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FTMN Quickie: Punisher Extended Cut
Punisher: Extended Cut 2004
Often there aren’t very many differences between an extended cut of a film and the theatrical edition. Often it’s just a scene or two, or a couple extra shots before or after certain scenes. And once in a while there’s a film that has some drastic differences between the theatrical cut and the director’s or extended cut like with Superman II or Daredevil. This falls somewhere inbetween those two. There is enough of a difference that I felt like I should comment on it, but there’s not enough of a difference to write a completely new review for the whole film, so instead I decided to just do a little quickie review of the Extended edition of the Thomas Jane Punisher film from 2004. If you would like to read my full thoughts on the theatrical version of the film, read here.
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Graphic Horror: The Monster of Frankenstein
The Monster of Frankenstein aka Kyōfu Densetsu Kaiki! Frankenstein 1981
Another day, another obscure Marvel anime released by Toei in the early 80’s. This was produced just one year after their Tomb of Dracula adaptation, this time they adapted yet another Marvel adaptation of a classic horror icon with Frankenstein. There were a couple things that I noticed very early on when comparing the two films, first is that many of the American dub voice actors would later go on to lend their voices to the iconic original dub of Akira. And second, that this was a much better film overall than Dracula. It’s still a long ways away from being a good movie, but it’s not the hilariously bad mess that Dracula was. This was a very serious and somber look at the tale of Frankenstein with a combination of some unique ideas as well as some of the standard ones. For the most part, I did enjoy it even if I knew how it was going to end up.
Graphic Horror: Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned
Yami no teiô kyuketsuki dorakyura aka Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned 1980
It’s October and I’m kicking it off with my first Graphic Horror post for the month. After Marvel had a string of failures in their TV movies in the late 70’s and their one success with the Incredible Hulk, they also sold the rights to some of their other comics including their Frankenstein series and the Tomb of Dracula which introduced Blade to Toei Animation. Toei is probably most well known for being the studio behind Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon, but before either of them came this cheaply animated made-for-TV film. It was later dubbed and released in the US in VHS and Beta but has since gone out of print and isn’t available on DVD, though copies have made their way online. I of course watched the English dub and found it hilariously awful. There is so much going on in this film and very little of it makes any sense that it’s amazing to watch. I found myself laughing uproariously through much of the run time even though I did have to split my viewing across two nights.
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Dr. Strange
Dr. Strange 1978
One thing that I find somewhat interesting when comparing this film to the Marvel animated film that came out almost 30 years later is that this film is almost always referred to by the abbreviation Dr. Strange. Meanwhile, the animated version and the upcoming live action film are both referred to in the long form Doctor Strange. I mainly reference this random fact because there is not really a whole lot to discuss when it comes to this failed pilot turned made-for-TV movie. It was produced a year after the successful Incredible Hulk pilot films which went to series and the limited series The Amazing Spider-Man. But when this pilot movie aired, it didn’t get nearly enough ratings for it to transition to a full series. Watching it now, the biggest problem seems like during the entire run time of the movie, nothing really happened. It’s extremely slow and very boring. I watched it over two sittings and found it hard to pay attention it was so dull, though I did happen to catch a little Easter egg where at one point Dr. Strange pulls out an Incredible Hulk comic. I would easily say that this is the worst movie based on a Marvel property that I’ve seen so far.
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Filmwhys #55 Battle Royale and Captain America 2: Death Too Soon
Episode #55 of the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guests are Jeff and Chris from the Really Awful Movies Podcast who ask me why I hadn’t seen Battle Royale, a violent Asian film that draws a lot of parallels to the Hunger Games except that it came out ten years earlier and was banned due to the violence. And in return, I ask them why they hadn’t seen Captain America 2: Death Too Soon, the 1979 TV movie that had very little to do with the actual comic book, but had Christopher Lee in it.
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Fantastic Four
Fantastic Four 2015
This is the fourth Fantastic Four movie that I’ve watched and reviewed for this site, it seems like the franchise gets rebooted every ten years or so. This one has been plagued for well over a year with reports of reshoots, studio interference, the director Josh Trank acting odd on the set, large sections of his film being pulled out at the last moment in the editing room, and now that it’s come out it’s getting largely negative reviews and the box office is over 30% less than early projections. There’s quite a bit of backlash against this film for quite a few reasons: it hasn’t been done well in the past, fans seem to think it would fare better with Disney Marvel behind it, and the early reports had the film changing seemingly everything that people supposedly knew and loved about the Fantastic Four. I will say that I don’t believe that it deserves the 9% it has at the moment on Rotten Tomatoes, I can imagine that it’s a high amount of mildly negative reviews which isn’t entirely fair to the film. What is a bit more obvious is that whatever the reason, this film became a victim of studio interference rather than a single creative vision. Ten years from now, the story surrounding the film will be much more prominent than the film itself as it will likely fade into obscurity unless someone has the guts to finish an alternate cut of the film to bring back the original intent. For my part, I could see where the film was going initially and I was interested, but it made a reshot nosedive towards the end and I could feel that a lot of the characters were missing from the final product.
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Five Reasons Why Fantastic Four Movies Fail
I will immediately preface this post by saying that my familiarity to this franchise extends only to the four films as well as the mid 90’s cartoon which I haven’t watched since then. Though I have heard other descriptions of how the team works in the comics, at least before it was cancelled by Marvel earlier this year. This team of heroes has gone through three different iterations, none of them have been critical successes, one of them wasn’t even released, and only one was much of a financial success. It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard to adapt this family of four heroes with unique powers that act together as a family, I mean the Incredibles was able to do it, so why can’t the Fantastic Four? Here are a few reasons why I think it’s been so difficult.
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Captain America 2: Death Too Soon
Captain America 2: Death Too Soon 1979
I imagine the thought process at CBS or whatever studio financed the two Captain America films was that the first one would be so popular that people would be clamoring for a sequel and so it went into production before the first one aired. And however the ratings were for the first one, it was essentially either too late or the ratings had enough merit to continue the production. There’s even an unlikely chance that these films were produced back to back but the true details are a little bit too far buried than my ten minutes of internet research will allow. It is interesting to note that this film was aired as essentially a two part mini-series, airing the first hour – counting commercials one night, and the second hour the next. And similar to the first Captain America, that is honestly one of the most interesting things about the entire film next to the fact that the villain was played by none other than the late, great Christopher Lee.
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Captain America
Captain America 1979
There are only a small handful of Marvel movies that I have yet to watch, and they all happen to fall within the realm of the dark days of Marvel in the late 70’s when they first started shopping their properties around to other live action studios in order to make TV shows and TV movies. One of the first ones was the famous Incredible Hulk TV show with Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk and Bill Bixby as David Banner, and just one year after that came out, there was this attempt at turning Captain America into a similar television property just one year after a full slate of superhero television properties like the Six Million Dollar Man, the Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, and the Incredible Hulk. It started out with this introductory TV movie which aired in January and followed with a sequel that aired in two parts in November. Even though it’s called Captain America it barely resembled anything close to the Marvel comic, and changed nearly everything about his origin in order to help fit within a limited television budget. Not only that, but it barely made for an interesting TV movie regardless.
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Ant-Man
Ant-Man 2015
It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve gotten the chance to see a new release in theaters, and there have been a small handful of new releases that have come out on digital and home video in the past few weeks that I plan on visiting very soon. But Ant-Man initially felt like Marvel’s first risky venture. Arguably last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy was also considered a risk, but the hype leading up to the release along with all the trailers were exceedingly positive the entire way through. Here, the fan reaction has been hit or miss with all the promotional materials leading up to the release, not to mention the backlash when Edgar Wright dropped out as director shortly before filming. Considering that Marvel has essentially become its own machine, with a similar tone in all of its movies with variations falling more on the drama half of the equation, I went in with moderate expectations and I really enjoyed myself. It was almost as funny as Guardians of the Galaxy, though it did have a slightly different style of humor, and the action was also quite impressive considering it generally involves the hero becoming really small and back again.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 