Original image by Orikunie at http://orikunie.deviantart.com/

This year we’re celebrating the 40th anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. The imposing tome is a massive collection of mythopoeic works that tell the creation myth of Middle Earth, and recount the ages that preceded the saga The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion is only for the hardest core hobbitphiles. It lacks the narrative drive of Tolkien’s classic stories while also being populated by a teeming host of unpronounceable creatures, characters and locales. It’s not without its charms, but readers definitely get a pass for not venturing very long into this very long book. With that in mind I think I’ve found an easier way: check out this video that uses some simple, charming animation to boil down the big bad book into a three-minute primer. This won’t substitute for reading the real thing, but it’s still a lot of fun for fantasy fans. Enjoy!

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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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Now that Guardians of the Galaxy has secured the unbridled success of superhero films a guaranteed slot on American movie screens for the foreseeable future, I’ve been looking back to see how other comic book flicks have fared without the support of a trendy tidal wave at their backs.

My favorite find is this 1994 Roger Corman production of Marvel Comics’ classic super-team, The Fantastic Four. Here’s the Wiki…

The Fantastic Four is an unreleased independent superhero film completed in 1994. Executive produced by low-budget specialist Roger Corman and Bernd Eichinger (who went on to produce a big-budget Fantastic Four film in 2005), the film was based on Marvel Comics’ long-running comic book and featured the origin of the Fantastic Four and that superhero team’s first battle with the evil Doctor Doom, combining the superteam’s origin from The Fantastic Four #1 and Doom’s origin from Fantastic Four Annual #2 with original elements.

…Speculation arose that the film had never been intended for release, but had gone into production solely as a way for Eichinger to retain rights to the characters; Stan Lee said in 2005 that this was indeed the case, insisting, “The movie was never supposed to be shown to anybody,” and adding that the cast and crew had been left unaware.

This flick is particularly interesting given the dismal ‘Four films that have actually been showcased in feature releases. Here’s what Film Threat‘s Clint Morris had to say about this bare-bones production…

“Yes it’s terribly low-budget and yes it’s derisorily campy and feebly performed, but at the same time there’s also something inquiringly irresistible about this B comic tale that makes you wonder why it didn’t get a release somewhere along the line. Even if it does resemble Toxic Avenger [more so] than say, Spider-Man … The script isn’t actually all that bad and some of the actors—notably Michael Bailey Smith—are actually quite good here, and with an extra polish I think they might have been able to release this thing.”

However, it was never to be. Who cares, it’s still a delight. Here’s The Fantastic Four (1994)…

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