Doctor Mordrid (1992)

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At the turn of the 1990s, Marvel licensing its characters to absolutely everyone in the hopes of finally getting films made. B-movie outfit Full Moon, for example, was meant to do a Dr. Strange movie, but the option expired and rather than shelve the project, Full Moon's waste-not, want-not attitude decreed the movie should just be rewritten with the numbers filed off. And so was born Doctor Mordrid, which is somehow more on model than the 1979 Dr. Strange TV pilot. This back story gives the cheap B-movie an extra layer of interest, as you squint throughout wondering what might have been (like, was Kabal Baron Mordo?). Jeffrey Combs is fine as an off-puttingly disconnected immortal sorcerer, but man, it does not serve the romantic subplot at all. He's too creepy for his charms to work on his co-star, Yvette Nipar. X-Files' slab-faced alien bounty hunter himself, Brian Thompson, plays Kabal with the expected gusto, but his scenes are often stolen by a henchman with ridiculous dialog, who looks like Andrew Garfield as a heavy metal fan. The effects are at least a decade out of date, and the climax's pacing really needs better editing, but you can count on director Charles Band to have fun with it, and at 74 minutes, this strange take on a Marvel hero doesn't overstay its welcome. Now how about writing Full Moon a check and giving Mordrid a cameo in Multiverse of Madness? 2 years ago