Albert Pyun's 1990 'Captain America' Is Getting A Director's Cut

When is another studio's movie a marketing dream? When you're sitting on a twenty-year old stinker that can ride the coattails of another company's marketing push to make a few extra bucks. Such is the case with the 1990 version of Captain America directed by Albert Pyun. Whether the movie might have ever been good is open to question. But the film's financial backing withered just as production began, and so what was designed as a superhero flick with a respectable budget became a cheapo exercise in just making do with what was at hand.

Now director Albert Pyun reveals that a director's cut of the film — with thirty extra minutes! — will hit Blu-ray in May, just before the new Captain America opens.

So what's different in this new cut? He tells io9 that it is built from "my own 35 mm CA work picture and temp mix [that] I did before I left [the] picture," and that the 124-minute edit will have "a few added scenes, and is more character-oriented and less 'super hero action.'"

A few added scenes? When the cut is jumping from 97 minutes to 124? Are they all eight-minute monologues?

As bad as the film is — and it is definitely bad — I have to respect the fact that Albert Pyun forged ahead even when circumstances changed to such a degree that many productions would have just crumbled. Perhaps there was no legal way to do anything else, but still: that's what filmmaking is sometimes. Have to work with what you've got, even when that turns out to be not anything like what you want or need. So, yeah, I'll watch the director's cut, just to see what it offers.

The film will be on Blu-ray in May, and will be shown at Fantasia in Montreal and at the B-Movie Celebration in Indiana this September.

Here's the trailer: