September 22

5 Rentals for $5 – 1990s Superhero Movies

As a quick preface to this post (and future posts), my local video store growing up, Captain Video in Cohoes NY, used to have a sweet deal where you could rent five old releases for five dollars for five days. Great deal right? Well as you can imagine, this deal came in handy for many a sleepover growing up…where you’d fire up the VCR and watch movies until your eyes just couldn’t stay open any longer. So “5 Rentals for $5” will be a recurring feature where we here at Saturday Night Movie Sleepovers will provide lists of five movies that would make for an awesome themed sleepover.

On with the show….

punisherposterThough Mark Goldblatt’s The Punisher was originally released internationally in 1989, alongside Tim Burton’s mega-blockbuster Batman, it didn’t find its way to the USA until 1991; making it an ideal sleepover rental for the (then) tweens of Dion’s and my generation. Because we are currently thought of as being in the midst of the “era” of the superhero film, it is easy to forget that the success of 1989’s Batman ushered in an entire decade of films focusing on masked heroes, mutant turtles and Power Rangers. So for those of you longing to get a little nostalgic or simply just looking to do a anthropological study about what primitive man watched during the Silver Age of home video, here’s a list of just five of the superhero films that the 90s had to offer that may be worth a revisit.
Continue reading

Category: 5 Rentals for $5 Movie Lists | Comments Off on 5 Rentals for $5 – 1990s Superhero Movies
September 20

The Punisher ” 1989

In the inaugural edition of J. Blake and Dion Baia‘s new podcast Saturday Night Movie Sleepovers, the boys fittingly pick the forgotten, some may even call lost and dark Marvel Comics classic, Mark Goldblatt’s The Punisher from 1989, starring Dolph Lundrgen and Lou Gossett Jr.

punisherposter

They go in depth about the film, discuss the era and climate it came out in, and perhaps why it was so quickly pushed to the wayside (for the right or wrong reasons) and if it truly deserved its inescapable fate. Was it as bad as we all remember?  Did it do the character Frank Castle the justice he deserved? Is it actually a good film that has shades of newer movies that we now deem ‘classics’? Will we ever see such a politically incorrect film quite like this ever be produced from Marvel again? Well… come on down and have a listen and find out! (And check out some great scenes that didn’t get passed the cutting room floor.)