Superman III

I remember walking out of the theater after seeing SUPERMAN III in 1983 and wondering how in the hell this piece of garbage ever got made.

After the superb first two entrees in the series, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind could no longer resist their schlock film background, spewing forth this stupid, unfunny third film.

We should have known we were in trouble when Margo Kidder refused to play Lois Lane as a major role, showing up for 12 lines of dialogue. She must have read the script. She is in the first couple minutes and then walks right out of the film.

We should be so lucky.

Richard Pryor was hot off of 'Stir Crazy" and "The Toy" and the Salkinds were excited to sign him. Sadly, the film strands him with maybe one or two funny lines and a WHOLE lot of painfully awkward scenes ill suited to Pryor's delivery.

It's the least funny he's ever been on celluloid.

Pryor said in his autobiography that he thought the script was horrible, but that there was no way he was passing on the $5 million payday. He had also hoped the film would be more serious than the final cut proved to be, expressing a desire to move into more dramatic roles.

He plays con man/computer expert (huh?) Gus Gorman, who comes to the attention of wannabe megalomaniac Ross Webster, who builds him a computer that can do anything. If that sentence sounds stupid, it's even dumber on screen. Pryor sits down at a Radio Shack level computer and after five minutes is writing world changing code. And man, what a computer this is. It can even affect the weather!

Robert Vaughn starts off strong as Webster, playing a solid riff on his famous roles in "Bullitt" and "The Towering Inferno". He's a dude in charge that you don't want to cross. Eventually the script lets him down as it spirals down the drain in a lost search of entertainment.

It's hard to believe this was written by David and Leslie Newman. These two wrote "Bonnie and Clyde", "What's Up Doc?" and the first Superman film. What happened?

Sequels like this are so dumb and worse, disrespectful to the fans who deserve more than this cheap, silly trash.

Only one man manages to escape fairly unscathed and that's Christopher Reeve as our man of steel. The film is better anytime he's on screen. Even when the dumbass story has him splitting into two Supermen, one good, one evil, he manages to pull off the evil role as if he's in a much better film.

Director Richard Lester (Help!, The Three Musketeers) has an old fashioned, slapstick sense of humor that he kept in check when he took over for Richard Donner on Superman II. Some think that its a better film than the first. Not me, I'll always side with Donner's more powerful, grand & sweeping take.

In this third film, Lester goes off the rails on goofy sight gags and eye rolling jokes that take forever to deliver a punch line. Lester demonstrates the rare ability to make Pryor unfunny.

Annette O'Toole (Cat People) is fine as Lana Lang, who Clark falls for writing a story about the Smallville Class Reunion.

Gavin O'Herlihy (Willow, Never Say Never Again) is saddled with the most bumbling idiot since Biff in "Back to the Future". He's Brad, former homecoming King, now janitor.

Pamela Stephenson is gorgeous and pretty funny as Webster's female sidekick Lorelei, but she pales next to the memories of Valerie Perrine as Miss Schumacher.

In all fairness, EVERYTHING in this mess pales compared to the first two films.

Superman fans almost universally agree that this was a flop, but the producers have argued that while its $60-million USA box office fell short of the previous two movies' $100-million+ gross, it still made an impressive profit. They note this was exceptional, especially against two huge hits at the box office the same summer, "Return of the Jedi" and OO7's "Octopussy", released the week before.

Christopher Reeve hated the final film and vowed to never return as the character again. Sadly, four years later, he donned the cape again after he was promised more involvement in the script. That fourth entry makes this one look good, which is damn near impossible.

At Christmas time 1977, when the first teasers for Richard Donner's original film hit theaters, I remember rolling my eyes and thinking how dumb that was likely to be. Who knew that it would actually be the third film in the series that sunk to my original, low expectations of what a comic book film would look like.

Lazy, unfunny and dull, SUPERMAN III is most despicable for stranding its sincere lead actor Reeve in a film so relentlessly undeserving of his heroic efforts to save it.

Bring on the Kryptonite, this turd gets a D.