Having (rather easily) stopped the neutron bomb threat in the first film, Steve Rogers Jr is now living a quiet life on the California coast working as a freelance artist in various seaside towns. The start of the film finds him doing a portrait of an old lady who tells him that there have been a spate of OAP's being mugged for their Social Security money.
Turning into Cap, Rogers shadows her to the post office the next day and beats the muggers in an unintentionally funny fight scene including one of the guys ducking when Cap's shield goes flying past him, stopping to laugh and then being whacked in the back of the head boomerang style as the shield returns.
Meanwhile, Simon has been called to a nearby lab to track down a professor who was supposed to be testifying at a Congressional hearing on the day at his own request but never showed up. Unsurprisingly it turns out he's been kidnapped to the shock of no-one but his dingbat of a security guard who thought he'd just been working hard in his lab and didn't want to be disturbed for the last couple of weeks. We find out the identity of the kidnappers and...
Woah, it's Christopher Lee! Aka Saruman/Sauron from Lord of the Rings, countless old school horror films and general all round badass. Well at least the general issue with a lot of the Marvel films of there not being a suitably believable villain hopefully shouldn't be an issue in this one. Lee plays General Miguel, a revolutionary anarchist guerrilla type who's either French, Dutch or English according to Simon (obviously did his research there then). He's kidnapped the scientist because he was working on a formula for a potion that ages people rapidly and wants to use it to hold the president to ransom by threatening to drop it on a city. To this end, he's posing as the governor of a jail in Oregon and replaced all the guards with his own staff. Well, you can't accuse the guy of not being prepared at least...
Steve, Simon and Wendy do a spot of research and realise that there's a certain ingredient for the serum that is mainly being imported near to them in California. Checking the records they realise that a shipment is due in tonight. Cap duly heads down the docks in the "I can't believe it isn't the Mystery Machine" van and takes out a bunch of villains in an inadvertently hilarious fight scene featuring the guy below who falls for the old primary school playground "slow-witted guy charges at you so you step to one side at the last minute and hold your fist out for him to run into" trick (with added Captain America shield) and deserves an award for services to inadvertently hilarious over-acting with his response afterwards.
Anyway, he gets a bag of the chemicals and chucks it over the wall to Wendy who takes it back to the lab. Cap then tails the van that picks the shipment up that night and trails them across the border into Oregon and a town called Belleville although the shipment is picked up by a couple of Miguel's goons en route meaning that Cap just ends up trailing the van back to the henchmens' house.
The henchmen wake up the next morning to find Steve outside their house painting a picture of his pet cat Heathcliffe. It isn't explained how Steve suddenly has a pet cat or where it's been all the time while he was at the docks. The bad guys make it pretty clear to Steve that outsiders aren't welcome in the town so he takes Heathcliffe to the vet instead who weirdly doesn't seem to understand any medical terminology. Steve also gets advised by a lot of people in the queue that he shouldn't stick around Belleville if he knows what's good for him.
Nevertheless he decides to hang about to try and get a lead on where the supplies are going to and sure enough he's promptly ambushed in the town centre by a group of five thugs with baseball bats. However, these guys don't realise that it's Captain America they're dealing with and promptly go down in a flurry of fists and bad baseball puns. A few onlookers are pleased to see the bullies get theirs including a young woman called Helen and her son Peter who Rogers previously ran into at the vet's and they invite him to stay at their farm while he's in town.
While helping with the chores on the farm, Peter calls Steve over to tell him that his pet lamb has suddenly turned into a geriatric sheep and has died from old age. Ah-ha, there's yer link young feller-me-lad. Steve demands some answers from Helen but promptly gets arrested by the police for beating up the goons the day before. However, by the time they arrive at the cop shop to finish him off, he's escaped by bending the bars and escaping. After asking Helen for some answers, it's revealed that the town is regularly sprayed from the air with the aging serum leading to the residents to have to go and get a dose of antidote from the fake vet every 24 hours to keep people in line and ensure the operation stays secret. Blimey, Miguel really wasn't taking any chances here was he?...
Meanwhile back at the lab, Wendy and Simon have been working on an antidote but by now, Miguel (having sent them a lynx cub which has become a fully grown lynx in a couple of days - odd way to get your point across but hey...) has lost patience with the president who thinks his threat is a bluff and sprayed the aging serum all over Portland (the phrase "not the obvious choice" springs to mind). By doing a bit of recon on the "vet"'s car (including a bit where Cap ends up forced to drive his motorbike off a dam and is last seen floating down a river holding on to it then Steve just shows up back at Helen's ten minutes later as if nothing had happened), Steve and Peter ascertain from the distance he drives per day that the hideout must be at the prison and Rogers duly suits up and sets off.
The final bit of the film is at least fairly engaging as there's a punch-up at the prison featuring Cap riding his motorbike through the office corridors, unconvincing genetic mutant dogs (basically they got some Dobermanns in and told them to jump at Cap while barking), some truly hilariously bad special FX (including Cap "throwing" a bike that's clearly made of cardboard or similar up on to the prison wall using strings) and Cap's bike turning into a hang-glider, something that's never been alluded to in either of the movies.
Cap tracks Miguel down to some woods near to the town where a helicopter was due to pick him up and fly him to safety. They get into a fight and Miguel throws a bottle of the aging serum at Cap only for him to launch the shield and shatter it leaving Miguel to get drenched and age about fifty years in a minute before dying of old age. Meanwhile, Wendy and Simon fly a plane with the antidote in over Portland and cure everyone there and Cap heads back to the farm to hang out with Helen.
Okay, let's make no bones about it, this is NOT a good film. However...unlike its predecessor and the '70s Spiderman films it at least does cross over into being so bad it's actually entertaining at times with the unwittingly hilarious fight sequences and there's admittedly a bit more plot to get your teeth into this time out. Plus Brown's acting has at least improved a little since the first film and Christopher Lee makes a suitably threatening main villain (though he's a bit underused until the final sequence) so it's at least not a total write-off. In short, don't go expecting anything massively worthwhile but if you're the sort of person who enjoys "so bad they're almost good" B-movies (and yeah, hands up, guilty as charged on that front) then this should at least give you a few yuckles.
This would turn out to be the last proper Marvel film for a good few years - as with Dr Strange, the idea for a Captain America TV series was never picked up and the project was put on ice although there would be another attempt to make a Captain America film a decade or so later (which we'll deal with when we come to it). By the end of the '70s though, it's fair to say that Marvel's star was on the wane with the Spiderman TV series being cancelled in 1979 and the Hulk one following suit in 1982. Looking at the poor quality of the films so far (just see the table below if you need proof), it's not really surprising - nearly all of them suffered from low budgets, poor scriptwriting, ridiculous amounts of padding to make up for the lack of substance in the plot and, with the exception of Christopher Lee in this film and Jessica Walter in Dr Strange, villains who simply didn't come across as any kind of threat to the main hero.
Technically, it would be another seven years before we'd see another Marvel film on the big screen which came along thanks to the intervention of George Lucas. Unfortunately despite a bigger budget, it'd turn out to be one of the most notorious flops in Marvel's cinematic history. However, before we get there, we're going to take a short detour into the mid-'80s and an "is it or isn't it?" trio of films which weren't originally Marvel characters but were in the Marvel comics group at the time the films came out so I'm gonna include them. More on that next week...
FINAL RATING: 🎯🎯🎯🎯 4/10
CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE
1. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
2. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (1979) (4/10)
3. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
4. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (1979) (3/10)
5. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
6. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)
NEXT WEEK: A Marvel film (sort of) with a bit of a bigger budget. And Arnie. This could go one of two ways...
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