Long after the Incredible Hulk television series had ended, NBC revived the Hulk with a string of comparably silly made-for-TV movies, the first of which was, naturally, The Incredible Hulk Returns. Still a lonely soul, Bruce Banner (Bill Bixby) is on the verge of finishing a project that he believes will cure him of his unfortunate Hulk-outs. But just when he’s about to fire up the machine and change his life for the better, he’s interrupted by some curly haired nerd from his past, who tells him of a polar expedition he recently undertook, where he found an ancient hammer that allows him to summon Thor (Eric Kramer). Got that?

Why would this dork think to track down the presumed-dead Banner to tell him all this? Never you mind, because he shows Banner a demo, and sure enough, here comes Thor (looking less like Thor than Vincent D’Onofrio’s car mechanic in Adventures in Babysitting), who proceeds the wreck the shit outta Banner’s anti-Hulk contraption. Oh, the irony!

Thor doesn’t even really act like the Thor of the comics. He acts like Fabio after a week’s training of Hooked on Phonics. Posing and winking like a pro wrestler, he walks around shirtless, downs gallons and gallons of beer, and greets visitors to Banner’s apartment by asking, “Why must you pound on my door with such insolence?” This is where you know director Nicholas Corea wanted to hit the button on the mixing console marked “LAFF TRACK.”

It just sorta ends after the climactic scene of the Hulk (Lou Ferrigno) and Thor working together to pull down a helicopter. Then Banner hits the road again, only to resurface in the following year’s misleadingly titled The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.