Marvel Mondays #3: Spiderman Strikes Back (1978)

Week three of my trawl through the Marvel back catalogue then and it's a second dose of Spidey for you. "Spiderman Strikes Back" was, depending on which side of the Atlantic you live on, the pilot episode for the Spiderman TV series in the States or the second Spiderman film to be released in cinemas in the UK and Europe. We looked at its predecessor, "Spiderman" a couple of weeks ago on this blog and to be honest, while there's worse Marvel films out there, it suffered from long periods of not very much happening and the lack of a genuinely threatening villain. So, could ABC get it right second time out? Let's see...

This sequel is set a year after the original Spiderman film with Peter having moved out of Aunt May's house and got his own flat while still splitting his time between working at the Daily Bugle as a photographer and studying at college. The only other characters to return from the original film are Peter's boss at the Bugle J Jonah Jamieson (though it's a different actor playing the part this time) and Michael Pataki as Captain Barbera, Parker's contact at the NYPD (sensible as he was one of the better things about the first film).

The plot then - one of Peter's science lecturers announces to his class that he has managed to procure some plutonium to help with the experiments he's doing which raises the ire of a trio of CND type students who plot to steal the plutonium as a way to make a statement as to how dangerous nuclear material is. Um yeah, you can already see that this thing's gonna have more plot holes than a Swiss cheese can't you?

Meanwhile, Spiderman's heroics have attracted the attention of a reporter from the national Examiner paper called Gail Hoffman who turns up at the Bugle asking if she can shadow Peter for a bit to hopefully get an interview with Spiderman. Cue ninety minutes of Parker pretty much pulling excuses out of his arse about why you never see him and Spidey in the same place at the same time. Fairly amusing the first time, less so by about the 16th...

Anyway, the CND student types steal the plutonium from the lab. Spiderman goes to stop them but he arrives too late and only succeeds in getting seen leaving the building by the security guards making him (and by extension Peter who everyone assumes is Spidey's best mate) number one suspect in the case. The students are expecting the story to be a big panic front page headline but it ends up being relegated to page 10 on the Bugle with an expert commenting that the plutonium isn't really dangerous anyway. Rather than accepting that they should really just give the f**k up at this point, they decide to make their point as to how dangerous the stuff is by building a nuclear bomb using their flat which just so happens to have a handy laboratory capable of handling nuclear waste in it.

Okay, let's just take a rain check here - this has got to be the stupidest plot to a film that I've ever come across. Peace-loving hippy students steal nuclear waste and then decide to build a bomb from it to demonstrate that nuclear waste is bad. Oh and they've managed to set up a lab for building stuff with plutonium in one of them's flat on a student budget. It's...just...GGGAAAHHHH! HOW DID THIS FILM EVER GET MADE WITHOUT SOMEONE SAYING THIS IS F**KING STUPID?! Anyway, yes, sorry - word gets out about the robbery to an LA-based villain called Mr White (who looks more like Burt Reynolds as dressed by Colonel Sanders than a Spiderman baddie) who decides to head from his holiday home in Switzerland (!) across to New York and nick some of the waste for himself.

Unsurprisingly, he succeeds as one of the students ends up falling ill with radiation poisoning (duh) and has to be taken to the hospital by the other two. With the cops initially having arrested Peter, he ends up released with an apology after they turn themselves in but the incident still results in him being fired from the Bugle. Meanwhile, with the nuclear-lab-in-a-flat unattended, White's goons simply waltz in and take the bomb. Spiderman attempts to stop them but only ends up getting thrown off a roof by one of them and saving himself by spinning a web across the alley to break his fall before placing a transmitter bug on their getaway car.

We're about halfway through the film now but the rest of it is such a non-event that I'm gonna skim through it quickly for the sake of all our sanities. Peter and Gail track White back to LA with Jamieson tagging along to keep an eye on them (having given Peter his job back and on the premise that he gets a major scoop out of it). They get involved in a car/bike chase with White's two thugs (a big seven foot bloke and the most inept karate henchman you ever did see) and, having already got into a scrap with them twice in New York, fight them about three more times, first on an old Wild West movie set, then in a music studio and finally at White's mansion. The fight scenes are pretty much interchangable and dull as ditchwater to be honest.

In the meantime, Gail gets kidnapped and forced to lounge around the pool in a bikini by White prior to Spidey finally turning up and defeating the thugs at about the fifth attempt. He doesn't even manage to catch White who has taken the bomb downtown and left it on a building next to the stadium where the President is due to give a big speech that day. Spidey flies in on a helicopter, jumps on to the top of the building and defuses the bomb about three minutes after White has left and about five seconds before it's due to go boom. That's it. No big final showdown, no villain getting brought to justice, just a bloke defusing a bomb on top of a tower block. Talk about the most anticlimactic movie ending ever...

Overall judgment - good lord this film is BAD. Even ignoring the 40 odd years of cinematic progress since it was made, it just seems to have taken all the bad bits from the first Spiderman and made them ten times worse. Loads of padding? Check. Repetitive fight scenes? Check. Underwhelming villain who looks more like he belongs in a Starsky and Hutch episode? Check. Add to that the stupid ending which doesn't resolve anything and this one's a real stinker frankly. There would be one more Spiderman film before ABC dropped the series and we'll be dealing with it in a couple of weeks' time. Let's just say I'm not getting my hopes up...

FINAL RATING: 🕸🕸 2/10

CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE

1. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
2. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
3. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: Captain America - the campervan years!

Marvel Mondays #2 - Dr Strange (1978)

A year on from the first Spiderman film and Marvel were starting to get a foothold in the world of TV and cinema. As well as Spidey's TV series being commissioned, the Incredible Hulk would also make his small screen debut later in the year (although it's gonna be another decade before we see him on the big screen). So, plenty of scope for a third Marvel TV series given that the first two were doing well...who would it be? Iron Man? Captain America? The X-Men? The Fantastic Four?

Nope, Dr Strange.

Of course, thanks to the recent MCU film starring Benedict Cumberbatch, most fans now know who Dr Strange is but this must've seemed like a bit of a leftfield turn at the time as he wasn't exactly one of the better known Marvel characters. Nevertheless, fresh off picking up a hit with the Hulk series, Universal commissioned a pilot for a potential Dr Strange TV series. Unfortunately, unlike the big green dude, this one bombed and the series was quietly shelved. As with Spidey the year before though, the film was given a limited theatrical release internationally and as such it qualifies for this list.

I have to be honest, with the exception of the Incredible Hulk film (which is very much an "is it or isn't it?" affair in any case due to Edward Norton being in it instead of Mark Ruffalo), the recent "Dr Strange" is probably my least favourite of the modern day MCU films. Don't get me wrong, it's still a good film but as good an actor as ol' Benny C is, he feels a bit miscast in the role while the plot definitely had a few noticeable holes in it. Minor gripes in the big scheme of things but when you're in such high quality company as the other MCU films, it does end up being a bit noticeable if you're not quite as good. So how does this one compare?

Well, one change from the modern film, the villain in this one is female - Morgan La Fey the sorceress who has been sent to earth by some evil hell demon type thing to kill the Sorcerer Supreme Thomas Lindmer (played by John "him from Kula Shaker's grandad" Mills, kind of the replacement character for the comic books' Ancient One as played by Tilda Swinton in the more recent Dr Strange film) and stop him appointing a successor before his power runs out. Jessica Walter who plays La Fey is probably the highlight of the film as she nails the whole femme fatale thing pretty well.

La Fey possesses a woman called Clea Lake and sends her to kill Lindmer which she tries to do by throwing him off a pedestrian bridge on to a busy road below. Being a sorcerer though, Lindmer survives and deduces that La Fey is after him. After chatting things through with his right hand man Wong, he decides he'd probably better get on with appointing a successor sharpish and tells Wong to contact a Dr Stephen Strange who works as a psychiatrist (not a surgeon in this version) at the local hospital. As it turns out, Lake (now freed from La Fey's possession) has been checked into the hospital after a cab driver found her wandering dazed in the street in the early hours of the morning so Lindmer's basically got both the people he was looking for in one place which is handy.

The next half hour is a bit of a slowburn to be honest with a lot of dream sequences and people at the hospital trying to work out what's wrong with Clea. If I'm gonna be really cruel here, I could say that it gets a bit reminiscent of the awesome spoof '80s horror show "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace" at times but hey, let's give it a chance eh? Plus you can always marvel at Strange's impressive white man afro to while away the time if you get bored...

After a bit of persuading, Lindmer persuades Strange that Clea has slipped into a coma due to La Fey's spell and that in order to rescue her he's going to have to do a dimension jump type thing and enter a demon realm. Lindmer gives him a safe word to use if he needs to be recalled and we promptly get the most hilarious "Austin Powers on acid" style dimension jump sequence you ever did see.

Morgan attempts to stop Strange by sending some sort of evil demon knight after him (which is meant to be scary but...um, really isn't) but in a battle which looks like they did it in a warehouse with some glow in the dark scenery, Strange shouts the safe word, banishes the knight and rescues Clea.

Demon dude is not happy with Morgan who admits she's been taking it easy on Strange because she's attracted to him. Because, as we know, girls all used to go crazy over guys who looked like a grown up version of Screech from "Saved By The Bell" back in 1978. Possibly. Anyway, back on earth, Lindmer asks Strange if he wants to be his successor as per the prophecy. Strange says thanks but no way EVER am I doing any kind of dimension jump again. On his way out of Lindmer's house, he sees a black cat sheltering from the rain and, figuring it must belong to Lindmer, brings it in.

Schoolboy error - obviously it's La Fey who promptly battles and beats both Wong and Lindmer using some '70s laser special effects. This probably looked dead cool at the time but, as with a lot of '70s Marvel stuff, it hasn't exactly aged well.

Meanwhile, Clea has been discharged from hospital and asks Strange if he'd like to go out on a date with her. Because, as we've already established, white guys with afros were irresistible in 1978. However, on arriving at her flat, La Fey reappears and sends Clea into a trance ordering Strange to come with her if he wants to see her again.

La Fey and Strange arrive on the demon plane (which basically looks like a platform with skulls on it hanging in midair) where she tries to seduce him into joining her. She almost succeeds until he sees Lindmer crucified just behind their bed...yeah, I'd imagine that'd be a bit of a passion killer. Strange uses the thunderbolt from his sorcerer ring to burn away the thorns and makes his escape with Lindmer back to earth. Fire demon is so angry at this that he turns Morgan into an ancient hag as punishment.

Wong is there to meet them and after reviving Lindmer, they complete the ritual to transfer the power over to Strange (who gets a natty new set of robes in the process). Next day, Strange is back at the hospital and finally gets to go on his date with Clea although as they pass a television shop, they see Morgan back on earth and back to her old self now running a self-help class. This was obviously supposed to set her up as the main villain for a TV series that never happened.

While it isn't a classic and it definitely drags in places (though nowhere near as bad as the Spiderman film last week did), this film isn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be. True, it hasn't aged well and the action sequences look just a bit silly but if you're prepared to accept it for what it is (a late '70s straight to video movie essentially) then it it's a passable enough use of your time once you get to the halfway point or so. As mentioned earlier, Jessica Walter very much steals the show as Morgan La Fey and gives the film the main thing the Spiderman movie last week was lacking in a genuinely threatening main villain (though the whole subplot about her being attracted to Strange should've been ditched as it kind of detracts from her general bad-assness a bit). If they do make a follow-up to the recent Dr Strange film then I think there's certainly potential for a more modern version of the character to be reintroduced. Peter Hooten is decent enough as Dr Strange and the other characters are reasonably well-rounded. Overall, it's a bit daft and low budget but it could've been a lot worse...

FINAL RATING: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 (5/10)

CURRENT MARVEL LEAGUE TABLE

1. Dr Strange (1978) (5/10)
2. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)

NEXT WEEK: Spiderman goes to LA and fights the same two blokes for an hour and a half after some CND people build a nuclear bomb. I so wish I was making this up...

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...

Coming soon...Marvel Mondays...

Something you may or may not be aware of - a couple of months back was the 40th anniversary of the first Marvel film being released - 1977's "The Amazing Spiderman" (well okay, there were a few multi-part Captain America short films that were broadcast in the States during World War II).

So I had a thought - what better time than to introduce a new feature on this blog - Marvel Monday. In this, I'll be looking back at each of the Marvel films in chronological order starting with that old Spiderman film on Monday and working up to the present day at the rate of one a week. I would say "Thor: Ragnarok" but given that there's been 69 (!) Marvel films to date, it'll probably be something more recent than that by the time I'm fully caught up!

I appreciate that this project is very much gonna have its ups and downs - for every "Avengers Assemble" there's gonna be a "Daredevil", for every "X2", there's gonna be a "Ghost Rider" and for every "Spiderman 2" there's gonna be a "Howard The Duck". Plus lots of the '70s and '80s Marvel films which were effectively B-movies. But hey, we're celebrating the good with the bad here so it's all part of the fun (and yes, you're welcome to remind me of that statement when I'm offloading with the bile on something truly terrible).

So anyway, tune in here on Monday for the first instalment of Marvel Mondays. Hopefully there'll be some other new stuff up on the blog in the near future as well - I'm aware that I've been a bit neglectful of it this year but I intend to try and put that to right in the weeks ahead. See you all then.