The recent release of special edition blu rays for the original Punisher and Captain America films got me reminiscing about the days when studio execs looked down on comics as little more than kiddy fare, and what little they did produce often went straight to video – or in one infamous case – nowhere.
As a member of the Television Club back in college I did a show about superheroes on film and television. This was 1992 mind you, so beyond the Supermans, the Batmans and the Hulk, most of what I was covering could hardly be considered classic.
It's hard to conceive of now but back in my day (did I really just say that?) superheroes were hardly the hot properties they are today. Aside from the aforementioned Batman and Superman, few studios were willing to take a gamble on characters from the funnybooks, and when they did they often strayed so far from the source material that the result was sheer parody.
The 80s and 90s are rife with superhero misfires both on film and television, but for today let's focus on The Punisher, Captain America and Roger Corman's infamous, unreleased Fantastic Four.
In 1989, we couldn't know we were teetering on the brink of a superhero renaissance, Sure, Tim Burton's Batman had just been released, but like Superman before it, all that film managed to do was spawn sequels, not films based on other properties. And while Superman was brought to life using state of the art techniques, no one was willing to lay out the money to realize lesser tier characters (like Iron Man perhaps?) in a realistic fashion.
By the year 2000, with the release of X-Men, everything changed. CGI effects had been around nearly a decade and had become cheap enough to breathe life into a whole host of characters that practical effects simply could not.
But in 1989, superheroes remained the purview of low budget filmmakers, many whose hearts were in the right place, but simply could not afford to create something taken seriously by the mainstream. Marvel licensed out its properties (for nominal fees) understanding that a lot of these films would never get made.
When New World Pictures bought Marvel in 1987 they announced an ambitious slate of film and television superhero adaptations. Formerly owned by Mr. Corman, New World existed in the same universe as Cannon Films, primarily producing schlocky genre and exploitation films (with an occasional diamond in the rough). Even as a 17-year old I knew not to be optimistic.
The only theatrical film they managed to produce was The Punisher starring Dolph Lundgren, which was slated to open in the summer of 1989, around the same time as Batman.
It didn't.
The non-release of The Punisher begat a trend for superhero films of this era that saw most of them released straight to video. Now, even though I understood these efforts would be of inferior quality it became an obsession for me to get my hands on them. And the only way to do that was to go to a comic book convention. No problem there.
At this time I was as deep into comics as ever, but when I attended cons I was more interested in the dealers hawking bootleg vhs tapes of stuff like the Star Wars Holiday Special and Legends of the Superheroes (which I've discussed previously). This was Holy Grail type stuff for me and prior to the Internet, the only way to obtain them was through cons or sketchy mail order.
I grabbed The Punisher sometime in '89, and it was my first (of many) time coded workprints. It wasn't the longer version that I would obtain many years later, and aside from the temp track and extra snippets of violence, it resembled the final cut that was released to video in 1991.
The Punisher is probably the best of the trio. Let's face it – there's not a heck of a lot of backstory to mess up. Frank Castle's family is murdered and he sets out to kill as many criminals as humanly possible. Period. The end.
In essence, the filmmakers got it right. The big mistake was inexplicably not showing Frank wearing his trademark skull shirt, as if they were trying to distance themselves from the comic (hardly a first with these adaptations).
Lundgren was his usual monosyllabic self, but he played the character as morose and as straight up as he is meant to be. Oscar winner Lou Gossett Jr. is on hand to lend some credibility, and for my money, it worked. It was a B production all the way, but it captured the spirit of a character who I wasn't all that fond of, but who was incredibly popular at the time.
Again, it makes no sense to me, given how popular The Punisher was at the time, that an A-list production could not be mounted on a reasonable budget. By the time those A-list films appeared Frank Castle was not nearly as popular, and they tanked.
I bought The Punisher on laserdisc and dvd, and eventually I found that elusive longer workrpint, which today has been included on a new special edition blu ray, which is available only in Germany. The blu ray features an audio commentary from director Mark Goldblatt and three versions of the film, including the workprint.
Here's a link to purchase The Punisher blu ray: http://shop.dtm.at/product_info.php?products_id=51271&osCsid=a34c9ee2452a4558ddb091eca1f54b49
We'll discuss Cap and the FF film in the upcoming weeks!
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