"I heard that you were feeling ill / Headache, fever and a chill / I came to help restore your pluck / 'Cause i'm the nurse who likes to..."
So quoth Stephanie Blake (who, according to journal of record imdb would go on to star in the 1990 opus Invisible Maniac as well as having a small part in Ken Russell's Whore [steady on at the back: any jokes you're thinking I have already contemplated myself]) as the strippogram nurse from John Hughes' seminal 1986 design for living guide Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Having had experience of the NHS of late, I have to be the bearer of the bad news that diligent and caring though the staff may be, I was not availed of any like services. I knew I should have gone with BUPA. In the remote vicinity of the topic at hand, though, whilst I was lollygagging around incapacitated I found my mind wandering to the strangest of places. Movies, mainly, as per usual - hence the above thought idly worming my way through my head - and increasingly so drifting back ("Back, Doctor!" cried Morbius, luring me into the loving arms of Morpheus, "Back to your beginnings!") to the time I wrote a piece for the lovely website We Are Cult (right here: http://wearecult.rocks/the-original-dr-strange-and-other-stories-marvels-phase-zero) suggesting the existence (like the fabled 'Season 6B' of Doctor Who fandom) of a Marvel Cinematic Universe 'Phase Zero', comprising the initial run of made for television films showcasing the mighty heroes of Marveldom in the late 1970s and 1980s. Oh, and into the '90s, too, including the last few Hulk outings and the Hoff-tastic Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD. If we must.
And so we take a peek back into a webhead world pre-Sam Raimi (still presumably in Michigan with the idea dawning that this short Super-8mm horror flick he'd shot in the woods might make quite a good ultimate experience in gruelling cinematic horror, maybe). Pre-Mark Webb's abortive attempts at a Sony-centric Spiderverse. Pre-.... whoever did Homecoming (oh, all right, Jon Watts). I speak, of course, of the wonderfully-monikered Egbert Warnderink Swackhamer's trailblazing 1977 opus Spider-Man.
(I'm slightly sad that I initially misremembered the release date as a year or two later than it was, as I really wanted to title this piece 'Spiderman '79' after the Veruca Salt song. Ah, well.)
Opening to the driving strains of Johnnie Spence's funktastic horn-driven title theme, the energy of the movie feels as much like the '70s TV action thrills of Starsky and Hutch as comic book superheroics - a feeling that grows with the opening shots of the gritty streets of late 1970s New York: all grey concrete towers and yellow taxi cabs. As the opening minutes pass, we see first a doctor's office in which the physician suddenly breaks off his consultation with a patient the instant the clock hits 10.45 a.m. and leaves the stricken man baffled with the blood pressure monitor still strapped to his arm (the doc's suddenly becoming a wordless, mindless zombie and striding out of the surgery will doubtless have done his hypertension no good at all); meanwhile, in a Manhattan courthouse, a lawyer freezes in the midst of his summation to the jury as the clock strikes eleven and he wanders out much to the fury and contempt of the judge. This pair of under the influence pillars of the community wordlessly team up to rob a bank, the doc serving as getaway driver whilst Mr Attorney dons a gas mask and walks into the building with a gun, a gas grenade and a briefcase that he soon emerges holding now filled with liberated money. All of this done silently and emotionlessly, they drive through the streets to an obviously preset destination where they drive the car straight into a brick wall. A pair of goons (the lead one being played by the instantly recognisable angular-faced character actor Len Lesser) then emerge from hiding, taking the golden briefcase as well as the distinctive circular pins that each man is wearing on his jacket lapel, and disappear.
Don't you just love the personal touch of a hired goon?
Across the mean streets, at Midtown
As Peter leaves to head home to his Aunt May, another robbery is in progress as a Cameron Mitchell-looking motherfucker (who soon turns out to be a high court judge) holds up an armoured car and makes off with the big bux in the same robotic manner as the previous miscreants, his kamikaze driving taking him straight towards Pete and pursuing him straight down a blind alley to plough into the cold cement at the end of the tunnel - prompting the panicked Parker to instinctively leap and crawl up the wall to safety before breathlessly staring at his hands (spider-hands, spider-hands, do whatever a spider can) once he reaches the top. After trying to explain the circumstances of the crash and subsequent disappearance of the cash to the gruff police captain Barbera (Michael Pataki, who has had a fist fight with Scotty as the boorish Klingon Korax in 'The Trouble with Tribbles', been the owner of Zoltan, Hound of Dracula and been the medical carer for the boogeyman in Halloween 4 in his long and varied career), Parker heads to the offices of that great bastion of the Fourth Estate The Daily Bugle. Proprietor and publisher J. Jonah Jameson (David White, who played Darrin Stephens' boss Larry Tate in the long-running magicom Bewitched) is already at his bellowing blusterous best over the inexplicable rash of robberies when a television newscaster - played by "surely that's a porn star name?" Ivan Bonar - relays the information that in "one of the most bizarre crimes in the history of this city" (big words, pal. This is Noo Yawk) a ransom demand is being made of New York City by the shadowy mastermind behind these events. This mysterious supervillain is holding the city to extortion by stating that ten individuals throughout NYC have been pre-programmed to commit suicide unless he is paid the sum of FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS.
This being the case, neither the volcanic Jonah nor his more cool-headed editor in chief and moral conscience Robbie Robertson (Hilly Hicks) are minded to pay Parker the money he's asking for the photographs he took of the almost fatal crash ("A wreck is a wreck is a wreck!" J.J. growls in a Gertrude Steinian bout of solipsism), and are more interested in the tales of a so-called "Spider-Man" ("That's what these drunks call him") reportedly spotted scaling the sheer walls of buildings. And so our friendly neighbourhood student-cum-freelance photographer begins to practise and hone his new-found spidery skills - waiting until Aunt May (Jeff Donnell, yes she's a woman called Jeff, so what?) is out, he climbs out of his bedroom window and scales the eaves, gables and balustrades of the house in a heartwarmingly nostalgic display of the naive '70s enthusiasm for {and belief in the abilities of) CSO / Chromakey / bluescreen. After somehow managing to stitch himself together a pretty impressive costume for a homemade effort (perhaps his other major was in needlework? At any rate, he'd be a hit a few decades later when the cosplay thing kicked in), our nascent Spidey utilises the preset timer function on his camera to capture a few happy snaps of his costumed self pulling some wall-crawling moves and gets them to the Bugle sharpish.
Whilst J.J., Robbie and Peter are in the newspaper office, a report comes in of yet another mystery crime following the zombified robbery/crash into a wall/cash goes missing template, the target this time being a factory payroll. After Jameson orders Robbie to put their top snap-man MacNeill on the job only to be told that he's already out on an assignment, the eager Peter is dispatched to the scene of the prang to find Captain Barbera and his sidekick Monaghan already there ("A professor who steals a Payroll? They don't make crooks like they used to!"). The "crazy lone wolf" - as Barbera calls him - semi-conscious behind the steering wheel is the respected Professor Noah Tyler (Ivor Francis), a teacher at the university, and Peter accompanies his daughter Judy (Lisa Eilbacher) to the hospital. Watching on is Len Lesser's Chief Goon, who radios his shadowy boss - whose face remains unrevealed like a pre-You Only Live Twice Ernst Stavro Blofeld - to inform him that the plan has gone awry as Tyler has survived.
At the hospital, after Judy and Peter are asked to leave the amnesiac Prof alone to rest, the goon slips in disguised as a doctor to place another of the strange pins on the Tyler's lapel whilst the villain in his shadowy base manipulates whirring machinery with the inputted order 'NOAH TYLER - DESTROY'. The frail academician suddenly finds himself clambering out of his sickbed and climbing to the window for a spot of leg-dangling upon the sill as he readies himself to hurl his body down, down to dash upon the ground down below. This is Pete's time to rise, and so off he dashes to the bushes to strip into his red and blue union suit and scale the hospital wall to intercept the suddenly suicidal doc and carry him all the way up to the roof and hand him over to the cops before skittering away before the eyes of Barbera - "Who is that character anyway?" he asks. I dunno, man. Is it Ben Reilly, the Scarlet Spider?
When Judy later confides in Peter about a secretive self-improvement group that her father had joined and that she thinks the other group members might have information that can hep understand what's happened to him, Parker agrees to accompany her to the group session (well, she is very attractive... oh. Not that kind of 'group session'. Right). There they meet the charismatic cult leader Edward Byron (Thayer David, the eminent Professor T. Eliot Stokes of long-running gothy horror soap opera Dark Shadows), who allows them to sit in on part of the meeting but politely asks them as they are not full members to leave before the private part of the conclave. This is the part where they all throw their keys in a bowl, isn't it? But, wait, no: it isn't. This is the part when Byron darkens the lights and flashes disco strobes into the eyes of his assembly whilst intoning hypnotic suggestions over an echoing tannoy that makes his low bass rumble sound as though it were coming from beneath the sea. Then he issues pre-programmed instructions for a number of them to kill themselves the instant they are issued the command. Which, like, completely harshes the mellow that he had going on, man.
Paying a return visit later in his more comfortable clothes Spidey capers across the rooftops of nearby buildings, leaping o'er the chasms between them as if skipping over puddles to clamber into a high office window. Ol' Webhead carefully makes his way through the silent and empty chambers of Byron's sanctum, searching for any evidence and then OMG NINJA ATTACK!! Out of nowhere a trio of Kendo killers armed with heavy bamboo staffs and snarling threatening guttural warnings advance. A man in a lycra gimp suit tussling with a large shaven-headed man with a moustache? Nothing homoerotic here - move along. Using his powers to his advantage, Spidey has the high ground as he scampers along the ceiling and walls to evade the "HAI!!" thrusts and swings of the mighty bo (Donatello's just can't get the staff these days) and leaves the martial artists encased in the sticky white goo he squirts over them (steady on, this ain't webbukkake.com) before making his egress from the roof by shooting a webline to a nearby flagpole and swinging to another building, and all without being made of CGI.
As the deadline of noon on Friday looms, Peter believes that he's made a breakthrough when his lab equipment picks up a strong microwave transmission sequence that he works out to be the method utilised by Byron to activate his somnambulist sleeper cells. Hurrying to the police precinct to give this vital information to Captain Barbera, he is overcome by the hypnotic wave when the badge pin that Byron attached to his jacket earlier is activated. As The Ten, all triggered and ready for noon doomsday, make their ways to their designated places of self-destruction (a man stops his car in the middle of a bridge and exits the vehicle to hurl himself over the side, a woman stands atop a skyscraper, the lovely Judy waits upon the edge of a subway platform ready to fall 'neath an oncoming train) Peter sleepwalks his way into the Empire State Building, makes his way into the lift, ascends to the eyrie of the viewing platform and readies himself to climb over the protective railings and drop into the abyss. However, the caprice of fate intervenes and as Byron types in the 'PETER PARKER - DESTROY' command (perhaps 10 PRINT 'PETER PARKER - DESTROY' 20 GOTO 10 RUN would have worked better?) and Peter attempts to obey, the prong of a rail catches the pin badge and it falls off, snapping him out of Byron's spell. Rushing in costume to Byron's base, just before the clock strikes 12 Spidey fires off a web that ensnares the broadcasting aerial dish atop the roof and tears it down - causing Byron's hypno-machine to start sparking and spitting like Kenneth Strickfaden arc generators and Tesla coils and turning the ray on him, reducing him to a zombified catatonic state. Finding him in this more suggestible condition, Spider-Man prompts him to make his way to the precinct and hand himself in to Barbera, as the hypnotic victims snap back to their senses and make their way to safety.
As Byron and his goons are hauled in by Barbera and his officers, Peter meets with Jameson and hands over a sheaf of photos of Spidey standing alongside the now genial ninjas. Amazed, the spluttering publisher can't believe his luck.
"How come you're the only one who can get a picture of him?"
"Simple," says Peter. "I believe."
And as he takes Judy's arm and they walk off together into the bright Manhattan afternoon leaving the apoplectic newspaper man with all his questions behind them, you know what? So do I.
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