Poodle Bites; Poodle Chews It

About a month-and-a-half ago, I broke a filling in one of my upper molars. My tooth doesn't ache, but there are days I have a devil of a time keeping my tongue away from it. There's this little pointy corner that I can't keep from prodding, particularly when my attention's wandering. I mention this because I went to see The Hulk at the movie theater yesterday.

And, boy, is my tongue sore.

I really really wanted to be whisked away by this flick. Of all the year's superhero extravaganzas, it was the one I was most anticipating due to Ang Lee's involvement. I wasn't just coming to the director from Crouching Tiger, I was also recalling his adaptation of The Ice Storm, which utilized another Marvel Comics series, Fantastic Four, as an intelligent and non-condescending metaphor. Surely, Lee and regular scriptwriter/collaborator James Schamus would be able to do something cool with the character.

Boy, you can sure see 'em working hard, maybe too hard. But watching The Hulk, I still couldn't shake the feeling that I was seeing a big budget version of a 50's drive-in flick with pretensions: one of those old-style horror s-f movies where you wait and wait and wait for the monster to appear, while you're subjected to endless scenes of experiments in the lab and awkward romantic interludes 'tween the doomed hero and his gal. In a way this is apt: the early Stan Lee & Jack Kirby Incredible Hulk comics were very much influenced by horror s-f pics by yeoman directors like Jack (Creature from the Black Lagoon, Monster on the Campus) Arnold and schlockmeisters like Bert (Amazing Colossal Man) Gordon. But it's also somewhat disappointing.

Make no mistake. I enjoy a good How-to-Make-A-Monster pic as much as the next big kid. But watching an A-Lister like Lee struggle with keeping our attention through torturous subplots via look-at-me! editing and visual flourishes out of a 30's urban psychological drama, I started thinking (all the while a-pokin' that tooth) of Ken Russell's Altered States, yet another When-the-Hell-We-Gonna-See-the-Monster pic tricked out with trippy visuals and exposition-heavy dialog.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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