Out Of Their League

 

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA-1997-This CBS TV movie was an unsold pilot based on the DC comic book team. I see why it was never released (but is readily available as a bootleg).  It takes place in New Metro where a tornado is created by bad guy The Weatherman threatens the city. The Flash, The Green Lantern and The Atom destroy the tornado and save endangered residents (and a cat). Guy Gardner (Matthew Settle) and Ray Palmer (John Kassir) are roommates with Fire (Michelle Hurd) but Barry Allen (Kenny Johnson) is a dysfunctional jerk who gets thrown out of his apartment so he later joins them. Tori (Kim Oja)), a meteorologist who works at a weather institute run by Dr, Eno (Miguel Ferrer) later becomes Ice and joins the league which is run by Martian Manhunter (David Ogden Stiers). The SFX aren't very good and the story is just like some disaster movie. It's further bogged down by wraparound scenes of the main characters talking about themselves and each other.

Director Felix Enriquez Alcala is still a busy in TV (BLUE BLOODS, THE GOOD WIFE, CRIMINAL MINDS). I read Lewis Teague (ALLIGATOR) may have directed some scenes. 

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Ghost Rider

GHOST RIDER-2007-This adaptation of the Marvel comic isn't very good. It takes forever to get started and when it finally does it's pretty incoherent. 

Nicolas Cage (who I've been told took his last name from comic book hero Luke Cage) is Johnny Blaze, a daredevil motorcycle stuntman who sells his soul to the devil (Peter Fonda, sounding a lot like David Carradine) to save his father who dies anyway. Eventually his head turns into flaming skull and he fights crime and three evil riders. Not learning from the mistakes of Ang Lee's THE HULK, some genius thought it would be good to bring in Sam Elliot to growl out the legend. Eva Mendes is equally unfortunate as Blaze's reporter/long lost love. 

This was not director/screenwriter Mark Steven Johnson's first encounter with a Marvel superhero. He'd previously messed up...I mean made DAREDEVIL with Ben Affleck. Still the movie did well enough to spawn a sequel in 2011, GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE.

The real deal!

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Woo Baby It's A Wild World!

THE WILD WORLD OF BAT-WOMAN-1966-Poor Jerry Warren! What was he thinking when he decided to become a director?

After spending most of the ‘50’s “Americanizing” Mexican and Japanese horror films, Warren (who had occasionally made his own messes like THE INCREDIBLE PETRIFIED WORLD) thought the time was right for a parody of the Super-Hero genre (The Bat-Man TV show was very popular at the time).

Katherine Victor (from several other Warren productions including TEENAGE ZOMBIES) plays the lead role, a masked crime fighter with a large bat adhered to her chest. She commands a bevy of Go-Go dancing cuties that go into action when her arch-nemesis Rat Fink steals some kind of atomic hearing aid. Washed up actor Steve Brody (later in Warren’s last film FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND) is the head of security at the company that made the stolen device. A nutty professor (who looks a lot like the Dr. Forrester character from MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 2000; they used it in an episode too) keeps talking about the monsters he created that live in a cave. When they finally show them it's scenes of the creatures from 1956 ‘s THE MOLE MEN (an American movie directed by Virgil Vogel; I guess no Mexican movie was available!). Bruno Ve Sota shows up in a wacky scene involving a séance in Chinese! Everything in this movie is very dumb and pretty boring but the bad actors seem to be having a good time!



The strangest part however is the fact that DC Comics actually sued Warren to keep BAT-WOMAN from being released!!

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