Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979)

A portrait in the park? $10 The look on your face when Captain America rescues your purse? Priceless.
A portrait in the park? $10 The look on your face when Captain America rescues your purse? Priceless.

So Captain America II (no subtitle in the opening credits) opens with a standard TV credit sequence: a slide show of the main cast, punctuated by a shot from later of Cap popping a wheelie on his rocket bike. Once the four leads are given their due the rest of the credits play out atop…aww crap! It’s the same driving footage that opened the first film! NoooOOOOOOO! Already I’m having flashbacks! Somebody make it stop!

Once the deja vu subsides we catch up to Steve Rogers (still Reb Brown) drawing portraits in an L.A. park as black men in short shorts roller skate through the background carrying ghetto blasters. Steve’s current client is an old woman, Mrs. Shaw (Susan French) who tells him about how the local muggers are making trouble for the local pensioners every time they cash their checks…because this is still the 70s, when (for all their Evil) corporations still paid pensioners on an actually-regular basis. Steve tells her to go cash her check and, when the thugs descend, Captain America is there to lay a re-introductory action sequence down on their candied asses. (So much for that secret identity, huh?) Continue reading Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979)

Godzilla the Series: An Exercise in Over-Analysis – Part II

The obligatory King Kong shot.
The obligatory King Kong shot.

Episode 3 – Talkin’ Trash

With a garbage strike seizing New York City in the wake of (that first) Godzilla’s rampage, a pair of eggheads at the Manhattan Institute of Advanced Technology (MIAT?) struggle to find a “scientific solution” to this problem.

The subordinate one, Felix (Faust?) (played by Grant Shaud—who will, to me, forever be Murphy Brown’s boss, Miles Silverberg) has an answer in his still-to-be-perfected “nanotech drivers”: a “colony of microbes” that consume petroleum-based products and manufacture copies of themselves from the result. Visible to the human eye as a red and orange, candy cane-striped sludge, the drivers are still untested, unstable…and more than a little ravenous. Nevertheless, Felix (Faust)’s as-yet-unnamed boss insists on a field test for New York’s (now unnamed) Mayor tomorrow afternoon. What could possibly go wrong…right? Continue reading Godzilla the Series: An Exercise in Over-Analysis – Part II

Batman (1989)

So it’s 1989 and I’m six years old. For my birthday I’m allowed the fifty-mile car ride down to the nearest theater to see one film. Like every other kid in 1989, I chose Batman and one of the results of that choice is the website you see today.

It’s impossible to underestimate the historical importance of this film. We have to remember that, before 1989, the only superhero to achieve real success in the only true mass medium was Superman. And before 1989, Superman was a fluke: a one in a million shot, barely duplicated thanks to the decision to split the first movie into two. A creation of the go-go Regan years that was already on its last legs in 1987, when Christopher Reeve’s ego and Cannon films horrible habit of embezzlement brought Superman IV: The Quest for Peace down upon us all.

Before this film, Batman’s only real cultural cache came from Adam West’s notorious TV show, which remained popular enough to justify continuous re-runs on at least one channel per year since is original cancellation. Burton changed all that, and in one film he rescued the Golden Age of American superhero movies from history’s dustbin. Shame about the film, eh? Continue reading Batman (1989)