Marvel Mondays #1 - Spiderman (1977)

So here we go, part 1 of the Marvel Mondays series (see previous blog entry for more info). For our first instalment, we're going back to the first Marvel film of the modern era - 1977's "Spiderman".

Marvel had actually had one cinematic release prior to this which was a 15-part Captain America serial way back in 1944 but as it was a series rather than a film, I'm gonna discount it (don't worry Captain America fans, he'll show up on this list soon enough). In 1977 however, CBS gave the green light for a pilot episode of Spiderman to be filmed as a potential lead-in for a new TV series. It was a success and the series was commissioned in the States. However, as the series never made it outside the US, the pilot episode was released as a film in the UK and Europe (as were a couple of other episodes as follow-ups but we'll deal with them in future instalments of this blog).

The first thing you need to bear in mind if you're gonna watch this thing (and this goes for a lot of the early films that we're going to cover in this blog) is that it was made 40 years ago so REALLY don't go expecting the sort of CGI that you see in the modern day Marvel films. Because of this, I'm gonna try and judge it on its merits for the time and on that front it's...well, about average I s'pose.

You probably know the plot by now - student and part-time newspaper photographer Peter Parker (him in the photo above) gets bitten by a radioactive spider one day while he's working in the college lab. After he gets chased down an dead end alley by an out of control car and suddenly finds he's able to scale a 50 foot wall to escape, he realises he's now got superpowers including climbing walls (for some reason he always goes headfirst when he's climbing down them - not sure how that works!) and firing webs.  While he's getting to grips with his newfound abilities, his home city of New York is coping with a series of weird incidents where upstanding citizens (doctors, lawyers, judges, professors etc) are suddenly going rogue, pulling bank jobs and then driving their cars into walls putting themselves into comas before the police can question them (including the one that Peter had his narrow escape from).

So who's behind this you might ask? Dr Octo? The Green Goblin maybe? Erm, nope - the villain is a guy called Byron who's a self-help guru who's been meddling with hypnotic technology to turn the people attending his self-help classes into unwitting accomplices for his criminal activities. And for me, that's kind of the main downer on this film - it just doesn't really feel like a Spiderman film. Rather than fighting some kind of scary supervillain, Byron feels more like a villain from Starsky and Hutch or maybe the '90s Superman series.

As with a lot of Marvel films of this era, it also feels like there's a lot of padding here including two failed attempts by Spidey to break into Byron's headquarters where he basically fights three karate thugs for a bit and runs away which feel a bit pointless.

Aaanyway, the whole thing comes to a head when Byron announces that he's hypnotised ten New Yorkers to jump to their deaths from various Big Apple landmarks - the Hudson River bridge, in front of a subway train etc, unless the mayor delivers $50 million to his goons on a boat in New York harbour. Due to a run-in with Byron and a hypno-device being placed on his jacket, Peter Parker ends up being unwittingly becoming one of the ten victims and is told to go up to the top of the Empire State Building and jump off. However, his badge is knocked off by one of the spikes on the balcony there (how handy) allowing Spidey to run back uptown (must've been incredibly quick is all I can say!), knock out the transmitter, capture Byron and save the day.

Looking back at this film 40 years on, it obviously hasn't aged very well - the special FX look unsurprisingly shonky and the fight scenes are more inadvertently funny than anything else (watch out, he's gonna tap that table with his kendo stick!). The film also drags quite a bit and the lack of a decent villain hurts it as well. Yet there's enough here to ensure that at least it's not a total disaster, at least by the era's standards. Nicholas Hammond makes a decent enough Parker/Spidey, Lisa Eilbacher is engaging enough as his love interest, the daughter of one of the professors caught up in the bank jobs and David White is good fun as the hard bitten Noo Yoiker police chief who Parker keeps having run-ins with.

Like a lot of Marvel films from this era, this is probably more of interest as a curio only but it passes an hour and half okay I s'pose. And as it's the first film we've reviewed on this thing, it automatically goes straight to the top of the Marvel film league table! Though I suspect it may not stay there for very long...

FINAL RATING: 🕸🕸🕸🕸 (4/10)

CURRENT MARVEL LEAGUE TABLE

1. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)

NEXT WEEK: Hold on, where's Cumberbatch? The first Dr Strange film...