Six things I learned from The Making of Judge Dredd

Judge Dredd was a pretty terrible film. And it was pretty terrible in a pretty unique way. Unlike many bad films I’ve seen, it’s one that’s really stayed with me since the first and only time I saw it, way back in 1995.

See, aside from that pretty cool 1991 Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment on Gotham one-shot by Alan Grant, John Wagner and Simon Bisley, the film was my first exposure to Dredd, whom I knew to be a very popular character across the Atlantic (would he be fighting Batman if he weren’t?) and worked on and/or beloved by a lot of extremely talented comics writers and artists.

So seeing his film and realizing it was just an awful, awful film confused and irritated me—if this character was so great, if his comics were so good, how could his movie end up like this? (Perhaps I should point out at this point that I was only 18 at the time, and while I had seen Howard the Duck and Swamp Thing, I hadn’t read or even heard anything about the comics they were based on).

When I finally started really reading Dredd comics a few years ago, mostly thanks Rebellion’s trade collections, particularly the Complete Case Files series, the memory of the movie kept coming back to me. I think that’s why it stayed with me for so long; it was my first association with the character, and so all subsequent ones recall it on at least some small level.

That the movie didn’t turn out to be a great one, or at least a pretty good one, and that it didn’t spawn a franchise the way Batman did confused me even more after I experienced the material firsthand.

THe Judge Dredd comics were actually pretty great, the movie made the costume and character look right (“right-er” than Batman got Batman, really), and Sylvester Stallone was a pretty perfect actor to cast—Dredd’s entire emotional spectrum was played out in his lip curls, snarls, frowns and tooth-gritting, and Stallone had one of the strongest chins and most expressive sets of lips of any action star of the last century. He was perfect for the role!

So why didn’t it work? I don’t know.

I reviewed it for my local paper at the time, and probably still have a clipping in a box in my basement somewhere, but I imagine if I re-watched it today, I’d have pretty different things to say about it. Perhaps I could better diagnose why Judge Dredd the movie was so different from Judge Dredd the comics if I re-watched it today, but then, I’d have to re-watch it, and forcing oneself to rewatch any film in which Rob Schneider is prominently featured is a pretty difficult task to set oneself to.

Someone recently suggested that I check out the book The Making of Judge Dredd (Hyperion; 1995) by Jane Killick, David Chute and Charles M. Lippincott, and once I found a copy at a library, I did so.

It was a pretty weird reading experience (Not that I read the whole thing. I read about the history of the project and the writing of the script, and trailed off as it got into the production of the special effects and so on). For one thing, it was kind of sad and sobering, a reminder that no one ever really sets out to make a terrible movie (various genre exploitation flicks aside), and that even this had scores of creative people who devoted, in some cases, decades of their lives to making a Judge Dredd and, well, you’ve seen the results (Or maybe you haven’t. Maybe it made back the money that was spent producing it, I don’t really know—I do know that there was never a Judge Dredd II and that Sylvester Stallone’s career took a bit of a turn at that point, as he did fewer and fewer big action movies and started trying out more adventurous roles, the occasional Rocky or Rambo aside).

And I learned some things. Specifically, six things. Here then, are the Six Things I Learned From Reading the firs half of The Making of Judge Dredd…


1.) Judge Dredd was in development for literally (figuratively) forever. The character was just created in 1977 (Fun fact: So was I!), and producer Charles M. Lippincott saw cinematic potential in the property by 1978, but he didn’t succeed in acquiring the rights until 1983 or so, after a year of negotiating, when the original rights holders allowed their original claim to lapse.

There were plenty of writers involved at various points, some just pitching, some working on scripts and some working on the final script. In fact, there were so many that producer Susan Nicoletti referred to them as “a parade of writers.”

Among them?

—Comics writer Jan Strnad

—The script-writing team of Tim Hunter and James Crumley (Their draft “was very well written but was incredibly complex and drew from so many threads of the Dredd legend that it would have been impossible to actually make,” according to producer Edward R. Pressman)

—Comics writer and artist Howard Chaykin (Apparently everyone loved his first pitch, done orally, which posited Judge Dredd as the Lone Ranger, but everyone hated his official treatment, which was Dredd wandering The Cursed Earth hallucinating a conversation with “an animated statue of Blind Justice”)

—Terminator and Terminator 2 screenwriter William Wisher (whose script was dense and science-ficiton-y, with lots of mutants and aliens)

—Steven E. de Souza, who wrote Running Man, Commando, the first two Die Hards and seemingly about half of the action movies you saw in the ‘80s and early ‘90s (Although director Danny Cannon pretty bluntly slams de Souza’s take, which stands out as pretty weird, given the overall tone of the book which is, predictably, rather rah-rah of the entire endeavor.)


2.) A lot of writers had a hard time coming to grips with the character at all. Apparently the screenwriters who tried to “crack the Dredd puzzle during the early years of development” tended to fall into two camps.

“One group consisted of those who simply hated the bloody SOB, for political as well as visceral reasons, and wanted to build a harsh critique of Dredd’s ferocious tactics into the story,” Killick and company wrote. “Another group comprised of so-called ‘fan-boys,’ who loved Dredd a tad too much, and couldn’t bear to see a single rivet on his leather codpiece shifted a quarter inch from its position as ‘established’ in the comic book.”

Nicoletti says the same thing slightly differently, there were fans in one category, and “[t]he other category was writers who hadn’t a clue who Judge Dredd was, and went off and did the research and came back and said, ‘I hate this guy. This guy is a fascist.’ And some of them would want the job anyway and would attempt to write a story about a character they hated. ‘I’m going to stick him in the background and write a politically correct science fiction fantasy storya that’ sa cautionary tale about excessive police power.”


3.) The peculiarities of the Dredd character that were so divisive among potential screenwriters may have been the heart of what went wrong.

Here’s Cottie Chubb, a production executive, talking about the challenge of taking Dredd the comic character and turning him into a film character:

The first thing…was simply whether or not or to what extent we wanted to put the comic book character himself, intact, onto the screen. Whether you wanted to, because the character had a couple of major problems. He never took off his helmet, for one thing. He literally never showed his face. Which of course means that if you’re going to be true to the comic in this respect you won’t hire Arnold or Sly, because, trust me, you’re not going to pay the fee of a star like that and then never show his face. Even in RoboCop you saw his face, at least enough to assure people that there was a human being under the suit. With Dredd it’s never clear that there’s a man inside.

At this point, 14 years after the movie was released, it’s easy to read this as The Producers Just Not Getting It. As I mentioned before, Stallone was one of the few bankable stars who probably was recognizable in a visor and helmet at the time, and his…distinct voice would reassure anyone watching it was in fact him under that helmet.

There has been at least one rather successful based-on-a-comic-book movie that kept it’s star fully masked throughout the entirety of the film since then as well. In V For Vendetta, we never see Hugo Weaving’s face and, in fact, I guess there’s no real way to know for sure that it is Weaving in the costume.

But the tension between having a recognizable star in your superhero movie and keeping a mask on him most of the time is one the makers of superhero movies are seemingly constantly wrestling with. Note Michael Keaton ripping his rubber mask off at the end of Batman Returns, Tobey Maguire having his mask or sections of it ripped off during emotional moments in the Spider-Man movies, and Robert Downey Jr. losing his helmet in the climactic fight in Iron Man.

Perhaps the closest example to Judge Dredd deciding to show Dredd’s face is Frank Miller’s decision to show The Octopus’ face in The Spirit, since neither ever show their faces in the comics (Well, Dredd is always masked, whereas the Octopus is usually in shadows or off-panel entirely).

The Spirit obviously did rather poorly at the box office, but it’s doubtful if the decision to show the Octopus’ face had anything at all to do with that; in fact, Samuel L. Jackson as the Octopus seemed to be one of the film’s saving graces (among critics who could find saving graces).

More from Chubb:

Now, there are Dredd aficionados who would say…you want to keep him as an exaggerated force of nature dealing with real problems in an over the top way. Shooting a person for littering, or whatever. It’s only funny because of the exaggeration. But you can’t ask the action audience in this country to go to a movie and laugh at itself for being insecure enough to want to see action movies with larger than life heroes.

This view ultimately prevailed, and probably a mistake. I think we’ve learned that the action audience in America has no problem with insane exaggeration, and has no problem laughing at itself, but perhaps that wasn’t apparent back then, before Hong Kong’s influence over Hollywood action had become quite so prevalent.

I would side with the aficionados and fan boys though. There’s little point in having Dredd struggle with internal conflicts, because Dredd doesn’t have internal conflicts, beyond perhaps “How hard should I kick this scum in the face?” or “Where should I shoot that person, in the leg, the head or the torso?”

I haven’t read every Judge Dredd story ever written of course—I’m only up to volume 11 of the Case Files—but as far as I understand it, Dredd doesn’t have much emotional range, and is more a force of nature.

It’s worth noting that no one’s had much luck making a Punisher film yet either, despite multiple tries. The Punisher is a lot like Dredd, a force-of-nature-character that works better as a two-dimensional plot engine than a fleshed-out character. The very best Punisher stories have been those by Garth Ennis—who, coincidentally, used to write Dredd comics—in which The Punisher’s whole personality can be summed up as “a guy who will kill bad guys, no matter what.”

Pressman compared the Judge Dredd property to Conan, which seemed “so logical and distinct” compared to other comic book properties that he “never doubted its viability as a movie, or that it would be worth the effort—even when it seemed that it was going to take forever.’

I can see that. Unlike Batman or Spider-Man, Dredd isn’t really a character, nor is Conan. There dudes we enjoy watching move through their respective world, but don’t necessarily care for them personally, perhaps because we’re so confident that their victory is always completely assured. (Well, I imagine everyone watching Batman and Batman Returns imagined Batman would make it out alive and defeat the bad guys, but would his love interests survive? Would he be lonely when it was over? Would he make his dead parents proud? Batman was of our world; even if Gotham City was fairly far removed from it, it was closer to us than Conan Land or Mega-City One. And we could recognize aspects of Batman’s emotional conflicts, in the comics and the movies, whereas in Conan’s comics and movies and Dredd’s comics, the conflicts were mostly physical and devoid of emotional content).


4.) Apparently 1987's RoboCop was a terrible blow to the production of Judge Dredd. It seemingly delayed the film’s forward momentum for a bit, and according to Pressman, “From then on it was essential that we say to every writer and director that we talked to that it can’t be too much like RoboCop.”

Also, once Stallone was cast, 1993’s sci-fi action movie Demolition Man, in which he played a cop fighting crime in the future, caused some anxiety, as they wouldn't want to have their Judge Dredd too closely resemble it either.


5.) Apparently, there was once some resistance to superhero movies. In 2009, on the other side of the Spider-Man franchise, and financial and critical success of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, when movies are being made of even relatively obscure comics and the entirety of Marvel’s character catalog seems to be in some point of development, that superhero movies used to be a tough sell.

Here’s Lippincott:

Dredd was actually sort of a tough sell…Most studios don’t make big SF movies, unless there’s an exceptional filmmaker like [James] Cameron or [Stephen] Spielberg attached. Contemporary action is easier for them because it is star oriented. And comic books aren’t generally popular with studios, either. Warner Brothers owns DC Comics, which publishes Batman, so that’s a special case. I can understand their anxiety. It’s hard trying to find a way to handle a comic book character. How do you take something that’s literally two-dimensional and make it three-dimensional? And Dredd presents additional problems because in a way there’s almost too much material, too many ways to go with it.

Hollywood has no trouble with the making two-dimensional things three-dimensional any more—although admittedly they don’t do much beyond doing so literally, and occasionally even make two-dimensional characters one-dimensional when putting them in movies—but the “too much material” problem still exists. It’s more of a problem for a first movie though, and if they can keep from trying to cram in too much (Daredevil, Hulk), then they can wait till the second and/or third films to get to more of that material.



6.) Judge Death was MIA in part because he was difficult to play off Dredd in a movie introducing the latter (they’re basically the same character, only Death is funnier), but also due to technical concerns. The technology of 1991 ruled out the possibility of Judge Death, as he would have been a special effect, and it would have been impossible to have a real actor play him to any extent. (Now’s a different story, of course in a post Andy Serkis-as-Gollum-and-King Kong world). The book noted hopefully that as special effects got more and more sophisticated, it was looking likely that Judge Death could appear in a sequel. Of course, there never was a sequel.

Three reveiws of three comics featuring two heroes who conceal two-thirds of their faces with their helmets and visors

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Vol. 11 (Rebellion) is the latest of the black and white phonebook-like collection of Judge Dredd adventures. It offers a couple hundred pages of stories from 1987 and 1988, all written by the John Wagner and Alan Grant team, and illustrated by the sort of all-star roster of artists that are pretty much par for the Complete Case Files course: Steve Dillon, Jim Baikie, Brendan McCarthy, John Higgins, Cliff Robinson, Brett Ewins and others contribute.

The most memorable story is both the biggest and the last one in the book, the 26-part “Oz” storyline.

Mega-City One skysurfing champion Chopper is rotting away in a cell, busted for illegal skysurfing (a future sport that’s exactly what it sounds like; surfers pilot flying surfboards), unaware that world championship Skysurf 10 is coming up in Australia, and that the loudmouth, maybe offensive to real-life Aussies Jug “The Wizard of Oz” McKenzie (any EDILW readers from Australia who have read this story who care to comment on …?) seems like a lock to win (and regularly trashes Chopper’s rep).

In the midst of being transferred, he managed to escape custody, and then attempts to skysurf all the way to Australia, which means a seemingly impossible journey over The Cursed Earth and over the ocean.

Meanwhile, the judges are being stalked by some sort of mysterious super-judges calling themselves The Judda, and Dredd journeys to Oz to arrest Chopper on the infinitesimal chance he manages to somehow arrive their alive (Dredd is, by that point, the only human being on earth who actually wants to arrest Chopper and prevent him from competing in Skysurf).

It’s a pretty great story, folding a series of the random-ish, episodic adventures of Dredd stories in general into a big, long, epic story (Highlights include Chopper’s battle with some bizarrely drawn (by McCarthy) giant birdmen who speak in outrageous Mexican accents and an encounter with a killer robot chef, and the extremely ‘80s sports movie formula Supersurf event itself.

There are a few other multi-part storylines in the book, including “The Alabammy Blimps” five-parter drawn by Steve Dillon about a group of very large what-used-to-be-Alabama-based Amazons in the Cursed Earth, but mostly the contents reflect Grant and Wagner picking up on an idea they saw in the modern world of the late ‘80s, turning it around and looking at it from a few different angles, and turning it into a ten-to-twenty-page tongue-in-cheek action adventure story sometimes only tangentially involving the title character.

More recent Judge Dredd adventures are collected in Judge Dredd: The Pit (Rebellion), a slimmer, collection of a series of stories form 1995-96 set in the titular neighborhood. A sort of dumping ground for Judges who are somehow defective and being punished for it, The Pit is a particularly bad part of town policed by a particularly corrupt bunch of judges.

At least until Dredd is sent there to be the new station chief, and turn things around—ferreting out corruption and improving judicial efficiency while fighting the rather rampant crime.

These stories, which all add up to a bigger story that starts with Dredd’s arrival and ends with his departure, are all written by John Wagner, and illustrated by his Dredd co-creator Carlos Ezquerra, plus Colin MacNeil, Lee Sullivan and Alex Ronald.

Wagner plays around with Hollywood movie clichés in his usual fashion, here focusing on a variety of police movies as he introduces a series of corrupt cops and moles, an undercover cop who can’t come back in from the cold and various good cops with bad habits and double lives, culminating in an Assault on Precinct 13 meets The Alamo climax.

Though the writing here seems somewhat stronger than in the above Case Files collection—somewhat more sophisticated, or at least more serious and more focused on character drama than social satire—the art seems a great deal weaker, perhaps in large part due to the fact that it appears in color.

I prefer experience Dredd’s world in black and white, as the garish neon-green of the judges’ uniform doesn’t come through and my eyes are spared its violent clash with the red, gold and blue-black of the rest of it.

The color here looks particularly garish in general. I’m not sure if this was colorized black and white —I’ve only experienced Dredd in trade—or what, but it has a sickly, air-brushed look to it, and over-ambitious application of light and shadow effects that I find personally aesthetically unappealing.

While not quite the feast that the Case Files collection offers, The Pit is still a pretty satisfying genre meal.

Warlash: Dark Noir #2 (Asylum Press) isn’t a Judge Dredd comic, but it’s hero does resemble him. Like Dredd, he always wears a helmet with opaque lenses hiding his eyes, and only his mouth and jaws betraying any humanity (and even those are generally frowning and clenched).

Frank Forte’s sci fi superhero series reminds me a lot of Dredd actually, and not just because of his head ware. The design of the character Warlash echoes Dredd in a few places, and he similarly patrols a generic-ish futuristic city (Pittsburgh in this case), and, in this series at least, his adventures are presented in an episodic, anthology-like format, drawn by different artists.

I wasn’t exactly impressed with the first issue, and despite liking all four the artists who draw the four stories here, this isn’t the sort of book I’d be adding to my pull list any time soon, or probably even reviewing here, if I wasn’t sent a review copy (That’s pretty much the secret to getting reviewed here, publishers! While I can’t promise to review every single comic book that gets mailed to me, I do promise that I will put every single comic book that gets mailed to me in a pile on the floor of my living room, look worriedly at that pile a few times a day, and feel extremely guilty if I don’t review everything in it at some point).

The first story is part two of “Phlegm Fatale,” which began in the last issue. Like all of the stories, it’s written by Frank Forte, and this one is drawn by him as well. Warlash fights a big worm-like, tentacley monster in the sewers. I can’t tell how serious it’s meant to be taken. It ends with Warlash brandishing his weapons and saying, “Now that the playing field is leveled, let’s see how you fare against Warlash…in full fury!” That’s a joke, right? Forte draws this one too, and I do like his art quite a bit.

Next up is a story called—I swear to God—“Enter The Bladeviper.” This one is co-written by Royal McGraw and drawn by J.C. Wong. Wong’s art is also quite strong, but the story may be the visually weakest, if only because there are a few pages where I can’t figure out exactly what’s happening (This has something to do with Bladeviper’s powers, which I don’t understand, but seems to have something to do with making sharp objects move around or appear or something).

In this story, Warlash fights scantily clad Bladeviper, who looks a bit like Marvel’s Medusa character wearing a bikini and mask designed by H.R. Giger, two unfortunately placed rubies on her bikini top. She and Warlash fight each other with their various pointy weapons for a while, she releases a bunch of mutants from glass cases that Warlash must stop to fight, allowing her to steal a blood sample from what looks like Swamp Thing’s head, while using a bunch of stupid sex metaphors for the procedure.

The best part of this story, aside from the employment of “KRAKKADOOMM!!” as a sound effect, is the bit where Warslash narrates about watching a “neurovid” of an old “2D” musical from over a century ago, apparently just so McGraw can allude to the Annie Get Your Gun’s “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” song to describe Bladeviper’s powers in relationship to Warlash’s.

Somehow Warlash just doesn’t seem like the sort who would watch ancient musicals on neurovids to me…

Next up is “The Transformation of Eduard Yan,” drawn Nenad Gucunja, in a cartoonier style with more extreme, energetic angles than the rest of the book. In this story, a couple of drug pushers cut up a junkie, who injects himself with something, and then gets thrown in the sewer, and turns into a big tentacley monster that fights Warlash.

Finally, there’s a black and white story by Steve Mannion, a continuation of the story that began in the first issue, in which Warlash fights a giant monster in the, um, sewer again.

Nice production values, all around great art—everyone in here can out-draw a good half of the folks working on DCU comics and a good quarter of the folks working on Marvel Universe comics at the moment—and a great value (42 story pages for just $2.95) make this at least worth a flip-through, should you encounter it in the wild. (Or you could just do a visual flip-through here; there’s a few pages worth of preview of each of the four stories in the issue).

The Scarecrow vs. Judge Death

From Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment on Gotham by Alan Grant, John Wagner and Simon Bisley (DC Comics; 1991)

Batman Beatdown #3

You can't win 'em all, even if you're Batman, and you therefore win about 99-percent of 'em.

In our ongoing efforts to chronicle the best ass-kickings that Batman, one of comicdom's premier assk-kickers, has endured, we've previously seen Deathstroke totally take him apart, and watched Etrigan, The Demon beat the hell out of him. Clearly Batman has a little more trouble dealing with metahumans and supernatural beings than your plain old regular joes.

There is one regular joe who has suceeded in taking Batman down, however—one Joe Dredd.

It happened in this comic book,



1991's Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment on Gotham, which was written by John Wagner and Alan Grant, and fully-painted by Simon Bisley.

This is Fourteen-Year-Old Caleb's favortie comic book, and even Thirty-Year-Old Caleb still sees a lot to like about. It's significant for several reasons. Personally, it was my fourth Batman comic and my first Judge Dredd comic. Less personally, it was the first of the three prestige-format comic book meetings between Batman and Dredd, and the only good one.

The plot involves Mean Machine Angel coming to Gotham City via somekind of teleporting maguffin machine. Judge Death follows him, and meets up with the Scarecrow, and it takes the combined forces of Batman, Dredd and Judge Anderson to settle the villains' collective hash.

But first, Dredd and Batman meet, when the latter is accidentally teleported to the future or alternate dimension or alternate dimension's future or whereever it is exactly that Mega City One is located in relation to Gotham City.

They come into conflict immediately, and, unlike 'Stroke and Etrigan, Dredd drops Batman without even exerting himself at all.

Let's watch:


(Click to mega-size it)

Oh my God! Did you see that?! One hit! He knocked Batman out with just one hit! From conscious to unconscious and unmasked in the space of just three-panels!

Now, Dredd may be as human as Batman, but he's no slouch when it comes to beating people up. While he doesn't have any superpowers or robot parts in him, he was born and bred specifically to beat up lawbreakers. Still, taking Batman out in one panel? Pretty damn amazing.

Now to be fair to Batman, this did occur at a point in his career when he was quite used to working with law enforcement officials, so chances are he had his guard down and wasn't expecting that nightstick to the head.

Later in the same book, he does punch Dredd in the face and knock him on his ass, and even has a sweet moment where Dredd's like, "Assaulting a judge, that's ten years!" and Batman responds curtly, "Make it twenty" while kicking Dredd.

Of course, while Batman does knock Dredd down with one hit, he doesn't knock him out. And it was something of a sucker punch, since Dredd was arguing with another character when Batman hit him. So we may never know whom could take whom in a fair fight (Unless that's settled in one of the two sequels to this story, whcih I've completely forgotten the contents of, on account of them not being very good).

But for now, let the record show that Judge Dredd once totally beat down Batman.