A far cry from the expensive, Richard Donner end of the superhero spectrum, Sidney J Furie's Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is content to cheerily motor along, striving to portray Silver Age situations and ideas that far outstrip the film's meagre budget. Following the mixed-to-negative reactions to Superman III and Supergirl, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind unloaded the ailing franchise onto nonsense specialists, The Cannon Group. Lumbered with less than half the cost of Helen Slater's adventure, Quest for Peace is forced to take significant shortcuts, resulting in - amongst other signs of an impoverished production - crumbling, partially transparent special effects and a frame permanently cluttered up with cheap theatrical props.
Petitioned by a schoolboy to rid the world of nuclear weapons, Superman scours the Earth, scooping up missiles from either side of The Iron Curtain. Following Kal-El's modern labours, this ballistic haul is then jammed into an enormous steel net before being hurled into the Sun. Thanks to a spot of scheming by Gene Hackman's criminal mastermind Lex Luthor, this disposal method inadvertently creates Mark Pillow's permatanned Nuclear Man. Rather than the decaying, flummoxed Bizarro seen in umpteen comics, Nuclear Man is Superman by way of hair spray rock and pro-wrestling. He's a grimacing vein-popper, completely unable to control the unfathomable powers he's inherited from his clone parent - which, for this instalment, includes an eye blast that spontaneously reassembles shattered historical monuments.
No comments:
Post a Comment