ITEM! While we’re on the subject of forgotten heroes, Alrugo Entertainment has just released the latest clip from the forlorn and forgotten first Marvel movie, Italian Spiderman (Italian with English subtitles, 1968). This "liberal," shall we say, interpretation of everyone’s favorite web-spinner was one of the worst and last licensing deals my former boss and late-lamented uncle-in-law Martin Goodman signed before selling Marvel Comics to Cadence Industries. Italian Spiderman was a movie so agonizingly, mind-boggling, soul-numbingly awful that it was never released upon its completion in 1968. When the Italian studio that made it went belly-up, the sole surviving print of the movie was shipped across the Atlantic by creditors for possible distribution in the U.S. Unfortunately for them, the cargo freighter sank before making port, taking this unknown classic with it.
Fast forward to 2007 when a salvage crew recovered some of the cargo from the sunken ship and up came Italian Spiderman, still hermetically sealed in its cobwebbed steel film canisters. Meantime Alrugo Entertainment had been resurrected based on the nostalgia renaissance occurring around their other 60s films Busto Busto and Sex Cops II. Alrugo then decided to unleash Italian Spiderman on an unsuspecting world a few clips at a time on the Intrawebs. The rest, as they say, is history.
The latest episode is a loose adaptation of The Amazing Spider-Man #6 (Nov. 1963). And by loose adaptation I mean there are episodes of Wally Gator that are closer than this thing, but what the hey! Honest Irv has embedded it below for your retro-60s foreign film fest enjoyment! You can catch up on the whole magilla at the Alrugo Films website or over at their YouToobs page. Who says this isn’t the Marvel Age of Italian Spandex and Epilepsy-Inducing Flash Cuts?
Excelsior!
Smiley
5 comments:
My sides are killing me. Wait... let me catch my breath. Nothing says comedy more than a chicken in a refrigerator. Bravo! Il pollo dovrebbe porre più tesori! We can only hope that there is a remake of this brilliant cinematic treat. The Italian Spiderman rules!!!
That's... really odd.
Is there any way to send this back to it's watery grave?
This is sorta like a bad 70's porno movie... without the sex.
Sometimes you just can't have your licensing cake and eat it to. Grantray-Lawrence stuck so close to our comics that they actually cut apart Kirby and Ditko art and (I'll be generous here) animated that. Uncle Marty's deal with Alrugo Films apparently didn't take international law and avant-guard Italian sensibilities into account. Almost makes yah homesick for the late-70s Spidey TV show doesn't it?
Smiley
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