Dr. Strange (1978)

At the tail end of the '70s, Marvel Comics teamed up with CBS to translate some of their superheroes from the printed page to the world of television. But while the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno-led The Incredible Hulk proved to be a big hit and became a memorable part of that era's pop culture, other efforts weren't so fruitful. A Spider-Man TV show lasted only a handful of episodes that aired sporadically between 1977 and 1979, while there were two incredibly hokey Captain America movies that ultimately never led to a series.

And then there's the case of Dr. Strange. Despite the success of the title character's comic books, he's so unlike Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Captain America that I'm actually surprised that they decided to give him a shot at TV stardom. I'm guessing that it wasn't much of a success, considering that it never made it past a pilot episode that aired on CBS on September 6, 1978. But there's nothing wrong with trying, is there? So as the Sorcerer Supreme makes his big-budget theatrical debut today as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I figured I might as well look back nearly forty years and see if Doctor Strange could have had as much success on the small screen as I'm sure he will on the big screen.

Beyond our world lies a realm of such mystic wonder that only a select few can truly comprehend it. This realm is host to a constant war between good and evil with our plane of existence hanging in the balance. Defending us in this battle is Thomas Lindmer (John Mills), a powerful wizard who holds the title of "Sorcerer Supreme." With him out of the way, the vile beasts opposing him would be able to invade and conquer Earth.

But the battle is taking its toll on a weakening Lindmer, who must soon pass the Sorcerer Supreme mantle to a successor before all is lost. Realizing that this will be their best time to strike, evil sorceress Morgan Le Fay (Jessica Walter) is sent by her dark masters to eliminate their foe before his successor can be found.

To do this, she arrives in New York City and possesses a young woman named Clea Lake (Eddie Benton), who she uses to push Lindmer off a bridge. He survives unharmed, but the possession leaves Clea so mentally scarred that she is taken to the nearest hospital's psychiatric ward and left in the care of brilliant psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten). Lindmer and his assistant Wong (Clyde Kusatsu) follow her to Dr. Strange, discovering that the fates have aligned to make him the next Sorcerer Supreme.

Despite his initial skepticism, Strange becomes intrigued by what Lindmer is trying to sell him and follows him down the rabbit hole into a world of magic and mysticism. And it's a good thing too, because if Le Fay is to be defeated and the world saved, Strange will have to fully tap into his potential and embrace his new role as the Sorcerer Supreme.

Thanks to a combination of low ratings and poor reviews at the time, CBS chose not to pick up Dr. Strange as a series. And honestly, I can see why. While this pilot really picks up during the second half, the first act is so lifeless and dull that by the time something interested happened, I'd begun to mentally check out by that point. It wasn't until the last thirty minutes of the movie that it really re-captured my attention. But it isn't bad, either; it actually shows some promise. The cast is good, and the effects aren't bad for a made-for-TV movie produced at the tail end of the '70s. And had it gone to series, I could've seen it finding something of a cult following similar to Kolchak: The Night Stalker. But it's not perfect, so let's get into why.

This pilot was written and directed by Philip DeGuere, who was no stranger to television. At the time he made Dr. Strange, he'd most notably written episodes of Baretta and The Bionic Woman among others, and would go on to create the long-running show Simon & Simon just a few years after this. But I can't say I was particularly enthusiastic about DeGuere's work here. As far as his script goes, there's not a lot here to justify its 90-minute length. A lot of scenes feel like padding or don't really add much to the story otherwise, but my guess is that these scenes were here to add threats that would be followed if the pilot got picked up as a series or in any potential sequel movies. But all it does here is make the movie feel like it had 45 minutes of story stretched out to an hour and a half.

The story also suffers from having a tremendously weak villain. The depiction of Morgan Le Fay here is a shallow, one-dimensional character who does practically nothing except for giving people the stink-eye for the majority of the movie. The ending implies a change for the charactor's methods, but considering that there was never any follow-up, we're just stick with this boring, uninteresting villain.

DeGuere's direction is a bit better than his writing, though I wasn't really too impressed with it either. I know I should probably judge a 1970s TV production differently than a theatrically released movie, but there's isn't a lot worth talking about here. At least not until the movie is almost over, anyway. Thanks to all the meandering around that it does in the first half, the movie is almost a chore to watch for quite a bit of time. DeGuere does spice things up in the second half by picking up the pace and giving us some action and the occasional trippy visual, but it's almost too little, too late. By the time things really get interesting, it's almost over.

At least the cast, for the most part, is what really elevates the movie. The exception is Jessica Walter, who you'll most likely recognize from her roles on Arrested Development and Archer, isn't really given much to work with here. She's not awful, but Walter is wasted playing a flat character with nothing really going for it.

I could very nearly say the same for Eddie Benton, who would be credited as "Anne-Marie Martin" for much of her later career (which includes 251 episodes of Days of Our Lives during the first half of the '80s, as well as co-writing the script for Twister). Benton doesn't have a lot demanded of her here, and I get the feeling that the character would have developed more over the course of a series. But Benton does what she can with the role, and puts forth a watchable performance at the very least.

On the other hand, I really liked John Mills, whose earnestness in the role made him feel very much akin to Alec Guinness' performance as Obi-Wan Kenobi. He contributes possibly the best performance in the whole thing, with Peter Hooten coming in a close second. I thought Hooten started off a bit on the dull side at first, but really began to win me over as the movie progressed. He's got a unique charm to him that really makes me wish for some kind of follow-up to the movie, be it a series or a sequel, because I'd enjoy seeing Hooten play the character as the fully fleshed-out Sorcerer Supreme that we saw in the closing moments here.

If this review feels like it's all over the place, I'll take part of the blame for that. It's not often that I watch or write about failed television pilots from the '70s. But to be fair, the movie is kinda all over the place itself. Its imperfections are boldly on display for anyone and everyone to see. Could Dr. Strange have worked as a TV series? Sure, I believe so. I saw some real potential deep down here. And I did leave wanting to see where they could have gone next creatively. But when it's said and done, Dr. Strange is just sorta... okay, I guess. But at least that's better than bad, right?

Final Rating: **

Carrie (2002)

Unless you've somehow completely missed the trailers, commercials on TV, posters and banners in your local theaters, and the rest of its advertising campaign, you've probably noticed that a remake of the classic 1976 horror movie Carrie is being released today. While Brian De Palma's original cinematic adaptation of Stephen King's novel is a great flick that still holds up very well nearly forty years after its initial release, I guess it was time for Hollywood to tell the story again.

But what you're probably unaware of is that this is actually the second time that Carrie has been remade. All is forgiven if you haven't heard of that other one, however. It actually almost immediately fell into obscurity, but that's probably because it was never released theatrically to begin with.

No, the earlier remake of Carrie was instead a made-for-TV movie. Originally broadcast on NBC on November 4, 2002, the movie was intended to be a backdoor pilot for a potential Carrie television show that would've been in the same vein as The Dead Zone. But thanks to poor ratings, the proposed series was scrapped. And while I wonder how the show would have went, I'm glad it didn't get picked up, because this pilot is about as mediocre as you can get.

It's hard not to feel sorry for poor Carrie White (Angela Bettis). The daughter of an abusive religious fanatic (Patricia Clarkson), Carrie's social awkwardness makes her a target for merciless teasing from her classmates. But just when Carrie thinks life can't get much worse than it already is, she gets her first period while showering after gym class. Thanks to her strict, sheltered upbringing, Carrie has no idea what's happening and believes she's bleeding to death.

Her classmates take great humor from Carrie's situation, happily mocking and laughing at her. The scene is only broken up when Miss Desjardin (Rena Sofer), the gym teacher, intervenes. That doesn't stop the bullying, though, as that same day Carrie finds her locker vandalized and stuffed full of tampons. Feeling guilty for her part in what happened, Sue Snell (Kandyse McClure) tries to make amends with Carrie by convincing her boyfriend Tommy (Robias Mehler) to show Carrie a good time by taking her to the prom.

But they are unaware of the plans of Chris Hargensen (Emilie De Ravin), whose extreme lack of remorse for having teased Carrie gets her banned from the prom by Miss Desjardin. Instead of trying to apologize to Carrie, Chris instead wants revenge for being punished. She rigs the ballot to get Carrie elected prom queen, and arranges for a bucket of pig blood to be dumped over her head during the coronation. No one could have predicted, though, that this prank would fully trigger Carrie's burgeoning telekinetic powers, an ability that sparks a violent, bloody rampage.

The tragic story of Carrie White is a timeless one. The only parts of the original movie that have aged badly are the fashion and hairstyles. But updating it for modern audiences, however, is not something I have a problem with. When this movie was first broadcast, it came just a few years after a batch of high-profile school shootings throughout the United States. So even after the September 11th terrorist attacks and George W. Bush's "war on terror" took over the headlines of the time, a movie about a teenage misfit's prom night rampage was still somewhat timely. It's too bad, though, that this remake is a disappointment through and through. It ends up proving that old saying, "Don't fix what isn't broken."

At the helm is David Carson, a veteran television director primarily known for his work with the Star Trek franchise. And for some odd reason, Carson films nearly the entire movie with the camera tilted at an odd angle. It's all very weird and disorienting, never once doing anything to benefit the movie. I just kept thinking to myself that I'd be much happier if the camera had actually sat naturally for a change. It also doesn't help that despite this ostensibly being a horror movie, there's nothing scary about it. The climactic prom scene and the chaos that follows could have been a tense, unnerving experience, but it's instead brought down by unconvincing CGI, a hilariously goofy soundtrack, and no tension whatsoever.

The biggest problem with the movie, though, is that it's too long and bloated, running three hours if you're watching it on television with commercials. Or if you're like me and watching it on DVD without commercials, it clocks in at roughly two hours and fifteen minutes, which is a small bit of mercy. Either way, that still feels too long. There's an hour left in the movie when Carrie and Tommy arrive at the prom, for crying out loud. Carson must have been under contract to deliver the movie to NBC at a certain length, because he honestly could have stood to chop out at least a half-hour of the extraneous fluff that populates the movie. He honestly could have brought this thing in at an hour and a half without commercials, and it would have been a far sleeker, less boring movie because of it.

But it doesn't help that he's working with a disappointingly dull script written by Bryan Fuller. I say that because the largest part of the script is padding, padding, and more padding. It causes the movie to move at a snail's pace, along an uneven path that takes us nowhere for much of the movie. While a lot of the fluff and padding does shed some light on the other characters and the world that surrounds Carrie, it ultimately serves to take away from Carrie herself. Granted, some time should be given to Sue, Chris, and Mrs. White, but Carrie is the movie's central character and it occasionally feels like Fuller loses focus of that.

Fuller does, however, take a different approach than expected by keeping the narrative somewhat closer to King's novel. While the book is constructed in part from eyewitness statements, police reports, and letter excerpts, the movie is told mostly in flashback, with Sue Snell and various others telling their sides of the story to the curious Detective Mulchaey (played here by David Keith). He also throws in some scenes left out of the original movie, like a scene where a young Carrie causes a meteor shower while being abused by her mother. It's a unique way to approach it, but all it really did was just remind me of Blair Witch 2. And if there's one thing I don't want a movie to do, it's remind me of Blair Witch 2.

Being made for network television does not help the movie at all, either. It forces Fuller and Carson to tone things down, to tame them to fit NBC's sensibilities and keep the FCC and watchdog groups from breathing down their necks. The bullies don't seem as particularly vicious as you'd imagine they would be. One character simply whispering "you suck" in Carrie's ear after she strikes out in a softball game feels more lame than mean, and the shower scene at the beginning is nowhere near as hellish as Brian De Palma depicted it in 1976. De Palma made you honestly felt Carrie's helplessness and desperation, but that's nowhere to be found here. The whole thing sadly seems neutered and watered down.

The movie's open ending has also been a point of contention for some people. Since it was supposed to lead to a TV show, I can understand the reasoning behind ending the pilot in such a way. But that TV show never came thanks to the low ratings the pilot got, so we're left with an ending that feels weird and out of place. I do wonder how a Carrie TV show would have gone, though. I imagine it would have been similar to The Incredible Hulk, with Carrie wandering from town to town, helping people and having the occasional telekinetic freakout that leaves a trail for Detective Mulchaey to follow. The show probably would have been awful and found itself cancelled after one season, but it still could've made for an interesting footnote in horror history.

And last but not least, the cast has its ups and downs. Among the supporting cast, Emilie De Ravin's character is written as a mean, hateful bitch, but her dialogue is often so lame that you end up rolling her eyes at her. It doesn't help anything that De Ravin plays the role like she's auditioning for some awful high school melodrama produced for Lifetime. Patricia Clarkson, meanwhile, is no Piper Laurie. She's on autopilot through the whole thing, almost as if she's doing the movie because she lost a bet and is disappointed because of it.

Kandyse McClure tries her hardest and come off as very warm and likable, while Rena Sofer is awesome as the gym teacher sympathetic to Carrie's plight. But as you might expect, the movie belongs to Angela Bettis. If you've seen her in May, then you're not alone if you thought the role of Carrie White would be tailor-made for Bettis. And while she's unfortunately stuck in the shadow of Sissy Spacek, Bettis is fantastic in the role. She brings a complexity to Carrie; you can sense shyness, sadness, loneliness, and fear all at once. Her Carrie would love to belong and live a normal life, but the abuse heaped upon her for so long by both her mother and her peers has turned her into a perpetually frightened ball of nerves. It's an excellent performance that Bettis should be proud of, even if it's wasted in a movie as mediocre as this.

Much like The Rage: Carrie 2, the original's maligned sequel, this remake exists today as something of a curiosity. Many have either forgotten or are simply unaware of its existence, and those who have seen it were often left unimpressed. I will give those behind this version of Carrie credit for at least trying to make the best movie they could. For all the negative things I've said about it, you can still see there's a desire to make a good movie. But try as they might, all they've done is remind me that somebody else did it better nearly forty years ago. I've never had a problem with the concept of remakes in general, but should they make me wish I was watching the original instead? I have high hopes for this new remake, so here's hoping it turned out better than this other one.

Final Rating: **

Generation X (1996)

Over the years, thousands of characters have appeared in the books published by Marvel Comics. Few, however, have been able to match the success of the X-Men. It took a little while for them to take off following their creation in 1963, but since then they've developed into one of Marvel's biggest cash cows, with no less than six comics related to the X-Men currently being published.

And it's no secret that they've seen success in pop culture beyond comics too. The most obvious is the five movies produced by 20th Century Fox, but the X-Men have also been adapted into video games, toys, and cartoons. People forget, however, that there was almost a live-action television show based on the X-Men. The massive boost in popularity that the X-Men enjoyed during the '90s (which was probably due to that awesome Saturday morning cartoon that ran from 1992 to 1997) led Fox to try their hand at a live-action X-Men TV show.

Rather than the X-Men at large, the show would instead focus on the "Generation X" spinoff created by writer Scott Lobdell and artist Chris Bachalo during the "Phalanx Covenant" storyline that ran in the X-Men books during 1994. The comics' version of the team was popular enough that their book would run for 75 issues between 1994 and 2001, but the show would not do as well. It began simply enough, as a made-for-TV movie that aired on Fox on February 20, 1996. But the ratings for the movie were so bad that plans for the show were dropped. And after seeing how awful the movie was, maybe the show not taking off was for the best.

Generation X takes us to a world where, much like every other depiction of the X-Men, humanity is split into two classes. There are the normal human beings, and those born with a genetic anomaly that grants them a particular superpower. These "mutants" are feared by the general public, loathed and shunned by a society that doesn't understand them.

Some of these mutants eventually find their way to the Xavier Institute for the Gifted, a very selective private school where teenage mutants can learn to use and control their developing mutations. As the movie begins, the Institute's headmasters — powerful telepath Emma Frost (Finola Hughes) and Banshee (Jeremy Ratchford), who got his codename via his intense "sonic scream" — have recruited Jubilee (Heather McComb) and Angelo Espinoso (Austin Rodriguez) into the school's ranks.

As Jubilee and Angelo grow accustomed to their new surroundings and acquainted with their classmates, an enemy soon presents himself. Five years earlier, Emma worked with a mad scientist named Russel Tresh (Matt Frewer). She'd had him fired from a prestigious institute because of his unethical experiments on mutants, and he's spent the intervening time swearing revenge. In those five years, he's developed a machine that allows him to enter someone's dreams and leave subliminal commands. It starts innocuously enough, with Tresh using his machine to get kids to play more Virtua Fighter at an arcade. But being a mad scientist, his sanity quickly slips away and world conquest starts looking like a pretty good idea. When he discovers that Emma is teaching a class of mutants, Tresh decides to use that to his advantage and use her students to perfect his machine.

If anything can be said about Generation X, it's that it most certainly fits the "mid-'90s action/fantasy TV for teenagers" mold seen in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's just so aggressively mediocre that it's no surprise it didn't get picked up as a series. Much like what would have happened if that Justice League of America pilot got turned into a series, it probably would have ran for six or seven episodes before getting cancelled or shuffled off into syndication, airing on local channels after Saturday afternoon reruns of Xena: Warrior Princess.

Helming this dumb little pilot is Jack Sholder, whose directorial output has mostly been within the realm of the horror genre. And all I can think to say is that his work here is really, tremendously bad. The camera's always moving or sitting at some cockeyed Dutch angle, which gets really old really fast. You just want Sholder to stop trying to be hip and stop all the wannabe music video crap. And it doesn't make the movie any less boring, either. Yeah, it's dull as dishwater. I can forgive mediocrity, but I can't forgive being boring. While some of this can be blamed on the lackluster script, Sholder should take some of the blame as well. For all his tilted camera angles and neon-colored lighting, he doesn't do anything to inject any energy into the movie.

But like I said, the writing is just as bad as well. Penned by Eric Blakeney, the script is just boring and uninteresting. The characters are just plain hollow, while the plot is stupid and goes nowhere. It takes forever for the story to actually start rolling. We get nearly halfway into the movie before anything even remotely resembling a plot kicks in. And because of that, I found myself struggling to care about anything in this movie. There was only so much I could tolerate before I wanted to just give up and find something better to watch, like paint drying or grass growing.

And then there's the cast, many of whom are underutilized and nearly all of whom are forgettable. Finola Hughes plays Emma Frost as a typical '90s TV bitch. There's nothing impressive or special about her performance, and it feels like she was trying to audition for Melrose Place more than anything else. And if Jeremy Ratchford's Irish accent sounded any faker it would border on silly. Ratchford's not bad here, but that accent is so bad, so unconvincing that you can't take him seriously.

Austin Rodriguez is trying very hard, which I respect, but he ultimately falls flat. It's like they hired Taylor Lautner or something. Randall Slavin, on the other hand, spends more time looking like a cross between Billy Idol and Matthew Lillard's character from Hackers than he does actually acting. In regards to Heather McComb's performance as Jubilee, I just rolled my eyes every time she spoke. They couldn't have hired a better actress? Hell, they couldn't have hired a better cast? They probably would have actually replaced some of the actors had it become a series, but still, you couldn't find anyone better?

But if you're going to watch Generation X, watch it for Matt Frewer. His overacting is absolutely astounding. Imagine Robin Williams cranked up to eleven and covered in a fresh sheen of mid-'90s neon. You can actually hear his overacting in scenes he's not even in. He's a ton of fun, making him the one bright spot of this whole awful movie.

Did you think X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine were the worst X-Men movies? Then you haven't seen Generation X. It's to the X-Men what The Star Wars Holiday Special was to Star Wars. The movie is 87 minutes of crap that simply isn't worth your time. That's probably why it has to get any sort of DVD release that I'm aware of. I had to download a bootleg from the Internet, and I still feel like I overpaid. So yeah, don't feel like you should be in any rush to check out Generation X. It isn't worth it.

Final Rating: *

Justice League of America (1997)

Today is the day; after four years and five movies worth of buildup, the cinematic adaptation of the Marvel Comics superhero super-squad known as "The Avengers" has finally hit theaters in the United States. Marvel has really been banking on it being a huge hit, but what you might not know is that The Avengers is not the first movie to feature a comic book company's resident team of superheroes.

Let's go back to the year 1997, when a pair of movies based on DC Comics properties — Batman & Robin and Steel — were released to extremely negative critical reaction. I guess DC figured that television would be a better recourse, because that same year they teamed up with CBS to create a TV show based on their premier team of heroes, the Justice League of America.

And what could go wrong? The Justice League's ever-evolving roster has featured some of the most famous superheroes to appear in DC's pages, so you'd think that the idea of a TV show where Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and others team up would be awesome. But if you thought that, you'd be wrong. It turns out that the show never got past the pilot stage. And to further hammer the failure home, that pilot has never aired in the United States, nor has it ever been legally released in any home video format. The only way you can find it at all is through bootlegs and YouTube. And I'm pretty sure that the reason it wasn't aired or picked up as a series is because it's terrible.

Welcome to New Metro, a sprawling city protected by the team of superheroes known as the Justice League of America. The Justice League's five members — the Flash (Kenny Johnson), Green Lantern (Matthew Settle), Fire (Michelle Hurd), the Atom (John Kassir), and the Martian Manhunter (David Ogden Stiers) — have successfully defeated every villain they've faced despite their problematic personal lives. But they've never gone up against an enemy quite like the Weatherman (Miguel Ferrer).

The Weatherman has developed a way to manufacture natural disasters, threatening to use it against New Metro unless he is paid a hefty ransom. The key to defeating him lies with Tori Olafsdotter (Kim Oja), a meek scientist who works at a local meteorological institute. She accidentally stumbles upon a bizarre device in the institute's laboratory that shorts out and gives her the ability to create and manipulate ice. It turns out that this device belongs to Tara's boss, leading her to put two and two together and realize that her boss is the Weatherman. Tara takes this information to the Justice League, who allow her to join their ranks with the codename "Ice." With their new member in tow, the Justice League sets out to defeat the Weatherman and save New Metro from potential destruction.

You know, I'd heard a lot about this pilot before I actually watched it. And everything I'd heard was resoundingly negative. Now that I have actually seen it, I can verify that every negative thing that's been said is absolutely true. This pilot is so bad, so utterly wretched that I can't say I'm surprised it wasn't picked it up as a series. And if it had been picked up, it probably would have been cancelled pretty quickly. There's no way that a show that followed up on this pilot could have been successful without some major retooling. It's the Murphy's Law of television pilots, in the sense that it gets every possible thing wrong.

At the helm of this sinking ship is Félix Enríque Alcalá, a director who has spent pretty much his entire career working in television. And the truth of the matter is that he does absolutely nothing to make me care at all about anything going on here. It's as if he realized this thing was going to suck and figured he wouldn't bother putting forth any effort to make things better. Alcalá just gives us some generic mid-'90s television direction in all its unimpressive glory. There's no style at all. And the whole thing is just plain boring, too. The movie is so plodding, so unbearably slow that after only an hour, I felt like I'd been watching this piece of crap for days on end. I just wanted this horrible garbage to end, but the end took forever to arrive.

It doesn't help anything that the production looks like crap. The effects are laughably bad, unconvincing and goofy-looking in large part because of the obviously minuscule budget. I mean, I know this is just a pilot for TV and that they probably would have redone it had the show been picked up. But are decent effects too much to ask for?! I could probably whip up something in Microsoft Paint in ten seconds and come close to replicating these effects.

There's also the costumes, which look like cheap Halloween costumes. I've seen cosplayers at comic book conventions with better costumes than the ones here. Green Lantern's costume is actually turquoise instead of green, while the Atom looks like his costume is just spandex with Styrofoam shoulder pads. Fire's costume is especially bad, as she's just wearing a green leotard with her hair pulled to the side and a dab of green makeup smeared under her eyes. The fact that she gets to wear green and the character with "green" in his name wears some other color is bad enough, but it gets worse than that. People pick on the perceived lack of difference in Clark Kent and Superman's appearances, but Fire doesn't even try. Her costume is so transparent that the kid who's stalking her civilian identity puts two and two together after seeing her as Fire on the news for a tenth of a second. The movie tries to say that he noticed her wearing the earrings he'd given her, but you'd have to be a damn fool to not see through that flimsy excuse for a costume.

And you'd better believe that the script is awful too. Written by Lorne Cameron and David Hosselton, this thing is like a bottom-of-the-barrel Friends knockoff combined with a bad Power Rangers parody using DC Comics characters. Whose idea was it to take a superhero team, an idea that could lend itself more to an action/drama format like Smallville, and make a badly-written sitcom out of that? The Justice League of the comics goes up against dangerous global threats on a regular basis, but here, they've got a busted TV and a villain who's a lame substitute of the Weather Wizard, a member of the Flash's comic book rogues gallery.

And I also got the impression that neither Cameron nor Hosselton ever bothered to read any comics or got familiar with the characters. I can't say I'm really familiar with how all of the characters are depicted in the comics either, but the ones I am familiar with are grossly misrepresented. For example, Ice is a meek, mousy ball of nerves who got her powers in a lab accident here, as opposed to the charming girl next door in the comics who was born with her powers as an extension of her Norse heritage. And there's also Green Lantern, whose changes got the most of my attention. His secret identity is explicitly stated to be Guy Gardner, the second of four human Green Lanterns in the comics. But not only is his costume the wrong color (which I've already mentioned), but they give him a personality similar to fellow Green Lanterns Hal Jordan and Kyle Rayner. The Guy Gardner of the comics is notoriously hotheaded and macho, and the only time the pilot comes close to matching that is when he threatens the Weatherman with a chainsaw constructed from his ring's energy at the end of the movie. But by then, it's too little too late.

I also wonder just how much the low budget affected the script. I say this because there are moments in this that seem like they were supposed to be big sequences yet are whittled down to nothing (or less than nothing). They establish that the Weatherman is trying to pummel New Metro with a massive hailstorm, but it's dealt with in ten seconds like it's no big deal at all. It gets worse when they tell us that the Justice League averted a mudslide orchestrated by the Weatherman, yet they never show us any of it. They tell us the whole thing happened in a news report after the fact, and they barely show the news report at that! If it was a budgetary issue that caused the mudslide to be left out, why not just delete the whole thing altogether?!

I also just plain didn't understand all the reality show "confession cam" moments. I know MTV's reality show The Real World was a huge hit around the same time, but did Cameron and Hosselton really think a Justice League show needed to borrow elements from it? The scenes have pretty much no bearing whatsoever on anything. They aren't funny, don't advance or even reference the story, and frankly feel like they're only there to pad out the running time. Padding is probably why they're there to begin with, what with the aforementioned non-existent mudslide scene.

The only thing left for me to talk about is the acting. And folks, the acting is awful almost all the way across the board. The cast is unimpressive and lifeless. With the exception of Miguel Ferrer, who I almost always enjoy even when he's stuck with lousy material, everyone in front of the camera is awful. They run the gamut from annoying to laughable to just plain bad. It's rare that I see a group of actors so thoroughly miss the mark, but this is one instance where everyone (with, as I said, the exception of Ferrer, who even then is only okay at best) is absolutely terrible.

I'm still amazed at just how bad this thing is. I watched it for free and still felt like I paid too much to see it. I can totally understand why the pilot never got picked up, but I do imagine where the show would have gone, though. Would the Justice League have fought more villains created just for the show? Or would they have battled comics villains like Darkseid or the Legion of Doom? Would any more DC heroes pop up? That's something that actually bugs me, because I have to ask why Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are nowhere to be found. They aren't even referenced. I have to guess that it's due to some kind of legal complications, because if I were making a pilot for a TV show featuring DC's number-one superteam, I'd want DC's top three characters on the show. I can understand why Superman may have been unavailable, since Lois and Clark had just ended and perhaps they didn't want him on another show so quickly. But no Batman or Wonder Woman? Really? That's a real disappointment.

But the entire pilot is a 90-minute mess. It's not only boring, but it becomes frustratingly bad when you start picking it apart like I've been doing here. The more I analyze it, the more it transitions from being a forgettable movie to being so bad that it took serious effort to keep from turning it off in disgust halfway through. If you are absolutely in desperate need to watch something made for television with the Justice League name on it, just stick with Bruce Timm and Paul Dini's Justice League and Justice League Unlimited cartoons that ran from 2001 to 2006. As for this pilot, it's unmitigated crap that is only worth tracking down for the curiosity factor alone. Now if you'll excuse me, I've gotta go see The Avengers. Here's hoping that its guaranteed success will be enough to convince DC Comics to make a Justice League movie that's better than this.

Final Rating: *

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

One element of the Christmas season that I've always enjoyed is the glut of holiday specials that television studios crank out in that span between Thanksgiving and New Year's. A lot of these specials — the classic Rankin/Bass stuff and A Charlie Brown Christmas, for example — have achieved legendary status among Christmas lovers like me. But one special has gone beyond "legendary" and has become one of the most infamous television broadcasts of all time.

I'm speaking, of course, of the catastrophe known as The Star Wars Holiday Special.

If you haven't heard of it, then you've missed out on what many consider to be one of the biggest disasters in television history. Broadcast on CBS on November 17, 1978, just a year and a half after the hugely successful release of the original Star Wars movie (retroactively titled Episode IV: A New Hope), the special has done absolutely nothing but be a continuing embarrassment for everyone involved. The cast and crew either become angry or feign ignorance when asked about its existence. The story goes that even George Lucas himself once said that if he had the time and proper resources, he'd track down every bootleg copy he could and smash them with a hammer. But enough lollygagging; let's jump right into The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Keep in mind that this is a "holiday special," not a "Christmas special." That's important to know, because the holiday being celebrated in this glorious piece of trash is not Christmas, but "Life Day." And as the special begins, we're quickly dropped aboard the Millennium Falcon as Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) travel to the Wookie home planet of Kashyyyk to get Chewbacca home in time for his family's Life Day celebration. Their voyage is unfortunately impeded, however, when they discover that the Galactic Empire has initiated a security crackdown and their forces have established a blockade around the planet.

Down on Kashyyyk, Chewbacca's family prepares for his return. His wife Malla (Mickey Morton) struggles to prepare a big feast, while his son Lumpy (Patty Maloney) and father Itchy (Paul Gale) just try to stave off boredom through whatever entertainment they can find. But things get shaken up when their home is invaded by a squadron of Stormtroopers as the Imperial Army searches for members of the Rebel Alliance.

That's pretty much the entire plot. There's no way it could fill out an entire feature-length movie, so the special is pretty much presented in the form of a variety show. And as such, we're periodically presented with comedy sketches and musical numbers from such '70s pop culture luminaries as Jefferson Starship, Diahann Carroll, Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and Harvey Korman. And the whole thing is pretty much torture.

Of all the things to have had the Star Wars name slapped on it over the last thirty-four years, The Star Wars Holiday Special is perhaps the most bizarre. For starters, it's absolutely nothing like any of the six movies in the franchise. Sure, it's got some of the famous faces from the saga, but the production design and the overall tone and feel of the special come nowhere near matching the grand spectacle of the movies. And so awful was the reception to the special that it was broadcast only once, and has never seen any sort of official home video release. It exists today only in the form of bootlegs sold at fan conventions and digital copies uploaded to the Internet. If it hadn't been for that handful of people who owned VCRs in 1978 and had the forethought to press the "record" button, the special might have just vanished into obscurity forever. And that would have been a shame, because I'm sure Star Wars fans enjoy having something that makes those dreadful prequels look better by comparison.

This debacle was helmed by Steve Binder, whose entire directorial résumé consists of practically nothing but variety shows. I haven't seen anything else that Binder has worked on, since I'm not a fan of variety shows, but after seeing this piece of crap, I think I'll be staying far, far away from anything with his name on it. For starters, Binder must have had absolutely no budget at all to work with, because everything looks abysmally cheap. The sets and props look like they were slapped together with whatever they could find on the studio's backlots, and with the exception of Chewbacca, the Wookie costumes look like ten-dollar Halloween costumes. I know this was being made for TV in the '70s, but you'd think they could have given Binder and the crew more than 50 bucks and stock footage from A New Hope.

And then there are the different variety sequences, which range from not funny at all, to so saccharinely cute that they'll make you want to vomit, to just plain bizarre. The sequence where Harvey Korman appears in drag as a four-armed chef on a cooking show is so insanely manic that it'll probably have you screaming in hysterics at the screen. That's the tip of the iceberg, as it's definitely out-weirded by Diahann Carroll's segment. I honestly don't know where to begin describing this segment, but by God, I'm gonna try. The setup for the segment sees Itchy watching a performance by Carroll through a virtual reality helmet. The whole thing looks like it should be a bad LSD trip to begin with, but seeing Carroll in a hideous pink wig flirting with Itchy and making sexual innuendos while Itchy reacts like he's having the best sex of his life is all kinds of wrong. It's an incredibly creepy segment that goes on far past its welcome, and it's risqué enough that I'm surprised that they managed to get away with it in what I imagine was supposed to be a family show.

The only thing that comes close to rivaling the utterly bizarre nature of that segment is a portion near the beginning of the special where we see Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy going about their daily routine. What's so bad about that, you may ask? Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy are Wookies, and the Wookie language is basically roars and growls. It wouldn't be so bad if the segment was subtitled, but there's not a single intelligible word at all for nearly ten minutes. We have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and maybe it's me, but if the actors were trying to communicate through body language, they did a really piss-poor job of it.

And when upon reflection, the special doesn't really feel like it has anything to do with Star Wars. Yeah, all of the big-name characters from the original movie are there (albeit they're mostly relegated to cameos) and the name is there. But in no way does it match the same sense of adventure or excitement that the original trilogy has going for it. If this was my first exposure to the Star Wars universe, there's no way in hell I'd want to watch any of the movies. It's like the producers just created a sci-fi variety show and slapped the Star Wars name on it. The truth is I blame the whole "variety show" garbage for making things that way, because if it hadn't been for that, they could have focused on silly things like a plot or making the special fun to watch. But no, we couldn't have that, could we?

The only part of the whole special that stands out as a positive is the animated sequence, which is really only notable for marking the debut of Boba Fett. Animated by Canadian entertainment company Nelvana, the segment is the closest the entire special comes to matching the feel of the movies. The animation isn't perfect and the characters look more like they belong in the opening credits of Grease rather than a Star Wars special, but it's still a fun little segment and I wish the entire special had followed its lead.

I understand why The Star Wars Holiday Special is the cult phenomenon that it has become. But having sat through it, I'm kinda sad that it even exists at all. I've never been a big Star Wars fan, but no franchise deserves to have something as bad as this be a part of it. The special is so horribly flawed that I can't say I blame George Lucas for trying to wish it out of existence. But then again, Lucas had no problem attaching his name to Howard the Duck, creating Jar Jar Binks, or making unnecessary edits to the original Star Wars trilogy, so what do I know? In any event, The Star Wars Holiday Special is an absolutely horrible mess, a train wreck of epic proportions. And though I may enjoy collecting bad movies, I actually feel kinda guilty for having spent ten bucks on a bootleg DVD-R of this piece of crap at a local comic book convention. But I'll still totally recommend it to all the diehard Star Wars fans out there that have yet to see it. If you think Greedo shooting first and Jar Jar Binks are the worst parts of Star Wars, you haven't seen anything.

Final Rating: *

Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979)

In my previous review, I spoke of how Marvel Comics teamed with CBS in the '70s to create a number of live-action television projects based on Marvel's characters. And with the exception of The Incredible Hulk, none of them really turned out that well. Of particular note was the movie based on Captain America, which was not only boring, but just a poor adaptation of the character in general. It was awful, but the ratings had to have been decent because they made a sequel. Let me repeat that:

THEY MADE A SEQUEL.

Yes, CBS actually did run a sequel to that piece of crap. Broadcast just ten months after the first one, Captain America II: Death Too Soon was proof positive that its makers didn't learn their lesson from the first movie, because it's awful. The thing is a downright poor excuse for a movie, and if Marvel ever wanted to pretend it never existed, I wouldn't stand in their way.

Steve Rogers (Reb Brown) has set up shop as a caricaturist on the beach boardwalk of a small town on the California coast, continuing to help his fellow man as the masked hero "Captain America." But the muggers and purse-snatchers he's been fending off lately will be nothing compared to what he'll soon be up against. An international terrorist named General Miguel (Christopher Lee) has gotten his hands on a chemical weapon that can greatly accelerate the aging process in its victims. With it, he plans on holding Portland, Oregon hostage for a hefty ransom. And it's naturally up to Captain America to save the day.

I don't know how the first movie performed in the ratings, but I guess it must have done well enough for CBS and Marvel to make a sequel. It's either that or they wanted to test the waters with a second pilot to see if there was sufficient interest in the property continuing as a series. A Captain America TV show never came to fruition, and judging by these two movies, I'm glad for it. The show probably would have been cancelled after a few episodes anyway.

At the helm is Ivan Nagy, whose only other notable credits are a few episodes of Starsky & Hutch and CHiPs (and judging by the names of some of the movies listed his IMDB profile, a whole bunch of porn too). While some things have been improved for this sequel, particularly Captain America's ugly costume from the first movie having been altered to something more closely resembling his comic book uniform, it's readily apparent that Nagy doesn't feel the need to try spicing things up. Sure, the costume is a step in the right direction and the fight scenes aren't as ridiculously goofy as they were the first time around, but there isn't much of a difference in the direction. And really, if you've seen one bad '70s action-themed television show, you've pretty much seen them all.

But let's move on to the script, penned by Patricia Payne and veteran TV writer Wilton Schiller. While the plot is better constructed and the dialogue is a very slight step up from the first movie, it's still an unbelievably silly mess. And Payne and Schiller must not have been able to come up with a script that was long enough, because the movie is padded with scenes that either do not accomplish anything or go on for far too long. Seriously, did that hang gliding sequence need to take up three minutes of the movie? CBS could have taken a commercial break there and come back without missing anything.

Payne and Schiller have at least tried turning in something better than the first movie, but the improvements are slight at best. It seems like they could have turned out a better script if they'd had longer than a few months to write it, and if it hadn't been a sequel to a crappy movie. If it'd been an original movie based on an original character, perhaps Payne and Schiller could have stepped it up a little. But nope, we're stuck with this. Sigh.

And bringing up the rear is our cast, the performances from whom are pretty much exactly the same. Barely anything has changed at all. I could probably copy-and-paste the paragraph from my other review into this space. Reb Brown does seem a bit livelier than he was previously, but the guy is still way too calm. Not once did I hear him even so much as raise his voice. Come on, Reb! I've seen some of your other movies, I know that's not like you! I'd much rather see the Reb Brown that screams and wildly opens fire with a machine gun. The movie still would have been awful, but it would have been a lot more fun.

The rest of the cast is sadly but expectedly unremarkable. (Geez, it feels like I'm writing the same review twice.) But I must make mention of the actor playing our villain, the one and only Christopher Lee. Yes, the same Christopher Lee that appeared in The Man with the Golden Gun, the Star Wars prequels, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and as Count Dracula in the legendary "Hammer Horror" films. And why he's appearing in this, I have no idea. He's better than this; he always has been. Lee is actually pretty good here, though the material is beneath him. It's just a shame that the role wasn't written better, because had Lee's character been a more proactive villain, it would have been a lot more awesome.

I can't even begin to understand why somebody thought it was a good idea to make this movie, let alone air it on national television. Even if it does try to slightly improve upon the crap that was the first movie, you can only try polishing a turd so much. But I'm actually a little sad that both movies have fallen into obscurity, because this kind of silliness needs to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. More people need to see what bad superhero movies can look like, so they can appreciate the good ones. So yeah, I'm going to give Captain America II: Death Too Soon one star on the scale. And as cheesy as some of his action movies might be, I still want to see Reb Brown in the Expendables sequel. That'd be awesome.

Final Rating: *

Captain America (1979)

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 on TV with Adam West's Batman and Lynda Carter's 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 about.

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: *

Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD (1998)

Not every comic book hero has to wear a fancy costume or have superpowers. Others can get by just by being themselves. One of these characters is Nick Fury. Created by industry legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fury first appeared in 1963 as the leader of the Howling Commandos, an elite unit of Army Rangers fighting in World War II.

The book was a solid seller, but Marvel Comics saw the popularity of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and the James Bond villains known as SPECTRE and couldn't help but capitalize upon it. Fury was reimagined in 1965 as a super-spy in charge of the government-endorsed espionage agency SHIELD. Fury and SHIELD have been mainstays within the company ever since, often having an influence on many of the characters within Marvel's fictional universe.

Though Fury's headlining books have rarely lasted long, he's been such a stalwart supporting character that he even got to star in his own motion picture. Okay, so it wasn't a huge movie. It didn't even go direct-to-video. Instead, the movie aired on the Fox Network on May 26, 1998, as the pilot episode of a potential television series that never materialized. One of the most obscure movies to be based on Marvel's characters, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD is really one of those flicks that earned its obscurity.

Colonel Nick Fury (David Hasselhoff) is retired, having left SHIELD five years earlier for a solitary existence in a remote location in the Yukon. He'd really rather be left alone, but he just might have to come out of retirement. His old enemies, the terrorist agency known as HYDRA, have surfaced once again. Leading this new incarnation of HYDRA are Andrea von Strucker (Sandra Hess) and her brother Werner (Scott Heindl), who have acquired the cryogenically frozen body of their villainous father, Baron Wolfgang von Strucker (Campbell Lane). Their intent: to use their father's DNA to create a sample of the lethal Death's Head Virus.

Despite his initial hesitation to return to active duty, Colonel Fury is prompted to rejoin SHIELD after the Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Lisa Rinna) passes along the information that the von Strucker siblings killed one of his closest friends when he attempted to thwart the theft of their father's body. Kill one of Nick Fury's friends, and he's gonna get pissed.

SHIELD has deduced that Andrea, now answering to the codename "Viper," has packed the Death's Head Virus into four missiles pointed at Manhattan. And unless HYDRA recieves one billion dollars, those missiles will be launched. The only person alive who could possibly give SHIELD the cure is Arnim Zola (Peter Haworth), a Nazi scientist who helped Baron von Strucker develop the virus in the first place.

But just their luck, Viper has planted herself within SHIELD as a spy, using their information to find Zola and take him into HYDRA's custody. It also presents her with the opportunity to infect Colonel Fury with a poison that will kill him within 48 hours. SHIELD is now stuck in a race against time to not only locate HYDRA's missiles, but find a way to save Colonel Fury's life. 

Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD is a movie made during a really weird time. Its first airing back in 1998 came just three months before Blade completely revolutionized the way Marvel Comics properties were approached. It still bears resemblances to the cheesy, forgettable Marvel movies that came before it. However, perhaps it is unfair to judge it as a legitimate motion picture. After all, as I noted in the opening paragraph, it is actually the pilot episode of a television series that was never picked up. And when looking at it from that angle... yeah, it's still not all that great. If it actually had become a full-blown series, I doubt it would have lasted more than a handful of episodes, let alone a full season. It probably would have ended up going the way of other action shows like Thunder in Paradise, running for so many episodes before fading into complete obscurity following its cancellation.

The man in charge is veteran television director Rod Hardy, whose work here is competent yet somewhat underwhelming. He does the best he possibly can, but Hardy seems hampered by his apparently meager budget. This leads to sets and studio backlots that look second rate, the occasional lackluster costume, and special effects that could have used a little improvement. With a larger budget, the effects would surely have looked more impressive. But instead, you can tell what's green-screen work and what isn't. None of it is 100% convincing, but for the most part, it's at least forgivable. Hardy does, though, manage to keep things rolling at a steady pace, and he also gets some ambitious cinematography from James Bartle and a good musical score from Kevin Kiner. All in all, Hardy's direction turned out better than it should have been.

Handling the script is David Goyer, the same guy who wrote the Blade trilogy and Chris Nolan's Batman movies. No, I'm not joking. Goyer's script is where the movie really starts to become flawed. Outside of Fury, Vallegra, and Viper, the characters all seem to blend together and become forgettable. Granted, this is most likely due to the movie being a pilot for a TV show, thus necessitating the need to really emphasize the primary characters. But still, you'd think Goyer would have tried to do something to make the supporting characters indistinguishable from one another.

However, he does at least try to overcome this with some particularly good moments, like one funny scene where Fury uses his pistol to handle a troublesome elevator control panel. But these scenes end up becoming fewer and far between as the movie progresses, and unfortunately starts rendering the script kinda dull. The whole thing is really inconsistent, which ultimately brings the movie down.

Last on my list is the cast. David Hasselhoff stars in the lead role, and I think he was only hired due to his name. He'd had something of a career resurgence a few years earlier thanks to the initial popularity of Baywatch, and I guess the producers felt that if they could get him, they'd be set. The problem is that he seems to have decided to do his best impersonation of Kurt Russell's "Snake Plisskin" character for the entire movie. That is, if Snake Plisskin was more prone to make the occasional corny pun or witty quip. Don't get me wrong, he doesn't do a completely horrible job, but "The Hoff" doesn't really seem like he's on his A-game. His whole gruff, macho thing ends up becoming silly after a whole.

And then there's our villain, as played by Sandra Hess. She apparently couldn't get a handle on the German accent she took on for the character. Sometimes it's barely there, and at other times, it's so thick you can practically see it. Even when overlooking the flaws in her accent, Hess's acting is really hammy. The character is written as if it were hearkening back to the goofy spy movie villains of the '60s, and Hess goes out of her way to give a performance to match. She's over the top, but it's unfortunately not in the fun "Frank Gorshin as Riddler" kind of way. Her performance is just "bleh" if you ask me.

Rounding out the hat trick of important characters, Lisa Rinna was okay. I must admit that I almost didn't recognize her, as Botox, collagen injections, and plastic surgery have made her look more than a little bit different between 1998 and now. But looks aside, Rinna's performance isn't bad. She's likable in the role, but the bad part is she's kinda forgettable.

That's really the problem with the entire movie: it's forgettable. I just watched the thing and I don't remember half of what happened. As I said earlier, I doubt a Nick Fury TV show would have lasted very long had it become more than just this movie. It's not as bad as the earlier Marvel movies, but it's not that great either. I think if I was absolutely forced to give it a standard star rating like I usually do, I'd give Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD two stars out of the usual five. It's a rare movie to find, but unless you're an absolutely devoted fan of Nick Fury or Marvel Comics, it's really not worth the effort to find it. 

Final Rating: **