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Captain America: The Winter Soldier was up first. It's the 2014 installment of the ongoing Captain America saga from Marvel Films. It's the second in the series and there's been another one, last April, but who knows when I'll get to see that. I'm not caring if I see something way after it's been released. Can't see everything when it comes out, even if it came out when you're alive. Often I'm seeing movies that were made when Cap was in the Army, you know, back in World War 2.
Chris Evans is back as Steve Rogers, Captain America, and he's working for Nick Fury at S.H.I.E.L.D. Samuel L Jackson plays Nick Fury and Scarlett Johansson plays Natasha Romanoff or the Black Widow. S.H.I.E.L.D. has been infiltrated by HYDRA all the way to the top of the organization. Their dirty plan is to launch three Helicarriers and use some magical algorithm to read people's media profiles and forecast who would be a problem to HYDRA's rule in the future. The Helicarriers will shoot all the people it thinks will be a problem, both now and in the future, to make the world a safer place for HYDRA to operate. They'll get world peace by killing millions of people. Good idea, huh.
Nick is killed and Captain America is suspected by Robert Redford. His smarmy behavior made me think he's going to be a piece of shit. I guessed right, he's a HYDRA guy and he's got the HYDRA tentacle so far up his ass that everyone should see it wiggling out his mouth when he talks. Robert is a Senator and he takes over S.H.I.E.L.D. when Nick is killed. Robert orders the agency to take Steve Rogers into custody because he won't tell what Nick said to him before he died.
Steve Rogers isn't having any of that, he hands out a beat down to the men who try. Steve joins forces with Natasha and an ex-soldier who becomes The Falcon. There's plenty of fighting, death, and collateral damage. There's a good bit of melodrama as Steve deals with the past. Since I'm seeing this some time after it came out I knew Nick would survive his death somehow and sure enough he turns up later in the movie. He joins up with Steve and his pals to put an end to the tainted S.H.I.E.L.D. I enjoyed the story well enough and the action scenes were pretty good. There's plenty of CGI and most of it looks good. I'm not happy with the design of the Helicarrier. The special area that stores the all important ship-running data cards is right out in the open on the bottom of the ship. It's something that seems designed by someone who hadn't thought about the security. Seems like a failure there. At least it helps bring the Helicarriers to their doom that much quicker.
I was happy to see it and enjoyed it more than a lot of the Marvel super hero movies. I'll probably see it again since I have a copy I got for a couple of bucks. One day I'll have caught up buying all the Marvel movies and watch them in one big gulp. I'm finding the DVDs at fairly cheap prices, $2-3 each, so I'm picking up those that I know I don't have. I got both of the fairly recent Fantastic Four movies for under 2 bucks each. At some point I'll make a list and check them all off.
Our second film was the 1999 Full Moon Pictures film Blood Dolls. It's written and directed by Charles Band. It's a weird one, there's a fight between millionaires and it turns to murder. One of the men, Virgil, is a twisted recluse. He's got a little tiny head and to make up for it he's filled with big evil. He turns 2 men and a woman into tiny living dolls that kill for him. He goes after two rival men who screwed him on a business deal. The wife of one of the men, she's got the brains in that house, fights back. She kills her hubby to frame Virgil but then offers up herself as his wife to build a bigger fortune.
Virgil lives in a big house with a clown faced butler, a dwarf and an all girl rock band in a cage. It's all pretty goofy and a lot more fun than most Full Moon pictures. It's not great, it seems to drag a bit in the last act, but it was worth seeing. I want to see it again sometime so I ordered a copy from Amazon, it was only 6 bucks. I also picked up a set of Gerry Anderson's The Protectors. Not sure how I'll like it but someday in the future I'll find out.
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