Spider-Man Strikes Back (1978 TV Movie) User Reviews

REMARKABLE EPISODES

[Big Movie Fan · 22 March 2002]

If you've read my review on the 1978 Spider-Man TV series you'll know that I hold it in high regard. Spider-Man Strikes Back (not a film but actually two TV episodes) was remarkable.

(POSSIBLE SPOILERS) There's a great cast here. Nicholas Hammond plays Peter Parker/Spider-Man really well whilst Robert F. Simon is really good as the grumpy Jonah Jameson. Joanna Cameron makes an interesting female in the film.

The plot is really good. Some students steal some plutonium in order to make an atomic bomb. They don't plan to explode it, they stole the material in order to prove how easy it was. However, a villain by the name of Mr White gets his henchmen together and makes his way to New York to steal the bomb...which they actually succeed in doing.

There's some great action scenes in here. Spider-Man battles Mr White's thugs atop a tall building and is thrown off. He infiltrates Mr White's house in California and battles the bad guys (one is a strong brute whilst the other is some sort of Martial Arts expert).

The comic book Spider-Man was a bit of a detective at times and in this film he is the same. Parker does his detective work in this episode trying to figure out where the atomic bomb is located and how to catch the bad guys.

I originally saw these episodes many years ago but I watched them the other night and enjoyed them again. The special effects may not have been as good as they are now but Spider-Man Strikes Back was good for it's time.

Lots of fun if you know what to expect

[konover · 10/10 · 19 November 2001]

For me, the 70s Spiderman live action movies were great fun. I look back on it with a lot of fondness and nostalgia. Someone unfamiliar with the series may not like it, but then again, you might if you know what to expect.

This is a low-budget made for TV film. The villains are regular villains in the form of a millionaire and his henchmen. If you know that, than I think your chances of enjoying this are better.

Despite its low-budget and lack of supervillains, I think the film still felt like an "epic" adventure. I really liked the musical score in the film. The acting was solid all the way around even if the 70s clothing styles may make you laugh.

Even today, I think Nicholas Hammond was a great choice to play Peter Parker/Spiderman. He was very convincing in the role, and fun to watch. I'd place his casting up there with Christopher Reeve as Superman and Linda Carter as Wonder Woman.

The rest of the cast is very good. JoAnna Cameron made an excellent companion for Peter Parker. Robert Simon was solid as J.Jonah Jameson, especially when threw a tantrum. Chip Fields was great as Rita. And Michael Pataki was great as Capt. Barbera.

I understand that this particular film was shot entirely in LA, which I wish I never read, because I always felt that the New York scenes FELT like New York.

As far as I'm concerned, the creators of this series made the very best they could with their small budget. I imagine with a Hollywood movie budget, the same people involved here would've made a Spiderman movie franchise equally enjoyable, but with special effects and super-villains to match.

That's not to say that the effects are bad. Just limited. The wall-crawling, web-slinging and fight scenes are solid.

I hope these Spiderman adventures will be available on DVD someday because I would definitely buy them.

I love this movie!

[Truman-10 · 10/10 · 13 March 1999]

YOU can criticise this movie in every department - if you compare it to films like Superman and Batman. But if you look at it as a movie of its time - the late 70's - and just let it wash over you, it's great stuff.

The fight scenes are funky rather than violent, the stunts are still impressive even today - man, is that guy really being pulled up a skyscraper by a rope? - and the whole thing is just so entertaining, if not thrilling. The bad guys are lousy, and the whole thing didn't cost much, but just seeing Spidey running around makes you smile.

Good If You Remember This Film Is Actually Two Episodes Of The 1977 Show

[jeremycrimsonfox · 8/10 · 26 July 2022]

I have seen a lot of bad reviews for this, but I saw it, and like it. Yeah, Spider-Man strikes back looks low budget, but here's the thing: this "movie" is actually the two-part series premiere of the 1977 series, The Deadly Dust, edited into a movie, so that is why it's so low budget.

After being framed for the theft of a nuclear bomb, made by three students at New York State University, which they made by stealing plutonium in order to do a project on the dangers of nuclear power. Unfortunatly, this news comes to Mr. White, a Swiss arms dealer, who comes to New York City seeking to take the bomb for a ransom plot. Now Spidey has to stop the madman from going through with his plot to detonate the bomb if he is not given one billion dollars, in a mission that takes the web head to Los Angeles.

This is a great movie. Yeah, it's not as good as the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies as well as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but you have to remember this was made from two episodes of a TV show, made on a TV show budget. Nicholas Hammond deserves the same respect that Tobey, Andrew, and Tom get for playing the wall crawler, as he does a good job separating Peter Parker and Spider-Man, and Robert Alda does a good job as the villainous Mr. White.

Mild but entertaining comicbook adventure

[The Spectacular Spider-Man · 10/10 · 5 August 2000]

Spider-Man Strikes Back never really captures the feel of the Marvel comics it's based on. Only two characters - Peter Parker and J. Jonah Jameson - make the transition and although both give likeable performances, neither are really that similar to their comicbook counterparts. Nicolas Hammond is too old for Peter, and as Spidey, lacks the wallcrawler's sense of humour, although his intelligence and scientific knowledge is essential to the plot. Robert F. Simon is grouchy, but doesn't have pompousness or anger of Daily Bugle editor JJJ. Secretary Rita was perhaps originally Betty Brant, but she has very little in common with her.

Spidey himself is done quite well, his costume is almost exactly the same as the original, and he climbs up and down buildings slowly but effectively. He even swings on a webline in one absolutely perfect (but very short) sequence, which will have fans in raptures. The fight scenes are cool, if short, with some intresting techniques thrown in, including jump cutting and P.O.V shots during the combat. There is also an exciting car chase and a genuinely dramatic climax with Spidey racing to defuse a nuclear bomb. The stunts are extremely impressive considering the budget.

The biggest fault is the lack of any supervillains. Instead of the Green Goblin, Kraven the Hunter or Mysterio, the arch enemy is Mr. White, a greedy millionaire who is after the bomb. His two henchmen are a kung fu guy and a huge, Jaws-like thug. They are all acceptable for 1970's TV shows, but for a movie released theatrically, insufficient.

There is some great music, however, and Peter's trademark day-to-day problems are all present and correct and occasionally amusing. A lot of the action takes place on top of skyscrapers as well, as in the comics. Compared to other comic based TV movies, it's one of the best, far superior to the recent Justice League of America (1997) and only surpassed by The Incredible Hulk (1977).

Overall, a pleasantly enjoyable movie and the best Spider-Man film so far, but nothing to get too excited about. Get excited about Sam Raimi's 2001 Spider-Man, with Tobey Maguire as Spidey fighting Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin.

No, not quite

[DrWorm · 10 June 1999]

Although this isn't terrible for a low-budget TV movie, it doesn't really work. This is mainly for one reason: Spider-Man hardly gets to do anything! Most of the movie is Peter Parker stumbling into an incident involving a nuclear bomb, and stuttering to people when they ask him about Spider-Man. A good effort was made here, but it just doesn't have a Spidey feel to it. They should have gotten one of the comics' writers to come up with a story for this one. Oh, well.

Spider-Man is back

[BandSAboutMovies · 4/10 · 7 May 2022]

Despite its high ratings, the CBS Amazing Spider-Man series only lasted 13 episodes. There are a lot of reasons why it didn't last - Marvel Comics publisher and co-creator of the character Stan Lee fought with producer Daniel R. Goodman (even telling Marvel house magazine Pizzazz that the show was "too juvenille"), it was expensive to make, it didn't get the demographics that the network wanted and they no longer wanted to be the superhero network.

Columbia Pictures helped recoup those costs by releasing two movies in UK, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, taking the "Deadly Dust" episodes - season 1, episodes 1 and 2 - and turning them into a feature-length movie.

Upset that their professor has brought a small amount of plutonium onto campus, three students decide to steal it and build a bomb in order to protest the dangers of nuclear power. They didn't figure on international businessmen and arms dealer Mr. White (Robert Alda) taking their bomb and trying to detonate it in Los Angeles as an attempt to kill the President of the United States.

Meanwhile, Captain Barbera (Michael Pataki!) suspects Peter Parker (Nicholas Hammond) of the crime. He's also pursued by Rita Conway (Chip Fields), a reporter who wants an interview with his alter ego, Spider-Man.

The great thing about the UK - well, maybe not great - is that nunchuks are illegal, so they get censored from every movie. Like this one. It played on U. S. broadcast TV but couldn't play UK theaters.

Not amazing, just entertaining.

[McFrogg · 7/10 · 18 April 2018]

Spider-Man Strikes Back is nowhere near as good as the movies in Sam Raimi's excellent trilogy. But it's still pretty darn enjoyable.

It doesn't have a lot in common with the comic books, but neither did the Hulk series from the 70s, and that one is considered one of the best shows based on a Marvel comic book.

Nicholas Hammond is good as Peter Parker (the hair is hilarious, though...the 70s was a tacky decade), and aside from the visible web shooter and belt, the suit doesn't look any worse than Christopher Reeve's Superman outfit. J. Jonah Jameson is very funny, and the fight scenes and stunts are exciting to watch. I felt more dizzy watching this than any of the scenes in the new ones.

I can't remember anything offensive in it, the fight scenes are bloodless, and there's no nudity, except for some ladies in bikinis. If you have small kids, it's probably better to show them this than the scary movies in the Raimi trilogy.

Nicholas "sound of music" Hammond dons the spandex for this crass second seventies outing.

[Mr Bungle · 25 March 2001]

Well you've read the comics, seen the various cartoon's and then you watch this. "Sweet jesus what is going on" was my first thought when viewing this nugget of 70's nostalgia. The first shock came when I saw good old Peter Parker, not only was he sporting a very fetching donkey jacket (I could almost smell the tramp urine) he also had the most ridiculous haircut, "ah well its only seventies fashion" I thought to my self, but no, not only had PP taken up the substitute school teachers wardrobe, he had somehow lost all his classic wit (probably all them nasty drugs). No longer was Peter Parker the nerd who became cool, he was just a nerd. Then he donned the spandex...

Gone was the athletic wall crawler who swung his way round the city with ease, only to be replaced by a positively lethargic "2cm per hour wall crawling speed" imposter, instead of gracefully traversing the city roof tops via his web shooters, he seemed to prefer to run about in a very foppish manner indeed (usually sticking to the one roof top)although on one occasion in the film he does swing from one building to another (although it is the exact same footage that was used in the first film and his webs are now inch thick white rope that can self tie knots around poles and other protruding objects). Then there's the fight scenes, In the comics he goes head to head with people such as Rhino and other massive super strong villians, In this he gets smacked by skinny "Jeff Capes" lookalikes, (so much for spider strength). On the villian front there is Mr. White who's about as threatening as your mum. Ah well for all its faults it is part of the Spiderman legacy, even if it does reflect the cheese of the seventies far too well. Watch it if your a die hard Spider-fan (call it spiderman the wilderness years) but if your new to the world of spider-man, read the comics and wait for Sam Raimi's film.

"Spins a web any size, catches thieves just like flies"... "these are a few of my favourite things!"

[walkingwithprimeval · 5/10 · 1 April 2021]

Back in the more innocent and carefree days of my early childhood life as a right young lad, I was properly into comic book-based superheroes (despite me never having read a single one of them). From the '60s Batman (Adam West & Burt Ward) to the '70s Incredible Hulk (Bill Bixby & Lou Ferrigno), I'd watch just about everything that had anything to do with these colourful, costume-wearing icons of pop-culture history. At roughly around the same time as when Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man film began to grow into a viable franchise juggernaut during the early 2000s, I remember having this old video tape of another Spider-Man movie that actually predated the more famous Tobey Maguire incarnation we all came to know and love (but little had I known it was from many, many years prior to when I was born). Yep, well before the immensely-beloved live-action Spider-Men of today's world (including Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland), there was the less-than-popular version played by Nicholas Hammond (of Sound of Music fame).

So now that I've had a chance to unearth and revisit this relic from my youth, was it actually worth rewatching after all these years? Well, yes and no. To my naive juvenile self, this was one of the coolest things ever. But to my now adult mindset, this is quite possibly one of the most laughable things ever. We always tend to take certain things a little more seriously as kids, so I'd say it's probably best-viewed through the eyes of a child (it suffers from what I like to call "Power Rangers syndrome" in that respect, where as a youngster it was really awesome but now as a grown-up it's kind of embarrassing). Seeing as though it was only a made-for-TV movie after all (not to mention, one from the 1970s), I'll cut it some slack on the special-effects side of things (such as with his web-slinging and the compositing shots) as I suppose they really weren't that awful when taking into account the decade in which this came out and the very minimal budget it must've had at the time of its production (you've honestly got to take these factors into consideration when judging a product such as this fairly). The stunt-work is truly enjoyable to watch as every bit of the choreographed fight sequences left me in hysterics, and I'm guessing this was most likely due to the heavier type of bulky TV cameras they were using in the late '70s (which I'm sure had a limited range of motion back then). And to top it all off with the technical details, there's always loads of unintentionally cheesy-sounding music cues which make the dramatic scenes seem more hilarious than anything else (no further comment on that one).

Although he's nothing like the full-fledged Peter Parker from the Raimi trilogy, Nicholas Hammond still does a semi-decent job in the role (Hammond's interpretation of Parker manages to capture that intellectual aspect of his nerdy character fairly well, and he even goes through the typical phase of wishing he'd never become the wall-crawling web-head). The spandex suit they designed is kind of a joke (I don't mean to be too picky here and maybe I've been spoilt by all the newer suit designs, but this one's aesthetic choices just make it look so funny in comparison to those others). Not only does it's very appearance come-off as if to say it was originally a cheaply-made, store-bought Halloween costume, but the mask's eyes are also pretty goofy-looking. And as for Spider-Man's movements, let's just say they're a little odd at best and downright bizarre at worst. Whenever he's lightly-running across a rooftop or crawling up and down the side of a building, it just looks incredibly awkward. Oh yeah, and the "Spider Sense" sequences are a spectacular sight to behold (it's just a dazzling display of strobing colour-effects layered over a choppily-edited scene of whatever the baddies are up to).

I'm very much aware of the fact that I haven't talked about the plot at all, but that's mostly because it doesn't really matter a whole lot, seeing as how it's not very memorable and feels so generically bland (there's something to do with Spider-Man having to stop a bomb from going off during a world peace conference, or at least something to that extent?). Quite frankly, it's just your mediocre '70s self-contained TV plot-line of the week (a pretty forgettable story, all-round). But even after all my harsh criticisms, I still find there's somewhat of an amusement factor to it (I suppose that's just my nostalgic memory doing the talking for me, now). It's a small-screen adaptation that's bound to go down in superhero history as an ironically-entertaining anomaly in the wider Spidey franchise (only for the morbidly-curious of dedicated Marvel Comics fans to seek out).

Made for TV superhero movies sucks!

[kenneth9265 · 3/10 · 13 June 2004]

I am sorry, but this movie was worst the then first one. How can you have a superhero movie without a super-Villain? Where is the web slinging! Why do he need transportation to get around?(helicopter to go the the roof of a building????). With a low budget and boring storyline, this movie is not even worth a rental! Hammond is too old to play Peter Parker, and where is Mary Jane, and Betty Brant? How is it that the Spiderman in the comics can take on Doctor Octopus, but in this made-for-TV movie, he gets his A*S kicked by TWO thugs? My children of 15, 11 an 8 saw this movie and threaten to call Child Protective Services for being cruel for making them watch this joke of a movie...Please, and I do mean please....I am asking all network media bosses only for one thing....If you going to make a Superhero movie for TV make sure that you stick to the original ideal of the comic and make sure that the Superhero has a Super-Villain to fight with.

Nicholas Hammond era

[hogan-13430 · 10/10 · 30 March 2023]

This Movie is connected from two parts of the first and second episodes (The Deadly Dust) of the Spider-Man TV Show

To start with, David White, who played the character J. J. Jameson in the TV Pilot Spider Movie, was replaced by another actor, Robert F. Simon, as a great lure as he is a witty and more likable take on Jameson.

I will not spoil the plot, if you want to find and see for yourself! The highlight of this film is actress Joanna Cameron, she shines in every scene and I'm really sorry that she was taken only for an two episode.

Spider-Man himself, by modern standards, may seem tedious and slow, but he was made mundane and realistic, which is a plus for me personally, Nicholas Hammond is an excellent Peter Parker, of course, he is very different from the version of Toby, Garfield or the same Tom Holland, but in him there is a special attractive charisma.

The practical effects are very well done, and the moment when the Spider hooked onto the helicopter with the help of a web is a legendary scene, but unfortunately forgotten.