Absolutely Brilliant!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The movie is based on Doc's first adventure, The Man of Bronze, with elements from several other stories. It's remarkably faithful to the source material, unlike so many of the 1970's (and even today) adaptions. From Doc's Fabulous Five (Monk, Ham, Renny, Long Tom and Little Johnny), which would go on to inspire superhero teams and the Hong Kong Cavaliers, to his Fortress of Solitude (which inspired Superman's), Mink's pet pig, Doc's gadgets and more, there is so much taken from the original pulp stories.The hard part of the film comes from how campy it gets, from patriotic theme songs dedicated to Doc with lyrics telling us how great he is to him having an animated twinkle in his eye. The TV Batman style died hard in Hollywood. Witness 1979's Legends of the Superheroes TV movies.The movie opens at Doc Savage's (Ron Ely, Tarzan) Fortress of Solitude, where our hero learns his father died under a cloud of mystery. While he looks at his father's papers, a Native American assassin with red fingers and a tattoo of a Mayan god tries to kill him. Doc gives chase, but his would-be murderer falls to his death.When he gets back to his apartment, his father's notes have been destroyed.Throughout the film, Captain Seas tries to kill Doc and his friends. Of note, Long Tom is played by Paul Gleason, Richard Vernon from The Breakfast Club. Meanwhile, Doc finds out that his father received a land grant in the interior of Hidalgo from the Quetzamal, a Mayan tribe that has disappeared. Despite government corruption, Mona Flores offers to lead Doc and his friends to the land.It turns out that Captain Seas is using the Green Death, an airborne plague, to keep the natives under his control (and he also used it to kill Doc's father). Most of the bad guys get covered in molten gold, while the chief of the natives offers the gold and land to Doc, who pledges to use it for the cause of justice.Unlike other pulp heroes, Doc doesn't kill. He rehabilitates with acupuncture and education, a fact that we see in action as Doc finds Captain Seas and his henchwomen ringing the Salvation Army bell for charity.As Doc gets back home, he gets a message that he's needed. He rushes out for his next adventure, which was to be titled Doc Savage: The Arch Enemy of Evil.Oh yeah — Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes) shows up here as a coroner!As helmed by Michael Anderson (Logan's Run, Orca, Around the World in 80 Days), this is a big, bombastic film. It flopped hard when released, though Norma Dent was said to have loved the film. How much you'll enjoy it depends on your love of silliness, John Phillip Sousa and the superheroes of the past. Me? I have a spot in my heart for this film and dreamed of having a shirt like Doc's that would be all ripped and cling to me when I sprung to action. However, I was a chubby six-year-old and had no villains to battle outside of the bullies who routinely kicked my ass. That said, as I grew older, I gave them all acupuncture, forgiveness and education, just like Doc Savage taught me!Read more at http://bit.ly/2i8sPNM

I dug this out and watched it tonight. I honestly think it must be 20 years since the last time I saw it. I remember it being a seriously flawed film. I don't remember it being THIS bad!!!!!I am absolutely aghast that a project with this much potential should have been mistreated so reprehensibly. Who am I to blame for this? The 2 guys who wrote (and I use that word loosely) the script? The casting directors who so terribly miscast at least 3 major characters in the story? (Only 2 of them are among "the amazing 5".) The director, who clearly refused to take it seriously, and kept shoving awful music on top of bad writing & bad acting everywhere? (I LIKED the theme song-- but it should never have been used all the way throughout the entire film!) Don Black, who should be ASHAMED at some of the lyrics he wrote for that music?It figures that I should pull this out, less than a week after re-reading the comic-book adaptation. The first 15-20 minutes of the film more-or-less (really, LESS) parallel the first issue of the comic. As I watched it tonight, I kept wondering-- why was ALMOST every single detail changed? Doc showing up, then using his wrist-watch remote-control to open the safe, and the sniper's bullet missing him by 5 inches because the refractive glass, were just about the only things left the same. I mean, if you're gonna do an "adaptation", WHY in God's name change EVERYTHING???Once they leave Doc's HQ, virtually NOTHING is as it was in the comic (which, given Roy Thomas, I figure probably follows the book). I read somewhere they actually combined elements of 2 different novels into one movie. Again-- WHY? I've heard it was changed because they weren't able to secure the kind of budget they wanted. I look at the film, and think... LACK OF MONEY in NO WAY explains what I saw on the screen!!You know, when people complain about Joel Schumacher, they should really take a look at this thing. The best thing I can say is, I think it would make a great double-feature with the 1966 BATMAN feature-- and probably a great triple-bill with that and the 1980 FLASH GORDON. All 3 films are "silly". Maybe we can "blame" the 1966 film (and TV series) for this. Some fans have complained over the years that Adam West's BATMAN ruined the image of comic-books in the minds of generations of non-comics fans. I think the same could be said for Hollywood. I'm reminded of how many really, really BAD films based on "classic" characters have been made over the years, especially (it seems to me) in the late 70's & early 80's. Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, Tarzan, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, The Lone Ranger-- all "murdered" by Hollywood types who think, "OH, comic-books! So you know it's supposed to be STUPID!" More like they're the "stupid" ones. What a waste of potential.Let me say some good things... Despite the script and the directing, Ron Ely is GREAT. When I read a DOC SAVAGE story, I don't think of the James Bama paintings, I think of Ely. Bill Lucking (who later was a regular on THE A-TEAM) is terrific. Eldon Quick (who I've seen somewhere else, but can't recall where) is terrific. Paul Gleason-- who I absolutely HATED with a passion and a vengeance in THE BREAKFAST CLUB ("teachers" like the one he played should be banned from ever teaching anywhere), may be the best of the "amazing 5" in the film. Pamela Hensley-- though her part was almost unrecognizable from the original story-- is terrific. Before she let her hair down, I also realized she looked a HELL of a lot like "Ardala Valmar" from those awful John Calkins BUCK ROGERS strips I just read the other day. She's got a big nose like Ardala-- only not quite as pronounced. The comics Ardala actually looked more like the 1936 movie Princess Aura-- or Cher. Or maybe Streisand. Take yer pick. (Ardala actually got plastic surgery in the George Tuska strips-- after, she was stunning!)Paul Wexler, funny enough, I saw just last week in a GET SMART episode. I wonder if he was anything like the character he was supposed to be playing? I don't know, because that character sure wasn't in the movie the film takes its title from.

The 1930's was the heyday of Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, the Spider, the Green Hornet, Captain Midnight, Gene Autry, Flash Gordon, and eventually Superman and Batman. A great pantheon of pop culture heroes flourished in pulp magazines, comic strips, radio shows, and movie serials. The 1960's gave us Adam West as Batman, Derek Flint, Maxwell Smart, 007, and many other hero spoofs(not to mention the theater then unfolding in the socio-political realms); the concept of the hero emerged from this period battered and shaken. The early 1970's saw the emergence of a new type of rather angry anti-hero: Dirty Harry, Shaft, Billy Jack, Superfly, etc. Producer George Pal had accurately predicted the sci-fi craze of the 1950's, and so he produced the first picture of that cycle as well as producing the classic and best versions of 'War of the Worlds' and 'The Time Machine'. George Pal correctly understood that by the mid-1970's the collective unconscious of America was hungry for a return of the old school hero, 1930's style. George Pal knew that to make an adventure of this sort with a hero like Doc Savage that you had to somehow acknowledge the absurdity of it all. Unfortunately, while Indiana Jones and the Rocketeer gave the audience the equivalent of a knowing wink, Doc Savage's director stopped just an inch short of having Doc Savage slip on a banana peel. This film, then, is an uneasy mix of authentic 1930's style pulp magazine adventure and ham-fisted attempts at camp. The single worst thing in this film is the soundtrack, a creative but ultimately dreadful batch of John Phillip Sousa marches, including a custom Doc Savage lyric, which is especially loathsome. It is indeed fortunate that a good many parts of this film managed to escape this score. Negatives aside, this film will be mildly enjoyable to fans of pulp magazines, old comics, radio and serial heroes, etc. Fans of Doc Savage should be mollified by the many elements of the source material which were faithfully realized, and that compared to more recent super-hero flicks, the writers took relatively few liberties. Overall, the cast is pretty good, and Ron Ely looks exactly like the vision of Doc Savage on the covers of the original pulps. I think he pulls off the role pretty well. And there are old style cars, airplanes, clothes, and fight scenes, so it's a pretty fun ride. George Pal might have missed the mark here, but not by much. Just a year after this film came 'Star Wars,' which was basically a retooling of the old Flash Gordon serials. In 1978 came 'Superman, the Movie.' Two years after that came the 1st Indiana Jones flick, set smack dab in the 1930's, just like Doc Savage. All of these latter productions, however, benefited by taking their source material or inspiration just a little bit more seriously than Pal did. But since 'Doc Savage,' more1930's throwback films have flopped than succeeded, at least commercially: 'The Legend of the Lone Ranger,' 'The Phantom,' 'The Rocketeer,' 'The Shadow,' and 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.' All of these were big budget affairs. For some reason, certain persons amongst us are irresistibly drawn to that long lost decade, when imagination populated the world with mythic heroes. Too bad these heroes usually remain one step beyond our reach.

Doc Savage returns early from his fortress of solitude in the Antarctic as he senses something is wrong. He arrives at his home to find the members of the elite Amazing Five group all waiting for him with news that his father has died and that his last words are in a letter in his safe. One failed assassination attempt by a mysterious Indian and a fire later and Doc is left with no letter and no information. Along with the Amazing Five, he sets out for the Caribbean where they must confront the evil plot of Captain Seas and the threat of the mysterious `Green Death'.I can vaguely remember seeing this film years ago and thought I'd better be fair to it and see it again before reviewing it. The film immediately hits you with a style that I can only hope was tongue in cheek; the Amazing Five are not the usual geniuses you'd expect and Savage himself is so wooden and all-American that he can only be a send up of that type of comic book character. The plot is nonsense of course - just an excuse to pit Savage against the typically evil and driven bad guy Captain Seas. If you can watch more than half the film and really give a toss about where it's going then you are likely taking it all too seriously!Certainly the film doesn't take it too serious: everything from the script, the characters and the special effects. Special mention goes to the laughable `Green Death'. I realise this film is almost 30 years old at time of writing but these are basic even by standards then! My problem with the film is that it was clearly meant as a spoof (dear God, please tell me it was meant as a spoof!). Having wooden characters, a guy sleeping in a giant cot, eccentric baddies and ludicrous plotting certainly suggests a spoof was the intention. However if it is a spoof then where are the laughs? It is all too silly to be funny and, because it draws on the sheer absurdity of the situation, it is hard to be sure as it has few outright gags. Leslie Neilson plays it straight but the laughs never stop; here I can only assuming this is a spoof.If it isn't a spoof then, God help me, this is one of the worst things I have ever seen. Being a misfiring spoof is one thing; being a straight film that is this awful is quite another! Anyway - in keeping with the spoof idea, the majority of the Amazing Five all play it for laughs, but the idea of a slob who is also a world-renowned chemist is just silly and not funny. Ely plays it straight in what I imagine is a spoof of the heroic types. Sadly he has no comic timing and his lack of acting skills and bulky frame combine to make him seem even more wooden than he was. Gleason is the only actor I have seen since but he has a very small part here. Wexler is actually quite good, he plays it over animated and over the top that it can only be a spoof: the only time I actually laughed during the film was due to Wexler's performance (in a good way!).Overall this is a poor film no matter what it's intentions were. As a superhero/matinee/TV series spoof it had potential but simply lacks laughs. However, if it was meant as a straight film with laughs, it is even worse and can only be described as a mess. If you are in the mood for a `camp', silly film with very low production values then this might just make you giggle in a cheesy way - but you're better avoiding it.