As the bean counters at various studios start counting up the profits from Iron Man and The Hulk a fast and loud path is being beaten to the door of DC, Marvel and indie comic outlets for movies. Batman, Wanted, Thor, Captain America, The Avengers, the sequels as well as films based on other properties like Y The Last Man, Invincible... it seems endless.
Some of these movies never made it to either the local theater or the local video store, the most infamous being B Movie icon Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four film which featured not only a Fantastic Four made up of acting school dropouts but also a Thing where you could actually see the zipper line to the rubber suit. With its badly lit sets; tin mask Dr. Doom and awful effects (you really have to see this Johnny Storm to believe it) the Roger Corman Fantastic Four never saw the light of day
For years it was only spoken of in whispers before willful comic collectors made it available at conventions and over the Internet. The funniest part was that while the special effects for the newest Fantastic Four movies were better and higher budget, the acting was just as bad and even the new Dr. Doom looked just as crappy as the Corman version.
As Hollywood gears up to do a Captain America film, I doubt if anyone on the crew will look back at the Captain America movie that came out in the early nineties. A film which manages to deftly destroy the origin of Captain America in only ninety minutes. The movie was so badly done it was hard to believe that Stan Lee produced it, even if the credit was in name only.
The plot of the film was Captain America VS The Red Skull but outside of that this was not Captain America at all. First of all The Red Skull looked like the filmmakers poured tomato sauce on the mask Louis Gossett JR wore in Enemy Mine. Then you had the wooden acting of Matt Salinger as Captain America, acting so bad that you could have sworn he stayed frozen in ice the entire film.
There were laughs though, especially when a young boy looks up and sees Captain America holding on to the missile headed for the Arctic. The young boy later grows up to be the President Of The United States and blah blah blah. When the movie was screened for audiences it was laughed at, even after re-shoots to add more stunts. If you thought the seventies Captain America TV (see above, starring Reb Brown) show was bad, then pull up a chair, pop some popcorn and check out this winner.
When he wasn’t making “classic” hip hop tunes with the Fu-Schnickens, basketball giant (literally) Shaq was royally screwing a classic character from the Superman series. Shaq attempted to use his brute size and brute acting skill to bring to life John Irons aka Steel.
I can see the meeting at the studio where four white men in suits who varied in age were slapping high fives at the marketing coup they’d just pulled by getting a major sports star to be in a superhero movie. Naturally the movie did away with anything having to do with the Superman connection, save for the Superman symbol tattoo Shaq had going into the film. In this version Shaq is a weapons designer (ok, I’ll wait until you stop laughing) who uses his Grandfather’s junkyard to design a super-suit to fight weapons dealer Judd Nelson. Pretty much any film where Judd Nelson is the bad guy is going to have to be NO!!!
Then there’s the Dolph Lundgren Punisher movie, which was the first bite at the Punisher apple. There was no skull shirt involved, which was ok because there was no acting involved either. Dolph is not exactly a wordsmith so giving him long speeches about “Why Am I Here” was the movies first mistake. The other was making the action nearly slapstick as well as making Dolph look more like Elvis with an attitude than the Punisher.
In this debacle Frank Castle is a street cop not a Marine and after his family is killed (in a car bomb, not gunfire) he fakes his death and lives in the sewer. Frank gets caught in a war between Italian and Japanese crime families and there’s also Louis Gossett JR as Frank’s old partner. The scene where Gossett JR tries to reach out to Frank in the interrogation room is one of the funniest dramatic scenes I’ve ever witnessed. The most incredible thing is that Boaz Yakin who went on to write and direct incredible films like Fresh and A Price Above Rubies wrote this movie. Rumor has it that Yakin has been tapped to script the new Conan movie.
Does anybody remember the Dr. Strange TV pilot? No? Well, I do because I tracked it down on eBay. It has nothing to do with Dr. Strange except in the name; they didn’t even hire a guy to play the good doctor who looks like him. Dr. Strange here looks like the bastard child of Doug Henning and Mike Brady. The film is an origin movie about Dr. Strange that has nothing to do with the origin of Dr. Strange. In this version Strange is a psychiatrist who owns a ring that belonged to his father, which means he can become the next Sorcerer Supreme.
The most frustrating thing is that Stephen Strange doesn’t become Dr. Strange until the last twenty minutes of this hard to watch movie. The only thing that’s fun is how they try and do “mystical” special effects in the seventies. Once again Stan Lee is involved, this time as a consultant. I can only assume Ditko (the artist who created Dr. Strange) couldn’t find enough matches to burn the production down before they bastardized his creation. The only saving grace here is that the show itself never got picked up.
Finally I have to bring up the Nick Fury movie where the toughest bastard in the history of the spy game is played by….drum roll…..David Hasselhoff. Yep, The Hoff dons the eye patch and cigar and desperately tries to play a role that he is completely unsuited for. In this movie Nick Fury is asked to return to SHIELD after the children of Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker try to re-start the terrorist group Hydra.
The Hoff desperately tries to be the tough, sarcastic anti-hero but it doesn’t work, it never works, not for one second. Instead it feels like his character from Baywatch grew some stubble and lost an eye in a tragic surfing accident. In another odd behind the scenes twist David S Goyer; the man who helped helm Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and the Blade movies penned this flat and unbearable script. This is not his prime work at all.
There are more of these films out there, like Tarzan The Ape Man starring Bo Derek or The Legend Of The Lone Ranger where the actor playing The Lone Ranger had all of his dialogue overdubbed by another actor. I was also particularly fascinated by Archie: Return To Riverdale, a TV movie where Archie goes back to the town he grew up in to try and save Pops Chocklit Shop.
If you didn’t grow up with these movies you may hate them because they aren’t the hi-end blockbusters you expected. For myself and the others like me these films remind us of a time when comic books were still just ours. The movies were awful but that was largely because nobody cared about the characters except those of us who were dedicated to reading them. With Hollywood swooping down on comic books it’s true we will have better film versions but some of what made them uniquely ours has been lost. Perhaps nostalgia has my by the throat but these films, terrible as they were, will always hold a special place in my heart.
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