| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CAPTAIN AMERICA
Rating: 
USA. 1990.
Director – Albert Pyun, Screenplay – Stephen Tolkin, Story – Stephen Tolkin & Lawrence J. Block, Based on the Comic Book Created by Jack Kirby & Joe Simon, Producer – Menahem Golan, Photography – Philip Alan Waters, Music – Barry Goldberg, Music Supervisors – Phil Broucek & Eyyen J. Klean, Visual Effects – Fantasy II Film Effects (Supervisor – Gene Warren Jr), Makeup Effects – Greg Cannom, Production Design – Doug Leonard. Production Company – 21st Century Film Corp/Marvel Entertainment Group Inc.
Cast:
Matt Salinger (Captain America/Steve Rogers), Scott Paulin (The Red Skull), Kim Gillingham (Sharon Cooperman/Bernice Stewart Cooperman), Ronny Cox (President Tom Kimball), Francesca Neri (Valentina de Santis), Ned Beatty (Sam Kolawetz), Carla Cassula (Dr Maria Vaselli), Darren McGavin (General Fleming), Michael Nouri (Lieutenant Colonel Lewis)
Plot: In 1941 polio victim Steve Rogers takes part in a US Army experiment, undergoing a series of injections that turn him into a brawny super-athlete, the first of a planned army of super-beings. Given the codename Captain America and outfitted with a red, white and blue fireproof costume and a bullet-proof shield , he is sent into action against The Red Skull, the product of a failed Italian Fascist attempt to create a similar super-being that has failed leaving him with a hard red epidermis. But instead Steve is defeated by The Red Skull and tied to a rocket launched at Washington. He manages to deflect its course but it crashes in Alaska where Steve is frozen alive. He is thawed out present-day and finds himself in a bewildering where The Red Skull is now the head of a powerful crime organization.
Created by Jack Kirby in 1941, the character of Captain America became the most popular superhero in the Marvel Comics lineup during the US War years. Kirby and Joe Simon designed the character to embody Wartime patriotism, thus Captain America had a uniform modeled on the stars-and-stripes flag and fought German and Japanese supervillains. The Captain America comic-book ended in 1949 but then the character was successfully revived by Marvel in the 1960s, thawed out from suspended animation in the present day, where he maintains a strong position even today. But the character of Captain America was always the product of wartime US patriotism and various attempts to film it have invariably seemed anachronistic. The character was played by Dick Purcell in a serial Captain America (1944) where the usual low serial production values stood in the way of an effective translation, and incarnated by Reb Brown in two laughably unconvincing tv movies Captain America (1979) and Captain America II (1979).
This cinematic revival of Captain America came from low-budget sf/action director Albert Pyun. (See below for Albert Pyun’s other genre films) and Israeli producer Menahem Golan, one half of the Golan-Globus production company that made a number of Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson action films during the 1980s. Captain America was made in an attempt to ride in on the post-Batman (1989) comic book superhero revival. [It is kind of depressing to think that Menahem Golan once held the rights to Marvel’s Spiderman in his hand. This was at one point announced as a project with Albert Pyun directing and could have ended up as another laughably tatty production like this. It should also be noted that Golan-Globus also picked up the rights to Superman and promptly put the Christopher Reeve film series in its grave with the shabby Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)].
Alas in Albert Pyun’s hands the character of Captain America fails by quite hilarious lengths to overcome its own anachronism. During the climatic confrontation the villain taunts America: “You are a clownish symbol that no-one cares about,” and nothing seems more apt an epitaph for the entire film. The image of Matt Salinger tromping around in his three-colour stars-and-striper suit is frequently laughable – the film fails to understand that the 1990s comic-book adaptions only succeeded by creating a world in which characters in the costumes could believably live. There are few comic-book films that have a greater credibility gap to get over than this film. And it succeeds in none of the cases – take the character’s origin where Steve Rogers is sent into combat without the slightest bit of military training and where the ludicrous suit is shrugged off with a laugh as being the designer’s peculiar taste in colours, and Rogers inexplicably develops the ability to throw his shield with remarkable accuracy and how his becoming a muscular hero, the first of a race of super-athletes, also inexplicably makes him become a literal athlete, capable of suddenly conducting remarkable mid-air acrobatics after having been a crippled polio victim all his life.
The action sequences are decidedly unheroic – in one really pathetic scene Pyun has Captain America flee pursuers on a bicycle. The most successful parts of the film are those showing America’s bewilderment at the modern day – where the images of a camera labeled ‘Made in Japan’ and a German-made car effectively capture the confusion of a man from WWII waking up after forty years. The scenes The scenes with Rogers confronting his now aged sweetheart are much more cliched.
Matt Salinger makes for a rather blank and dopey-looking hero. Although Kim Gillingham’s playing, especially as the brainless modern day heroine, is if anything worse. Scott Paulin has some fun as the Red Skull, playing with a hammy cruelty and tortured accent that seems like a bad impersonation of a Mafia thug, until one realizes about halfway through is actually Paulin conducting a perfect mimicking of Bela Lugosi.
Albert Pyun’s other films are:– The Sword and the Sorceror (1982), Radioactive Dreams (1986), Vicious Lips/Pleasure Planet (1987), Alien from L.A. (1988), the uncredited Journey to the Center of the Earth (1988), Cyborg (1989), Deceit (1989), Dollman (1990), Brain Smasher: A Love Story (1993), Knights (1993), Nemesis (1993), Arcade (1994), Heatseeker (1994), Hong Kong 1997 (1994), Nemesis 2: Nebula (1995), Nemesis 3: Timelapse (1995), Nemesis 4: Death Angel (1995), Omega Doom (1995), Adrenalin: Fear the Rush (1996), Postmortem (1997), Ticker (2001), Infection (2005), Cool Air (2006), Bulletface (2007) and Left for Dead (2007).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
|