Somewhere in Time (1980)

Director: Jeannot Szwarc

Cast: Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour, Christopher Plummer, Teresa Wright

Have I Seen it Before: I’m sure I had to have. It lies among that long list of movies which seemed perpetually on cable. I would have had to see it over the years, but I may have only seen clips.

Did I Like It: I’m going to double down on that assessment that I must have seen it before, because I found the whole affair—besides the last few minutes; we’ll get to that in a minute—thoroughly predictable. I had to be remembering it, right? Szwarc might be purveyor of films I can’t bring myself to watch all the way through (Jaws 2 (1978)) and films that feel like the studio barely decided to release (Supergirl (1984)), but Richard Matheson really doesn’t have it in him to miss.

The chemistry between Reeve and Seymour sells the movie, but maybe I’m just too inured to the charms of a time travel story to get engaged, especially when traveling across the 4th dimension is presented less a question of improbably physics, and more a question of philosophy, willpower, and the need to clean one’s pockets.

When the film isn’t being predictable, it’s going out of its way to be aggravating. How did Elise (Seymour) put it together that her love (Reeve) was from the future and had to go back there based on the available information. Even Christopher Lloyd and Malcolm McDowell had to level with Mary Steenburgen in order to move things along. There’s also the suddenness of the film’s final moments. It takes great pains to sell us on the romance of the early years of the 20th century, only to rip Richard Collier back to the present and have him miserable amongst some of the most depressing vies of the early 1980s (the film really did have a great casting director when it came to actual, literal garbage). He then dies in such a way that leads me to believe Reeve has to walk before Natalie Portman could run in Star Wars — Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005). Then their together in heaven. Hey, movie: Jim Cameron called, and he’s positively one submarine away from trying to sell us on the idea of one vacation ruining you from making another connection with a human being for the rest of your life.

Deathtrap (1982)

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Michael Caine, Christopher Reeve, Dyan Cannon, Irene Worth

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I honestly hadn’t even heard of the film before seeing a review in an old episode of Siskel & Ebert. As I’m not allowed to recommend movies for podcasts based on those two gentlemen from Chicago—with good reason—I’m still free to watch films like that on my own, right?

Did I Like It: There’s two very obvious observations one can make about this film. First, it’s clear that Christopher Reeve is having a great time doing this film. He’ll never not be known as Superman, he’d likely never have been a movie star without Superman, and I think he probably liked being Superman. But your guy needed a break. And I can feel the happiness he must have felt when he read this script.

I can also see where this film tripped slightly at the box office. Trying to hit the 1980s moviegoing audience where their red and blue clad hero is a sociopathic writer who is lovers with Michael Caine. I’d like to say that we’re more evolved now, but I can swing my arms and hit somebody on the internet who would set their hair on fire if Henry Cavill kissed a man on film today.

The film itself packs a fair amount of surprises, although most of those occur in the film’s first half. I legitimately thought that Sidney (Caine) had killed Clifford (Reeve). I figured the film wouldn’t have made use of a star only to off him in the first act, if for no other reason than Hitchcock got away with it the one time and it’ll never happen again. When he does return, I didn’t think that would be the shape of the film’s plot. Good on it, surprising me that effectively.

The rest of the film plays out a little by the numbers. Turnabouts are laid on top of turnabouts, only to have the whole film be somebody else’s play. It’s an unsatisfying ending, to be sure.

Village of the Damned (1995)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Christopher Reeve, Linda Kozlowski, Kirstie Alley, Mark Hamill

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I’m not 100% sure how, when my average of watching some of Carpenter’s later films has been low for quite a while, but I imagine it showed up on a Netflix recommendation at some point, and the thought becomes, “John Carpenter and Christopher Reeve? What could possibly go wrong?”

Did I Like It: And nothing much really does go wrong, so there’s that, but I can’t report much goes right, either.

With every one of Carpenter’s later movies, I keep lamenting the fact that at a certain point Dean Cundey stopped shooting his pictures. I mean, I guess Cundey at this moment is off shooting movies for Spielberg and the like, but is it really that hard for him to make the time for his older friend Carpenter? It seems like Carpenter is in a pattern with every othe movie in this phase of his career. With They Live (1988), I’m very nearly prepared to let Cundey go the way he wants to go (which was apparently directing Honey We Shrunk Ourselves (1997)) and just go withe the flow and accept what Gary B. Kibbe has to offer. Then I’m struck with Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), and I yearn for Carpenter’s glory days. But then, right on schedule In The Mouth of Madness (1994) threatens me with a Carpenter renaissance.

And now we’re here. One might want to nitpick the little things that went wrong. The special effects aren’t anything beyond the 1960 original, which really leaves one to wonder why they felt the need to remake the story in the first place. Reeve is solid, but he managed to be solid in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), so that defense will hardly work in the film’s defense. Alley made her bones in genre movies (or rather the genre movie, by way of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and I can’t ever dismiss someone who was in that movie), but it feels like she has just spent too much time doing sitcoms (again, anyone on Cheers on which I cannot and will not turn my back) to bring any degree of earnestness to really much of anything.

Ultimately, there is one problem that governs the film’s failures. Carpenter has been on the record saying he was a gun-for-hire (despite him getting his name above the title once more) , but there is not a moment where I needed him to tell me that. Everything here is perfunctory, and that is the last thing one wants to see from a Carpenter film. Ultimately, it’s unfair to think that Cundey shooting the thing would have saved much of anything.

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987)

Director: Sidney J. Furie

Cast: Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder, Mariel Hemingway

Have I Seen it Before: A couple of times, mystifyingly.

Did I Like It: Oh, boy... Where to start? Before we get into any of the myriad details, here’s the big, unfortunately reality of this film:

It is worse than the universally reviled Batman & Robin (1997).

Yes, Batman & Robin is a mostly wrong-headed*, somewhat cheap affair, but it is at least a complete film, which undeniably has a point of view and the full support of its studio at the time.

Superman IV isn’t even finished. Some of the most baffling editing choices exist in this film, and the special effects are nearly uniformly awful. There is one shot of Superman (Reeve, doing his best here, but even some of the pristine sense of the borders between Clark Kent and the Man of Steel are gone) flying toward the camera that is used at least ten times. It is such a terribly rendered process shot, made all the worse by the fact that I am reasonably sure it was actually shot for Superman III (1983). 

There have been some disappointing big-franchise films in recent years—Star Wars: Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and Justice League (2017) come to mind—but anyone (including me) who has complained about those films needs to sit through this thing and witness just how far a franchise can fall. In Superman (1978), we believed a man could fly. Here, I still can’t quite bring myself to believe that the studio actually released this in theaters. Fantastic Four (1994) was never intended to be released, and it still has a touch of movie magic to it.

There’s a temptation to say that the story might be able to rise above the production shortcomings, but I don’t buy that argument much. Reeve’s passion for nuclear disarmament fitfully comes through in a couple of scenes, but the rest of the film is wall-to-wall b-movie cliche, punctuated by two of the singularly most baffling moments in cinematic history.

The film spends a sequence trying to recreate the magic of Superman and Lois Lane’s (Margot Kidder, walking through the film in a daze, which makes her seem like the only person in the production who knows whats going on) fly through the air in the original film. To do so, the film retcons the “memory-wipe kiss” from Superman II (1980) (admittedly, one of the weaker parts of that film), indicating the memory-wipe didn’t work and says Lois just chose not to say anything about her knowledge of Superman’s identity. They fly. Can You Read My Mind? The whole bit. Although it is, obviously, much worse. They land. Then Superman kisses her and wipes her memory again. It’s a staggeringly bad choice, and I have a hard time believing that at least some version of this fumble-to-end-all-fumbles didn’t appear in the script.

This all culminates in Superman’s final battle with Nuclear Man (voiced by Gene Hackman, who you can begin to sense is starting his fifteen year journey to not wanting to be a movie actor anymore, but physically performed by Mark Pillow, who I believe was never heard from again) where they play a little tug of war in outer space with seemingly mortal human Lacy Warfield (Mariel Hemingway). She breathes fine during the whole event, after which Superman takes her... somewhere in the vicinity of the planet Earth, after which the character is never heard from again. Ed Wood would have stopped that thinking in its tracks.

But then again, that scene could be related to the editing. Maybe the space sequences were meant to take place within Earth’s atmosphere, and more lost background plates are at play here...

You know it’s a bad film when you can never quite tell whether the script or the complete lack of production values are what is completely obliterating the experience. In some reviews for films I didn’t care for, I try to look for some bright spot, or at least some worse film to compare it to and put everything in perspective. Unfortunately, the film I often reach for in those comparisons is Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. It is, without a doubt, the worst superhero film ever made.

*It is often unfairly maligned as a gay movie, and if that weren’t unfair to begin with, but I’ve had a revelation recently that it has been more formative for LGBTQ people of my generation growing up than I ever would have thought.

Superman III (1983)

Director: Richard Lester

Cast: Christopher Reeve, Annette O’Toole, Richard Pryor, Robert Vaughn

Have I Seen it Before: Yes.

Did I Like It: Along with Supergirl (1984), this film is a cheap, sort of depressing affair. It constantly reminds one that the high highs of Superman (1978) are far in the past. And yet, both films have aged better than their initial reputations, thanks in no small part to the absolutely stunning disaster of a film that is Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987).

Unfortunately, this film has a little bit more going against it. As much as it benefits from how terrible its successor it is, it is made worse by the over-validation of the theatrical cut of Superman II (1980). There is much in that film to love, but re-hiring Lester to direct this film implied that all of his contributions to II were the right choices, when everything about that film that works came from the work of Richard Donner before he was fired by the Salkinds. That ignominious firing and the ensuing fallout relegates Margot Kidder to nothing more than a cameo, and it very nearly feels like she’s only accidentally in the film at all. 

It also forces Gene Hackman out of the film entirely, in favor of a character that I would bet a substantial amount of money had been Lex Luthor in earlier drafts, and the filmmakers couldn’t be bothered to fundamentally change the character to some other type of villain. They could have gone for something truly different, like Brainiac or even followed through on the beginnings of Bizarro that they have here, and really let Reeve play the villain and the hero.

But they didn’t

The resulting film is a wall-to-wall festival of camp. It is only fitfully funny in its larger physical comedy set pieces, and largely falls flat during any other attempts at banter or bits straight out of a sitcom. Yes, I do still believe a man can fly here; they hadn’t yet gotten the idea to slash the budget to shreds. Reeve is doing good work here, and his fights with a darker version of himself are the highlight of the film, if only they could have appeared in a different film.

This also, for reasons passing anything resembling understanding, is essentially a Richard Pryor movie. I’m going to reach for a potentially unpopular opinion and say that while Pryor is absolutely one of the great stand-up comics of all time, he was never much of a movie actor. He’s not terribly funny here, either, so despite his prominent presence in the film, he is just one more joke that doesn’t quite land.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Terrence Stamp

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. 

Did I Like It: I’ve taken my fair share of potshots at Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021) but I legitimately think the framework for this long-lost director’s cut of a DC superhero movie would have been a better outcome for that more recent situation. Out of necessity (decades passing, and a number of the key players passing away), the cut is cobbled together from the material already available. Some sequences key sequences are built from rough footage and screen tests. Had they just released the disparate footage that Zack Snyder had shot—and not shot a lot of extraneous nonsense with Martian Manhunter.

Does that cobbled together quality detract from the experience? Does it somehow make the more polished theatrical cut of the film a better film?

The answer is a resounding no on both fronts. The rough edges only make the film more fascinating. That they were able to make a watchable film out of forgotten film canisters which were—at that point—thirty years old is something of a small miracle. The wobbliest example is the scene where Lois Lane (Kidder) finally proves that Clark Kent (Reeve) is the Man of Steel is actually taken from their final audition for the roles, and to hear Donner tell the tale, you can actually see the moment where Reeve earned himself the job and the definitive on-screen portrayal of the character was born. The fact that that moment is given some context, and isn’t just b-roll on a behind-the-scenes featurette is nearly reason enough for this new version of the film to exist.  

And ultimately, I think this is the better version of the film pound for pound. The weird moment in the theatrical film where Superman throws what appears to be a cellophane version of his emblem at one of the villains (a moment so silly, I doubted it actually existed for a moment, and had to google to confirm) is gone. Gone too is the super-kiss which wiped Lois’ memory and set everything back to zero. Those are already some fundamental improvements to an experience which was, admittedly, pretty good to begin with.

In it’s place is a re-setting of the “spinning time into reverse” trick, which works even less than it does in Superman (1978). Jackie Cooper’s toothpaste returning into its tube is a neat gag, but the only time when “everything that happened in the movie you just watched didn’t really happen” worked, it was The Wizard of Oz (1939). Maybe Inception (2010). It’s clear that Donner and company never really had their ending worked out, and all the sudden influx of cash from Warner Bros. after the fact wasn’t going to fix that.

Also, the story of Superman’s sacrifice of his powers in favor of his love for Lois doesn’t quite make sense. It’s improved with the restoration of recordings of Brando as Jor-El into the cut, as the weird bald Kryptonian bald guy in the theatrical cut and Superman’s mom never quite fit. The film is still never quite able to earn both the power of the sacrifice itself, and the speed with which it is reversed so Superman can propel himself into the third act, where he has to do final battle with General Zod (Stamp) and his cronies.

But both of those complaints are going to be present in some form of the theatrical cut, so I can’t really fault this film when it improves somethings, if it never quite fixes some other insurmountable things.

Superman (1978)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder

Have I Seen It Before?: Any number of times. It is, incidentally, the only film that I’ve owned two copies of at the same time. I have it on blu-ray, along with the Donner cut of Superman II (1980, although that cut was released in 2006). I also have a DVD set that includes the theatrical cuts of all four films in the Reeve series. I keep that set only for completions sake to have the theatrical cut of II, and Superman III (1983) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). Thus, I have the first movie in the same version twice, simply because I can’t bring myself to buy another copy of The Quest For Peace in another format.

Is anyone still reading after all of that?

Did I like it?: On paper, this movie is the perfect alchemy of everything that made big studio films great in the 1970s. Marlon Brando “stars,” but really makes enough money for the rest of his life for a couple days’ worth of work. John Williams’ score finishes the one-two punch he started with Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). And much of the same production team and facility that made the Roger Moore era of Bond movies the pure cinematic confections that they were is on full display here. It is big budget entertainment done perfect. It certainly goes on the list of movies I regret watching for the first time via a VHS copy.

And much of the intangibles justifiably recommend the film, and unfortunately inspire a spiral of increasingly icky sequels to come. Christopher Reeve so thoroughly inhabits the role (and yet somehow, third-billing) of the Last Son of Krypton that everyone else who has attempted has been varying degrees of pale imitations, from the likable if slight Brandon Routh in Superman Returns (2006) to, well Dean Cain. The less said about Dean Cain, the better off we all are. Including Dean Cain. Gene Hackman cuts a deliciously roguish figure as Lex Luthor, especially when stacked up against the woefully mis-cast Jesse Eisenberg, and the completely unwatchable Kevin Spacey. Margot Kidder is the right type of performer for Lois Lane, but ever since the DVD/Blu Ray documentaries put into my head that Stockard Channing was in contention for the role, I can’t help but think they may have missed the mark ever so slightly.

But there are some things that work on the nerves, despite the film’s legendary status. Some of the miniature work is obviously miniature work, which serves to undercut the epic scope of the movie, but that the film delivers on its promise to make one believe a man can fly tends to forgive any technical details which may have aged more aggressively.

And still, that sequence where Lois performs “Can You Read My Mind?” as a poem recitation while she and Superman are in mid-flight sets my teeth on edge every time I watch it. It might be hyperbole to say it is my least favorite thing that has ever been in a movie I otherwise like, but it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration.