CAPTAIN AMERICA 1990
Not an easy task to make a low budget Captain America flick especially when the first twenty minutes are a period piece. But Albert Pyun manages to deliver something that manages to give some sort of Captain America like impression. It's all fairly odd but strangely watchable. Pyun has a decent supporting cast: Ronny Cox, Ned Fuckin' Beatty and Darren McGavin, who eats it up as a traitorous Southern general. He reminds me of the "rich Texan" from "The Simpsons". I have no idea why Matt Salinger was cast as polio victim and later super soldier Captain America. The Red Skull turns out to be an Italian piano protege kid who is experimented on by the Nazis in an attempt to make super soldiers. Their first attempt is a rat, who ends up some sort of super Red Skull stop motion super rat. Heil Hitler! The Red Skull himself looks pretty cool, his face resembles red, wet leather and he has an alternate universe Bela Lugosi accent. He manges to survive the war and becomes some sort of super evil cabal leader that's responsible for killing JFK, RFK, MLK, well all the K's really. He has a Eurotrash daughter that flies around in a jet doing evil with her bored looking Eurotrash friends. Ronny Cox is the President who saw Captain America fly by him, strapped to a V-2 rocket when he was a boy. Cap gets frozen in Alaska, eventually to wake up and start walking to America. There's a montage of events and dates scroll by on screen while something that sounds oddly like knock off Duran Duran plays. Later there's a sad song about memories when Cap goes to see his old girlfriend who now wears old age make up. President Cox gives a speech about the environment and the need to stop using plastic bottles which was actually useful.
The few various scenes of Cap fighting are okay, at least they make an attempt. They're way better than say the 1970's tv movie Captain America. Pyun really does manage to get all he can outta what he is provided. The president gets kidnapped but it doesn't really seem to matter to anyone, it's almost as if he was Kevin, the night manager at Wendy's. There no huge secret service detail, he mainly seems to have only Ned Beatty, a goofy reporter, as a confidant. In the present the Red Skull looks really odd, he's fleshy and has slicked back Eurotrash hair. It reminded of the weird make up they did for that TV movie about the Leno-Letterman feud. There's also something Tarantino-y about his chin. His big finale comes on top of a castle as he sits at a piano, though I don't know why. Anyway, it's just weird and I suspect will vanish completely by the time the new Captain America movies comes in 2010. Technically, this is a tape from the garage as it's not on dvd. There's a guy who has one on Amazon for 100 bucks. At the end of the credits, there is a plea to support THe Environment Act of 1990.