Less powerful than the Locomotion, unable to leaf through old newspapers. It's a turd! Whose to blame! It's Superman IV!

What the hell happened to this series? I can't believe that they didn't learn anything after Richard Pryor. After two brilliant epics the bottom fell out of this wonderful series and in the latter two we get a computer hacker and Nuclear Man.

Once a brilliant multi-layered story of the origins and adventures of the greatest American superhero somehow fell off the wagon and took not one wrong turn but two! The producers of Superman III committed career suicide by trashing the series with the addition of a computer hacking sidekick played by Richard Pryor. After that bit of insanity they came back and gave us Superman IV: The Quest for Peace in which Supe tries to save the world from itself by ridding it of nuclear weapons. I've pulled better stuff out of my vaccuum cleaner bag!

Just in case you were lucky enough to miss this chunk of Krypto-Crap, allow me to summarize:
The movie opens with The Man of Steel saving the Mir space station from a runaway asteroid and after that finds that The Daily Planet is in danger of a hostile takeover at the hands of Mr. Warfield who wants to turn the once-great publication into a tabloid (is nothing sacred?). Speaking of sacred, Clark is being forced to sell the old farm, but first he has to whack a baseball into orbit (too bad he didn't hit the Mir with it)

The problem doesn't end there, oh no. The summit at the United Nations about Nuclear Disarmament have deteriorated and faster than you can say "Let's pretend it's 1951" schoolkids are being taught the "duck and cover" method. What next? Superman battles Joe McCarthy?

Supe answers a letter from a kid asking him to rid the world of nukes and lo and behold, he DOES. He wraps all the nukes up in a nice little ball and hurls them into the sun, which makes for one of the stupidest looking special effects since Greedo missed.

Problems might seem to be over, unfortunatly Lex Luthor has busted out of prison again, this time accompanied by his irritating nephew Lenny played by Jon "Duckie" Cryer.

Luthor dredges up the ultimate in dumb ideas: He slips a mass of cells, like the ones found in our hero, into one of the missles and when it reaches the sun, out pops Nuclear Man who looks like a Hungarian weightlifter and has an allergic reaction to the light. He loses his power when you turn off the lights!! What kind of stupid supervillian loses his powers when he's without sunlight for too long!!! This is the first and I hope only time I ever see a movie where the villian's lifeline is photosynthesis! Just for fun, I thought it would have been funny if Supe got his hands on a strobe light!

Superman and Nuclear man battle it out across the globe, over Metropolis, the great wall of China and on the moon where Nuke is wrapped up inside an elevator car that sits with the door facing direct sunlight.

Even more baffling than the dumb story are the holes in the movie that one could hurl Krypton through. Like the fact that at one point Nukie drags Marial Hemingway out into space without a suit and she's breathing. Or how about the fact that in the vaccuum of space, Supe's cape happily flaps in the breeze. Or Nuclear Man's cables are visible almost throughout the film. Or the fact that it's apparently daylight in China, New York, Italy and Russia at the same time! And what kind of city has a firetruck that catches on fire?

AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!! GOD I miss Richard Pryor!