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Tagline: If the world's most powerful computer can control even Superman...no one on earth is safe.

Pizza: Big Mama's and Big Papa's

Preshow Entertainment: MORE THINGS THAT AREN'T HERE ANYMORE

"AS YOU MAY KNOW, BEFORE SUPERMAN III WAS SUPERMAN II AND
SUPERMAN THE MOVIE."

-Pierre Spengler, Producer of SUPERMAN III

Not since the DVD commentary on BUTTERFLY have I heard such idiocy drool from a producer's mouth. OMZ! (Oh My Zod!) Producer Ilya Salkind is perhaps a, if not the, reason this movie is such shit. On the commentary, I almost slit my throat when he defended the silliest moment in SUPE III, when two blinking stick figure men in a walk/don't walk sign get into a fist fight. His defense? (I'm paraphrasing) "Unless someone can show me proof this cannot happen when a computer goes haywire..." He then admits that since he was involved in this movie, he feels compelled to defend it, continuing to tell us things that he thinks are wrong with the movie, like the hiring of Robert Vaughn who was "too famous" to be the villain. Really? With that logic, he must have really hated having Gene Hackman in the first two movies.

Also, how does a producer of a SUPERMAN movie brag - "That's a real helicopter." Salkind also boasted about the fight between Good and Evil Superman: "I think everybody agrees it's one of the greatest moments of the three films." No, we don't agree, schmucko. Though I concede it's a good idea conceptually, it would have worked so much better if the movie had the tone of the first two movies instead of being a sopho-moronic campfest. I'll give you one more; regarding the last scene, producer Pierre Spengler: "Here, I think, the suspense is working 100%" Here's my commentary: "Here, I think, the suspense does not exist." Suspense? IN SUPERMAN III??? These bozos really need to speak to some people who aren't on their payroll.

SUPE III (1983) was directed, with comic misfirings at every turn, by Richard Lester. He also made a lot of SUPE II (but the far superior version was directed by Richard Donner, released on DVD years later - click HERE for that story). Lester removed the wonderfully human tone that Donner and writer Tom Mankiewicz put into the first two, and replaced it with silly gags not worthy of Urkel. Lester, with screenwriters David and Leslie Newman, wanted the franchise to have more yucks. They got what they wanted. Here comes the first yuck --> YUCK!

Back are Christopher Reeve as Clark/Supe, Jackie Cooper as Perry White, and Marc McClure as Jimmy Olsen. That's it. The rest of the cast - MIA. Sure, Margot Kidder's Lois Lane appears for a few seconds (her role reportedly cut due to her allegiance to Donner over Lester, though producer Salkind denies this...but we've already learned not to trust him). Also absent - all chemistry between anyone. Since there's no Lois, they added Lana Lang (Annette O'Toole) as a love interest for Clark, and a couple of evil-lite villains; Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor, playing Gus as a loquacious Nervous Nellie who will give you a migraine) and Ross Webster (Robert Vaughan, bland). YUCK. Gus and Ross? Even their names are boring.

Two and a half minutes of Gus in the unemployment line leads him to a matchbook with an ad to be a computer programmer, which in turn leads him to be an amazing computer programmer, a wunderkind....in just one day. How did he do it? Gus: "I don't know...I just did it." Guess he's an apt pupil or the writers are l-a-z-y. This Gus/computer bit occurs during the credit sequence, which is the biggest bungle of any Superman movie - over five minutes of ridiculously horrid slapstick akin to the opening of the old MR. MAGOO cartoon (they both even have a car running over a hydrant). YUCK. "I myself was not so enchanted with it (the opening)." -Ilya Salkind, producer. But...but....but you are the producer! You could have....oh, what's the use. Even Christopher Reeve thought the gags were silly and over the top.

So Gus finds a way to make money (illegally) using his newfound (though again, no one, not even himself, knows how he found the) skill. He does so by funneling fractions of pennies from people's paychecks into one large check...for himself (this was used in the movie OFFICE SPACE, where they even mentioned Pryor doing it in SUPERMAN III).

And when he's caught by his boss Webster, he's blackmailed into doing some very bad things. So instead of Zod or Lex Luthor, we get annoying Gus the computer guy and Gus's boss Webster. YUCK. Webster's the owner of several companies that control the world's coffee beans...except for the ones in Colombia (a year after SUPE III's release, Starbuck's bought Peet's. Hmmm...). His idea is to ruin Colombia's crop by having Gus use computers to alter a weather satellite to create a tornado. To do this, Webster sends Gus to...Smallville, where, of course, Superman changes the weather back. But we don't really see that happen. We mostly hear Gus describing it to Webster. Also in Smallville, Clark is reconnecting with high school crush Lana (since Lois is all but out of the picture - literally).

Webster doesn't want to stop at coffee. Now he wants oil. But he has to get rid of Supe first. So Gus points the satellite to find fragments of Krypton so he can analyze them and recreate Kryptonite. Holy shit, I think this write-up is more detailed than the film's original treatment.

So what was that about that Good vs. Evil Superman mentioned earlier? Supe, due to Kryptonite, turns on the dark and becomes Evil Supe, doing things like puncturing an oil tanker (in real life, this was a BP tanker...ironic? Prescient?...watching BP oil spill into to the ocean...), and arrives too late to save a truck driver dangling over a bridge. Then, of course, he must fight himself in an auto junkyard. It's the movie's only halfway decent scene that, like evil Supe himself, arrives too late. Actually, in theory, I also liked the idea of Gus's supercomputer protecting itself and making a Computer Woman (who looks like a metallic Billy Joe Armstrong) out of Webster's sister Vera (Annie Ross). But it's played campy, so it loses its effect. SPOILER, BUT DO YOU REALLY CARE?: Gus having to destroy his own machine would also have worked great had we maybe seen the machine before. But we didn't see it until the last few minutes of the movie. So we just didn't care. And speaking of not caring:

There's one time when Superman takes off, and you can see the wires. That should tell you everything you need to know about how little they cared about the movie. Adding to the suckiness of things like bad green screens and laughable stock shots my 3-year old niece would groan at (if I had a 3-year-old niece), is perhaps the worst executed setup/payoff joke I've ever seen; the Leaning Tower of Pisa gag (Evil Superman straightens it out, and the souvenir sellers break their now unsaleable statues in disgust. Later, Good Superman restores the Tower's crookedness, prompting the same sellers, now selling straight Tower of Pisa statues, to break them again).

More forced gags have Gus, for no reason whatsoever, put on skis and walk up Webster's ski slope... just so he can accidentally ski down and fall over the side of a building, landing on the street in his skis. Salkind admits that this is only slightly over the top. Yet, he still defends it: "There have been cases with people falling from buildings and nothing happened..." Even Reeve himself wasn't crazy about Lester's take, saying "I didn't think that his going off the top of a building on skis with a pink tablecloth around his shoulders was particularly funny." Salkind also equates the fact that because the film was "a big hit" means that it worked. What he never said, or realized, is that people went to see it because they loved the first two so much and thought they were going to get another great movie. And as for "big hit"; while the first movie made 600% of its budget, SUPE III made 150%.

Oh, and say, just when did Superman become a moron? When threshers in a wheat field threaten to chop the shit out of Lana's son Ricky (Paul Kaethler), who was knocked out by a rock (which completely disappears in the next shot), why did Supe stop the thresher? Wouldn't it have been easier, and smarter, to just lift Ricky up?

Okay, I'm almost done griping. But there's more. Vaughn's Webster is a failed substitute for Hackman's Luthor, and Pamela Stephenson's (who's now a Beverly Hills psychologist specializing in sexuality) bimbo Lorelei doesn't come close to Valerie Perrine's Miss Teschmacher. Annette O'Toole's the only one, besides Reeve, that displays chops here. But that's all you get. Everything else, in case I haven't been clear, is awful. Even the movie's trailer is wrong; the supercomputer doesn't change the weather, the Vulcan satellite does. And how come in Smallville and Metropolis, there are signs with limey spellings like defence, colour, and unauthorised? Well, we know why, because the producers didn't care. It was a fixable mistake that they could have, but didn't, fix. Instead, they said, "Fuck you, audience, we don't care what you think." Well you should care, because I think your movie supersucks. YUCK!

In the MAKING OF SUPERMAN III, while referring to the scene where Superman becomes evil, the announcer tells us, "Even Lana and Ricky are too late to save him. The writers have done their worst." I couldn't agree more.

Preshow Entertainment: MORE THINGS THAT AREN'T HERE ANYMORE

We finished up this documentary from 1996 about lost Los Angeles places. This show is so cool. So much is available on YouTube, so if you can't get your hands on the doc itself, I urge you to Google, Bing or even Lycos the segments. This installment featured stuff like:

Spade Cooley, the fiddle player/band leader whose 1948 television show on KTLA popularized western swing for the masses. Cooley was eventually sent away for killing his wife. A few months before he was due to be paroled, he dropped dead of a heart attack. Okay, so not every story has a happy ending.

The Rex, a gambling ship run by Vegas Casino owner and bootlegger Anthony Cornero. You took a water taxi from Santa Monica a few miles into international waters. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlPoMyQGVDA

Sheriff John, an L.A. kids show staple from 1952 to 1970. Coincidentally, he died between the time we watched this and the time I wrote this up. Which just proves a man can die by the time I finish one of these long-ass write-ups. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teH91xjNZ2o

Corriganville, the movie ranch not 30 minutes away from RMC headquarters. Closed in 1982, this "movie town" was the setting for many TV shows and movies from 1949-1965, as well as hosting weekend shows (for a buck) for tourists and locals. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Tbi3dhFdY

Jungleland, a zoo which housed many Hollywood animals, and closed in 1969. http://www.weirdca.com/location.php?location=197

Posted by Rich on September 02, 2012 at 8:00 PM | Permalink