It’s impossible to talk about Clayface, the character, the villain who’s part of Batman’s rogues’ gallery, without talking about his depiction in Batman: The Animated Series. And it’s hard to talk about Clayface, the new DC Studios film from director James Watkins, without talking about the shadow cast by that character-defining arc in BTAS, a standout, somehow, among not just a frankly absurd number of high points in that improbable children’s show, but among any Batman story ever told.

For one thing, Clayface borrows BTAS‘ Clayface retcon, taking elements of the backstory of Basil Karlo, the first iteration of Clayface to appear in Detective Comics, and mashing them up with elements of the origin story of Matt Hagen, the second version of Clayface to grace the pages of Detective Comics. In Clayface, as in Batman: The Animated Series, Matt Hagen is a down-on-his-luck actor who seeks a way to restore his old face after he’s left with severe facial scars. But where BTAS was more concerned with Matt’s humanity, framing his transformation as a powerful and tragic metaphor for addiction, Clayface is necessarily more focused on Matt’s monstrosity. This is a revenge story, told through the lens of body horror. We’re meant to sympathize with Matt to a point, but we’re mostly meant to delight in the carnage wrought by his ever-shifting hand.

In that, Clayface largely succeeds. This is a film that knows what it is—a comparatively low-budget (for a comic book movie from a major studio) genre swing —and doesn’t try to be much more than that.

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