By Geno McGahee
I always wonder just how much better the life of David Banner (Bill Bixby) would be if he just minded his own business all the time. Why must he always get involved? I know he’s a hero and whatnot, but he’s got his own set of problems to contend with and helping people isn’t helping him get better. He just keeps looking for a solution to the Hulk problem only to be pulled away from it by somebody in need of help. He should have said in at least one episode: “Help yourself bitch. I gotta get this green muscle man out of my ass.” The writer of the show may have phrased it differently.
In OF GUILT, MODELS AND MURDER, Banner is walking at night in an affluent neighborhood when he hears a woman screaming for help. It didn’t take long in this episode for him to find a cause. He runs up to a mansion and sees model Terri Ann Smith (Deanna Lund) screaming, but before he can save her, he has a problem. Two Dobermans are running at him and they are fucking pissed off. Why aren’t Dobermans talked about anymore? All I hear is Pit bull. Pit bull this. Pit bull that. I once heard of bulldog where a guy moons somebody and has his dick hanging out to represent the tongue of the dog, but that hardly has anything to do with this point. Dobermans kind of get a pass now, but in the 70s and 80s, if your neighbor owned one, you kept one eye open and you watched your ass.
The two dogs attack Banner and despite the kindness of the scientist, the Hulk is not a dog lover. When he morphs into the green monster (Lou Ferigno), he takes those two little shit dogs and launches them like footballs. Fuck PETA. Hulk is not taking shit from dogs and even though they didn’t show it, I bet Hulk went back and kicked the ever-loving shit out of them. I’ve never seen Hulk so furious. You can’t blame Hulk either. He wakes up and he has two dogs trying to bite his dick off. He can’t think. He just has to react. I am all for animal rights but when you just wake up and you have a couple of vicious dogs trying to chomp off your junk, you kill those peckers.
Unfortunately for Banner, he doesn’t remember much of what happened in that mansion, outside of the fact that he came back from Hulk mode to find the model dead. He quickly gets out of there, but finds an electronics store and watches the news broadcasts and this is where it kind of gets weird. Cosmetics owner, James Joslin (Jeremy Brett), holds a press conference and talks about how the Hulk went apeshit and killed his top model, but I didn’t think that anyone really believed that the Hulk existed. He’s sort of like Bigfoot. That is why Jack McGee (Jack Colvin), a reporter for a shit magazine, is the only one really chasing the story. Now, all of a sudden, everyone takes the Hulk as a real thing?
Even weirder is that McGee was given press credentials for the event and was placed in the front row. Who is he blowing? Now, I have considered McGee a dickhead in the past and I’ve always thought that Hulk should bend him over and split like firewood, but he proves how much of an asshole he is here. One poor reporter is trying to ask a question, but McGee cuts him off and takes over the questioning. I know Hulk is his story, but you can’t be an asshole prick like that. Wait your turn McGee!
Banner nearly gets picked up by a female hitchhiker and she ain’t bad. Banner, if he wasn’t the Hulk, would be getting pussy left and right. He probably wouldn’t have minded his wife dying and him not being the Hulk because all these women keep throwing themselves at him. Unfortunately, Banner has to avoid all sex because if he hulks up during intercourse, they’ll need an ambulance. I imagine Hulk, noted at 7 feet all, is probably hung like a horse or two horses.
Hulk is already set up as a murderer, which haunts Banner, but now they are trying to pin another one on him and he’s not having it. He goes for a job as an assistant to James at the mansion and when James sees him, he hires him on the spot, telling his receptionist not to argue with him, but she didn’t. She didn’t say a word before he scolded her, but maybe she’s a royal pain in the ass and always argues and he is just nipping this one in the bud. Or, he may just be a world class cocksucker.
In reality, James recognized Banner from the night of the murder and wants to keep him close and see why he’s shown up like this. I don’t think that James hid his anger at Banner very well. When first meeting him, he was standing in this way that made me think that he was going to fuck Banner up the first chance he got. If I got that sense, then Banner surely got it, but then again, even if he thought that James wanted to fuck him up, how could he? He would just Hulk up and it’d be over. I’ve not seen one guy ever send the Hulk running and James didn’t seem like he’d be that guy.
Banner is given the tour and sees a whole group of hot babes with some of them wearing only bikinis. This job has turned out to be way better than his typical menial job, even if there is an element of danger to it. He meets the new number one model and face of the company, Sheila (Loni Anderson), and he wastes no time in grilling her about the night that the other model was murdered. She tells him that she is terrified of James and goes into a flashback to the night the murder happened. There are a lot of flashbacks in this episode, but it worked pretty well. According to Sheila, James hit Terri with a statue and knocked her dead after she tried to blackmail him into marriage. The Hulk shows up and fucks shit up and becomes the perfect murderer. So, Hulk didn’t kill anyone and Sheila actually notes how sad Hulk was when he found the dead body. I’m not sure if he was really sad or if one of those dogs bit his junk and it’s finally hit him. It’s one or the other.
Banner makes a threat to go to the cops if Sheila doesn’t, but how could he possibly mean that? The cops will arrest his ass once they discover he faked his death and then he may even Hulk up when they lock him up. Nothing good can come from Banner going to the police. Perhaps it’s a bluff, but Sheila buys it and now Banner goes to meet up with the former assistant, Sandy, who has been blackmailing James from a secret hideout that Banner discovered. Unfortunately, (Spoiler), Sheila set him up and now they know where that rat is staying and they are all going to die!
I was concerned for Banner and Sandy here. James and Sheila brought some goon with a very bad 70’s porn mustache that screamed “I’ll fuck anything that moves.” When they tied up and gagged Banner and Sandy, it seemed my worst fears were about to come true. The mustache creepy guy was going to cornhole them, but thankfully, that didn’t happen. What did happen was totally unbelievable and I guess could be called lazy writing. Sheila discussed another flashback where she killed Terri and in a hilarious part of the episode, she notes that she knows karate and starts breaking shit to demonstrate it. She goes on and on and on about how and why she killed Terri and how much funny business that they are all involved with. Unknown to them, Banner is recording it with McGee’s tape recorder.
They load Banner and Sandy into one of those car compactors at the junkyard and it’s certain doom…if Banner didn’t have the power of Hulk. As expected in a situation like this, Hulk gets out, saves Sandy, and then…runs away. Well, he throws that mustache guy just to make sure his cock is at least 50 feet away from him, but he does nothing to Sheila and James. They tried to frame him for murder and he lets them slide when he could have smashed their heads together over and over again until he was just holding head guts. I know head guts may not be a thing, but it is now.
The tape recorder is discovered and Sheila and James and mustache weirdo rape guy are all locked up and McGee takes total credit, once again displaying how much of an asshole he truly is. NOT COOL McGee! Banner solved the case and they should have said what they normally say. “A middle aged man with brown hair and ripped up pants and who’s always getting into other peoples’ business dropped off the recorder”. But McGee gets the nod. I guess it’s not a bad idea considering how many times they wanted to fire him or get him to stop covering the Hulk. This attention probably bought him some time.
Overall, this is a good episode, bordering on very silly. Loni was quite good in this and I remember her being a really big thing at one point when I was a kid. Everyone around me was like “that Burt Reynolds doesn’t treat her right and his wig sucks.” I’m not sure if he treated her right or not, but his bad rug isn’t fooling anyone. That’s for sure. Rich mother fucker looks like he has a dead rat on his head.
I recommend this one. I think they could have come up with a better way for David to discover all the details rather than Loni going on and on, but some people like to brag. That’s how they get caught and here is a good example of how it happens. So, let this be a valuable lesson to all future criminals out there. Don’t tell anyone. Just keep your mouth shut and you may get away with it. You don’t want to be getting it from Bubba, do you?
Rating: 7/10
