Captain America is the greatest superhero ever created. Oh, he may not be the most popular anymore and the hip kids may snicker at his patently jingoistic attire and gimmick. They’ll probably complain that he’s a dinosaur better suited to an earlier time when good and evil were easy to tell apart. Continue reading “Captain America (1990)”
Category: Adventure
The Mooncussers (1962)
The problem with The Mooncussers is that it manages to steal copiously from Treasure Island which isn’t really an awful thing to do since that was a great Disney movie and I’ve always said that if you’re going to steal, you should steal from pirates because it isn’t their crap to begin with.
It’s just that if you’re going to re-use the entire “pirate pretending to be good guy actually deep down has a soft spot for the kid” gimmick, your pirate should be convincing in being a pal to this kid and the kid probably shouldn’t be wearing a red silk shirt for a good portion of the movie. Continue reading “The Mooncussers (1962)”
Treasure Island (1950)
This being a Walt Disney movie, I was let down a tad by this one. I mean, there wasn’t an asinine song and dance number to be had, not one crappy comic relief sidekick, and no bloodless, goofy violence to give the kids in the crowd the idea that pirates were lovable scamps who talked funny and needed a bath. That’s not to say that Long John Silver wasn’t someone to be admired for the way he played both ends against the middle and eventually won the respect of the kid whose throat he periodically threatened to slit. Continue reading “Treasure Island (1950)”
Knights of the Round Table (1953)
I think it was all those speeches that Robert Taylor as Sir Lancelot delivered in his stentorian monotone that did it. When it finally came time for Arthur to banish Lance from the realm, he may have said it was because Lance couldn’t quite seem to avoid hanging on to Guinevere’s green ribbon with an almost fetish-like fervor, but honestly, he was just tired of hearing all of Lance’s chivalry babble. Continue reading “Knights of the Round Table (1953)”
The Sea Pirate (1966)
Other than Long John Silver, Johnny Depp, and Willie Stargell, Robert Surcouf is one of our greatest and favorite pirates who ever sailed the seven seas or played left field. As befitting a man of such stature that I hadn’t heard of him until this movie, The Sea Pirate is not exactly the high profile vehicle these other pirates enjoyed (Treasure Island, Pirates of the Caribbean, the 1979 World Series), but that doesn’t mean his story isn’t worthy of an obscure mid 1960s Italian swashbuckler! It means that he’s deserving of two such films! But it also means that the second film, Il grande colpo di Surcouf has no known English release. Continue reading “The Sea Pirate (1966)”
Kill, Panther Kill! (1968)
Fifth films in movie series have a spotty track record. For every crappy movie like Star Trek V, there’s a movie like Hellraiser: Inferno that I can’t even remember if I’ve even seen it! Continue reading “Kill, Panther Kill! (1968)”
Ali Baba and the Sacred Crown (1962)
Who is the real Ali Baba? Is he just a simple woodcutter who stumbled onto the greatest find in all of ancient Arabia? Perhaps he’s just a common thief, sneaking around securing his ill-gotten gains by eavesdropping on other thieves? Or maybe he’s the guy who has to constantly be saved from the murderous thieves by the guile of his brother’s slave girl?
If you were any kind of reader, all the foregoing would certainly be possible based on the tale commonly recounted in One Thousand and One Nights. My Ali Baba though is too cool for trillion year old stories that don’t make a lick of sense. (What sort of lesson does this story teach – make sure your slave girl is some kind of Navy SEAL?) Continue reading “Ali Baba and the Sacred Crown (1962)”