Other Reviews in this Series.
Director: Ivan Nagy
Writers: Wilton Schiller, Patricia Payne
Cast: Reb Brown, Connie Sellecca, Len Birman, Christopher Lee
Runtime: 83 mins.
1979
Captain America II: Death Too Soon is the 1979 sequel to the 1979 TV movie Captain America, and it is several orders of magnitude better than its predecessor. If you're in the market to watch one of these movies for camp purposes, it should undoubtedly be this one. It's not like you'll be missing anything important from the original's pointless wheel-spinning narrative.
In fact, the plot is a fair bit clearer and more straightforward. A mysterious terrorist who goes by the name General Miguel (Christopher Lee) plans to hold the entire town of Portland hostage by dropping an aging serum on their heads. Miguel is in hiding, pretending to be a prison warden at a local penitentiary. Steve Rogers (Reb Brown) must investigate a small town where something suspicious is going on, so that he might ultimately discover Miguel's location and let Captain America take care of business. Meanwhile, in an irrelevant B-plot, our favorite scientists Dr. Simon Mills (Len Birman) and Dr. Wendy Day (conspicuously replaced by Connie Sellecca--didn't this character used to be blonde??) are working on a cure for the virus. They deliver exposition ably, but fail at everything else.
The film still takes a little too long to reveal what is going on in the town, but the plot is for the most part less obtuse. This is very much to the film's advantage, because the last thing this movie should want is for us to start using our brains to figure out what is happening. Everything about the story is ridiculous, of course, but it's well within the reasonable bounds of schlock sci-fi. Steve Rogers taking time to woo a single mother and hang out at her farm with her kid is a less forgivable narrative misstep.
That being said, you can shrug that stuff off with a laugh because, unlike Captain America, Captain America II doesn't spend an ungodly amount of time on every single sequence. It sets up what it needs to, knocks it down, and awkwardly edits into the next scene. Parts of it still drag, but at least we're not watching a doofus go off motorcycle jumps for five to ten minutes at a time.
