scarab” on his back that transforms into weaponry and such; Garfield “Beast Boy” Logan (Brandon Soo Hoo), a green boy who can shapeshift into animals; and goth-girl-who’s-sort-of-the-devil’s-daughter Raven (Taissa Farminga, in an inspired bit of casting).  

It’s Raven and her backstory on which this film hangs. Her mother was a teen runaway who got involved with a cult, and when said organization did a little ceremony to see what would happen, they summoned an extra-dimensional entity known as Trigon (Jon Bernthal). Raven’s mother was the naive but willing Rosemary in this situation, and her baby, Raven was to be the vessel through which Trigon would permanently enter our plane of existence to conquer the earth and turn it into a hell-like place. His time is nigh, as it turns out, and he’s stepping up his astral gaslighting to get her to open up the portal. Helping his cause is a possessed Superman, through whom Trigon’s minions are able to dig what can only be described as a stargate out of the desert, in preparation for his coming. When the Titans are attacked by Trigon’s henchmen while on an outing to a carnival for some mandatory team-building fun, Raven spills this backstory, and tells them about how she was raised in a magic utopia until she was about eleven, when Trigon found their little hidden fairyland and turned it into hell; this is not an exaggeration, as pits of molten lava erupt, everything is turned to ashes, and every living thing evaporates in a puff, except Raven. She pretended to join him, she sealed him in a crystal that she hid in another dimension, but apparently he’s out and trying to get a stranglehold on our dimension. The Titans can’t be possessed since Raven is protecting them, but nothing is stopping Trigon’s forces from taking over the League . . .

There are a lot of great teen horror elements in here, mostly put to good use. The carnival is such an iconic location for a horror movie and doubly so when the characters are teens, so that whole sequence is a lot of fun. There’s also something about Raven’s pale emo girl aesthetic that’s such a key element of the genre that it transcends decades, so much so that you can almost hear the performance that Winona Ryder would have given as this character if the movie was made in the 80s, or the one that Fairuza Balk would have given if this had been made in the era of The Craft. Her borderline fanfiction backstory—demon daddy didn’t love me and also he is actually essentially the devil—is actually fun here, so I have no complaints. I’ve never really cared all that much about this character in any other media, not even Titans (2018), which I watched all the way through along with dozens of others worldwide, but this is the perfect length to condense everything down into a digestible package. But what really sells this as a horror story is just how awful and gross things get. 

We eventually go all the way to (similar to but legally distinct from) Hell, but even before we get there, there’s enough to disturb us here in our own dimension. Raven’s recap of her origin story includes a scene in which Raven’s willing mother is frightened out of her mind when the glamour on her lover fades and she finds herself facing his true demonic form, complete with jet black horns that sprout and grow with a disgusting sound effect, and with additional points popping out like antlers as they elongate. Superman finds himself alone in his apartment laundry room, and not only is the sequence drawn with a lot of spookiness, he tries to get the image out of his head by beating it against a wall for what may have been hours, which is difficult to watch. Once the group does get to the place where the crystal should be, everything for as far as the eye can see just looks like exposed, flayed muscle tissue, with tumorous bones and teeth popping out randomly. At one point, a wall of corpses comes alive and pulls a villain into itself, tearing it apart, all while a giant metal rhombus hovers above the landscape like Leviathan in Hellraiser 2. Beast Boy undergoes a full-on Cronenbergian/Akira tumorous body horror transformation upon exposure to Hell’s energy. Punches are not being pulled in this movie, and its animation lets it get away with a lot.

This isn’t a perfect movie. For one thing, the pace at which they were putting these out and the strains that this would put on any animation team are starting to show, as there are quite a few obvious animation errors that I’m surprised weren’t caught prior to release, mostly in the carnival sequence. One of these is a misspelled sign that advertises “Salloons” [sic] instead of balloons, and another is when Raven and Damian end up dropping their respective guards around each other as they see their dual reflections in some funhouse mirrors, which reflects a sign that says “Smoothies” but doesn’t mirror the text. This sequence, while fun, also goes for that Final Destination vibe with the inclusion of an emo ballad that I believe was written specifically for this release, plays in its entirety over a montage of the Titans bonding, and which is one of the worst things that I have ever heard, genuinely. If you must hear it for yourself, it’s here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. But if you can make it through that, you’ll be rewarded with something really fun, like a kaiju-sized Trigon making a beeline toward a city to destroy it while Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash are completely powerless against it, or dimensions made of meat. That soundtrack is knocking this one back a few pegs, but don’t let that make you skip this one (maybe just mute it during the carnival montage).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond