Marvel Mondays #12 - The Punisher (1989)

Confession time - I'll admit to having not seen the new(-ish) Marvel Netflix "Punisher" series yet but I'm led to understand that it's very good ultra-violent fun. Having seen the character introduced in series 2 of Daredevil, I'm hoping that it lives up to the hype.

However, it wasn't always like this. Before Marvel brought the series back in house and gave it a good old Netflix reboot a la Daredevil, the Punisher was largely known for being one of those franchises that people had attempted to repeatedly bring to the silver screen with disappointing results (see also the Fantastic Four and pre-Chris Evans Captain America). Today we're looking at the first of the three Punisher films, released way back in 1989.

So you can imagine the conversation among the director, producer etc when this film got the green light:

"Hey guys, great news, we've got Marvel's permission to do a Punisher film!"
"Awesome, Frank Castle, the all-American vigilante badass! Who shall we get to play him?"
"I know, how about Ivan Drago?"
"I LOVE IT!"

Yes, for reasons best known to themselves it was decided that Dolph Lundgren, fresh from playing the Rooskie baddie in Rocky 4 would be given the job of playing Frank Castle in the first Punisher film. Having said that, if he gets to utter the phrase "If he dies, he dies..." during the film then I'll forgive 'em.

The film starts with a Mafia boss being released from jail and a news reporter asking him if he's worried about being attacked by the Punisher who has apparently bumped off 125 (!) villains in the past five years. The guy laughs it off and goes home to celebrate.

Two minutes later, his henchmen have been bumped off (including a lynching scene which is oddly reminiscent of Richie from "Bottom" in the Christmas special) and his mansion's blown up. Morale of the story - do not mess with the Punisher.

At the crime scene, one of the detectives, Berkowitz, tries to reason with the police chief that Frank Castle is the Punisher but he's dismissed out of hand as the police believe Castle has been dead for five years. However, he's overheard by another detective Leary who also believes this theory and together the two are determined to get to the bottom of the case. During a flashback shortly afterwards, we learn that Castle's family were wiped out in a botched mob hit during with everyone assuming that he had perished in it as well.

Castle also has a sort of henchman called Shake, an English hobo and former actor who's kind of similar to a good guy version of Turk Barratt from Daredevil/Luke Cage. The first time we're introduced to him, we see Castle luring him into a back alley using a whiskey bottle on top of a remote controlled toy truck (!). Shake informs Castle that a large shipment of heroin will be arriving at the docks that night with all five Mafia families dividing up the rewards between them - apparently the Punisher's antics have weakened the mob to the extent that they're now having to co-operate with each other.

Frank turns up in time to see the deal going ahead but before he can open fire, the mobsters are ambushed and wiped out by the Yakuza who attempt to make off with the drugs. Frank takes off after them on his motorcycle and manages to send the van and the narcotics to the bottom of the harbour but is then shot by a Yakuza gunman and falls in the water himself (although we see that he survives and makes his way back to his hideout in the sewers).

The Mafia dons are visited by the Yakuza's leader Lady Tanaka who offers them a 75/25 split on all drugs traffic in New York. The mafiosi reject her outright and she vows to force her decision on them. Cue the children of the dons being kidnapped by Yakuza gangsters.

Shake contacts Castle and tries to persuade him to rescue the kids. Although Castle is initially reluctant (now here would have been the perfect spot for an "if he dies, he dies" line), Shake convinces him. The pair arrive at a deserted fairground on Coney Island where the children are supposed to be being held. Inevitably it turns out to be a trap  and after an almighty punch-up, Castle is captured and taken to be tortured with Shake.

Tanaka tries to get information out of Castle but fails so leaves her chief interrogator to finish the job. Unfortunately for him, Castle has managed to unshackle himself and gives the guy a taste of his own medicine, eventually finding out where the children are actually being held. For some reason, the Yakuza bloke appears to be wearing stilettos - not sure what that's about...

Thinking that it's checkmate, all but one of the Mafia dons agree to meet with Tanaka and pay a ransom for their children's release. However, it was a trap with three of the mafiosi being tricked into drinking poisoned champagne and the fourth being shot by Tanaka.

Castle nicks a bus (though he's nice enough to let the wino asleep on the back seat off at his home stop) to go and rescue the kids from the warehouse where they're being held. He gets there just before the kids are due to be sold into slavery to Arabs and rescues them, taking the guards out along the way. However, one of the kids, the son of the remaining surviving Mafia boss Gianni Franco, gets lost during the escape and is recaptured by the Yakuza.

Castle makes his escape from the Orientals with the other kids in the bus with a car chase scene featuring plenty of explosions etc. However, he's stopped at a police blockade - although the kids are rescued, Castle is arrested for his previous murders.

In his cell, he's visited by Berkowitz who it turns out was Castle's protege back when he was a police officer. However, he's not interested in talking and Berkowitz storms off in disgust, later quitting the force. This means that the next day Castle is taken to prison with Leary accompanying him who's angry about Castle's treatment of Berkowitz. However, before they can argue too much the bus is stopped by Franco's men who abduct Castle.

Franco takes Castle back to his headquarters where he apologises for the mafia hit that wiped out his family five years ago and asks for Castle's help in rescuing his son from the Yakuza. Frank tells him to go to hell but it turns out the Mafia have captured Berkowitz. Feeling a bit guilty for his previous treatment of his old buddy, Castle agrees to help Franco.

With a bit of help from Shake, Castle and Franco storm the Yakuza HQ for a big vicious climactic fight scene and shoot, stab and bludgeon their way to the top of the building to rescue Franco's son Tommy. Tanaka is killed with a dagger through the forehead while her assassin daughter has her neck wrung by Castle.

Unsurprisingly though, Franco tries to stab Castle in the back, telling him that now he's helped him wipe out all the other criminal organisations in New York, he's in prime position to clean up, especially if he kills the Punisher as well. The two struggle but in the end Castle gets the fatal shot on Franco. An upset Tommy goes to shoot Castle but can't bring himself to do so. Castle tells Tommy to go away and grow up a good man unlike his father, warning him that if he does otherwise he'll be seeing him again.

It's not awful but the first "Punisher" film is definitely no better than average I'm afraid. It's easy to laugh at Dolph Lundgren's terrible acting but let's be honest, that isn't really the point with films like this and at least it's action-packed enough to just about keep your interest for an hour and a half. As with most of the '80s Marvel films it's very much of its time and although the body count is staggeringly high, compared to...well, the Punisher TV series for a start, the violence is fairly tame by today's standards. However, if you're into no-brainer '80s shoot-'em-up films, there's plenty worse out there I guess...

As we said at the beginning, there would be a couple more Punisher reboots in the early 20th century. But that's another story for another time...

FINAL RATING: 💀💀💀💀💀 (5/10)

CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE

1. The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) (6/10)
2. Conan The Barbarian (1982) (6/10)
3. Conan The Destroyer (1984) (6/10)
4. The Punisher (1989) (5/10)
5. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
6. Red Sonja (1985) (4/10)
7. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (4/10) (1979)
8. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
9. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (3/10) (1979)
10. Howard The Duck (1986) (2/10)
11. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
12. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: Hulk meets Daredevil! Now there's a crossover you didn't see coming...

Marvel Mondays #11: The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)

So I'm guessing we all saw "Thor: Ragnarok" at the pictures a couple of months back then? I have to say, I thought it was one of my favourite MCU films so far. Let's be honest, any film with Thor and Loki in it is cool by me (especially given the excellent dynamic between them of two guys who pretty much hate each others' guts but can't seem to get rid of each other due to their destinies being interlinked) and when you add in the Hulk and a host of other cool characters and a smart script, it's pretty much a guaranteed home run. Yup, let's just say that when I finally come round to reviewing that one for the blog in about 15 months' time (!), I'm very much looking forward to it.

However, if you thought that this was the first time Hulk and Thor have shared the big screen together, you would be very much mistaken. And no, it wasn't in the first "Avengers" film either. For that you'd have to go way way back to 1988 and the subject of this week's Marvel Monday, "The Incredible Hulk Returns".

As we've not yet covered the Hulk on this blog, I guess we should probably go into a bit of background here - the Incredible Hulk TV series was actually piloted around the same time as "Spiderman" about ten years before this. However, unlike Spidey, the series was picked up on both sides of the Atlantic and went on to have a decent five year run hence the episodes by and large only appeared on the small screen and although a couple of "double episodes welded together to make a feature film" specials were made, their cinematic release was pretty limited. The series starred Bill Bixby as Dr David (not Bruce) Banner and Lou Ferrigno as his big green alter ego. However, by 1982 viewing figures were falling off and the series was cancelled by its US network CBS. Bixby, however, was keen to revive it and after leaving Universal who'd put the TV programmes together, took the series over to NBC. Although the first planned effort to revive the Hulk, a "Hulk vs Spiderman" programme idea which would have also seen Nicholas Hammond returning as Spidey, never came to fruition, Bixby was nothing if not persistent and in 1988, "The Incredible Hulk Returns" hit TV screens in the States and cinema screens in the UK and Europe. The plan for the film was two-fold - one to launch a new Hulk series and two to launch a spin-off starring the film's other main character (and fellow Marvel comics mainstay) Thor, played by Eric Allan Kramer. Unfortunately neither idea was picked up and Bixby would go back to the drawing board for "The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk", another crossover which never got beyond the pilot stage and which we'll come to in a couple of weeks here. But first...just how did Ragnarok translate to the world of '80s movies?...

The story picks up about five years after the Hulk TV series ended with Banner having settled in California and taken a job at the Joshua Lambert Institute as a nuclear scientist under the pseudonym of David Banyon. His chief project is building a Nuclear Transponder, ostensibly as a device for removing radiation from people infected by it. Of course, the underlying reason is that he's building something to cure himself of the radiation in his blood that makes him turn into the Hulk. Banner is also romantically involved with a young widow working at the institute called Maggie Shaw and due to being somewhat more content than of late, hasn't transformed into the Hulk in two years.

One night at the institute, Banner is putting the final touches to the Transponder when he's interrupted by a former student of his, Donald Blake (played by Steve Levitt), who's just started working there. Blake explains that he needs Banner's advice on something - prior to working at the Institute, he was on a scientific expedition to Norway where he came across the tomb of an ancient warrior and found a warhammer buried alongside the warrior's skeleton. Contained within the hammer is the spirit of the Viking warrior Thor who was barred from Valhalla by the god Odin for transgressions committed during his life and now needs to complete a certain number of heroic deeds to get his entry pass back.

Thor is now bound to serve Blake much to the annoyance of both of them (again, a slight change from the comic books here where Thor possesses Blake's body and the two change identities whenever Blake picks up the hammer) as Thor is pissed off that he's got a nerdy weakling like Blake as his overlord and Blake desperately wants to get rid of Thor due to the amount of trouble he causes. Apparently he's tried to get rid of the hammer but every time he does, he wakes up the next morning to find it's back again.

Banner is sceptical about the story and suggests that Blake has in fact gone nuts which prompts him to bring the hammer out of his bag to prove his point. Of course, summoning up a viking in a scientific lab is not the most sensible of ideas and Thor manages to knock a cabinet off the wall believing it to be a fridge containing beer. Banner tries to stop him but Thor accidentally throws him into a computer console.

Uh-ohhhh...

Sure enough, this leads to Banner turning into the Hulk and a Hulk vs Thor brawl in the lab with half the equipment getting smashed. Thor temporarily manages to stun the Hulk using his hammer but this only works for a few seconds before Hulk recovers and chucks the Norseman through a window.

Thor offers a truce with Hulk but the latter hears the police sirens approaching and does a runner. Bad editing here as we can see that someone forgot to paint the soles of Lou Ferrigno's feet green!

Banner wakes up in an alleyway the next morning and manages to procure himself a new shirt from someone's washing line. The first person he runs into is Thor who apologises for the previous night and takes him to Blake's car which is waiting at the bottom of the alley.

Banner obviously isn't best pleased with Blake but the latter offers to help him repair the Transponder as a way of saying sorry. However, unbeknown to both of them, there's skulduggery afoot. Firstly, Joshua Lambert's younger brother Zach is working as a "man on the inside" for a criminal consortium with designs on stealing the Transponder and using it for their own ill-gotten ends (though what exactly these are is never really elaborated on during the film). Secondly, Banner's old nemesis Jack McGee (a journalist who was perpetually unsuccessfully trying to prove that the Hulk and Banner were the same person during the TV series) has also reappeared on the scene and is up to his old tricks. He makes an appearance at the Institute on the premise of doing a feature on the place one day causing Banner to do a runner.

Meanwhile, Banner has suggested that Blake spend a bit of time with Thor to try and establish a friendship with him. It turns out that Thor is still pretty downcast about being thrown out of Valhalla but is keen to work with Blake to right the wrongs he committed in his past life. Blake suggests that the two of them go to a biker bar for an evening of bonding which leads to a fun sequence with Thor downing jugs of beer, engaging in an arm-wrestling contest with some bikers and having a line-dance with a couple of cowgirls while Blake gets paralytic.

Back at the Institute though, sinister goings-on are afoot. A team of hoodlums turn up to try and kidnap Banner but they make the mistake of beating him up and causing him to turn into the Hulk who goes berserk on the no-goodniks causing them to flee. Hulk staggers off towards Maggie's beach house where she finds him unconscious on the sand having turned back into Banner.

The next day, Maggie asks Banner to tell her what's going on but their conversation is interrupted by the kidnappers turning up again and making off with Maggie after stunning her and the Hulk using sedative darts. Blake and Thor turn up but they're marginally too late as the villains take off in a helicopter leading to Hulk and Thor shaking their fists at the sky as it flies away...

Back at Banner's flat, our intrepid trio are trying to work out where the villains have taken Shaw to. They're briefly interrupted by McGee turning up but the sight of a half-naked Thor answering the door is understandably enough to scare him off. Eventually, they get a phone call from the bad guys saying that if Banner brings the Transponder over then they'll let Shaw go.

Left with no choice, Banner sticks the Transponder's CPU in a microwave which prevents the data from falling into the wrong hands but leaves him back at square one regarding finding a cure for his condition. Meanwhile, Zach loses his nerve with the kidnapping which leads to the gang shooting him. In the hospital and on life support, he tells Banner that Shaw is being held at a warehouse downtown.

Thor, Blake and Banner head to the warehouse but as they're plotting they are disturbed by Joshua Lambert turning up swearing vengeance for his brother who it turns out died shortly after Banner left. Banner tries to talk him out of it but the two get into a bout of fisticuffs which leads to Banner turning into the Hulk and lifting Josh's car off the ground!

Cue the big end-of-film punch up in the warehouse which is enjoyable (and suitably daft) enough with Hulk and Thor running riot and eventually rescuing Shaw before legging it off down an alleyway to allow Blake to claim credit as the have-a-go hero.

The film ends with Blake, Thor and Banner all deciding to move on to pastures new (with Thor pausing to chat up a beach bunny while walking Shaw's dog). McGee is yet again a laughing stock and fired once more from his paper while Banner spends one last night with Maggie before saying his farewells and hitching a ride on to his next destination.

Okay, y'know what, I'm just gonna come right out and say it - I liked this movie a lot more than I was expecting to. Yes, it's very much of its time but at least unlike the Spiderman/Captain America films from a decade earlier, there's an actual plot to get your teeth into here and the action scenes and dialogue (especially when Thor's involved) are entertaining. Also, the chemistry between Blake, Thor and Banner/Hulk works better than it really has any right to and makes "The Incredible Hulk Returns" a surprisingly enjoyable hour and a half of '80s no-brainer entertainment. In other words, don't go expecting the depth of the modern Marvel movies but for what it is, this isn't bad at all and for that reason, it's going to the top of the table.

Sadly, a Thor TV series never materialised (a shame as I think it definitely had some potential on the evidence here) but Bixby and Ferrigno would be back the following year with another Hulk crossover film which we'll deal with in a couple of weeks' time...

FINAL RATING: 👊👊👊👊👊👊 (6/10)

CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE

1. The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) (6/10)
2. Conan The Barbarian (1982) (6/10)
3. Conan The Destroyer (1984) (6/10)
4. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
5. Red Sonja (1985) (4/10)
6. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (4/10) (1979)
7. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
8. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (3/10) (1979)
9. Howard The Duck (1986) (2/10)
10. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
11. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: The Punisher! Starring...Ivan Drago?!?