Review: Ultimate Spider-Man ‘Blade and the Howling Commandos’

Spoilers Below

Spider Man and the crew are chillin in a graveyard when they come across a bunch of shadow vampires. Blade shows up and is the only one that can destroy them….for a while. Nova eventually destroys them all, and the vampires run away. We learn that Blade is here to stop Dracula who is trying to take over the world and only HE has the power to stop him.

We’re hanging out with Nick Fury now and yea he tells us all about Dracula and his plans to take over. Blade gets pissed because SHIELD has given him a whole bunch of teammates that aren’t want he was asking for. Blade goes off on his own, but the heroes stalk him until he eventually relents on letting them come with. They end up going to the Museum of Natural History where they grab this Ankh that is said to be an important key in stopping Dracula. Spider-Man grabs it which causes the vampires to show up along with Satan’s right hand, the immortal, Dracula. Spider-Man and the heroes try to fight him, but this guy’s TOUGH, even Nova’s super does nothing. To be honest, Blade’s the only one causing any sort of a fuster cluck for Dracula but not really. Dracula ends up grabbing Power Man with the idea of now controlling him.

Dracula now has Power Man under his control and that causes him to beat the hell out of all of his used to be friends. Everyone gets mesmerized with the exception of Spider Man and Blade. Spidey is able to burn Dracula causing him to run away with all of the heroes, but now he’s back with SHIELD and it’s here where Fury introduces him to his new team…the Howling Commandos.

As Spider-Man is getting used to his new team on SHIELD, Dracula and the usta be heroes show up to start shit. The bad guys show up, grab the Ankhs, and leave. Spidey heads back home with the Commandos because Aunt May COULD be in trouble. Eventually, the guys run into Blade and even though he doesn’t like the Commandos, everyone secures May and take off in a Monster Truck to Transylvania to fight Dracula.

To help even the odds, SHIELD sends in the Man-Thing. The whole team defeats the vampires and run into Dracula which gives Spidey time to save HIS team, but Dracula forges the Ankhs only for Spidey to grab them and take them outside where there is sunset. Dracula starts to burn, so he runs away. The N’kantu Mummy grabs the Ankh, merges them, and feels the power that allows him to turn into a monster. He turns on EVVERYONE! The super teams head to NYC, but its SHIELD that has to fight because N’kantu has the upper hand on the other Commandos. Spidey comes up with an idea to make a Giant Size Man Thing which allows everyone on the Commandos to fight the Giant Pharoah and defeat him for good.

Overall, I think this series needs to put a stop to these ridiculous cutaway gags. Basically what they are is the show’s lame attempt at trying to be like Family Guy and it just doesn’t work because at the end of the day Spider-Man’s not THAT funny of a character. The reason why Family Guy’s cutaways work is because they have a variety of characters that make the interruption seem rather seamless, whereas the Spider-Man cutaways kind of get in the way of anything decent that is happening. They seem forced and are poorly setup and as such should be thrown away.

That said, I rather LOVED the inclusion of N’kantu and Man-Thing into the Howling Commandos lore, but you knew the Living Mummy was a bad guy if you had read ANY of the comics so you kinda knew where it was going to go BUT the way he was delivered was stellar. Blade was a great inclusion into the episode, but Dracula was a let down from an aesthetics point of view as I would have much preferred the 1972 depiction versus this one. The final battle with Man-Thing versus N’Kantu was the cream of the crop and well-thought out but part of me thinks the last 15 minutes seemed rather rushed but overall it was a nice special  preferably for the peeps who haven’t been reading the comics for almost 30 years.