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.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS: The Hound Returns Meekly to the Kennel of Odin

The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) – Directed by Nicholas Corea – Starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Steve Levitt, Eric Kramer, Charles Napier, Lee Purcell, and Jack Colvin.

Surprisingly, it’s the main selling point of THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS that proves to be its biggest weakness: the battles between Thor and the Hulk.

The Thor vs. Hulk battles have long been a staple of the comics, and were major high points in both the Avengers movie and the Hulk Vs. animated film. Yet here, in the TV-movie that continued the story of THE INCREDIBLE HULK TV series that had gone off the air six years earlier.

Here, however, it’s the Thor vs. Hulk battles (both against each other and the bad guys) that sink the narrative a bit.

RETURNS is still a solid outing, but the purpose of the movie has shifted. This is no longer a story about David Banner trying to rid himself of the Hulk as much as it is an opportunity to use the Hulk to get Thor onto the small screen.

When the movie feels like an excuse just to show Lou Ferrigno in green paint, growling and yelling, or when the Donald Blake (Steve Levitt)/Thor (Erik Kramer) subplot overtakes the David Banner (Bill Bixby)/Hulk (Ferrigno) angle, RETURNS falters, but when it focuses on the human characters, when it focuses on the Bannner/Blake relationship, or when old investigative reporter Jack McGee (Jack Colvin) starts poking around, RETURNS picks up.

The feeling I get when watching RETURNS is that NBC knew there was value in the Bill Bixby-Hulk franchise, but that the network wasn’t committed to the franchise for the sake of the franchise, but for what else it could do for the network. This was the ’80s, of course, and NBC had developed a fair number of action franchises (The A-Team, Knight Rider, Riptide, Hunter) and perhaps they wanted to attempt a new one with Thor. Perhaps that’s why much of the narrative focuses on the reason that many of the people watching were likely tuning in to see.

The Blake/Thor relationship is different from the comics. Instead of being a sickly doctor who pounds a wooden staff into the ground, Don Blake is a doctor who discovers Thor’s tomb and then they sort of co-exist. Don gets to keep walking around, but when he wants to he holds Thor’s hammer aloft, yells, “Odin!” and then Thor magically appears after a storm of bad CGI lightning. Blake gets to hang around so he and Thor can do an Odd Couple routine.

Did they think this would work? You can already see the strains this conception causes the characters, as every time Blake and Thor come to an understanding, Blake waits a scene and then goes back to being a whiny dick. While the Odd Couple relationship isn’t bad, it is limited because Blake has all of the power in the relationship, as he can send Thor packing any time he wants.

Unfortunately, RETURNS is rather let down by some mediocre action sequences. The key to my enjoyment of the Bixby Hulk is that David Banner is such a fascinating character and Bixby is such a committed actor to the role. Honestly, I’d place Bixby right alongside Tom Baker is his total commitment to making his character and his world real and believable.

During the first act of RETURNS, when Banner is committed to ridding himself of the Hulk (even after his alter ego hasn’t appeared in two years), only to be interrupted by the arrival of Donald Blake and his story of Thor, is solid. In this opening, the movie plays to its strengths: Banner’s commitment to the cause and Bixby’s earnest determination. Steve Levitt isn’t in Bixby’s class as an actor, but he manages to tell his story of finding Thor in an effective manner. It’s when Thor arrives and then causes enough internal strife in Banner that the Hulk appears that the narrative first comes off-track.

After this initial appearance, we get three subplots: Blake and Thor trying to make peace with each other, some Cajun thugs trying to ruin the company Banner works for, and Banner himself. It’s this third plot that disappears in the middle of the film, as RETURNS goes into “possible pilot” mode for Blake and Thor. The duo heads to a bar so Thor can drink and arm wrestle and grope biker women. During this time, Blake largely sits off to the side and watches, looking miserable.

Was this going to be the show? Thor wanting to have fun and Blake being a whiny babysitter? Yeah, it’s a shame that show didn’t get made …

Levitt and Kramer do their best to make the Blake/Thor dynamic work, but there’s just not a lot here in the script for them to work with. All it really does is keep us away from Banner, and when we do go back to the reason we’re here, Thor has more chemistry with him than he does with Blake.

The plot itself take a back seat to simply watching Thor, Blake, and Banner, and that’s a good decision because the plot sees some mobster’s helping a company man get his revenge on the company. Other than some really good scene chewing from Charles Napier (he actually says, “I gare-ron-tee” like he’s in a commercial for Ruffles Cajun Spice potato chips), this whole angle is bland and complete forgettable.

At the end, Thor and Hulk team up to stop seven people with guns and rescue Banner’s lady friend, and then Banner walks away sadly because he’s contractually obligated to walk away beneath sad piano music as much as possible.

RETURNS isn’t a horrible TV movie, at all, and it’s nice to see an attempt at doing a live-action Thor, even if it doesn’t really look like an idea that could have sustained itself over a season. I mentioned earlier a few of the NBC action shows that found success, but RETURNS was put on the air in 1988, at the end of NBC’s run as an action network. They were still trying, of course, but shows like Stingray didn’t find the same success, and those older shows were either already gone or on their way out. RETURNS didn’t launch a new Thor TV program, but it was the first of three new INCREDIBLE HULK movies. It’s nice to see Bixby and Ferrigno back in the saddle, again – I just wish this movie had as much interest in them as me.