Solomon Kane, a grim demon-slaying pilgrim in a slouch hat, is one of Howard’s more inspired creations, but the character hasn’t exactly launched the careers of any Republican governors, so it’s easy to see why the studio bean-counters backed “Conan” over “Kane.” This isn’t to say that “Solomon Kane” writer/director Michael J. Bassett (“Deathwatch”) has delivered a completely faithful adaptation of any of the original Kane stories, but he has crafted a solid sword and sorcery movie built mostly on James Purefoy’s (Mark Antony in HBO’s “Rome”) ability to be totally badassed in the title role while looking like a refugee from a Thanksgiving parade float. Joining Purefoy are the late Pete Postlethwaite (“The Town,” “Inception”) and Max von Sydow, who would’ve made an awesome Solomon Kane himself if Ken Russell or Dario Argento had directed this thing in the 1970s.

The film begins in 1600 with Kane snarling to “kill the putrid heathens” as he leads his band of pirates in a raid on a North African minaret. At the top of one of those stone staircases, demons pop out of mirrors to snatch Kane’s men into some dreaded abyss, and Kane barely escapes from a dark entity with a voice like Darth Vader who informs him that his “soul is damned.” Once back in a grim England, Kane renounces violence as he walks through a landscape of corpse burnings and hanged men being picked at by crows.

Thankfully, the obligatory origin material is kept to a minimum, and it’s not long before an evil necromancer called Malachi (Jason Flemyng of “X-Men: First Class”) starts rounding up villagers for no apparent reason. When Malachi’s goons butcher the puritan family that gave Kane his buckled hat, Kane finally reconsiders the nonviolence thing. “If I kill you, I am bound for hell,” Kane muses before adding that it’s a price he “shall gladly pay,” as he guts several attackers.

Once the evildoers kidnap the surviving Puritan girl (Rachel Hurd-Wood), Kane sets off on a horse-drawn carnage spree, cleaving Malachi’s followers to the bone in true Howardian fashion. En route to his final confrontation with the forces of Satan, Kane confronts a creepy witch girl, fights his way out of a tomb filled with hissing zombies, and is crucified for added oomph, recalling both the Tree of Woe scene in the first Schwarzenegger “Conan” movie and the finale of “The Sword and the Sorcerer,” the best bad fantasy film of all time.

Unlike the films that license his creations, Howard rarely let himself get bogged down with the genealogy of his heroes, usually going straight to the violence that pulp readers demanded.  From the moment that Kane, Conan or King Kull show up in a Howard story, “moving like panthers” with their “thews of steel,” we know who they are with only a few lines of florid prose to characterize them. While Bassett is as unwilling as the makers of other superhero movies to let his archetypes speak for themselves, he maintains Howard’s vision of Kane as an unstoppable force of piety who will pursue the girl and her abductors to the ends of the Earth. “Solomon Kane” also dispenses horror and action in the right measurements, and surprises with some atmospheric shots of the English (and Czech) countryside and above-average special effects.

As a fan of Robert E. Howard (and you can probably tell I am one), I can only look on with envy at how much Hollywood is cowed by the legions of Tolkien and J.K. Rowling admirers who will launch a blistering campaign of Tumblrs and tweets if their beloved fantasy figures are mishandled by the movie industry. Because of their numbers and veracity, those other fantasy fans are rewarded with Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and a well-crafted “Harry Potter” franchise, while Howard’s more ragtag following gets a series of studio tax write-offs.

But in “Solomon Kane” we have a glimpse of the Howard franchise made with some respect for the source material — at least if you can get your hands on it. “This movie has not been released on DVD,” Netflix warns in fine print. “Future availability is not guaranteed.”

In a little under two minutes, the “Norwegian Ninja” trailer combines the Scandinavian martial arts madness that the title suggests and footage of miniatures set ablaze with flames that look like they’re coming out of a Zippo lighter. And there are crazy-looking amphibious assault vehicles and sheep — lots and lots of sheep — and a synth score that resembles the repetitive triumphalist theme to the Chuck Norris epic “Delta Force,” only more somber and European. “Be one of us,” a stern blond man wearing glasses and a black karate uniform urges, “Be a Ninja.” I am so there.

With “Norwegian Ninja,” first-time writer-director Thomas Cappelen Malling somehow, against all odds, delivers a film that’s even stranger than its boffo trailer suggests. Malling bases his hallucinatory mishmash on the biggest case of espionage and treason in his country’s history. Arne Treholt was a Norwegian diplomat who was busted for passing secrets to the Soviets in 1984, but here he is reimagined as the patriotic commander of a crack team of ninjas dedicated to guarding “the Norwegian way of life.”

“No one will occupy us,” the heroic Treholt vows through subtitles, “neither Russians nor Americans.”

As it turns out, protecting Norway’s “sovereignty and self-sufficiency” seems to involve lots of philosophical discussions held around campfire barbecues, all in an island compound that looks like a petting zoo and is protected by Feng Shui. “System disharmony halts the flow of energy, slowing down intruders with illness and bad luck,” Treholt explains. When the ninjas do go out on missions to find marauding Russian subs or stop oil derricks from blowing up, they always seem to come up short. Mads Ousdal of Norway’s National Theater holds the lunacy together by playing Treholt with utter seriousness — even when he’s appearing and disappearing in puffs of smoke like a low-rent magician or flicking cigarettes into his mouth with action hero aplomb.

Squaring off against Treholt is Hans Otto Meyer (Jon Øigarden), another shadowy figure lifted from the annals of Norwegian conspiracy theories. Here, as well as certain corners of Wikipedia, Meyer works for Stay Behind, a CIA-backed covert op that stages train station bombings in Italy and other acts of terror all around Europe, and then blames it all on Soviet partisans to get these countries to allow U.S. bases on their soil. “Would you kill one person to save a thousand?” the Stay Behind field manual reads during a sequence of visual exposition. “Then you’d kill 4,500 to save all of Norway,” is the grim answer. Meyer even resembles G. Gordon Liddy and has a framed 8×10 of Ronald Reagan on his desk as he plots plane crashes and sabotage to “scare voters into the lap of the powers that be” and demands “war against an innocent scapegoat.”

The influence of Wes Anderson’s kooky visual and storytelling style is undeniable here (especially “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”), but the seriousness of “Norwegian Ninja’s” source material has it sharing common, albeit less bloodstained, ground with Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” (2009). While Tarantino clings to the “Dirty Dozen” paradigm of a band of gun-toting sociopaths shooting their way to freedom, Malling shows its absurdity by infusing the mundane and somber world of espionage with ridiculous amounts of hyper-macho super spy mythos. The real Treholt was just a bureaucrat attempting to pass some folders pulled from a ubiquitous gray file cabinet to other bureaucrats over a brunch of sausages. In the end, he was apprehended by airport police.

To illustrate his point, Malling intersperses scenes of ninja ass-kicking with old television news reports on the real Treholt and Meyer. And while this may be a silly movie, this disregard for nationalistic masculine fantasy goes at least a short way towards explaining Norway’s sober response to the recent massacre. After the attacks, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called for “more democracy, more openness and greater political participation” — a stark contrast to American politicians’ response to 9/11.

“A real ninja wins without fighting,” the fictional Treholt tells us in between explosions that look like sparklers. Now there’s a piece of chop-socky zen to think about.

After the July 22 release of the summer blockbuster “Captain America: the First Avenger,” we’ll probably see even more Captain Americas waving placards at protests for all parts of the political spectrum. The Red, White and Blue Avenger is and always has been a potent political image, but whose side would Captain America be on? Would he be a New Deal Democrat slinging his mighty shield for new public works programs or would he be rallying with the Tea Party to lower taxes on billionaires and gut Medicare? Whose Captain America is he anyway?

“He’s not just a guy in a flag suit,” former “Captain America” writer Steve Englehart says as he takes a break from signing copies of his latest fantasy-action novel, at the Big Wow ComicFest in San Jose, Calif.

“The problem comes from, I think, when people do say, ‘Well, he’s a guy in a flag suit,’” Englehart adds. “But he sort of transcends. He stands for America as an ideal, not America as it’s practiced.”

Englehart, a conscientious objector who was honorably discharged from the Army, took over the writing of “Captain American and the Falcon” in 1972 in the midst of the Vietnam War. To make the comic’s star-spangled superhero appeal to an antiwar youth audience, Englehart took on the duality and contradictions not only of the comic book superhero, but of America itself. During his first four issues (Nos. 153-156), the original Captain America, who was frozen in a block of ice at the end of the Roosevelt years and then thawed during the Johnson administration, battles a raging McCarthyite Cap from the paranoid 1950s. The ideological struggle between these alternate versions of the hero isn’t all that different from what might happen if the Rally to Restore Sanity and the Tea Party Caps came to actual blows with their plastic shields.

With the Watergate hearings underway, Englehart had Steve Rogers hang up his Captain America persona altogether in “Captain America and the Falcon” No. 176, a comic book dated August 1974 — the same month that Nixon resigned from the White House.

“He had thought that the ideal and the reality were the same thing, and finding out that it wasn’t threw him off and that was the basis for the whole story,” Englehart says, explaining the story line where Rogers took off the red, white and blue and became a darkly clad hero called Nomad for several issues, ending with No. 183 in 1975.

“He stood for something,” Englehart continues. “When what he stood for seemed not to exist or seemed to have been damaged, he couldn’t go out and stand for that anymore. Again, in my story, he eventually decided that having a Captain America was better than not having a Captain America, whatever was going on with America per se.”

Looking at the very first issue of “Captain America,” it’s easy to dismiss it as a piece of jingoistic wartime propaganda. After all, the cover has our hero leaping into a war room and punching out Hitler while Nazi goons fire their Lugers and machine guns at him. However, “Captain America” No. 1 hit stands in December 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II. While Captain America fit perfectly into the mood of the war effort once it got underway, co-creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon originally forged the character as a protest vehicle to stir a stubbornly isolationist America to action.

“To me, the times were screaming war,” Jack Kirby recalled during a 1989 or 1990 radio interview on “Hour 25″ that can now be found at Kirbymuseum.org. “To me the enemy was Hitler. The enemy was growing and growing, and I didn’t know where it was going to end, but every day something new would happen, and it was really scary. This was the kind of event that I felt was ruling our times and I felt it inside of me and it had to come out in some way.”

Kirby’s depiction of Hitler as a comic book villain had Nazis calling the artist at his office and threatening to “beat the daylights” out of him. “These were New York Nazis,” Kirby explained. “They had a camp on Long Island.” Growing up as a tough scrapper during the Depression on New York’s Lower East Side, Kirby was ready for a fight, but the Nazis never showed up.

“They wanted to fight, well, what the heck,” Kirby said flippantly, “I would do it.”

Jack Kirby passed away in 1994, but Joe Simon, now 97 years old, is still around. Simon supported President Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. He even re-created the iconic cover of “Captain America” No. 1 with Osama bin Laden replacing Hitler.

“We just couldn’t sit back and let this keep happening,” Simon told the Asbury Park Press in 2004. “We had to go in there. I know it’s very sad and everything, but I think he’s doing the right thing. I’m 100 percent behind [President Bush].”

However, an earlier interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer found Simon in a more reflective mood. “After Sept. 11, I redrew the cover of ‘Captain America’ No. 1, but put Osama bin Laden in place of Hitler,” he said. “But I just did it for myself. War is too sensitive a topic for comics to deal with today. “

In the comic books themselves, Captain America never fought the War on Terror as directly as he participated in World War II. Marvel instead preferred to keep its heroes in their own universe, using metaphors for current events that were safely open to interpretation. The “Civil War” crossover series by Mark Millar and Frank McNiven that ran from July 2006-January 2007 had Captain America and Iron Man taking opposing sides over a U.S. government Superhuman Registration Act, not the Patriot Act.

When Eisner Award-winning writer Ed Brubaker depicted a Tea Party protest in a slightly negative light in “Captain America” No. 602 in 2010, the right-wing blogosphere and Fox News cranked up their outrage machine, griping that Marvel was “making patriotic Americans” into “its newest super villains.” With a $140 million “Captain America” movie only a year away, Marvel had more to lose than back when it was just selling magazines. The company promised to remove the material that wounded the Tea Party’s sensibilities from future reprints of the series.

Joe Simon may have put it best when he said, “Things are far more complex than they were in the days when Captain America could punch Hitler in the jaw,” but the broad appeal of Captain America appears undiminished by recent controversies. In between Captain America’s appearances at the rallies to restore sanity and shut down the government, Mexican American pro-wrestler Rey Mysterio wore a Captain America costume during his match at WrestleMania XXVII in Atlanta. Mysterio’s outfit had a Mayan motif in place of the star on Cap’s chest, making the character more Meso-American than merely Norte Americano. It seems that Captain America may be the only thing that can bring this fractured country together, if we could only agree on who he is.