Review of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) by Gimly M — 13 Nov 2013

I don't always rate movies by just quality, I include the entertainment value too. This justifies why I've given one of the most notorious and panned sequels a decent star rating. Superman IV is a huge mess no matter how you look at it, but on the entertainment scale it's damn fun to watch.

On the one hand, I'll tell you I'm just appalled as everyone else with the problems in this film: the story is full of gaping holes, it's poorly edited, a lot of the special effects look like bad blue screen tests from the 60's or cutouts from a magazine and look very cheap, Nuclear Man is absolutely laughable and just growls a lot, the love subplot with Lacy is brought in and forgotten, a boy who plays a pivotal part in the story with sending a letter to Superman is brought in and forgotten too. That's really the biggest problem with the film: it's been hacked down from the original 2h 15min runtime to 1h 30min, and the worst and most sad part is knowing that a lot of the deleted scenes available to the public fix a lot of these plot issues, but yet we have to accept that they weren't in the final version and therefore presents story flaws.

I can agree with everyone about how awful this film is, but I enjoy it cause it's so bad. You notice a new flaw or something different every time you watch the movie, the sissy fights between Superman and Nuclear Man are just so lame but entertaining to watch, and the movie is just one hilariously bad scene after another. But it's a mess that's so interesting that it's amusing, and I grow some sort of sympathy towards it knowing that a lot of it didn't have to be as bad as it was.

Superman IV has a ridiculous plot that was too grand on scale for its low budget, but it had potential. The film at least made a lot of nice attempts that sounded great on paper, but just weren't executed well. For that reason, I enjoyed this more than Superman III because Superman IV was a Superman film, a movie with a lot of ambition which I can respect even with the tragic results. Superman III was a boring, lame, uninteresting film from the get-go with only a handful of fine scenes, and left you empty handed at the end. Superman IV manages to be more memorable because of its unforgettable cheese and awfulness which is a plus for me over an uninteresting, side-tracked (cause of Richard Pryor), silly film like Superman III. Superman IV for me will always be one of the ultimate guilty pleasures.