DVD Reviews

Captain America (1992) – DVD Review

By Jeff Swindoll Sep 8, 2011, 15:15 GMT

During World War II, a brave American soldier (Salinger) volunteers to undergo experiments to become a new super-soldier, codenamed “Captain America.” Infiltrating Germany to sabotage Nazi rockets pointed at the U.S., Captain America faces off with Nazi superhuman warrior Red Skull (Scott Paulin, The Right Stuff) who defeats the hero, throwing him into suspended animation. Frozen for 50 years, Captain America is found and revived only to find that Red ...more

Making a movie on the exploits of Marvel comics’ Captain America sounded like a good idea at the time.  However, the resulting film was so bad that it was shuffled directly to video in Caps’ home country.  It’s certainly not a movie that you want to wrap in Old Glory, more wrap in cement, sink, and forget. 

During WWII, Dr. Vaselli (Carla Cassola) is working on a formula to make super soldiers.  She had been working on the same program with the fascists years before, but objected to their methods for obtaining a test subject – murdering a young boy’s family and kidnapping him.  She escaped from them and has been working with the Americans. 

Steve Rodgers (Matt Salinger) has volunteered to be her subject.  The transformation is a successful one, but Vaselli is killed and her formula is lost.  Her murderer was a henchman of the Red Skull (Scott Paulin), the deformed result of Vaselli’s previous experiment, who is working with the Nazis.  Rodgers is codenamed Captain America and sent to dispatch the Red Skull before he can fire a missile at the White House. 

His mission is unsuccessful and the Skull ties him to the very missile he was tasked to stop.  The bound Rodgers is able to throw the missile off course, but not before a young boy takes a picture of the missile, and it crashes in Alaska.  Cut forward to modern day 1990, and the Captain is thawed out.

He finds that the Red Skull, though looking like a plastic surgery practice dummy and no longer red, is still causing chaos and is about to assassinate the President (Ronny Cox) who happens to be the young lad who took his picture all those years ago. 

Captain American had been a comic staple for nearly 50 years so a movie to coincide with that momentous anniversary may have been a good idea.  It also helped that Batman stormed into theaters the year before in 1989.  The problem was that it was done on the cheap by a company called 21st Century and it cast a block of wood as the titular Captain. 

The movie starts off interestingly enough in WWII but quickly becomes lame when we switch to modern times.  Supposedly the movie tested badly and more stunts were filmed – they didn’t help.  It was deemed to terrible that it was only released overseas avoiding Cap’s home country.  It wouldn’t get released in the United States until 1992, some two years after being completed. 

Maybe it was the fact that the Nazi Red Skull kicks Cap’s ass every time they go up against one another.  In the final tally, Cap only wins because ole’ Red gets distracted.  That and the Red Skull quickly turns from a groovy, bloody “red” head to a thug that went into a plastic surgeon and said make me look like Jack Palance after he was in a horrible car wreck.. 

MGM releases the title on their burn-on-demand service to cash in on the recent remake.  I pity the fool that picks this one up and thinks that it is the one that recently ran though theaters.  They’ll think they smoked some bad stuff.  It is awful enough that it may qualify for “so bad that it’s funny” status. 

Captain America is presented in fullscreen, looking very murky and washed out.  The only special feature is a trailer for the atrocity.  Director Albert Pyun keeps threatening to unleash a director’s cut, but this version doesn’t appear to be anything more than a port over of the VHS. 

A travesty full of lame dialogue and situations and pretty much screwed up a good film idea.  However, if you’re a lover of bad cinema then you may be delighted.  I can’t say that I was. 

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