Awfully Good Movies - Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (Video)

Awfully Good Movies – Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (Video)

November 17th 2017, 10:59am

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)
Director: Sidney J. Furie
Stars: Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder

With the JUSTICE LEAGUE making their anticipated cinematic debut, and Superman rising back from the dead to join them (SPOILER ALERT, my ass), Awfully Good Movies returns to finally tackle the movie that kicked Superman off the big screen for nearly 20 years, as Christopher Reeve stars in SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE! The year was 1987, and Alexander and Ilya Salkind have driven the SUPERMAN franchise into the ground, so they decide to sell it off to another infamous duo of foreign movie producers: Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who brought us many a DEATH WISH sequel with the Cannon Films studio. But now Golan and Globus had a million-dollar franchise on their hands that could finally make their studio legit, and they nearly got the entire SUPERMAN cast—Gene Hackman and Margot Kidder included—back on board for this sequel, with Christopher Reeve co-writing the script to have Superman battle the timely threat of nuclear weapons. But even a fallout shelter couldn’t protect audiences from this megaton bomb of a sequel, with Golan and Globus shafting the crew with a pitifully low budget and having Superman face off with a solar-powered weightlifter named Nuclear Man…because there clearly weren’t any villains left from the Superman comics to choose from. And when audiences left this flick, they did indeed believe that a man could fly…after you attach him to some wires and put him in front of a crappy green screen. Still, there’s no drug-fueled improv from Richard Pryor in this sequel, nor are there any scary woman-to-robot transformations, so I guess that you could give SUPERMAN IV some points on that front. But then I remember Jon Cryer’s performance in this movie, and then I proceed to take those points away.