Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)

[choochoo_the_wonder_slut 740]

Guys,

 

I just watched this on Encore. Before I go try to piss on my own eyeballs to get the sting of this viewing out, I wanted to drop a line and let you know this may be the very worst movie I have personally ever seen. This piece of shit makes Superman III look like Citizen Kane. If Uwe Boll had directed this, it would have been a marked improvement. Please, for the love of all that's holy, do this movie.

 

 

 

ps- the Judge Dredd episode was the best thing ever.

[HeyDumDum 39]

SECONDED!!!

 

I would also like for the HDTGM crew to really get to the bottom of how slutty Radioactive Man's outfit is. He is a brazen hussy!

[jarrycanada 2483]

According to IMDB the villain in this film is called Nuclear Man, they most of been up all night to come up with that character name. then they just gave up and called him Nuclear Man... That has to be the worst name for a Villain.

 

BTW that trailer is painful to watch.. the part with the bricks being rebuilt one by one in china. When superman flys by the camera at the end he should give a big thumbs up and a wink... Thats all that is missing from this.

[seanotron 2307]

As bad as Superman 3 is, this is 10x worse.

[sillstaw 414]

According to IMDB the villain in this film is called Nuclear Man, they most of been up all night to come up with that character name. then they just gave up and called him Nuclear Man... That has to be the worst name for a Villain.

 

The great thing about Nuclear Man? As pointed out on the Agony Booth, he's supposed to be the embodiment of all that's evil about nuclear energy, but he immediately loses all his power if he is taken out of sunlight. In other words, he's solar-powered.

[Johnny Unusual 525]

I'd love to see this one.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ka2Yt5_6M

 

Those are not good credits.

[RocHoover 400]

This movie used to play all the time on TV/HBO when I was growing up, I just can't seem to catch it now though.

I DID recently see a few short minutes of the moon fight scene and it is definitely up there in Rolling Stones top 100 worst fight scenes list.

 

I believe there was actually a foot stomp by one of them....a FOOT STOMP in a fight between comic book superhuman characters.. It blew my mind.

[choochoo_the_wonder_slut 740]

Slowmoeroticism

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zVsd5ubpJ4

[justinmh05 1968]

This is the worst super-hero movie of all-time. This movie makes no sense - probably because they cut like 40 minutes out of it. Including most of the exposition explaining how Nuclear Man came about.

 

The special effects were worse than TV's Superboy, which was airing at the time. The DVD commentary track for the movie opens with the writer accusing the film's producers of betraying Christopher Reeve with this film. He's right. It's a shame that this is the last image of Reeve as Superman.

[jarrycanada 2483]

I'd love to see this one.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ka2Yt5_6M

 

Those are not good credits.

 

look at those effect shots. you go, commodore amiga! don't over heat....

Your going to want to get this movie on bluray.

[choochoo_the_wonder_slut 740]

It's funny to look at Nuclear Man's imdb.

 

1. Chippendale's dancer

 

2. Superman IV

 

3. one episode of Wiseguy

 

And that's it. Clearly a casting couch victim.

[seanotron 2307]

Good lord, the guy's name is Mark Pillow. PILLOW!

[therealjayknox 26]

Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder, Jackie Cooper, John Cryer... hey these are good actors right so it can't be so bad... hmm Mark Pillow? Ok well lets ... is this a joke movie.. wow this is horrible.. oh 'Golan Globus' just explained a lot.

 

If you ask me this is what HDTGM is really all about. It's a 'given' the movie is absolutely horrible, clearly went wrong, under-achieved,

but,

this is where the real question (the premise of the show) comes up - Okay.. we know its an epic flop but how the hell did this movie get made?

Can someone just explain what nightmarish contract forced these actors to do this? Was this Jon Cryers' 'paying dues'? Did nobody stop and think plugging a volcano is going to unleash worse natural disasters in the region?

[choochoo_the_wonder_slut 740]

You'll forget about the volcano when you see Nuclear Man kidnap Mariel Hemingway and fly her into space without, you know, a spacesuit and stuff.

[NeilMiddleton 13]

I love the scene where Superman and Nuclear Man are fighting in space and they're clearly just standing on the floor painted with little stars to simulate "floating." There was no attempt in this film to make you believe a man can fly. Every scene of Superman flying you can see the rigs holding him up. This movie is just awful...

[brettburton 17]

I agree Superman IV. I just watched Electric Boogaloo: The Untold Story of Cannon Films. Superman IV was the death nell of an entire studio that specialized in bad films. They also made Over the Top and Masters of the Universe with Dolph Lundgren.

[CarloVanstiphout 34]

I can't believe this wasn't done in favor of Superman III. This is so much more bonkers. Fucking love it.

I mean Menahem Golan produced this glorious piece of shit. Need I say more?

[nimorphi 1]

Superman III was bonkers and had crazy choices. This movie is just sad and no one wanted to be there including the money and they did what they could. It is the old war vet with Alzheimer's telling war stories of Superman movies.

[The Jackal 0]

Just watched it, batshit crazy. Twenty minutes wasted on what's basically a bad episode of Three's Company, where Superman & Clark Kent go on a double date & have to take turns excusing each other. The effects, the dialogue, everything - just shit. But unfortunately, it's also pretty amazingly boring.

[nthurkettle 148]

At 0:54 when Christopher Reeve ridiculously shouts: "STOP! DON'T DO IT!.......THE PEOPLE!" fully Shatner-style, I have to imagine he asked the director after: "was that too silly? It felt silly", and the director looked at his watch and was like "NOPE, couldn't be better, MOVING ON!"

 

[NundercoverBrother 174]

I think this was the first movie I left the theater with the thoughts of "That wasnt a good movie."

I would be 9 years old in this memory.

[joel_rosenbaum 1269]

Would Damon Lindelof come back for this one?

 

Directed by the immortal Sidney J. Furie, who has been tragically overlooked by HDTGM so far.

[SlidePocket 707]

NYC live show next week!

[WillHarrisInVA 8]

Just in case Paul happens to check in on this topic before the show, I did a Random Roles with the esteemed Mr. Cryer several years ago for the A.V. Club, and we had actually talked about trying to do a Comic-Con panel devoted to Superman IV, but it never came to pass. Still, he had plenty to say about the film during the course of our conversation, so if anyone's interested in the discussion...

 

That was an absolutely heartbreaking experience for me, because I had loved the Richard Donner Superman like nobody’s business. I was a Comic Con-fanboy-crazy guy about that movie. I just loved it so much. So I’d always thought that if I got the opportunity to be in a Superman movie, I’d jump at it. Superman II was terrific, but then Superman III was kind of a mess, and the idea of Superman IV was to resurrect the franchise. They had new producers, and Golan-Globus had been doing all these cheesy genre movies. They had made a great deal of money with their Cannon films, and this was their bid for respectability. They were gonna reboot the franchise, and resurrect it for everybody after the debacle that was Superman III. Little did we know that we were actually going to be working on the debacle to end all debacles.

 

 

But it started very promisingly. My very first day, we were doing a huge practical effect, a flying effect. It was going to be me and Gene Hackman. Okay, first of all, that’s incredibly cool. But we were in a ’30s-style open-top roadster and, basically, Superman—played by Christopher Reeve, also amazingly cool—flies underneath the car, and he would fly away with it. Nowadays they would do that with green screen. You’d be lucky if you ever actually even got in the car. But at the time, they did it practical. So they literally got one of those huge construction cranes that are usually on the top of buildings, and lifted this convertible 40, 50 feet in the air, with Christopher Reeve wired underneath it in full Superman outfit. Did I say “outfit”? I’m apparently from the 1950s. [Laughs.] In full Superman costume. And they literally flew us away. The idea was that, at the end of the movie, he catches us and flies away with us. I just was in heaven. I mean, I’m working with Gene Hackman, I’ve gotten to meet Christopher Reeve, and here’s Superman flying me away in this car!

 

But what I came to realize as we kept shooting was that things kept getting… They were running out of money, but I didn’t know that. I just noticed little things, like the craft-service table got more and more meager. And they took less and less time every day. We would get props that were especially, uh, crappy. But I was still having a blast, and working with Gene Hackman was so much fun. Although it drove me crazy, too, because Lex Luthor was creating a villain called Nuclear Man, and yet Gene Hackman kept pronouncing it “nu-cue-lar.” So during one of the scenes I corrected him. In character. And to his credit, he did not go Popeye Doyle on my ass. [Laughs.] I think it made it into the movie, actually, although I haven’t seen the movie in ages.

 

Toward the end of the thing, they started dropping whole sequences that they were going to shoot, and I thought, “That doesn’t bode well.” But I finished my shooting and went back to the United States—we shot in England. A few months later I ran into Chris Reeve on the street, and I said, “Hey, let’s have lunch!” And he said, “Okay, sure!” We went out for lunch, and I said, “I’m so excited about the movie! When’s it coming out?” And he said [Takes a deep breath.] “You need to know: It’s an absolute mess. We had six months of flying work that we were supposed to shoot; they cut five months of it. They’ve thrown together an edit that barely makes sense.” And I was absolutely devastated, because I really wanted to be a part of bringing Superman back, you know?

 

The movie does not do justice to the script at all. The script was actually pretty clever. The script was basically that a kid asks Superman to get rid of all the nuclear weapons in the world, saying, “You’re Superman! Why can’t you do it?” That was a much bigger part of it than a lot of the really dumb Nuclear Man stuff that ended up being used. It ended up with Superman basically deciding that’s something Earthlings are going to have to do for themselves, which I thought was an important message at the time. When I finally did see the movie, every frame of it hurt me physically. [Laughs.] I’d had such high hopes for it that… To feel like you’re a part of the downfall of something that you had hoped to resurrect, that’s a tough thing to take.

 

But that it has acquired a so-bad-it’s-good sort of thing after all these years is kind of fun. And I’ve said publicly that if they ask me to be on a Superman IV panel at Comic-Con, I’ll do it! But… [sighs.] You do get into this business because you love these stories, and if you care about them, seeing them go in a direction that you hoped they wouldn’t, it does hurt. The fullness of time has given me some perspective on it.

 

https://tv.avclub.co...ting-1798238147

 

[SlidePocket 707]

New episode finally taking place next week!