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The Fantastic Four

  • Title: The Fantastic Four (1994)
  • IMDb: link

After holding onto the movie rights for nearly a decade, and with the clock ticking down, German producer Bernd Eichinger reached to Roger Corman to produce a super-hero film on the cheap for only $1,000,000. With only a month of shooting, but several months of post-production, the film seemed to be ready for Labor Day 1993, until it wasn’t. Parties disagree whether the film was ever meant to see the light of day, or simply as leverage to keep the rights in Eichinger’s hands, but either way the film was pulled and never release theatrically. And so the stories began about The Fantastic Four movie that never was. And yet, speaking before Fantastic Four: The First Steps hits theaters, one could make a case that it’s better, or at least certainly not worse, than any of the FF films that did get released over the next 30 years.

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Small Soldiers

  • Title: Small Soldiers
  • IMDb: link

Originally intended to be  slightly edgier teenage fair until the studio decided to make it more fan friendly during production in order to cash-in on promotional tie-ins, 1998’s Small Soldiers became a mix of those two concepts leading to a lukewarm reaction by both critics and moviegoers. You can certainly see director Joe Dante struggling to serve both masters, especially given how much of the film was shot prior to the imposed change in direction.

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Commando

  • Title: Commando
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back 40 years to perhaps the most Schwarzenegger movie Arnold Schwarzenegger ever made. More than 20 years before Taken, Schwarzenegger stars as retired Special Forces Colonel John Matrix. After a precredit sequence showing several other former soldiers killed, and a goofy credit montage showing Matrix living it up in the woods as a stay-at-home dad, Matrix’s daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano) is kidnapped by an old enemy (Dan Hedaya) and an old friend (Vernon Wells) who plan to blackmail Matrix into committing an assassination. Matrix, however, has other ideas and begins killing his way back to his daughter.

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The Puntastic Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle

  • Title: The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back to the year 2000 and the adventures of a moose and squirrel. Adapted from the 60s cartoon, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle brought Rocky the Flying Squirrel (June Foray) and Bullwinkle J. Moose (Keith Scott) into the real world to stop the latest nefarious plot by Fearless Leader (Robert De Niro), Natasha Fatale (Rene Russo), and Boris Badenov (Jason Alexander) to use television to take over the world. Their guide on their journey through the real world is plucky young FBI Agent Karen Sympathy (Piper Perabo) who needs to get the two beloved 60s cartoon characters from Hollywood to New York in time to foil the villains’ plot.

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Heads of State

  • Title: Heads of State
  • IMDb: link

Heads of State is a particularly dumb action-comedy starring John Cena and Idris Elba as the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Britain who must put their mutual animosity aside when a terrorist organization attempts to kill them as part of a larger conspiracy to destroy NATO. We also get Priyanka Chopra Jonas as a MI6 officer, and former flame to the British Prime Minister, who eventually teams up with the pair in an attempt to get both of them to Italy alive. The most interesting moment of the entire film comes in the form of a montage flashback sequence explaining how she caught up with them which, from the looks of it, would have made a far better film than the one we got.

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