Spider-Man 1977 Film Review

Spider-Man fans the character has been around since the sixties and has been getting alot of films as of late and so I thought that i'd do something that I don't think anyone has done and that's take a look at what is technically the characters first theatrically released feature film. I say technically because this was a made for TV film but in alot of countries this was released to theatres and here is my review of "Spider-Man" enjoy.

The plot of this movie is that someone is using mind control techniques to get people to rob money and it's up to university student Peter Parker to find out who's doing before they have ten people killed. Yeah i'm not going to lie this plot was strangely hard to follow since mind control exists in this world and that alone raises alot of questions but I will say that the story was fairly well told given that it also had to do the Spider-Man origin story.

Starring in the film is Nicholas Hammond as Peter Parker / Spider-Man , David White as J. Jonah Jameson , Michael Pataki as Captain Barbera , Hilly Hicks as Joe "Robbie" Robertson , Lisa Eilbacher as Judy Tyler , Jean Marie "Jeff" Donnell as May Parker , Robert Hastings as Monahan , Ivor Francis as Professor Noah Tyler and Thayer David as Edward Byron. This film was a pilot for the show The Amazing Spider-Man and when that show aired the characters of May and J. Jonah were recast while the character of Robbie was written so this is the only time in which these actors appear in the franchise since neither of them returned for the show.

As for what I thought about the acting how do I put it nicely it sucks like pretty freaking badly and that's me putting it nicely. Granted the acting in pilot episodes is never that good but even so the acting here is just bad I honestly can't describe how bad it is. Don't get me wrong the guy who's playing Peter does an OK job but that's only when you compare him to all of the other actors in the film if he was to be judged on his own people would say that he sucks.

This film also got to sequel films as well each edited versions of episodes of the show the first being Spider-Man Strikes Back and the second being called Spider-Man: The Dragon's Challenge with Strikes Back being released one year later and The Dragon's Challenge being released in 1981. I don't know why they chose to edit episodes of the show together since it would be very obvious to anyone watching that these are meant to be episodes of a TV show but here we are.

Let us take a second to talk about the suit that Spider_man wears for this role because my god do i have something to say about it. To put it simply it looks cheap which for a TV film does make sense since those don't usually have huge budgets but even so they could have put alot more of the money towards the suit since it's one of the things that the hero is most well known for but they didn't for some reason.

Now I will have to admit the film is actually impressive due to the fact that they had alot of scenes with Spidey wall crawling. Those scenes honestly had me wondering how in the hell they were filmed because today you'd just use a computer to do them but this is the mid seventies so that's not an option and they didn't use the same technique used for the sixties Batman show either they actually filmed those scenes on location so again I have to wonder how in the hell did they film those scenes.

Even tho the wall crawling scenes look really good what doesn't look good is how Spidey uses his web. I get that for the time how they did it would have been impressive but the effect really doesn't hold up well at all infact i'd say it was a dated looking effect in the eighties but given the time period and the fact that this was a made for TV film they had to go the way they went because it would have been the only option available to them at the time.

There is at least one character that straight up disappears for a large portion of the film and that's the character of Judy Tyler. We hear Peter trying to get a hold of her and then that's it we don't see her again until the end of the movie and she's meant to the main love interest for the movie so you'd thought that the film makers would go the extra mile to make sure that she doesn't disappear from the film but they didn't it even got so bad that I legit forgot that she was even a character in the film that's how bad things got.

Now I don't know what the budget was for this film altho I assume that it wasn't that huge since it was a TV film but I can say that it actually did make some money at the box office. This film went on to make nine million dollars at the box office which for a superhero film at that time was very unheard of of course now that nine million just about covers the marketing budget for a Spider-man film but even so the fact that it managed to make that much money is still impressive.

Since this is technically an action film that does mean that we have to talk about the action that's seen within the film. Rather understandably so the action is pretty bad alot of the action consists of guys just waiting for the next move to come and that's it but at the same time given that this was the mid seventies and it must have been hard to fight in that Spider-Man mask I can kind of understand why the action is as bad as it is what I don't really understand is why there isn't any music playing during those scenes since that could have made those scenes a little bit more exciting.

Overall in terms of pilots it's pretty basic it does a good job of setting up the characters and setting up the world. However as a film that's where it all falls apart because it looks cheep and it's cheesy as all hell and not to mention the webbing effect really doesn't hold up very well at all. That being said I would fully understand why people would like this film since it's one of those films that's so bad it's good and so it gets a midest but respectable 5.5 out of 10 from me.