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.

At long last, we have reached the final Batman film in this long saga. I don’t expect that this will be the last time we talk about him, as I have no doubt that he’ll play a part in the upcoming massive Crisis on Infinite Earths triple feature (pray for me), but this is the last time that it’s his name in the title, and that’s something to celebrate. This is another one of those Elseworlds style flicks—what if Batman, but H.P. Lovecraft? The answer is another adaptation of a comic by Mike Mignola, whose previous Gotham by Gaslight was adapted into a thoroughly mediocre animated feature that sanded off all of the grit from Mignola’s art. Will this one fare better?

This time, it’s the 1920s, and Gotham City’s most beloved orphan, Bruce Wayne (David Giuntoli), has spent the last two decades traveling hither and yon in the wake of his parents’ deaths. In Antarctica, he and his three assistants—Dick Grayson (Jason Marsden), Santay Tawde (Karan Brar), and Kai Li Cain (Tati Gabrielle)—are searching for the lost Cobblepot Expedition. They encounter undead members of the crew and manage to subdue one, named Grendon (David Dastmalchian), and return with him to Gotham City, not realizing that he was already infected by parasites from the otherworldly creature he was attempting to free from the ice when Wayne et al arrived. Thus begins the unraveling of a tangled web of interconnections between the founding families of Gotham and the Cult of Ghul that worships the elder, eldritch god Iog-Sotha, and need only the Testament of Ghul to allow him to cross the threshold into our world and do whatever it is that Cthulhu entities do. 

In addition to the above-mentioned group of onetime Robins whom Bruce collected on his voyages, there are, of course, other members of the same old usual suspects here. The “Cult of Ghul” tells you pretty early on that Ra’s and Talia are going to pop up and cause trouble at some point. Kirk Langstrom, who is normally a tragic villain known as the “Man-Bat,” is referred to as “the bat man of Crime Alley” before our title character really becomes a known element in the city. Here, instead of being transformed into a giant batlike man, he’s a mad scientist whose research into bats has led him to believe that they are speaking to him, a trait we ultimately learn he shares in common with Bruce. Jason Blood is also here, sometimes in his demon form as Etrigan, and it is he who starts Bruce on his road to learning the true horrors which lie beneath the surface of the rational world. Oliver Queen (Christopher Gorham) is made a Gotham resident here and the Queens are established as one of the founding families of the city, with OIiver using his family’s wealth to fund a one-man war on supernatural evil, while playacting as a booze-smuggling lush to keep his activities under wraps. There’s no Joker or Catwoman, but Harvey Dent is here reimagined as a candidate for mayor who becomes infected on one side of his body with a horrible rash that eventually breaks out in bumps and tumors which then spread onto a nearby wall to create a portal to Iog-Sotha’s realm. It sounds gross, and it is, but it also doesn’t really hold a candle to how revolting and frightening the demons in Justice League Dark and JLvTT were. 

This is one of the film’s bigger weaknesses: the inability for this animation to really convey the horror of the mythos that it’s adapting. It disgusts, but it never harrows. One could unironically call it the comic book-ification of Lovecraftian horror, except that actual comic book adaptations of that material often rise from actual artistic interest and which result in some truly glorious art, but not art that easily translates to the moving image, even if what we’re talking about is being “drawn” in both artforms. I’ll admit that it was an inspired choice to bring in Jeffrey Combs(!) to voice Kirk Langstrom via his apocalyptic log, but that desire to make connections to previous Lovecraft adaptations is the only real time that this feels like it’s trying. Everything that makes it special comes from the source material, which, like Gotham By Gaslight before it, means that this is just a diminished version of what it’s supposed to adapt, with no real improvements. It’s not a bad movie, but there’s something really lacking that would have pushed it into being something special. I’d rank it only slightly above average if for no other reason than that we get to see Bruce fully commit to turning into an eldritch bat monster in order to save the day. That’s got to be worth something, right? 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond