The Amazing Bulk
by Emily Nagle
“She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” premieres on Disney+ today. In honor of the show’s premiere, I will be reviewing a film from the Galxy catalog of a similar title: “The Amazing Bulk”. For context, this film is a mockbuster parody of Marvel’s “The Incredible Hulk”.
The movie is about Henry “Hank” Howard (Jordan Lawson), a government research scientist who is developing a serum that will increase strength and longevity. Hank also is planning to marry Hannah (Shevaun Kastl), the daughter of General Darwin (Terence Lording), who commissioned Hank to create the serum. However, Darwin won’t let Hank marry his daughter until he develops an effective serum.
It all seems impossible until one night, when Hank and his fiancé get mugged on the subway. When they get home, Hank injects himself with the serum and transforms into the Bulk, a giant purple humanoid who looks a lot like a rip-off of Thanos. Hank then goes back out, finds the mugger, and kills him.
Most of “The Amazing Bulk” falls into the “so bad it’s good” category due to the low-budget visuals. When the opening credits are in Comic Sans, you pretty much know what you’re getting yourself into. Actually, scratch that – I was unprepared for how lazy the visuals were going to be. This movie came out in 2012, but the CGI is reminiscent of a 90s video game. Some of the scenes feature unnecessarily over-the-top transitions where they zoom into a microscope lens or something to change locations.
Before watching this movie, I saw the trailer and couldn’t stop laughing at the awful visuals. Every single background is green-screened in, and the animation is super low-budget. However, the CGI takes up maybe about a third of the movie, leaving us with bad acting and an incomprehensible story. And while the terrible CGI is hilarious, the live-action sequences are tough to sit through. They have boring dialog that sounds like it’s from a video game cutscene, terrible audio mixing (despite nearly 20% of the film’s budget going towards sound editing), and the confusing story will leave you thinking, “Wait, what’s going on?”
Here’s why the story is so weird: There’s a bad guy named Dr. Werner von Kantlove (Randal Malone) who lives in a castle with his wife Lolita (Juliette Angeli) and loves blowing up monuments. Why? Who knows. But his scenes are thrown into the movie for seemingly no reason, as nobody even mentions him until the end (at which point it just gives the impression that they had to come up with a way to connect the two stories at the last minute). I love low-budget film ripoffs as much as the next person, but by the time the movie ended, I was tired and ready for it to be over. The joke had mostly run its course.
If you’re a sucker for terrible CGI or absurd film ripoffs, you’ll get a kick out of “The Amazing Bulk”. You can experience the magic for yourself, and stream “The Amazing Bulk” for free on Galxy.