ATOMIC REACTIONS: MARVEL COMICS ON FILM Now Available on Kindle!

The Kindleversion of ATOMIC REACTIONS: MARVEL COMICS ON FILM is now available for purchase at Amazon. I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out.

Here’s the KINDLE link and here’s the PAPERBACK link.

Taken from my reviews here, MARVEL COMICS ON FILM contains every single one of my Marvel reviews, and covers every single instance of Marvel Comics on film that I’m aware of.

Here’s the book’s Table of Contents:

Table of Contents

Fade from Black

Part One: The Marvel Cinematic Universe
1. Iron Man (2008)
2. The Incredible Hulk (2008)
3. Iron Man 2 (2010)
4. Thor (2011)
5. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
6. Marvel’s The Avengers (2012)

The Avengers Reactions
1. The Hawkeye Reaction
2. The Agent Coulson Reaction
3. The Black Widow Reaction
4. The Nick Fury Reaction
5. The Maria Hill Reaction
6. The Captain America Reaction
7. The Chitauri/Thanos Reaction
8. The Hulk Reaction
9. The Thor Reaction
10. The Loki Reaction
11. The Iron Man Reaction

Marvel One-Shots
1. The Consultant, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer, and Item 47

Part Two: Spider-Man
The Sam Raimi Trilogy
1. Spider-Man (2002)
2. Spider-Man 2 (2004)
3. Spider-Man 3 (2007)

The Marc Webb Relaunch
4. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Part Three: The X-Men
1. X-Men (2000)
2. X2: X-Men United (2003)
3. X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
4. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
5. X-Men: First Class (2011)

Part Four: Blade
1. Blade (1998)
2. Blade II (2002)
3. Blade: Trinity (2004)

Part Five: The Punisher
1. The Punisher (1989)
2. The Punisher (2004)
3. Punisher: War Zone (2008)

Part Six: The Fantastic Four
1. Fantastic Four (1994)
2. Fantastic Four (2005)
3. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)

Part Seven: Ghost Rider
1. Ghost Rider (2007)
2. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012)

Part Eight: Daredevil & Elektra
1. Daredevil (2003)
2. Elektra (2005)

Part Nine: The Non-MCU Avengers
1. Captain America (1944 serial)
2. Captain America (1990)
3. Hulk (2003)

Part Ten: The Nexus of All Realities
1. Howard the Duck (1986)
2. Man-Thing (2005)

Part Eleven: The TV Movies
1. Captain America (1979)
2. Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979)
3. Dr. Strange (1978)
4. Generation X (1996)
5. The Incredible Hulk (1977 pilot)
6. The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)
7. The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989)
8. The Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990)
9. Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (1998)
10. Power Pack (1991)
11. Spider-Man (1977 pilot)

Part Twelve: The Marvel Animated Movies
1. The Invincible Iron Man (2007)
2. Doctor Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme (2007)
3. Hulk Vs. (2009)
4. Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow (2008)
5. Planet Hulk (2010)
6. Thor: Tales of Asgard (2011)
7. Ultimate Avengers (2006)
8. Ultimate Avengers 2 (2006)

THE DEATH OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK: The Dying Gasps of a Man in Green Paint and a Bad Wig

The Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990) – Directed by Bill Bixby – Starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Elizabeth Gracen, and Andreas Katsulas.

THE DEATH OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK represents the end of an era that had been over for everyone but the Hulk for nearly a decade. Full credit to Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, and all the various cast and crew who extended the 1970s superhero TV boom into the ’90s. Once upon post-United States Bicentennial, network television had room for THE INCREDIBLE HULK, Captain America, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Wonder Woman, but the brief boom went bust rather quickly for everyone but the Bixby-Ferrigno Hulk.

And here they still are, at the dawn of the 1990s, still kicking for one last ride.

Unfortunately, THE DEATH OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK is a solemn, slow-moving bore, and instead of feeling like the dramatic conclusion that the franchise deserves, DEATH feels tired and in need of a mercy killing.

None of this is the fault of Misters Bixby and Ferrigno, who offer their usual solid work one last time. Well, we can give a little blame to Bixby, who also directed DEATH, but the fault here is really in the script, the pacing, and the overall tone. After the last two movies, which saw the introduction of Thor and Daredevil, DEATH relies solely on David Banner and the Hulk for its superheroics. There’s a foreign secret agent here, but she’s kind of boring, and an old scientist, who’s also kinda boring. The film could have easily used Natasha Romanoff and Henry Pym and added a bit of much-needed pizzazz to the special, but there’s no one here but the Hulk.

Perhaps the producers decided to go with the Hulk alone, just in case this was the final INCREDIBLE HULK production. (There were plans for another TV movie, but they ended with the passing of Bixby in 1993.) If so, that wasn’t necessarily a bad decision – the original pilot movie had only the Hulk and it was an outstanding production.

The fitting conclusion would have seen reporter Jack McGee finally get his story, but Jack Colvin had sadly passed on after the first comeback movie, so there was Bixby and Ferrigno and a bunch of people we’ve never seen before.

The plot here has Banner pretending to be a mentally-challenged janitor who sneaks into the lab of the institute’s senior scientist and fixes his formulas. Banner is still trying to eliminate the Hulk and this is his best bet. Eventually, Banner is found out by the scientist, who agrees to help him. We get a few scenes of Banner living with the scientist and his wife, but like so much of this special, it’s just blah blah blah killing time until the Hulk shows up. This is the first time in any of these Hulk movies where I was bored by the Banner plot.

The part of the narrative that’s been carried by Thor and Daredevil in the past two TV movies is given over to a foreign spy and her handler, the One Armed Man from the Harrison Ford Fugitive movie. Or, as he’s better known around these parts, G’Kar. Maybe if Andreas Katsulas had played his part as a One-Armed G’Kar this movie would have been-

No. It wouldn’t have been better. Not at all.

DEATH moves slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooly, building no tension as the special agent ends up being betrayed by her handlers. She gets over this by falling in love with Banner the way only people in made-for-TV movies fall in love – immediately and in a log cabin.

This foreign power angle goes nowhere interesting, except at the end when it leads directly to the death of the Hulk. Two bad guys are getting away in a plane, but before they take off, the pilot wants to run down and chop the special agent to death with his front propeller. This allows the Hulk to rip the plane open and jump inside, and then the plane blows up and he falls to the ground and transforms into Banner and dies.

Um … that’s kinda depressing.

I suppose Banner had to die alongside the Hulk so that he paid the ultimate price for his initial hubris to experiment on himself, but it is a bit disappointing that there wasn’t a scientific ending to the Hulk, that Banner wasn’t rewarded for his decade-plus long scientific quest to rid himself of the Hulk.

The real shame is that after all these years, the Hulk couldn’t have been sent off to afterlife with a better story. Watching the film, you can see that we’re at the limit of what a man in green paint can bring to the audience. By the end of the decade, FOX would televise both Generation X and Nick Fury movies, and while the special effects in those films are a long way from the 2003 Ang Lee Hulk, the tried-and-true technique of the Ferrigno Hulk smashing through a brick wall is starting to feel a bit old.

As always, though, if the story is good, I’m able to look past the special effects and the story in THE DEATH OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK is simply not compelling.

THE TRIAL OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK: I’m Sure It’s a Fine Bandage. May I Sit?

The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989) – Directed by Bill Bixby – Starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Rex Smith, John Rhys-Davies, Nancy Everhard, Joseph Mascolo, Michael O’Hare, and Stan Lee.

David Banner (Bill Bixby) is a smart guy, but it is not his smartest moment to take the ticking time bomb that is the Hulk (Lou Ferrigno) into a city.

Banner (calling himself Belson this time around) is working outside of a city doing physical labor but after being roughed up by a fellow worker, he decides it’s time to move on, and the big city nearby is the place he decides to go to stay hidden. Crammed cities are almost as good a place to hide as isolated locales, but when you’ve got the Hulk buried inside of you, and all it takes to pop him out is a bit of uncontrolled rage … maybe the desert is a better place to lose oneself than the city.

Banner’s less-than-brilliant decision makes for some good TV, though.

Unlike THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS, which focused a bit too much on the appearance of Blake and Thor, TRIAL does a much better job integrating Daredevil (Rex Smith) and the Kingpin (John Rhys-Davies) into the mix this time around. Part of what makes this integration better is the approach the story takes with the non-titular characters. In RETURNS, it was Blake and Thor bursting into Banner’s story and too much of the focus was on the interlopers; TRIAL operates antithetical to that, with Banner entering a city where an ongoing story is already taking place. Since he’s our in, it feels more natural to stick with him, and then when we go off to spend time with either Matt Murdock, Daredevil, or the Kingpin, it feels like we’re getting a fuller part of Banner’s story instead of getting a competing story.

Rex Smith is pretty good as Matt Murdock. The movie does feel the need to keep reminding us, “He’s blind!” but Smith manages to get some good moments out of it. When he stops by the hospital to interview a woman who was attacked on the subway and is now blaming David (he was there, didn’t want to get involved, then did, and Hulked out) thanks to pressure from the mob, she asks him if he can see her bandage. She realizes that he can’t see the bandage, of course, and starts to apologize.

“I’m sure it’s a fine bandage,” he says easily and quickly. “May I sit down?”

Smith is less impressive as Daredevil. It’s not that he looks bad (that’s the ugly black suits fault), but the cheeseball lines he has to spout at times is right out of the How to Be a Lame Superhero Handbook.

Continuing the one really positive aspect of RETURNS, the best part of TRIAL focuses on the relationship between the human halves of our resident superheroes. When David and Matt are on screen together, TRIAL works as serious human drama. The scene between the two at Matt’s apartment where he tells David his origin story in order to get him to help carries with it the weight the two men feel at having such dangerous secrets. David doesn’t fully relent, or share his own secret, but he is moved by Matt’s story. David is particularly drawn in when he learns that Matt’s blindness was caused by radiation.

After this chat, Matt gets a tip that the woman that the Kingpin (they never actually call him the Kingpin, just Wilson Fisk) is holding is being kept an an abandoned movie studio, and Matt goes off to rescue her. David eventually follows and stands helplessly outside as Fisk’s men do a number on Daredevil, so he goes all green rage monster, busts the door down, and rescues the fallen vigilante. After carrying him away, a barely conscious Murdock gets his fell on all over the Hulk’s face and holds it as he transforms back into Banner, thus ceding his secret to the lawyer.

John Rhys-Davies is very good as Wilson Fisk, though the production makes some odd choices for him, such as keeping him in really large, dark sunglasses, and filming him from sharp angles that are supposed to make him look cool, I guess, but really just make him look like the poster boy for late ’80s kewl. Rhys-Davies’ deep voice and commanding presence counters all that gimmickry, creating an effective bad guy to play off both the Hulk and Daredevil.

I really like how TRIAL puts the Hulk in tight spaces. In showing the Hulk inside a subway car, a courthouse, and then a prison, the sense of the Hulk’s power comes across far more effectively than it does jumping off a building or crushing steel. Even if the movie doesn’t even show a second of the Hulk breaking out of Banner’s cell or busting through the far wall, the first scene in the subway car sets an appropriately physical tone.

If TRIAL was intended as a back-door pilot, it is a bit of a shame that we didn’t get a regular Daredevil TV show out of the deal. The set-up between Murdock, his fellow attorney (not Foggy Nelson), and his male secretary, plus the addition of Wilson Fisk overseeing the city’s crime factions, could have turned out okay, even if the late ’80s were probably not the best time for a superhero show to find a network audience. I don’t think it would have set the world on fire, but I’m guessing it would have been more successful than Street Hawk.

Come on, you didn’t really think I was going to go this entire reaction without mentioning Rex Smith’s 13-episode series about a physically disabled guy who fights crime on a fancy motorcycle, did you? It kind of makes you wonder – when they were casting TRIAL, did someone say, “Look, if we’re going to have a physically handicapped man dress in black and fight crime, we HAVE to get Rex Smith?” Or did Smith have to audition like everyone else, with all the other actors in the waiting room eyeing him with hate for his experiential advantage?

Bill Bixby does his best to put Daredevil over, and it would have been a fitting legacy to everything Bixby did in terms of making good, quality superhero television if these last three INCREDIBLE HULK movies had launched a few additional series, but really, the depiction of neither Thor nor Daredevil is as striking as that of the Hulk.

THE TRIAL OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK is notable for being the first Marvel movie of any kind to feature Stan Lee, who plays a juror at David’s trial. That’s not why you should watch the film, but it’s nice to see Stan make an appearance. (Also, if you’re a Babylon 5 fan, Michael O’Hare has a small role as a mobster thug.) TRIAL is a marked improvement from RETURNS; where RETURNS is a movie I watch simply for the chance to see a live-action version of Thor, TRIAL is actually worth watching for the story. It’s a good effort and a decent TV movie, thanks mostly to the work of Bixby, Ferrigno, Smith, and Rhys-Davies.