It’s like some weird twist of fate that the movies that I’ve been watching for the past couple of weeks (in the cinema, on TV and on DVD) were all comic book movies. And not only that, they shared another common trait, all of them sucked.

What I can take away from that experience was an impression made that somewhere in Hollywood, there’s a factory filled with writers, casting agents, producers, directors and financiers aimed at putting out lame, run of the mill comic book adaptations.

First up, there was Wolverine, which was rather ho-hum. Blazing through his formative years, the movie stuck to adamantium bonding process but took liberties with how he lost his memories and the whole thing ended up like X-Men for pre-schoolers. Sanitized, with some boogie-man scares (that sewn up Deadpool) thrown in for good measure.

I watched Punisher: War Zone last Saturday and one of the earlier scenes involved Frank Castle gate-crashing a mob dinner by going all-ninja on them (read: with a sword). I didn’t know the Punisher used swords. And downgrading what used to be a suave mob boss to a campy potrayal of the Joker-wannabe known as Jigsaw; that was just so painful to watch.

And just when I thought that was the last of it, I caught the first 40 minutes of Ghost Rider earlier tonight on Cinemax. It was a rather cliche experience, like I’ve seen this manner of story telling so many times. Or maybe I had one too many comic book movies these two weeks. I think I’m gonna hurl.