Super-suckitude.

0 stars

Starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder
Directed by Sidney J. Furie

Amazon Link

The fourth installment of the Superman franchise nearly made me cry (and would have been a good entry in the So Bad They’re Good movie contest). This is despite solving one problem of Superman III: Gene Hackman and Margot Kidder are back as Lex Luthor as Lois Lane - but unfortunately, everything else is a complete and utter disaster.

Injustices rain down from the start: cheesy zooming credits and a head-on Superman flying sequence that is tragically recycled throughout the film. We meet terrible characters like Lex Luthor’s nephew Lenny Luthor, a Valley-boy plaid-wearing retard (John Cryer) and Nuclear Man (more about him later).

Superman himself is out of character, sporting the undocumented super power of a super-stare used to rebuild the Great Wall of China and a super-kiss. Bad behavior continues as Clark Kent leaps off a building with Lois Lane, and reveals his secret identity. They then fly around the world, striving to relive the romance of Superman I, but due to bad effects and editing, Superman looks like he’s deliberately dropping and catching Lois repeatedly, smiling as she screams in fear - as if she’s a plaything. The capper is a “super-kiss” which wipes her memory of this nightmare. When did Supes become such an asshole?

Another lapse of reason is Superman’s quest to rid the world of nuclear weapons. He basically steals the world’s nuclear missiles, puts them into a gigantic super-space-sack, and tosses them into the sun. It’s essentially theft, and doesn’t solve the political issue of pissing off nuclear powers, or the practical issue of them simply building replacements.

But it gets worse: Meet Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow), created by Lex Luthor using a strand of Superman’s hair. Nuclear Man is solar powered, his outfit resembles a toga from Clash of the Titans, and his secret weapons are nuclear fingernails with which he must scratch Supes.

The romantic aspect is another head-shaker. Lana Lang of Superman III has inexplicably vanished, so Lacy Warfield (Mariel Hemmingway) appears as Clark Kent’s new distraction. In one mindless scene, Lacy has a date with Clark Kent while Lois has an interview with Superman. Superman has to change back into Clark Kent and vice versa repeatedly. No sparks fly, and all romance is abandoned for Nuclear Man and boring fist-fights on the moon.

Short list of other travesties:

• Clark Kent aerobics.
• Un-super-speech at the low-budget United Nations.
• Superman stopping a volcanic eruption by cutting of the top of a mountain with laser-eyes and tossing the top into the volcano.
• Nuclear Man throwing the Statue of Liberty into Manhattan.
• Nuclear Man kidnaps Lacy and flies her into deep space where she neither explodes or dies of asphyxiation.

If you must know, the cinematic suckitude is due to unfortunate movie monkey business. The Salkinds (producers of the first three films) sold the rights to financially troubled Golan & Globus of Cannon Films, who cut the movie’s budget in half after production started. The cost-cutting showed, so just before wide release, someone decided to hack the film to pieces in a last-ditch exercise in futility: 45 minutes of pointlessness was eliminated to create something even more pointless and borderline incomprehensible - but at least the end result wasted a little less of the audience’s time.

The DVD commentary track by Mark Rosenthal may be the first I’ve heard where the speaker trashes their film. It’s actually quite hilarious - he rants on and on about the vast difference between his intentions and the shameful results on screen. Rosenthal considers the movie a personal insult and essentially borderline-unethical in its treatment of Christopher Reeve, who was convinced to reprise his role script unseen.

The saddest revelation is that everyone’s intent was to make a better film than Superman III (which they considered an embarassment) but somehow created film that was even worse, killing the Superman franchise for nearly two decades. Superman IV is cinematic kryptonite.

IMDB: Superman IV
Wikipedia: Superman IV
Rotten Tomatoes: Superman IV 11%

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Categories: 0 Star Movies, General, Movies :: Tags: 0 stars, Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder, Sidney J. Furie :: Trackback URL
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