Year: 1992
Synopsis: The mysterious good wizard Doctor Anton Mordrid protects the Earth from the evil wizard Kabal.
Pros:
• Camp Supreme Jeffrey Combs (Mordrid) drives the film.
• Is visually interesting to watch, in spite of its minimal budget.
• It is admittedly fun in its low budget ridiculousness.
Cons:
• Generic and largely predictable story.
• Very thinly written.
• Sometimes too ridiculous for its own good.
• There is a large swath of the film were Mordrid is literally just standing around as an astral projection.
• There is something very familiar about all this …
Discussion:
This film may seem familiar to present day audiences — and many comic book followers, because it is an unofficial adaptation of Doctor Strange. It began as an official adaptation, however. For whatever reason, the filmmakers, B-Movie Supremes Albert and Charles Band, lost the film rights before they could start production. So, instead of scrapping the project, the Bands decided to rework it as an “original” film. Well, maybe not so original. The overall plot seems like any comic book film of the 1990s, which take much from Tim Burton’s rendition of Batman (1989), and is rather close to the official Doctor Strange adaption in 2016. Both films depict Strange/Mordrid protecting the Earth from a rogue sorcerer in league with something perceived as evil.
What does that all mean? If Mordrid became an official adaptation, the story might have been deeper. Mordrid is not really an origin story like the official adaption with much of the same plot. Yet, true origin story films, as we know them today, were not really en-vogue until the early 2000s. Doctor Mordrid has a “what might have been” vibe, and perhaps, just perhaps, it planted the seed in Hollywood’s consciousness that a mystical superhero can be as engaging as lucrative.
Related:
Doctor Strange
Rotten Tomatoes — N/A%
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