Space 1999! The One that was the first Marvel movie

 

Title: The Amazing Spider Man

What Year?: 1977

Classification: Prototype

Rating: Dear God WHY??!! (1/5)

 

In doing movie reviews for multiple features, one of the more complicated decisions is which films should go under which feature. The counterintuitive part is that the actual difficulty for me has never been in making the call, but assessing why I did it. It’s pretty much a matter of instinct; I can tell when something doesn’t “fit” long before I can say why. With this review, I’m making the most counterintuitive decision of all, by placing a superhero movie outside Super Movies, my superhero/ comic book movie feature. For once, it was something I seriously debated, but my assignment very much reflects its significance in the history of TV movies, as well as existing reservations whether it belonged with the ones I have done and want to do for the earlier feature. So here is The Amazing Spider Man, a feature-length Marvel movie made for television… and it’s terrible in more ways than you can easily imagine.

Our story begins with a credits sequence of a familiar costumed character climbing along the buildings of a city, all with transparently forced perspective shots. We then meet Peter Parker, an aspiring reporter who gets bitten by a spider while doing a story at a science lab that will have no further role in the story. He discovers he has gained the power to climb up walls among other superhuman feats, and soon begins fighting crime, in one case seemingly just by distracting the bad guy. Meanwhile, we also encounter a crew of bad guys who are perfecting mind control behind the cover of a sort of self-help cult. But rather than taking over the world, they are sending ordinary people on a wave of robberies. As the hero and the authorities try to unravel their plot, the bad guys come up with a new plan: They demand to be paid a ransom from the city, or 10 of their subjects will be ordered to commit suicide. Can our hero save the day, or has he already been brainwashed? I ask because I honestly can’t tell!

The Amazing Spider Man was a TV movie coproduced by Marvel and Danchuck Productions as a pilot for a TV series based on the character. Aside from Captain America serials made during World War 2, it was the first feature-length, live-action movie based on a Marvel character. The film was directed by the prolific E.W. Swackhamer, also credited for the pilot of Law and Order, starring grown-up Sound of Music actor Nicholas Hammond in the title role. Veteran character actor David White appeared as J. Jonah Jameson. The movie led to approval of a Spider Man TV series, which was cancelled after 13 episodes. It received theatrical release outside the US, with sufficient success that two “sequels” were put together with episodes and footage from the TV series. The next major treatment of the character came when (oh dear Logos) the Cannon Group optioned the property in 1985, but the project never left preproduction.

For my experiences, I probably first heard of this movie in Peter Nicholls’ Fantastic Films. What really stands out is that I knew enough about it to make the judgments outlined in the opening of this review well before actually seeing it. In the course of that time, I had seen commentators (notably Nicholls) who criticized it harshly and others who vocally identify as fans and defenders. Most of my further research went into figuring out the options for viewing it; I finally went with an online video I watched over the weekend before writing this review, probably not much better or worse in quality than actual 1970s video equipment. (When people ask if VHS is “that bad”, my answer has been that CRTs were worse.) I went through it with my usual intermittent attention span, and even with that factored in, I quickly reached two conclusions: This movie is convoluted and nearly incomprehensible in its story and editing; yet, it is also quite inexplicably boring.

Moving forward, it’s just as well to get the “good” out of the way. The movie’s effects and action sequences are decent, especially for TV, and there are good stretches that justify its relatively favorable “campy” reputation. The best of these is a scene where Spider Man clambers through a neighborhood, clearly portrayed with a combination of optical effects and forced-perspective camera work. A close second is a brawl with three armed martial artists, in which Spider Man disorients the goons by jumping from the floor to the ceiling. There’s further help from the very ‘70s music, which sounds eerily like the theme from SWAT (whose pilot was also directed by Swackhamer!). However, we already have problems on multiple fronts. The pacing is usually too uneven for real tension. At several points, Spider Man climbs in painfully unnatural postures that would do nothing but make him a bigger target. Then the real problem is, the hero has no true opposite number, despite a vast rogues’ gallery to choose from. There’s no Dr. Octopus, no Green Goblin, no Electro, any of whom could have been tailor-made for the cheesy low-budget treatment (though Doc Ock would be tricky). We don’t even get the Purple Man, who would have provided the mind control theme without the technobabble.

On the other side of the equation, the simple fact is that most of the movie is simply nothing happening. It’s further fragmented by bizarre editing, to the point that I literally couldn’t figure out what happens in a scene where Peter Parker prepares to jump off the Empire State Building. What’s worse is that there’s little if any corresponding dialogue, character development or world-building to fill the dead air. Far too many of the characters, including Peter Parker, are bland, undeveloped or just “there”.  The far too conspicuous exception is White as Jameson, who for once comes across as a nuanced character who cares about his job. The tipping point for me is the completely illogical plans of the villains. With the posited tech, they could rig any election, sell any product, convert people to any religion, or at least tell people to give them money. What they settle for instead is a few suicides that critical authority figure could easily write off as a coincidental cluster, which would have been an unnerving social commentary if someone actually said as much. The only thing that could really make this work is a literally psychotic villain like the Joker, Megavolt or for that matter the Purple Man, but again, the characterization is too bland for a leader to stand out, let alone seem interesting.

That leaves me with the “one scene”, and I actually considered several. The one that was ahead all along is a brief scene about 15 minutes from the end, where we find Spider Man injured and trying to hide from the bad guys. (Watching him try in his bright primary-colors suit makes for several amusing moments in itself.) He makes his way out of a back alley to a cab, which happens to be driven by a black guy. The cabby (played by the late and evidently accomplished Harry Caesar) remarks without looking that he is about to return to the company warehouse. He is surprised but not unduly alarmed when he sees the costumed hero. Spider Man promptly insists that he is coming from a costume party (in a bad part of town, in broad daylight…), which the cabby obviously disbelieves but doesn’t comment on. The driver becomes vocally skeptical when the hero tries to offer him payment for a ride, remarking, “You don’t even have pockets in that suit.” Finally, he says, “I ain’t driving no Spider Man to that part of town,” which from what we have seen would in fact be a reasonably well-off suburb. The cab drives away, and the next shot finds Spider Man riding inside a garbage truck. It’s a clever satire of the superhero premise (where do Clark Kent and Peter Parker leave their wallets???), complete with a more relevant take on race and society than plenty of later “message” movies. More than usual, the frustration is that the whole movie isn’t like this.

In closing, I will give one more reason why I have covered this movie here rather than elsewhere: Even compared to the unreleased/ direct-to-video Marvel movies of the 1980s and early ‘90s, the production values of this movie fall far below the minimum standards I would normally apply anywhere but here. At this point, it would be easy to say that it shouldn’t be held to the same standards as theatrical movies. But this was intended to be a high-profile TV movie, at the height of the artform, and on top of that, the people involved had enough confidence in their product to make the jump to a theatrical run. Still, the core problem is not that it is “bad”, nor that it should have been better. It is that this could have been more entertaining, more memorable and flat-out better-looking if it was “worse”. What was really needed here was either a serious approach that brought out the darker elements of the material, or else the kind of high-energy camp that the ‘60s Batman series brought to the table. With neither in evidence, all that remains is a bland and forgettable TV movie from an era when the artform was at its peak.