After being frozen in suspended animation for nearly five decades, Captain America is thawed out and given a new mission: rescue the kidnapped President from the clutches of the villainous Red Skull.

CRITIQUE

Thank God for Blade. Were it not for that 1998 sleeper, it’s likely that movies adapted from Marvel Comics properties would still suck. See, before New Line, Fox, Sony, and Paramount came calling, Marvel was licensing its titles to whoever came along first, and back in the late 1980s it was Roger Corman and Menahem Golan who came along first.

That’s how we ended up with stuff like that 1994 Fantastic Four flick that’s never been officially released (and with good reason), the 1989 version of The Punisher (which starred Dolph Lundgren in the title role and was dumped to home video after sitting on the shelf a couple years [and with good reason]), and this little gem, which was supposed to hit theaters in 1990 (I remember seeing a poster for it) but instead went straight to cable and home video (due in no small part to the collapse of Orion, which was supposed to handle domestic distribution) here in the States (and with good reason).

Released on DVD in hopes of generating some collateral interest from this summer’s big-budget Captain America: The First Avenger, this latest entry in MGM’s Limited Edition Collection (a fancy name for their manufactured-on-demand program) offers itself up to a new generation of fans who will undoubtedly want to pretend it doesn’t exist, which is exactly what those of us who’ve seen it choose to do.

Created in 1940 by writer Joe Simon and artist Jack “King” Kirby, Cap was an intentionally patriotic (but not jingoistic, despite what people who don’t know the difference between the two terms often claim) character, and the cover of his first issue featured him punching the living daylights out of Hitler. Simon and Kirby, both Jewish, were repulsed by the news coming out of Europe and sick of the U.S. twiddling its metaphorical thumbs. They wanted to use their chosen medium as a sort of call to arms, stir some fervor.

If their creation’s sales figures are any indication, they were successful, as Cap’s book became one of the country’s top sellers during the war years (selling roughly a million copies a month, which is a pipe dream for every current comic). Sales crawled to a halt after war’s end, and the character went through a couple unsuccessful revamps (he turned his attention from Nazis to commies) before vanishing from newsstands. He was eventually revived (literally and figuratively) by Kirby and new collaborator Stan Lee at Marvel in the early ‘60s, joining the Avengers after being discovered floating in a block of ice in the North Atlantic.

As with virtually all comics icons, he’s been retooled/remade/remodeled over the years, but his origin has remained largely unchanged: A kid from Manhattan who tried to join the Army but was rejected due to scrawniness, Steve Rogers volunteered to be a test subject in a top-secret military research project. Injected with the Super-Soldier serum and given a dose of one of those amusingly named forms of radiation comic books have been using as go-to devices since superhero titles first came along, Rogers was reborn, turned into the perfect specimen of human ability, gifted with amazing strength, endurance, and a retarded aging process. Outfitted with his famous tri-colored uniform and handed a shield forged from steel and vibranium, Cap and his young partner Bucky headed to Europe and gave all of those National Socialists what they had coming. Forget Superman--you can’t get more American than that.

My first exposure to the character came via a couple of TV movies that aired when I was still in elementary school. Starring the stone-faced Reb Brown (who would go on to star in the camp classic Yor, the Hunter from the Future), these laughably bad, laughably cheap pieces of nonsense did more to tarnish the character’s reputation than even that concurrent Nicholas Hammond TV series did to tarnish Spider-Man’s. That’s probably why I never got into the comic back when I was cuckoo for superhero books. I know I shouldn’t have judged the book by its TV offshoot, but I was young. I only remember buying one Cap comic during my younger years, and that was only because Deathlok was in it.

It wasn’t until Steve Brubaker began his run on the character that I actively read Cap’s adventures, and I only did so then because I was buying them for my nephew and I wanted to make sure at least one of us was reading them. What I read of them I really enjoyed, liking the mix of political intrigue and big action. I stopped reading once I found out how Cap’s “death” was being negated, not because of the fact he was being brought back (that was never in doubt) but rather for the way he was being brought back, which struck me as a lame lift from Slaughterhouse-Five. It may have gone wonky, but were it not for the Brubaker book’s popularity  the Joe Johnston flick wouldn’t exist, and that flick makes it possible to further ignore the existence of this movie (which I promise to actually get to in a minute), which is reason enough to champion it.

Okay, so what about this movie? Well, this movie absolutely blows. This is a case where everything that could have gone wrong, well, you know. The first mistake was optioning the rights to Golan, famous for churning out cheap junk. Golan and producing partner/cousin Yoram Globus were responsible for Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (the budget for which was forty million dollars less than that of the original), so those of you who are fortunate enough not to have seen this movie but unfortunate enough to have seen that one can extrapolate the sort of cheap junk we’re dealing with here.

This movie’s budget was reportedly ten million bucks, which wasn’t terribly large twenty years ago but wasn’t exactly chump change either. Where all of that money went is beyond me, as the movie looks like it cost less than half that. The makeup is cheap (the Red Skull looks more like some poor sap who’s been the victim of a box-cutter attack), the effects are horrifying in their awfulness, and the whole thing takes place in something like four locations, which really isn’t what you want from what’s being sold as a globetrotting action flick.

The movie sticks fairly close to Cap’s comics origin, but after that it starts screwing with the mythology. The Red Skull (played by an ineffectual Scott Paulin) goes from being a megalomaniacal holdover from Nazi rule to being a hapless Italian lad who was taken from his family and mistreated by his kidnappers. And what does he do when the war’s over? He joins the mob. The guy goes from firing rockets at the White House to hijacking cigarette trucks. (Okay, that’s not exactly true but it’s not far off.)

He also has reconstructive surgery, which makes no sense in the context of the story (the pre-op Red Skull, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Richard Moll’s character from The Sword and the Sorcerer [which I’ll bring up again in a minute], looks like he could strike fear into his minions, whereas the post-op Red Skull would likely be pointed at and mocked by young children) but is obviously just a way of decreasing the makeup budget.

Cap (played by an ineffectual Matt Salinger, whose father was a certain reclusive author) spends an awful lot of the movie out of costume (toting his shield in a giant purse), which is another obvious way of keeping the budget down, as replacing off-the-rack clothes would undoubtedly have been cheaper than constantly repairing and/or replacing Cap’s costume (which looks to have been made out of leather that was lined with padding meant to emulate muscle, making it seem impractical as hell).

Golan has a tendency to use the same hack directors over and over again, and in this case he went with Albert Pyun, who’d previously helmed Cyborg for the producer. Pyun has directed something like eight thousand movies over the course of his career, of which I’ve seen a few. I’d say his best work is The Sword and the Sorcerer (told you), which was his feature debut. Thing is, saying that’s Pyun’s best movie is like saying Creed’s best album is (insert name of whichever Creed album sucks the least here), or that being hit by a bus is better than being hit by a dump truck. Pyun makes crap, and I’ll never see his movies as anything other than crap. The guy makes films, but he’s not a filmmaker. Every aspect of his work is clunky and schlocky, the work of someone hired to keep his mouth shut and get footage in the can. He is to filmmaking what the drummer in Selena Gomez’s backing band is to percussion. And thanks to his complete lack of skill, even his intentionally junky movies can’t be enjoyed on the level of junk.

Test screenings for the movie reportedly found audiences clamoring for more action, so the movie’s planned release date was pushed back to allow for some reshoots and reediting. (Stan Lee, who’s credited as one of the executive producers, once infamously attempted to spin this to make it seem as if the test audiences were so happy with the movie they wanted more of it.) I can understand why they were disappointed with the amount of action in the movie, because there’s hardly any. And the little you do get is lame.

Fights consist of random evil henchmen falling over. Gunfights largely consist of close-ups of blazing muzzles. The big chase scene finds Cap and his female companion (an ineffectual Kim Gillingham) speeding down a cobblestone street on a 10-speed, which they for some reason steer over a cliff and into the drink. Whenever Cap throws his shield (which looks like it was created as a mockup for a line of tie-in toys), all you get is a close-up of the shield slipping from his fingers, this often followed by a repeatedly used (and supremely unconvincing) effects shot of the shield flying to the right side of the frame, crossing to the left side of the frame, then flying back toward the camera. (In order to add some variety, the shot is optically flopped in order to make it appear the shield first flies to the left side of the frame.)

The big finale consists of Cap and the Skull standing fifty feet apart, Cap playing an audio recording, the Skull taken aback by what he’s hearing. (The particulars of the scene don’t warrant elaboration. It’s enough to say that no superhero flick should end with the antagonists standing around listening to the damn radio.) These brief spurts of action (more like non-action) are separated by long stretches in which Cap walks around a picket-fence neighborhood while thinking about the life he’s missed, the Skull and his cronies sit around a table and talk about how much their livelihood will be negatively impacted by a piece of pro-environment legislation, and Cap and the daughter of his old flame tour the Italian countryside. Good grief. Imagine if audiences whose appetite for superhero flicks had been stimulated by Tim Burton’s Batman had actually been exposed to this. The resulting scorn and ridicule likely would’ve killed the genre.

I’m going to use one scene from the movie to illustrate everything that’s wrong here. The Skull takes a captured Cap and straps him to a rocket. The Skull tells Cap the rocket is aimed at the White House. The rocket is launched and speeds toward its target. The young boy who will later grow up to be the President and get kidnapped by the Skull is visiting the District of Columbia (twice identified with onscreen text as Washington, D.C., this for anyone who can see a shot of the White House and think the setting is Oahu) with his family. He sneaks out his room in the middle of the night and heads down to the White House, hoping to snap a few pictures. Just as he’s lined up a shot he hears something in the sky. He trains his camera on the night sky and sees the rocket zooming down at him, Cap still tied to it. As the rocket approaches the little tyke, Cap kicks his heels against the rocket’s fins, thereby throwing it off course, narrowly missing both the boy and the White House. The scene then cuts to the snowy wastes of Alaska, where the rocker crashes and Cap is immediately frozen. Got all that? Good.

Now here’s what I’d like to know: Why in pluperfect hell does Cap wait until he’s three seconds away from blowing the White House (or as it’s presented here, a terminally fake rear-projection version of the White House) to smithereens to attempt to alter the course of the rocket? Are you telling me he spent his entire time over the Atlantic just admiring the view? How does crashing into a snowy landscape in Alaska result in an instantaneous cryogenic freeze but a trip into the upper reaches of the atmosphere not even result in an icicle on Cap’s nose? Why didn’t the absence of oxygen in the upper reaches of the atmosphere affect Cap in any way? Why doesn’t the rocket explode when it crashes? Wouldn’t the rocket build up heat during its descent? (Maybe that explains the lack of icicles.)

If so, wouldn’t this heat be enough to keep Cap toasty for a while following the crash? How is it simultaneously night in Germany and D.C. and daytime in Alaska? Why didn’t the Skull fire a second missile, one not carrying a guy capable of contravening fourteen laws of physics with his right foot? Was he working for one of the poorly funded divisions of the Nazi war machine and could afford to build only the one doomsday weapon? That’s the sort of logic that’s used throughout the entire movie. Sounds like fun, Huh?

Because it features Melinda Dillon (who plays Cap’s mom) and Darren McGavin (who plays one of the President’s advisors), the movie becomes a weird sort of A Christmas Story reunion. And because it features Ronny Cox (playing the President) and Ned Beatty (playing a journalist who helps the newly defrosted Cap), the movie becomes a sort of Deliverance reunion. It also means the movie features a bunch of people who should have known better. Truth be told, everyone involved should have known better, even Golan and Pyun. Someone should have performed a mercy killing early on, sparing the world from this debacle. If this isn’t the worst comic-book movie ever made, I don’t want to see the one that is.

THE VIDEO

The movie opens with a warning that the transfer was sourced from the best available elements, and we all know what that means. This disc’s 1.33:1 transfer (yes, you read that right--this thing’s full frame) looks like it was sourced from an old VHS tape. I recently caught some of the movie on a standard-def basic-cable channel, and I don’t think the image looks any better than that broadcast version did. It’s noisy, faded, hazy, washed-out, murky, and indistinct.

Colors look awful, blacks are a soupy grey, and whites are blown-out. There’s no sense of depth, nothing approaching clarity, and whatever detail may have existed in the original photography is nowhere to be found. I don’t think the folks at MGM or those handling the encoding process are really to blame, as there’s no doubt in my mind that whoever’s been holding the elements all these years put no care whatsoever into their storage.

Note: Like all of MGM’s MOD releases, this movie has been encoded onto a single-layer DVD-R.

THE AUDIO

The movie’s original stereo mix hasn’t been reworked in any way; it’s presented here as a Dolby Digital 2.0 track. On the plus side, there’s an okay spread across the stereo channels. On the negative side, the audio sounds like it was recorded and mixed at the bottom of a well. Dialogue is hollow, the moldy effects sound like they were lifted from a television broadcast of some old B movie, and the low end has no heft whatsoever.

THE EXTRAS

The sole extra is the movie’s theatrical trailer.

FINAL THOUGHTS