This expensive film version of the long-running comic strip by Dale Messick may have languished on the shelf long than any other major studio film in the last 20 years. Completed in '86, it had a run outside the U.S. in 1989 but didn't show up on these shores until 1992, and it really wasn't worth the wait. Sumptuously photographed by Freddie Francis and generally well cast, it's the poor direction and undeveloped scripting that make this perhaps the worst live-action film adaptation of a comic