So these are the infamous Joel Schumacher Batmans. Joel was given this film in the wake of the fairly popular and successful Tim Burton films. Those films brought a strange, dark, Charles Addams, German expressionist look to the Bat universe. Joel wanted to do his own thing and decided to embrace the latent homo-eroticism and general camp of the Adam West TV show, much to the annoyance of Batman fans and much to my great interest!
This is not a good film however. There are the bat nipples, yes, and codpieces (pieces cod?) and the Robin is old enough that it's not super creepy to imagine him and Batman smooching, but they are action films in the end, big on spectacle and fight scenes. The films are very gaudy. There's a lot of scenes that are simultaneously so impressive and so tacky. At one point they're climbing up to the Riddler's lair. The pipe they crawl up has lasers forming question marks on the walls, like a rave. It's so gaudy, so campy, so much, and yet for so little.
I didn't hate the movie very much, but I definitely see where the malcontents of the 90s are coming from. Having grown up with the Bruce Timm animated batman, I was left (ahem) cold by the Mr Freeze. Poins Ivy was handled pretty well, but Twoface and the Riddler are totally wrong. The Riddler is gloriously grotesque in his defeat however, looking like the drag performer Christeene:
I also feel like Poison Ivy was handled pretty well too, but it's only in moments and snatches like this that the film pays off. Mostly it's this gaudy spectacle full of plastic and dry ice and looking like it smells like a Halloween costume.
I don't think these films deserve their reputation. They're definitely weak films, and heavily camp-inflected, but they're far from terrible or excruciating. They're bad in a generic way, not a particularly unwatchable way. Eh. They're not good though.
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