Can you believe it’s been 25 years since the Captain America film premiered? No, I’m not talking about the latest pair of franchise-within-a-franchise films in Marvel’s contemporary cinematic empire. I’m talking about a direct-to-video version of the Steve Rogers story that took liberties with the shield-slinger’s legend to deliver an environmental message back in the days of grunge. Here’s the Wiki…

The film was given very negative reviews, holding a 9% ‘rotten’ rating on the film critic aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, based on 11 critics (all of whom wrote reviews a decade after release).

In one of the few contemporaneous reviews, Entertainment Weekly critic Frank Lovece wrote, “The movie isn’t merely wrong for kids — it opens in pre-war Italy with a sequence in Italian with subtitles, and a machine-gun slaughter — it’s just all wrong”, and decried the “shapeless blob of a plot” in grading the film an F.

A Blu-ray of the film was released by Shout! Factory on May 21, 2013 as a Collector’s Edition which features a widescreen HD presentation and brand new interviews with director Pyun and star Salinger.

I don’t want to give away plot points, but suffice to say that fans of the hero’s origin story will find this version to be just familiar enough to be baffled by all of the other choices that get made here. As the Shout! Factory release implies, the end results are a trainwreck but not one without its charms, and definitely not anything that could stop our Cap’n! Here’s Captain America (1990)…

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This year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of my favorite David Lynch film, Wild at Heart. Released in 1990, Wild tells the tale of Sailor and Lula, a red-hot couple who are reunited when Sailor is released from prison. The pair take off on a cross-country road trip that turns into a journey that resembles The Wizard of Oz on mushrooms. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival before becoming mired in controversy. The movie’s opening scene finds Sailor (Nicolas Cage)smashing the head of a would-be attacker hired by Lula’s (Laura Dern) mother against a marble stair step until his brains slurp out of the back of his head. Commentators claimed to be shocked by the scene — and they probably were — but the reaction against the film seemed to have more to do with the overall violence of the bizarre imagery and strange set scenes that make up this weird and wonderful tale.

Here’s an interview with Lynch, talking about the film in 1990…

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The Beastie Boys are the bastard sons of the kind of b-boy/hardcore mongrel that could’ve only been born in 1981. After a short tenure as young punks inspired by Black Flag, the boys teamed up with Rick Rubin to create a metal/punk/hip-hop sound that sounded like the inside of the head of a 13 year old boy.

Three Jewish kids doing rap seemed more than a little odd in 1986 when the Boys released License to Ill and became household names on the strength of party anthems like “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)” and “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” The whole thing was catchy enough and the Beasties were really funny, but anyone can be forgiven for dismissing the trio as a novelty act.

Of course, groundbreaking music followed and the Beastie Boys proved to be one of the most important bands of the 1990′s and beyond. Following the cancer death of Adam Yauch/MCA in 2012, the Beasties officially called it quits although there is an autobiography project in the works, slated for a 2015 release.

Today would’ve been Adam Yauch’s 49 birthday. While you’re waiting for that new book to come out, here’s MTV’s exhaustive documentary of the band, Beastiology…

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