One of the weirdly charming and bizarre parts of the forgotten 1990 Captain America film is when he pretends to be carsick to steal a car. It’s a weird enough scene to see once, but as you’ll see in the video clip below, he actually pulls this stunt TWICE! Who wants to see Cap throw his shield and do cool stunts when you can enjoy him faking nausea and carjacking innocent citizens?
I was working in San Francisco in the fall of 1989 when the downtown area was plastered with Captain America posters with the phrase, “Coming to Theaters Everywhere in 1990.” It was false advertising. The film went straight to video in 1992, and according to Wikipedia, was inexplicably released in The Philippines with the title Bloodmatch as a double feature with a Snoopy movie! It’s kind of charming in a silly way, but hard to watch. This was just a year after a movie version of The Punisher starring Dolph Lundren was made, and suffered a similar direct to video fate. It’s hard to imagine a time when Marvel didn’t own Hollywood and floundered so heavily with these. Marvel struck out yet again in 1994 when a Fantastic Four movie produced by Roger Corman failed to get a theatrical release, too (though the movie may have been made just to preserve the film rights). It wasn’t until 1998’s Blade and 2000’s The X-Men did things finally start to gel for Marvel movie properties.
FUN FACT: Cap is played by Matt Sallinger, son of “Catcher in the Rye” author JD Sallinger!