For the last decade or so, Marvel Comics has been cornering the market on superhero movies. But you younger readers might be surprised to learn that before they started showing up in movie theaters, live-action adaptations of Marvel's characters were all over television instead. After the successes that DC Comics had with TV shows based on Batman and Wonder Woman in the '60s and early '70s, Marvel tried duplicating it with their own superheroes.
To accomplish this, Marvel teamed up with CBS — the network that aired the second and third seasons of Wonder Woman — to create a batch of TV shows and made-for-TV movies. Their cartoons during the '60s were popular, so why wouldn't their '70s live-action efforts be? Alas, they didn't turn out so well. The only one that had any sort of lasting impact was the Incredible Hulk TV show that starred Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. And the movies, which I'm guessing were supposed to be backdoor pilots, just weren't good.
The most notable of these made-for-TV movies were the two (yes, two) based on Captain America, the patriotic super-soldier created by comic book icons Joe Simon and Jack Kirby shortly after the start of World War II. Captain America has always been one of Marvel's most enduring characters, so he naturally wouldn't be left out of something like this. And that's too bad, because these two movies are just plain awful. But let's begin at the beginning and start with the first one, which aired on CBS on January 19, 1979. And take it from me: if you haven't seen it, you aren't missing much.
Our story focuses on Steve Rogers (Reb Brown), an ex-Marine fresh out of the service who's perfectly content to just drive around America and make a meager living as an illustrator. He's approached one day by Dr. Simon Mills (Len Birman), a scientist who has spent decades working on an experimental serum for the government. Named the Full Latent Ability Gain, shortened to just FLAG, the serum has the ability to greatly enhance a recipient's physical abilities. The one catch, though, is that none of the lab rats it's been tested on have survived longer than two weeks.
Dr. Mills and his assistant, the lovely Dr. Wendy Day (Heather Menzies), have reached out to Steve in the hopes that he can help them. His dearly departed father had aided in FLAG's development, even going as far as to test it on himself. The experiment was a success, and he secretly used the abilities FLAG granted him to become a crimefighter before his untimely demise. Since Steve and his father have a similar genetic makeup, Dr. Mills theorizes that Steve would make a perfect candidate for FLAG and could become the super-soldier that his father could have been.
Steve's answer: "No." I'm not sure why; I'm not sure even Steve knows why. But the guy turns it down. It doesn't matter, though, because Steve soon finds himself critically injured in a car accident shortly after leaving Dr. Mills's laboratory. The accident has left him on the verge of death, and in order to save his life, Dr. Mills gives him the serum anyway. This turn of events doesn't sit too well with Steve once he regains consciousness. He pretty much tells Dr. Mills to go screw himself, and that he plans on living his life like nothing ever happened.
What he doesn't know is that things don't always work out as planned. It turns out Steve's car accident had been orchestrated by Lou Brackett (Steve Forrest), an oil tycoon who wants to branch out into domestic terrorism. A recently murdered friend of Steve's had been developing a neutron bomb, the plans for which Brackett wanted for himself. He'd had Steve's friend murdered to acquire those plans, and tried killing Steve under the assumption he knew something about it.
Brackett eventually does assemble his own neutron bomb, and with it plans to nuke Phoenix and steal 1.4 billion dollars worth of bullion from the city's gold depository. And that just isn't cool at all. Unwilling to stand by and let so many innocent people die senselessly, Steve transforms himself into the heroic "Captain America" and vows to save the day.
I just don't know where to begin. This movie is just so frustratingly awful that any words I could use to describe it escape me. I can forgive a bad movie as long as it's cheesy and at least somewhat entertaining in its ineptitude. But where Captain America fails as a bad movie is that it's a tremendous bore. Don't be fooled by the fact that my plot synopsis is five paragraphs long; there's nothing going on in this movie. Nothing happens during this whole stupid thing. I loathe bad movies like that too, because it's much more fun (and frankly, a lot easier) to mock crappy movies that have an aura of silliness to them. But movies like this, ones that are not only bad but boring to boot, are nothing less than painful to write.
If this was really supposed to be a backdoor pilot for a Captain America TV show as I suspect, then it's a pretty miserable attempt at such. I was more filled with contempt for its existence rather than a desire to see the further televised adventures of Steve Rogers. This piece of crap is practically a chore to get through. And what makes it that way is a combination of a number of things. One is the unbelievably mediocre direction from Rod Holcomb, a veteran TV director who's helmed episodes of a ton of classic shows over the course of his three and a half decades in the business. Captain America was one of his earliest forays into directing, and frankly, he does a piss-poor job.
I can understand that the movie looks like a low-budget TV show, since it pretty much is. But Holcomb doesn't even make an attempt to inject any sort of life or excitement into the movie. He doesn't draw good performances from his actors, the cinematography is weak, and the action scenes are just plain boring. And then there was the stupid decision to not show Captain America in his full costume until 71 minutes into the movie! If you watched it on television without the commercials edited out, it's 94 minutes! The movie had the balls to take that long to give us Captain America in his costume. That's just not cool. And call me crazy, but I get the idea that Holcomb simply did not care.
But then why should he care when the writer couldn't be bothered to? The script was penned by Don Ingalls, himself a veteran within the TV industry. I just can't believe how bad the writing is. The worst part of it all is just how badly Ingalls screwed up the title character. In the comics, Steve Rogers was a frail yet strong-willed young man who wanted do nothing more than serve his country in World War II. A military science experiment turned him into a super-soldier, advanced to the peak of natural human ability and made into the living embodiment of everything good about the United States and humanity in general. He's one of the most respected and beloved superheroes in the Marvel Universe. But in this sweaty turd of a movie, Steve Rogers is some burly dude who just wants to drive around the country and not do much of anything. He's shot up with super-steroids against his will and does nothing but whine about it until essentially being talked into becoming a superhero.
I don't know how it was in the '70s, but this utter lack of respect in regards to the source material is disappointing and insulting. Ingalls practically stripped away every bit of dignity the Captain America character had and turned him into a lunkhead wearing cheap spandex tights and a motorcycle helmet. I know comic books were viewed differently then than they are now, but Cap is a character who could have kicked ass on television if he were treated right. Ingalls doesn't swerve into full-blown camp parody like William Dozier did with the Batman TV show, but his apparent lack of respect for the comic book character is sad.
Beyond his crappy take on Steve Rogers, Ingalls doesn't write anything worth talking about. The plot is so threadbare that it barely exists at all, a 30-minute story stretched out to three times that with no improvements made to fill the added running time. You know, I'd like to go back in time and ask Ingalls just what in the blue blazing hell he was thinking when he wrote this thing. I'm sure he was just hoping to cash a nice CBS paycheck for writing some dumb little comic book movie, but is it so hard to friggin' try to write something that doesn't suck?
Even the music totally sucks. Composed by Mike Post and Pete Carpenter, a pair of musicians who contributed to some of the most famous television shows of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, the music quite simply does not fit at all. Their music here is remarkably bland and quite unbecoming of a superhero movie, which I guess is a pretty good summary of the whole movie in general. It's way too mellow and doesn't suit any scene in the movie at all.
And naturally, the acting blows too. Like you'd expect any different. In the title role is Reb Brown, star of the tremendously awful Space Mutiny. Captain America is actually a departure from Brown's usual performances. Instead of yelling and screaming and acting like a total spaz while blowing things up like he does in most of his movies, Brown is laid back and casual. It's like he took a whole bunch of downers during production. Nobody will ever accuse Brown of being a good actor. But his cheesy overacting in bad foreign action movies is a heck of a lot more entertaining than this.
The rest of the cast also fails to make any sort of positive impression. Lens Birman seems like he wanted to put forth an earnest performance, but he just struck me as being stiff. Heather Menzies is forgettable, and Steve Forrest simply doesn't make for a very believable villain. I know Captain America doesn't have a very well-known rogues' gallery outside of the Red Skull, but couldn't they come up with something other than an oil tycoon holding a gold depository hostage with a bomb? That's worse than the worst Bond villain. The fact that this is such a weak character doesn't help Forrest's performance any, though he isn't all that great regardless of the writing.
I don't know what else there is for me to say about this stupid movie. There are only so many nasty things you can say about a bad movie before you get tired of it, and Captain America is awfully close to wearing out its welcome. It's a failure as a superhero movie; it's a failure as a pilot for a TV show; and it's a failure, period. It's actually worse than that Captain America movie from 1990, and that's saying something. So this movie gets one star and a recommendation to avoid at all costs. But do you want to know the really sad part? It gets worse. It gets much, much worse. Stay tuned.
Final Rating: *
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