(Delayed) DC Saturdays #8 - Superman 3 (1983)

Whoever it was who sang "Three is a magic number", they were clearly not a fan of comic book tie-in films. There seems to be an unwritten rule, certainly in the pre-MCU era, that the third film in a series of films based on comic book tie-ins, either Marvel or DC, was often the point where either the downward spiral started in terms of quality or the series out and out jumped the shark altogether. You want examples? "Batman Forever", "Blade Trinity", "X-Men Last Stand", "Spiderman 3" and, arguably the one that started it all, 1983's "Superman 3".

As we discussed when we reviewed "Superman 2" on these pages, the cinematic version of the film was plagued with problems as director Richard Donner left/was dropped from the project (delete depending on who you're asking) to be replaced by Brit Richard Lester. This caused no end of problems on set as the two were like chalk and cheese in terms of their style - while Donner had gone against the wishes of producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind to inject the first film with a bit of gravitas, Lester's past was in more light-hearted comedy films meaning that the Salkinds arguably had a director who was much more malleable to their vision of what the films should be. However, this new more slapstick approach didn't sit well with a lot of those from the first two Superman films with Gene Hackman refusing to return for a third outing as Lex Luthor and Margot Kidder being reduced to a cameo appearance in the film, allegedly for criticising Lester and the Salkinds. Lester attempted to add some star power to the picture by bringing in Richard Pryor (still hot property at the time) in a supporting role but on its release, Superman 3 was savaged by the critics and fared much worse than its predecessor at the box office. The series limped on for one more film, 1987's Superman 4 (which did even worse still but we'll deal with that in two weeks' time) before being put out of its misery with this film being generally regarded as the point where it all went wrong. So yeah, this could be...erm, interesting...

The film begins with Clark Kent walking to work one morning seemingly through some kind of Ealing comedy as a load of guys get distracted by a hot blonde lass walking down the street and we see a blind man inadvertently operating a road sweeper, a mime tripping up on some golf balls and Superman having to save a bloke from drowning inside his car. Not exactly a promising start to the film...

Anyway, it turns out that Clark is taking some leave from his job as he's been invited to a high school reunion back in his old hometown of Smallville. As it turns out, Lois Lane is also away on an assignment in Bermuda so Kent is given Jimmy Olsen as his sidekick on the journey. However, en route the greyhound bus they're on is stopped due to a fire at a petrochemical plant. Jimmy quickly sneaks in to get a few photos but ends up on a ladder which collapses and breaks his leg. Clark quickly turns into Superman to save him before putting out the fire by freezing the surface of a nearby lake and dropping it on the flames to extinguish them! Just as well too as there was a room full of beltric acid which would have turned into gas and formed a poisonous cloud over the coast if the flames had got it. However, Jimmy is taken back to Metropolis in an ambulance and Clark ends up going it alone for the rest of the journey.

Back in Smallville, Clark ends up reuniting with the girl he had a crush on in high school Lana Lang (who we briefly encountered in the first Superman film). She's now an early thirtysomething single mum and her old high school boyfriend Brad (who again we encountered in Superman I) is still trying to win her back in spite of the fact that he's turned into a boozed-up ne'er-do-well in the intervening years.

Clark saves Lana from Brad's attention at the reunion party and the two reunite to take Lana's son Ricky bowling and then off to a picnic where he ends up tripping up in a field and falling unconscious. Clark hears him and turns into Superman to save him from being mashed up by a combine harvester.

However, Clark has to cut short his stay in Smallville when Superman is needed to counteract a rogue weather satellite which has started dropping torrential rain on Colombia threatening to wipe out their coffee supply. It turns out that this villainous deed was the work of Ross Webster (Robert Vaughn), this film's replacement for Lex Luthor, who owns a company called Webscoe.

Webster is basically an evil uber-capitalist (with a ski slope on the roof of his office block no less!) who has a trade deal on coffee with every nation in the world except for Colombia so hijacked the weather satellite to sabotage their coffee crop. He's done this with the aid of his resident computer expert Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor) who's come to his attention after being caught using his advanced IT skills to embezzle several thousand dollars from the company. Gorman has a long history of unemployment prior to joining Webscoe and Webster promises not to fire him if he'll assist him with his various nefarious schemes. Also along for the ride are Webster's sister Vera and his girlfriend Lorelei (Pamela Stephenson from "Not The Nine O'Clock News") who we'd previously seen in the opening sequence as the main distraction which caused all the accidents.

Pryor's presence in the film is a weird one as his character isn't very well defined - Gorman is obviously the comic relief in the film but he starts out as a workshy dole scrounger whose main aim in life appears to be to fleece the system for anything he can but then acquires a conscience the longer he works for the villainous Webster. However, it's a bit difficult to take the character that seriously or really get invested in him when he's stuck doing ridiculous sequences like ski-jumping off a tower block with a pink blanket round his neck...

With his plot foiled by Superman, Webster enlists Gus and Vera to take him out for good so that he can engage in an even bigger scheme to gain a monopoly on the world's oil. Gus attempts to brew up some homemade Kryptonite in the company labs but doesn't get the formula quite right meaning it doesn't prove fatal when he presents it to Superman at a civic reception in Smallville where ol' Supey is presented with the keys to the town as a symbol of their gratitude.

However, the not-quite-Kryptonite does have an interesting side effect in that it starts to turn Superman evil. Initially it's just small things like being late to an emergency in Smallville involving a truck driver stuck hanging off a bridge because he's hanging around chatting to Lana but soon he ends up straightening the Leaning Tower of Pisa and blowing out the flame at the Olympics for a laugh.

With Superman out of the picture, Webster is able to put his plan into motion by building a supercomputer for Gus which allows him to reprogram all the world's oil tankers and maroon them in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean before switching off all of the petrol pumps in the USA. One tanker, however, disobeys orders leading Webster to dispatch Lorelei to seduce Superman by sitting on top of the Statue of Liberty.

Spurred on by the promise of a night of passion with Lorelei, Superman tracks down the tanker and punches a hole in the side leading to it being stranded in the ocean with a massive oil spill pouring out of it. Lorelei makes good on her promise and Superman promptly gets invited back for a spot of apres-ski at Webster's penthouse ski slope...

Now a national hate figure, Superman spends his days in a bar taking it out on the bottle and smashing spirit bottles with superpowered peanuts. Eventually the landlord throws him out and he attempts to take off but crashlands in a junkyard. Crippled by guilt, he ends up splitting into two personas - the evil Superman and the good Clark Kent. The pair have an actually quite enjoyably surreal fight in the junkyard which Clark ultimately wins after taking a bit of a battering by strangling his evil alter ego and having his Superman powers restored to him.

Back to being the good guy figure of old, Superman flies back to the ski lodge to apprehend the Webster siblings and Lorelei only to find them fled to a base in the grand canyon where the tower-sized supercomputer is stored. Arriving there, he finds Ross firing missiles at him using what looks like a NES game from about 1986.

Superman dodges the missiles and makes it into the base where Ross and Vera attempt to incinerate him with a Kryptonite death ray. However, Gus and Lorelei both end up feeling a pang of conscience with Gus fighting Ross and knocking him out before switching the death ray off. However, the computer goes into self-protect mode when Gus tries to disable it with Vera being dragged into the computer and turned into a cyborg who uses her lasers to incapacitate Ross and Lorelei before Superman knocks her into a chasm. He eventually beats the computer by flying back to the chemical plant from the start of the film, retrieving some beltric acid which heats up and dissolves it. Vera is turned back into a human and Superman leaves her along with Ross and Lorelei for the authorities to find. He drops Gus off at a coal mine allowing him to walk back to Metropolis from there.

Back in Metropolis, we find out that Lana and Ricky have both moved out of Smallville to the big city with the former now working as a receptionist at the Daily Planet and dating Clark. However, they're hassled on their first date by Brad turning up at Lana's apartment. However, he makes the mistake of challenging Clark to a fight and...well, I think you can guess how that ends. Roll the credits.

So I'm gonna be a bit controversial here - while it's undoubtedly a big step down from the first two Superman films, I thought Superman 3 was...inoffensive enough I guess. Certainly, there's enough action here to ensure it at least never gets boring and the cast, especially Reeve, certainly can't be accused of phoning it in. The section with the "evil Superman" culminating in the junkyard fight is actually, dare I say it, pretty cool. The main problem here is twofold - firstly, the script just plays it a little bit too slapstick for its own good at times and veers into out and out silliness, something which if you've seen the first two Superman films, is definitely a bit unwelcome. Secondly, there's just a general sense of the whole thing not fitting together as well as it should. As much as I like Richard Pryor, and it's not for a lack of trying on his part, he just feels like an awkward fit with the film. Secondly, much as Robert Vaughn tries, he's just not a good replacement for Gene Hackman in the main villain role and it seems as though the producers knew this as well as they quickly went crawling back to Hackman when Superman 4 came out a few years later.

Overall though, if it's an afternoon's worth of generally harmless and fairly mindless fun you're after, Superman 3 should just about suffice. I s'pose its main problem was that it was the sequel to two films which just set the bar incredibly high. Although the film made its budget back, it grossed less than half what each of its predecessors did and the writing was arguably on the wall. The Salkinds and Lester would all jump ship prior to the series' last hurrah, 1987's Superman 4: The Quest For Peace. Let's just say that if Superman 3 saw the wheels on the franchise starting a wobble a bit then that film would see them well and truly come off...but we'll save that angst for when we review it in a couple of weeks.

FINAL RATING: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 (5/10)

CURRENT DC FILM TABLE

1. Superman (1978) (8/10)
2. Superman 2 (1980) (8/10)
3. Batman (1966) (8/10)
4. Superman 3 (1983) (5/10)
5. Swamp Thing (1982) (5/10)
6. The New Wonder Woman (1975) (5/10)
7. Superman and the Mole Men (1951) (5/10)
8. Wonder Woman (1974) (3/10)

NEXT WEEK: Another Kryptonian hits the silver screen (and another cannonball hits the bows of the Superman series) as we look at 1984's Supergirl...

Taking a (very) quick break...

Hi folks, just a quick blog entry today - unfortunately both this week's DC Saturday and Marvel Monday are going to be up a bit later than usual due to me being away on holiday for the next few days. The original plan was I was going to sort them out this week but unfortunately time hasn't allowed it so I'm gonna put them back and get a bit of much-needed downtime. Don't worry, they should hopefully be up by the tail end of the week and we'll be back to normal as of Saturday. Keep 'em peeled. As the orange said to the grape...

Marvel Midweek Bonus - The Incredible Hulk (1977)

I should probably apologise at this point - if I'd been sticking to my guns then I'd have reviewed the 1977 version of "The Incredible Hulk" way back last autumn when I was doing the very early Marvel films. Unfortunately it got missed out because a) I wasn't aware it got a cinematic release at all and was under the impression it had gone straight to TV and b) I didn't have a copy. However...watching the disappointing "Hulk" remake by Ang Lee earlier this week made me curious to go back and revisit the two '70s Hulk films (this one and 1978's "Bride of the Incredible Hulk" which I may or may not cover this week depending on time constraints).

As we established a few days ago, while the Ang Lee film attempted to do a slightly different take on the Hulk's origins it pretty much fell flat on its face. So, big question, how did the '70s version with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno go about it? And, crucially, was it actually better?

The story begins with David Banner in bed having a nightmare regarding his wife Laura's death - the two of them were in a car crash but while Banner was thrown from the wreckage, Laura was trapped inside as the car exploded. Banner attempted to force open the door but couldn't and still blames himself for not being able to save her.

Fast forward to the present day and Banner is working at a science lab specialising in psychology. He and his partner in study Dr Elaina Marks have been studying how certain people's energy spikes when they're placed under extreme stress. When they come across a lady who saved her son by lifting up a car in almost exactly the same circumstances that Banner lost Laura, Banner starts to question why the woman was triggered during the incident but he wasn't, especially as the other key factor is a high level of adrenaline in the blood which Banner also has. The pair are also being hassled by a local journalist Jack McGee who's interested in the research they're doing but as he's got a reputation as something of a disreputable sort, neither are particularly in any hurry to talk to him.

Further research by Banner proves that the third key factor was that all of the incidents he and Marks have been studying was that all of them took place during incidents where there was a high level of gamma radiation in the atmosphere whereas his wife's death didn't. Impatient to recreate the task he tries to call Marks but she's out so he goes to the lab himself and sets up an experiment to dose himself with some gamma radiation to see if anything happens. Unbeknownst to him though, one of his colleagues has been trying to max the equipment out and has upped the dosage to six times the level Banner thinks it is.

Despite this though, nothing happens during the experiment and, fed up and ready to call it a night, Banner sets off home. However, while he's been in the lab a huge thunderstorm has started and halfway home his car blows a tyre out and while he's trying to fix it, his jack breaks. This triggers his anger and...well, you can guess what happens next...

Suffice to say that if the Hulk ever applies to work in your local Kwik Fit, do not employ this man...

The next morning, Hulk has wandered down to a lake where he encounters a young girl fishing. Panicking, the girl runs into the water leading Hulk to push a tree trunk into the water for her to climb on and get to safety. However, her dad, thinking Hulk is attacking the girl, shoots the beast with his rifle causing it to break his gun in half then throw him in the lake!

Sitting down by a pond, the Hulk turns back into Banner who flees to Marks' house and asks her to help him piece together the events of the previous night as he has no memory. The pair travel to a semi-disused lab just outside the town. They attempt to recreate the conditions of the previous night in a pressure chamber designed for deep sea research by turning the lights off, turning on the sprinklers and shorting an electrical current but none of it works.

Exhausted, Banner drifts off to sleep and again has a nightmare about his wife's death which causes him to panic and transform into the Hulk again. Marks is still awake and watches in terror as the Hulk breaks out of the chamber by smashing through six inch thick glass and steel doors. However, it seems calmed by her presence and she manages to persuade it to sit down on the couch whereupon it reverts to being Banner again.

With Banner back to his normal self, the pair discuss the evening's events and Banner panics as he realises that the Hulk isn't something he's going to be able to control. Things go from bad to worse when the police show up with Jack McGee in tow after a set of giant footprints have appeared near the lake along with the fisherman and his daughter reporting their sightings of a green giant down there.

Banner and Marks decide they need to try and reverse the experiment as quickly as possible but unbeknown to them, McGee sneaks into the lab through an open window while they leave to get some food. They discover him hiding out in a cupboard upon their return and Banner throws him out but he knocks over some flammable liquid during the struggle which duly ignites and causes the building to explode.

David goes running back in but finds Elaina trapped under a pile of fallen concrete. Panicking, he turns into the Hulk who manages to lift the rubble and carry Marks out of the lab. McGee, seeing the lab go up in smoke, assumes that Banner is dead and the Hulk has kidnapped Marks.

In the woods, Hulk attempts to revive Marks but unfortunately he's too late and she tells Banner she loves him with her dying words. Cutting forward, we see the pair being buried next to each other at the local cemetery with McGee explaining to one of the other scientists present that the police have put an arrest warrant out on the Hulk for a double murder. After everyone's gone, Banner emerges to stand at the graveside where he promises Elaina he'll carry on looking for a cure in her memory and tells her he loved her as well.

Like a lot of the '70s Marvel films, "The Incredible Hulk" is very much of its time but unlike most of the other ones, it hasn't actually aged too badly. Sure, the special effects look dated but the plot holds up just well enough to carry this thing through. Bixby as always does a good job as Banner and the storyline's gripping enough to keep you interested. It's certainly easy to see why out of the various attempts Marvel made at getting film and television series off the ground in the 1970s, this was the one that had the longest lifespan. Certainly if you've got a spare afternoon and want an old school film to watch, you could do a lot worse than this.

FINAL RATING: ✊✊✊✊✊ (5/10)

CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE

1. Spiderman (2002) (9/10)
2. X-Men 2 (2003) (8/10)
3. Men In Black (1997) (8/10)
4. X-Men (2000) (8/10)
5. Blade 2 (2001) (7/10)
6. Blade (1998) (7/10)
7. The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) (6/10)
8. Conan The Barbarian (1982) (6/10)
9. Conan The Destroyer (1984) (6/10)
10. The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk (1989) (6/10)
11. Men In Black 2 (2000) (6/10)
12. The Incredible Hulk (1977) (5/10)
13. Doctor Mordrid (1992) (5/10)
14. The Punisher (1989) (5/10)
15. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
16. Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD (1998) (4/10)
17. The Fantastic Four (1994) (4/10)
18. Hulk (2003) (4/10)
19. Red Sonja (1985) (4/10)
20. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (1979) (4/10)
21. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
22. The Death Of The Incredible Hulk (1990) (3/10)
23. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (1979) (3/10)
24. Howard The Duck (1986) (2/10)
25. Captain America (1990) (2/10)
26. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
27. Generation X (1996) (2/10)
28. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)
29. Daredevil (2003) (2/10)

COMING UP NEXT: Time permitting, there may be another instalment of Hulk smash shenanigans before next week's Punisher review. Watch this space...

Marvel Mondays #28 - Hulk (2003)

In a very indirect way, "Hulk" marks the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it tells the beginning of the Incredible Hulk story. Although the film was semi-rebooted when Marvel brought it in house for 2008's "The Incredible Hulk", this is the origin story which kind of sort of leads on to the follow-up. It's a long story but I'll cover it in the outro here...

Released in 2003 to quite some fanfare (this was the first time the Hulk had appeared on the big screen in well over a decade) under the direction of martial arts film specialist Ang Lee, "Hulk" received mixed reviews at the time with some critics saying it was a brave attempt to branch out and others decrying it as dull (it's certainly cropped up on a couple of "Worst Marvel films" lists I've seen down the years). I seem to remember missing it first time out as a friend went to see it before I was planning to and told me it wasn't worth bothering with. So...underappreciated hidden gem or creative mis-step? Let's find out.

The film starts off with a backstory in the 1960s. Scientist David Banner is working on a government research facility experimenting into regeneration. The aim is that he is planning to invent a serum that will create a new race of supersoldiers with this characteristic which will effectively render them indestructible. However, his commanding officer "Thunderbolt" Ross bans him from moving his experiments from animals to humans. Because of this, Banner is left with no alternative but to experiment on himself.

Although the experiments have no effect on Banner, soon afterwards his son Bruce is born and exhibits strange characteristics including his skin starting to turn green when he's stressed. Banner Senior quickly adds another arm to his research of trying to work out what has happened to Bruce and whether he can cure it. However, Ross discovers that Banner has been experimenting on himself when he discovers a vial of human blood in the lab and quickly shuts his experiment down. Furious, Banner sets the equipment in the facility to self-destruct and does a runner.

Twenty years later, Bruce (Eric Bana) has been brought up by a foster family and now goes by the name of Bruce Krenzler. He works in a lab in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend and research partner Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly), Thunderbolt's daughter. The pair have been conducting experiments very similar to David Banner's in terms of cell regeneration but all they've succeeded in doing so far is making a bunch of toads explode. They're also being approached by a wealthy industrialist Glenn Talbot who wants to buy their lab and use the facility to help the military but neither Bruce nor Betty are interested, especially as the latter is now estranged from her father. These sequences also see the first appearance of something we'll encounter a lot throughout the film, namely the action suddenly going split-screen to presumably emulate the comic books. Words alone cannot convey just how annoying and potentially migraine-inducing this is.

With Talbot continually on their case, Betty decides to try and mend fences with her dad in the hope of putting the kibosh on his hostile takeover. However, Ross is aware of Bruce's past and is intrigued as to what's going on. However, things take a turn for the worse when back at the lab, one of the pair's colleagues, Harper, inadvertently causes the machine to spring a fault and go into meltdown. Bruce runs into the lab to get Harper out of there but ends up getting hit by a blast of pure radiation. Strangely though, he survives with hardly any ill-effects and is quickly discharged from hospital.

However, while Bruce is in the hospital, he's visited by a janitor from the lab (Nick Nolte) who it turns out is David Banner (nice nod to the '70s Hulk TV series there). Banner warns him that he may have triggered something that he can't control and needs to be careful. He also explains that he is Bruce's father but Bruce doesn't believe him, telling him that both his parents died when he was young.

A few nights later at the lab, Bruce is doing some research after a very very stressful day including dealing with both Talbot and David. The stress causes his body react and he turns into the Hulk for the first time, smashing up the lab before escaping. David sees him in the corridor and almost gets attacked but the Hulk ultimately leaves him alone.

Bruce wakes up the next morning to find an army squad led by Ross at his door. They explain that he is under house arrest until they work out what happened the previous night. Meanwhile, Betty goes to visit David to try and get some explanation out of him but Banner Sr still hasn't forgiven Ross Sr for all those years ago and sends a trio of mutated dogs (which he's injected with the same serum as Bruce has in his bloodstream) to kill her.

Meanwhile, back at Bruce's house he gets an unwanted visit from Talbot. The pair end up arguing and Talbot gets violent, attacking Bruce which causes him to Hulk out and beat ten bells out of Talbot. Just before Talbot's visit he also gets a phone call from his father explaining that he has reluctantly had to eliminate Betty. Hulk runs to her house and eventually kills the three Hulk dogs (including, erm, a Hulk-poodle - wtf?) after a less than convincing CGI fight scene.

Betty asks Thunderbolt to take Bruce to a government facility underneath the town in the Mojave desert where they both grew up for safekeeping. Unfortunately Talbot promptly gets the government to override the order so that he can do some experiments on Bruce. This goes about as well as you'd expect and the decision to stimulate his brainwaves bringing back memories of how his father attempted to kill him, thinking he would grow up to be a monster only for his mother to throw herself in the way of the knife and die instead, causes him to transform into the Hulk. Talbot attempts to neutralise him with foam so that he can drill his head open but that doesn't work and Talbot ends up getting killed by a grenade thrown by Hulk.

Busting out from the facility, Hulk heads across the desert towards San Francisco. We get a few fight sequences which have a couple of neat moments (Hulk swinging a tank around like it's a hammer) but it's all a bit a) dragged out and b) a bit silly when you see tanks being thrown across valleys and helicopters knocked out of the sky only for the soldiers in them to crawl out afterwards as if nothing had happened!

Eventually, the Rosses track down Hulk in San Fran and he reverts back to being Bruce thanks to Betty's calming influence. Unfortunately the government has ordered that both Banners be sent to the electric chair so that they no longer pose a threat (David having voluntarily turned himself in so that he can see Bruce again). As they're sat in said electric chairs (which for some reason are in the middle of an aircraft hangar!), David tries to get Bruce to transform into the Hulk but he refuses. However, David has been doing some further experimenting on himself and has managed to acquire the ability to take on the consistency of anything he touches. He promptly bites through an electric cable turning himself into a man made of electricity and the shock first turns Bruce into Hulk and then blasts the pair of them halfway back across the desert.

The two have a confrontation at a desert lake with David overwhelming Bruce due to his newfound power and attempting to absorb the Hulk's energy from him. However, he ends up turning into a sort of giant gas cloud which makes him an easy target for some incoming government fighters which promptly blow him to kingdom come.

A year later, we see Bruce has started a new life in the South American jungle working as a missionary (with Betty and Thunderbolt both presuming him dead). As he's working at a med camp, we see some mercenaries attempt to attack and the film ends with Bruce telling their leader "Don't make me angry...you wouldn't like me when I'm angry..."

I can see what Ang Lee was going for here with a different take on the Hulk story and he deserves credit for that but there's no getting around the fact that unfortunately "Hulk" just doesn't work. It's far too long for its own good (quite honestly, they could easily have taken at least half an hour off this thing) and seems to take forever to get going. And when it does, the fight scenes are either a disappointment (Hulk poodle? Evil gas cloud? Really?) or just dragged out way too long for their own good (the desert sequence). And those stupid split screen sequences are just an unnecessary assault on the senses. Overall, it just feels like a film that's trying to take itself far too seriously for it's own good when it should just be cutting loose with the Hulk Smash.

"Hulk" ended up being a box office bomb, doing well on its opening week but rapidly dropping off the radar thereafter and turning in a very small profit considering how big its budget was. Plans for a sequel were shelved and Marvel would bring the character back in house with the creation of the MCU a few years later. Although 2008's sort-of-sequel "The Incredible Hulk" would touch upon the events of the first film very briefly, it would end up being an almost total reboot and, coincidentally, a much better film. I guess "Hulk" is maybe worth a watch for reference purposes to see where the MCU kind of began but compared to its successor (and even to two of the three '80s Bill Bixby Hulk films), it's very much one of the poor relations of this particular Marvel franchise.

FINAL RATING: ✊✊✊✊ (4/10)

CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE

1. Spiderman (2002) (9/10)
2. X-Men 2 (2003) (8/10)
3. Men In Black (1997) (8/10)
4. X-Men (2000) (8/10)
5. Blade 2 (2001) (7/10)
6. Blade (1998) (7/10)
7. The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) (6/10)
8. Conan The Barbarian (1982) (6/10)
9. Conan The Destroyer (1984) (6/10)
10. The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk (1989) (6/10)
11. Men In Black 2 (2000) (6/10)
12. Doctor Mordrid (1992) (5/10)
13. The Punisher (1989) (5/10)
14. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
15. Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD (1998) (4/10)
16. The Fantastic Four (1994) (4/10)
17. Hulk (2003) (4/10)
18. Red Sonja (1985) (4/10)
19. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (1979) (4/10)
20. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
21. The Death Of The Incredible Hulk (1990) (3/10)
22. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (1979) (3/10)
23. Howard The Duck (1986) (2/10)
24. Captain America (1990) (2/10)
25. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
26. Generation X (1996) (2/10)
27. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)
28. Daredevil (2003) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: The Punisher battles John Travolta. Yes, you read that correctly. Although, time permitting, we may see some more Hulk related stuff before then...