Superman on TV is nothing new. The on of the first live-action superhero TV series based on a comic book was The Adventures of Superman in the 1950s, there was a popular series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in the 1990s and a very successful teen-oriented show Smallville in the 2000s. And Supergirl on The CW on now is one of the more popular shows airing on that network too. So the new Krypton series on SyFy is really just the latest in a long line of shows based on the man of steel.
Well, kind’a sort’a as Krypton doesn’t actually feature the strange visitor from another planet, its focus is on Superman’s granddad Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe) and doesn’t take place on Earth. It tales place on that “another planet” Krypton 200 years in the past.
In that time on Krypton the house of “El,” of which Superman, aka Kal-El will one day be a part of, is no more after Seg’s granddad Val (Ian McElhinney) was executed for insisting that there’s life on other planets which also meant the house of “El” was striped of their rank and name. Seg’s a bit of a wild-card, I think he got into more fistfights in the first episode of Krypton than is usual for a whole season of a similar regular series. When he’s not beating people up he’s running off to be with his girlfriend Lyta Zod (Georgina Campbell). But when mysterious Earthling Adam Strange (Shaun Sipos) appears and tells Seg that the future of Earth, if not the universe is is at stake, Seg must get his life back tougher and finish Val’s work to stop to stop a massive interstellar threat so that his genes can continue on.
Krypton is interesting if it’s a bit all over the place. On the one hand some of the characters and characterizations are as over-the-top as those in the 1940s Superman movie serials, yet in other times Krypton tries to be a modern series with sex and violence and a season-long story. I don’t mind either over-the-top or modern, I just wish the producers of the show had settled on one.
The visuals of Krypton are right in line with the current ethos of the DC movie franchises — dark and dreary like in the Man of Steel movie. I’m not opposed to this, it’s just a different view of Krypton that we’ve thus-far seen on TV. Always before Krypton was this bright, shining beacon of hope, even if the scientists of Krypton couldn’t see that their own demise was coming. The Krypton of Krypton is a worn-down nub of a civilization where people hide from the weather under domes, corruption is rife and most of the populous is under the sway of a religious leader who’s taken over the government of the planet.
I’m kind’a sort’a interested in seeing where Krypton goes from here, but my guess is that after a few more episodes I’ll probably be done with Krypton for good.
Santa Clarita Diet
All episodes for the second season of the Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet dropped last Friday. This series about a realtor/mom Shelia (Drew Barrymore) who one day unexpectedly becomes an undead flesh-eating ghoul, but not turning totally zombie as long as she eats enough human meat was funny enough last season. This new season starts right where the first one left off, with Shelia’s husband (Timothy Olyphant) and daughter (Liv Hewson) along with neighbor (Skyler Gisondo) trying to find a cure for Shelia’s undead-ness before she either totally zombies-out or rots and falls apart.
I liked the first season of Santa Clarita and was looking forward to the second, if I can’t quite all remember what went on in that the first? And I’m usually pretty good at remembering those things. I don’t think that Santa Clarita Diet is a bad series, it’s just there are so many shows on now and they’re all coming so fast and we consume them so quickly, that even if a show is good, if it doesn’t really stand out it can be as quickly forgotten as it is watched.
TV series and movies over the last several years have mined many of author Philip K. Dick’s ideas. Mostly known as the writer of novels like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and We Can Remember It for You Wholesale which were turned into mega-movie-blockbusters Blade Runner and Total Recall, over the years Dick was a prolific writer having penned hundreds of stories and novels. One of Dick’s favorite themes was the notion of how can you be absolutely sure that reality is, well, real, and how can you tell a simulation from the real thing if the simulation is perfect in every way?
These themes Dick would turn to again and again just so happen to be the themes of several popular TV series these days that, while aren’t based on a specific piece of Dick’s work none-the-less are based on his ideas.
Shows like Westworld with robots who live and work inside a theme park that don’t know they’re robots would be right at home in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. And the battle that takes place inside of character David Haller’s mind on the show Legion fits perfectly with the themes explored in We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Even a show like Black Mirror that owes a great debt to the series The Twilight Zone owes an even bigger debt to the works of Dick. Time and again episodes of that show explores the notion of a reality altered by some technology gone amok with the episode entitled “Metalhead” being directly influenced by Dick’s story “Second Variety” that was also adapted as the movie Screamers.
Even one of Dick’s own books The Man in the High Castle about an altered reality where Germany and Japan both won WW2 is currently a series on Amazon Prime, to which a new anthology series entitled Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams joined last week.
This series originally aired last year in the UK and now all episodes are currently available to stream on Prime.
In the first episode entitled “Real Life” that takes place in a somewhat distant future, detective Sarah (Anna Paquin) is trying to get over the murder of 15 of her colleagues. To help her relax Sarah’s significant other Katie (Rachelle Lefevre) suggests she try spending some time in a virtual world where she’ll be able to forget real life and take part in a simulated one. In this virtual world Katie becomes George (Terrence Howard), a billionaire software tycoon living in a time just a few years from our own investigating the murder of his wife. As Sarah starts spending more time in the virtual realm as George and things there begin to collide with things in Sarah’s “real” world, from people to places to the fact that George’s dead wife is also named Katie and also looks like Sarah’s Katie. Sarah begins questioning which is the real life and which is the virtual one? Is Sarah living in a futuristic world where there are literally flying cars, or is George’s reality of having to fight through the pain of losing a loved one real instead?
From start to finish “Real Life” was Philip K. Dick 101 with questioning and examining the nature of reality with one heck of an ending. I thought I had the ending pinned down at about the halfway mark of “Real Life” but wasn’t anywhere close as to where the episode went.
To me, Electric Dreams is modern Outer Limits in tone and structure, it’s very much more of a story and idea driven show than a character one, but I don’t think this is a bad thing. In fact I liked Electric Dreams a great deal and would probably not like it as much is it were something like a clone of Black Mirror.
Krypton TV spot
Movies
The Movie Chain: #2: The Abyss (1989)
The Movie Chain is a weekly, micro-movie review where each week’s film is related to the previous week’s movie in some way.
In the 1980s writer/director James Cameron was on a bit of a hot-streak. While his first film Piranha Part Two: The Spawning was forgettable at best, his next were to become two of the most beloved films of the sci-fi genera; Terminator and Aliens. So when Cameron’s next movie was announced to close-out the 1980s with The Abyss in 1989 fans of sci-fi were excited. This movie about the crew of an undersea mining platform who when a disaster strikes are simultaneously stranded at the bottom of the ocean while also discovering that there might be alien life down there probably had too many expectations going against it to ever reach the heights of the likes of Terminator or Aliens. While those other two films are both fun, action “shoot-em-up” movies, The Abyss, while having some action in it, is more of a thinking person’s movie.
Much like with The Hunt for Red October there’s a strong “techno-thriller” vibe running through this film. There’s even a nuclear sub in The Abyss that could have been used directly in The Hunt for Red October without any changes.
Both The Abyss and The Hunt for Red October were a part of a group of films at that time period that all took place at the bottom of the sea. In addition to those two there were the cheapy flicks DeepStar Six and Leviathan both from 1989 too. If The Hunt for Red October is a great film and The Abyss a flawed sort of masterpiece then DeepStar Six and Leviathan are both fun, if a bit dated, “b” or “c” grade schlock fare.
There are so many superhero series debuting this TV season there’s almost too many to cover here. In fact, there are at least eight new live-action superhero shows debuting this season which will bring the number currently airing to more than 25 based on comic books.
Inhumans
Inhumans
What was originally set to be a series of Marvel films has now become a TV series with Inhumans on ABC. I never really collected any Inhumans comics so I don’t really know the core Inhumans story. I do know that the show will be the third Marvel series to debut on ABC with Agents of SHIELD entering its fifth season and Agent Carter being cancelled after two. I wasn’t a fan of Agents of SHIELD nor of Agent Carter but will still checkout Inhumans, if with a bit of trepidation.
What I do know about The Inhumans, and what I could glean from ABC’s marketing materials, has them as a race of super-powered people living in a hidden city on the Moon with the likes of Black Bolt who’s voice is so powerful it can destroy entire cities and Medusa with living hair. In the series, a coup on the Moon forces this ruling family down to the Earth to face life among us mere mortals and the rest of the Marvel universe characters.
The Gifted
The Gifted
The Gifted on FOX looks to take the X-Men franchise TV screens with a series about a family on the run after they learn that two of their kids are mutants with super-powers. Some X-Men characters are set to appear in the series but don’t expect Wolverine, Cyclops or Jean Grey to show up in The Gifted. Instead the likes of Polaris, Thunderbird and Blink will be the muties helping the family on the run.
Krypton
Syfy enters the superhero TV game with their series Krypton about life on Superman’s alien home-world decades before his birth. But like with The Gifted don’t expect the Man of Steel to swoop in during sweeps week to boost ratings on the show as Krypton follows Superman’s granddad Seg-El as a spry 20-something living and working on Krypton before the planet went and got all explody.
The Punisher
The Punisher
The Punisher, on Netflix, follows the character of the same name who originally began as an ally/antagonist on the series Daredevil before being spun-off onto his own show. Not much is known about The Punisher other than to expect to see him eliminating as many bad-guys as he can in 13 episodes.
Runaways
The Hulu series Runaways sounds interesting, but reports from the creators of the show make me wonder if it’ll be as interesting as I first thought? The comic series Runaways is about a group of teens who discover that a) they all have superpowers because b) their parents are all major super-villains who run a west coast crime empire. But the creators of the Hulu version have said that the series will be “the O.C. of the Marvel Universe” and that just because the parents are super-villains who quite literally sacrifice people, “that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all that bad.” Ugh, ugh, and double ugh.
Black Lightning
Black Lightning will join the CW stable of established DC characters like Arrow, Supergirl and The Flash this season with the title character who can harness electricity and must return to the superhero fold years after retiring.
Freeform, the old ABC Family, is set to debut two new superhero series next season with New Warriors and Cloak and Dagger.
New Warriors
Cloak and Dagger
When I was a teen New Warriors, a comic about a team a sort of teenaged X-Men, was one of my favorites. But this TV New Warriors isn’t an action series, it’s reportedly a half-hour comedy starring a character named Squirrel Girl, who’s, admittedly, really popular with the younger set these days.
Cloak and Dagger
In the comic Cloak and Dagger Cloak was a character of darkness and Dagger of light who were a team called, you guessed it, Cloak and Dagger. From the looks of it, the TV version retains the characters and their powers, but looks to be more Twilight, “they’re from two different worlds but are in love,” than X-Men “let’s kick Magneto’s butt” in tone.
Non-comic book series
I can’t tell you how weird it feels to write that. Literally a few years ago there weren’t any series based on comic books, now there’s so many I can’t even keep track. But even though there’s quite a few new superhero TV series to look forward to this season, there are a few non-superpowered shows debuting 2017–18 as well.
The Crossing
The Crossing
The Crossing on ABC has a small town becoming inundated when hundreds of bodies begin washing ashore from some disaster. But this disaster is something that’s going to happen in the future and these people are really refugees escaping to their past, our present, to find safety. The Crossing is a show I’m interested in as long as it doesn’t turn out to be another Lost where the goal is to spread the mystery of it out over as many seasons and episodes as possible rather than telling a coherent story.
Even The Crossing seems to have somewhat of a superhero element to it with some of the characters from the future possessing strange abilities far beyond that of mere mortal men.
There are a few interesting looking non-superhero series on FOX this season, the first of which is The Orville.
The Orville
The Orville
The Orville created by and starring Seth McFarlane of Family Guy fame is a live action comedic take on Star Trek. From the looks of things, The Orville is a sort of TV version of Galaxy Quest if the characters on Galaxy Quest were really the bumbling crew of a starship and not Hollywood actors playing them. I think The Orville is a great idea for a series, if I don’t think I laughed once at the promo that was released for the show a few months back.
Ghosted
If The Orville is a take on the movie Galaxy Quest then Ghosted also on FOX seems to be a take on the movie Ghostbusters. This time, instead of four scientists working together to bust ghosts, it’s, according to FOX, a skeptic (Craig Robinson) and true believer (Adam Scott) who’re the ones having to go around and do the busting as it were.
LA > Vegas
LA > Vegas
LA > Vegas has the most unique sitcom setting I can think of over the last few years. The show takes place aboard an airliner that makes a weekly round-trip between LA and Las Vegas with there being some regular characters of LA > Vegas including jet’s crew and people who travel to Vegas every week as well as new passengers each episode on a trip to lose money in the desert.
S.W.A.T.
The S.W.A.T. franchise has had a surprisingly long history. The original TV series of the same name debuted in 1975 with a feature film version in 2003 and a low-budget sequel released in 2011. And now comes a new S.W.A.T. TV series on CBS that’s set to premiere later this fall. CBS dramas aren’t known for their subtly and the promo for S.W.A.T. isn’t subtle with S.W.A.T police officers having gun battles in the streets one minute, smooching with their wives in the shower the next to dodging bazooka blasts a later that evening.
Star Trek: Discovery
Star Trek: Discovery
Star Trek: Discovery also on CBS has the most interesting path to series of any show in memory. This series has been around so long that I originally wrote about it in my 2016 TV preview. Star Trek: Discovery was supposed to premiere January 2017 but was then pushed back to May after execs realized that there was no way the series would be ready to air last winter. Then, a few months into 2017, they also realized that a May debut wasn’t going to happen either so the series was once again pushed back to September 24. Which looks like it’s going to happen since there’s been quite a bit of marketing released on the series including things like posters and online promos for the show.
But wait, there’s more.
Only one episode of Star Trek: Discovery will be shown on CBS with the remainder of the episodes then debuting over the next few weeks on the CBS All Access streaming service for residents in the US and Netflix for most of the rest of the world. Which seems like a bit of a misstep to me. I think CBS is eying fans of Star Trek and are just assuming they’re going to shell out $6 a month to watch Star Trek: Discovery because it’s Star Trek and fans of Star Trek will pay any amount of money to see anything labelled Star Trek. Now, I’m a fan of the Star Trek but I think most of what CBS offers is pure mung and can’t imagine shelling out $6 a month just to watch Star Trek: Discovery when there’s so many other things to watch on TV, especially around the time Star Trek: Discovery is premiering.
Here’s what I could see doing, though.
Star Trek: Discovery
If that first episode of Star Trek: Discovery that airs on CBS is good, if it’s intriguing enough for me to want to checkout the rest of the episodes — all of which is debatable since though I consider myself a fan of Star Trek none-the-less I really haven’t liked anything Star Trek since the late 1990s. If Star Trek: Discovery is interesting enough what I may do is wait until all the episodes are available on CBS All Access since they’re not all being released at once but instead over the course of a few months. And when they’re all available get CBS All Access for a month, binge them and then cancel my subscription.
But like I said that’s debatable. Star Trek: Discovery will have to be really good for me to want to do that and everything I’ve read about the show, from original series helmer Bryan Fuller exiting the series to CBS changing the look of Star Trek: Discovery from retro-Trek to something more futuristic makes me doubt that I’ll be in a big rush to checkout the rest of the series after it debuts in September.
Returning series
Because of the weird nature of TV I’m not quite sure what all current series are returning and when? Like both the series Legion and Westworld aired episodes in early 2017, but are only scheduled to return “sometime” in 2018, which might mean they’ll return in a few months or in more than a year. While there might not be a load of returning shows I’m interested in this season, those that are returning are really good and I don’t think I could be more excited about new episodes if I tried.
The Good Place
The Good Place
One show that is scheduled to return fairly soon is The Good Place on September 20. This NBC comedy about a woman (Kristen Bell) who dies and wakes in “the good place” but really was supposed to go to the bad one was the one new network show from last season that I liked that’s still around for a season two. I was surprised as to just how much a slow-burn The Good Place was, with each episode acting as a single chapter in a season-long story. My initial thoughts on the show was that it might be the most disturbing thing on TV since in the universe of the The Good Place 99.999% of everyone who dies goes to “the bad place,” and it’s only the supremely good among us that end up in “the good place.” So even the best of us are doomed. And in the show if Bell’s character is ever found out what happens to her? Does she get a one-way ticked to hell? I liked The Good Place enough to stick with it until the end, when a twist I saw coming from the very first episode hit that I was still surprised by made me change The Good Place from a show I liked to one I adored.
Stranger Things
Stranger Things
The 2016 breakout TV series that I think surprised everyone, including myself, as to how good it was Stranger Things returns to Netflix for a second season October 27. Stranger Things is a show about the 1980s but isn’t about the 1980s, it just so happens to take place there and is this weird, cool mesh of horror and sci-fi I really wasn’t expecting when I first started watching it last summer. Stranger Things stars a mostly pre-teen/teen cast of actors who, after one of the group goes missing and a girl mysteriously appears out of nowhere, must go on a quest to rescue their friend. But be it starring kids and teens or not, the danger and violence of the first season of Stranger Things was palpable with characters being shot, consumed by monsters and cocooned alive to wait out a fate worse than death. I don’t want to say that the first season of Stranger Things was a perfect show, but it might be about the most perfect show fans of horror/sci-fi these days can hope for.
Black Mirror
This surprisingly long-lasting British anthology horror/sci-fi series returns for a fourth season on Netflix this year. It’s easiest to describe this series as a modern day The Twilight Zone, but it’s really its own thing. Generally, episodes of Black Mirror take place in a few years time and deal with our everyday technology gone amok. Be it a society that runs on social media “likes” or soldiers with computers in their heads doing battle with mutant people who turn out to be a little less “mutant” and a lot more “people.” Where Black Mirror excels is at this everyday horror aspect to our lives, it’s the answer to the question, “Do we control our technology, or does it control us?”
And now for the ones that return sometime in 2018.
The Expanse
The Expanse
The Expanse on SyFy channel remains the lone holdout on a network that’s supposed to be for fans of sci-fi that actually is a quality sci-fi show. Two seasons in and I’m surprised as to just how well The Expanse has progressed. What started as a sort’a conspiracy thriller set in deep space with the search for a missing woman has grown exponentially into a war spanning the entire solar system with a group of characters spread out between the Earth, Mars, the asteroid belt, Jupiter and now Venus. I think what I like most about The Expanse is that while the show has grown in scope, the focus has remained on most of the same characters from the first season with a few additions here and there. So while a similar series like Game of Thrones has grown to the point of being unable to contain its story in a single episode, The Expanse has remained grounded and feels much like the same show when it started while the bounds of the story had been let to expand.
Legion
Legion
Legion might be the most trippy series on TV — and one of the best. It’s a superhero show but is nothing like a traditional superhero show since the focus of Legion is on character’s mental states rather than who can punch the villain hardest. I’m not sure the construction of the first season of Legion is like any other series out there. Legion starts out with David Haller (Dan Stevens) living his life inside a mental institution who has these weird memories of his childhood. It seems like David can do these strange things, or maybe he just imagines that he can. As the series progresses we go in and out of David’s, as well as other character’s minds, to the point where we’re really not sure what’s real and what’s not. But in the universe that is Legion what’s real and what is not is not as important as what the characters believe is real or not.
Westworld
Westworld
To me at least, this year wasn’t a great one for original series on HBO. I’m not sure if I’m just aging out of the core HBO demographic, but in 2017 the only show I really cared about there was Westworld, and much like with The Good Place I didn’t think it was going to be very good when I first heard about it. I mean, how could it be? Westworld was delayed ages because of “script problems” and was based on a decades old movie about rich people who visit a theme park where they can do whatever they want to the robotic inhabitants there. And I mean whatever they want. But instead of simply following the model of the movie, the creators of the Westworld TV show also made its focus on the robotic characters of the park in addition to the wealthy visitors. These robots are doomed to unknowingly live the same day over and over again, on a loop with the park’s patrons treating them like toys to be shot or raped or murdered. The question of the Westworld series is, what happens if these robots start realizing their lives aren’t their own and want to claim them back?
The X-Files
The X-FIles
An eleventh season of The X-Files is slated to debut in 2018 on Fox even with the 2016 tenth season having the fans divided. Some thought that because episodes of the new The X-Files were essentially a continuation of the old, and were told in the same anachronistic 1990s fashion, the new episodes were no good when put up against other modern series. While others, myself included, thought that when people were screaming that they wanted more The X-Files, and when more episodes of The X-Files arrived on their TV screens, what did they think they were exactly going to get?
Better Call Saul
Better Call Saul
The AMC series that started off as just a prequel to the hit series Breaking Bad but over the years has evolved into something so much more Better Call Saul usually returns in the first quarter of the year. The last two years I’ve called Better Call Saul the best series on TV and so far in 2017 it’s still the best. This series has some of the best characters out there, be it sack-sack Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) who in the third season is well on his way to becoming Saul Goodman, Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), Jimmy’s not yet right hand man who turned to the dark side last season and Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), a woman who’d seemingly have it all together and a great life as a lawyer except she’s fallen into Jimmy’s orbit and ends up literally crashing and burning this season.
I think I’m done with Game of Thrones. I’ve spent the last six seasons watching the show but the last few years I’ve welcomed its return less and less. It’s not that I don’t like Game of Thrones anymore, it’s just that it watching it has become a chore.
The stories of the first few season of Game of Thrones were much more contained than the ones in the series are now. At first there were stories of Winterfell, Westeros and the Targaryen’s across the sea and that was about it. And even then those stories were interconnected with the likes of the people of Westeros and Winterfell meeting and coming together to the point where there were really only two story locations for a while. But with each season the stories have fragmented more and more and more, to the point where no single episode of Game of Thrones can contain everything going on at once with stories having to be spread out between multiple shows. And even then some stories only get five or ten minutes an episode and one character even went missing an entire season only to pick back up with his story a year later since there wasn’t enough room for him.
With all this story weight meant that each season Game of Thrones started moving slower and slower to the point where in its fifth season, to me at least, there wasn’t enough story progression in it to hold my interest.
While things did pick up in the sixth season of the show, I started finding myself less and less interested in certain stories. So much of what Game of Thrones was last season was of characters who used to be together being off on their own adventures and since I wasn’t into each and ever character’s adventures I found myself more and more skipping through parts of episodes to get to stories that I was interested in. I’d generally stop at Tyrion stories but skip through Arya ones. And honestly by the end of the season I was pretty much only interested in Tyrion.
When I start using my DVR to skip through episodes of any series I know that my days of watching it are numbered.
I do think that if this were the last season of Game of Thrones I wouldn’t be writing this I would instead be watching the show just to see how it all ends. But this season isn’t the last, there’s one more left, and even then HBO is examining the possibility of spinning off the show into a variety of different series. All of which is fine, but at what point is the story of Game of Thrones only about continuing the story of Game of Thrones rather than coming to some sort of ending?
Everyone likes to make fun of soap operas, but at what point do self-perpetuating TV series like Game of Thrones become more soap opera-like than what they initially set out to be like smart, fantasy dramas?
Inhumans promo
Defenders promo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_6J9BqgonU
Krypton promo
Westworld promo
https://youtu.be/phFM3V_dors
Stranger Things promo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgS2L7WPIO4
Star Trek Discovery promo
The Gifted promo
Movies
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
One of the few movies I did see in the theater in 1987 rather than on VHS or cable was Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. That summer I was watching my younger brother at home while my parents both worked and one week they gave us a little cash to get out of the house and go to a movie. I looked through the paper to see what was playing at the theater in riding distance to our house and the choices were Superman IV and Madonna lead Who’s that Girl. Being the mega-comic book fan that I was with a closed full of Superman back issues I, of course, chose to see, you guessed it, Who’s that Girl. I have no idea why I’d want to see that movie at all — in fact I’m relatively sure I’ve never seen it. I can only guess that it was because it would be easier to explain to my friends that I went to see a movie that starred then it-girl Madonna than a Superman movie, since at the time once you were a certain age you weren’t supposed to like superheroes or comics anymore. My mom used her parent veto and nixed the idea of my eight year old brother seeing Madonna prancing around on-screen in a fancy leotard and told us we were seeing Superman IV with Christopher Reeve prancing around on screen in his fancy leotard.
So, one weekday my brother and myself rode our bikes to the theater and saw Superman IV. When you’re a pre-teen kid Superman IV isn’t a terrible movie. It’s got the humous Lenny (Jon Cryer), Lex Luthor’s nephew, and even has ol’ Lex himself (Gene Hackman) back in the role he originated after missing out on Superman III. And let’s not forget Mariel Hemingway co-stars who was one of the most beautiful women on the planet in 1987 which didn’t hurt the movie either.
Looking back on Superman IV 30 years later, it’s a mess of a movie. Produced by Cannon Films known for such gems as Invasion USA and Over the Top, Superman IV was made on the cheap and looks that way. The movie is barely an hour and a half long and that includes both beginning and end credits with the opening credits being the looooooooong credits the Superman movies were known for back then. Christopher Reeve is back as the Man of Steel and a lot of the other cast members like Margot Kidder have returned as well. But other than Reeve the rest of the recognizable faces other than Hackman are in cameo roles at best.
A lot of the movies I’ve gone back and rewatched from 1987 might not be as good as I remember but they all have some sort of weird nostalgic appeal, and Superman IV is no different. Though I would argue that it’s the one movie I’ve watched that’s actually a lot worse than I remember.
The story of Superman IV is of Superman trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons, but in a devious plans Luthor uses Superman’s tossing all of the nukes into the Sun as a way to make Nuclear Man, a character created for the movie and so-far is his only appearance, in order to destroy Superman. Essentially, Superman IV is a smaller version of everything that had come before in the previous films. It’s almost a small-budget remake of Superman II in many regards with Superman battling one superpower villain instead of three. And since IV was made on the cheap all of the seams show.
Low-budget or not, Christopher Reeve gave it his all in Superman IV in what would be his last role as the title character. After the disappointment of Superman IV it would be nearly 20 years with the release of Superman Returns in 2006 until the character returned to the big screen. However, it’s not like there weren’t attempts at a new Superman movie after IV as most of the 1990s were spent with Tim Burton trying to get his version of the character off the ground in a movie that would have been called Superman Lives and then in the early 2000s there was another attempt this time with J.J. Abrams in another dead movie that would have been called Superman: Flyby.
If you are interested in finding out what happened behind the scenes with Superman IV: The Quest for Peace it’s chronicled in the 2014 documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) as well as in Jon Cryer’s memoir So that Happened. You can also find out what happened with Tim Burton’s aborted Superman movie in the 2015 doc The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened?
I first became aware of the work of Geof Darrow in his incredibly detailed drawings in the comic mini-series Hard Boiled when I was a bit too young. That comic, an acid trip through a hellish, corporatized future where robots kill scores of people turned me on to Darrow’s work. Years later I found an amazing book on his artistic contribution to the movie The Matrix that is still one of my prized possessions and now comes another Darrow art book, Lead Poisoning: The Pencil Art of Geoff Darrow.
Geof Darrow’s slick, precise inks and stunning detail have amazed comics fans for decades, from his early work with Moebius to Hard Boiled, his first collaboration with Frank Miller, to the overwhelming success of his current series, The Shaolin Cowboy.
Now Darrow provides incredible insight into his process by sharing the pencil drawings behind his meticulous inks in a huge hardcover collection. Featuring well-known covers and never-before-seen drawings alike, Lead Poisoning is a behind-the-scenes look that reveals perfectionism at its best, showing how clean and perfect the initial drawings can be as well as the bizarre alterations that appear to happen on the fly.
Featuring commentary by Darrow and his notable peers, Lead Poisoning: The Pencil Art of Geof Darrow is a hardcover that brings you right to Darrow’s drawing board.
Well, kind’a sort’a as Krypton doesn’t actually feature the strange visitor from another planet, its focus is on Superman’s granddad Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe) and doesn’t take place on Earth. It tales place on that “another planet” Krypton 200 years in the past.
All episodes for the second season of the Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet dropped last Friday. This series about a realtor/mom Shelia (Drew Barrymore) who one day unexpectedly becomes an undead flesh-eating ghoul, but not turning totally zombie as long as she eats enough human meat was funny enough last season. This new season starts right where the first one left off, with Shelia’s husband (Timothy Olyphant) and daughter (Liv Hewson) along with neighbor (Skyler Gisondo) trying to find a cure for Shelia’s undead-ness before she either totally zombies-out or rots and falls apart.
These themes Dick would turn to again and again just so happen to be the themes of several popular TV series these days that, while aren’t based on a specific piece of Dick’s work none-the-less are based on his ideas.
In the 1980s writer/director James Cameron was on a bit of a hot-streak. While his first film Piranha Part Two: The Spawning was forgettable at best, his next were to become two of the most beloved films of the sci-fi genera; Terminator and Aliens. So when Cameron’s next movie was announced to close-out the 1980s with The Abyss in 1989 fans of sci-fi were excited. This movie about the crew of an undersea mining platform who when a disaster strikes are simultaneously stranded at the bottom of the ocean while also discovering that there might be alien life down there probably had too many expectations going against it to ever reach the heights of the likes of Terminator or Aliens. While those other two films are both fun, action “shoot-em-up” movies, The Abyss, while having some action in it, is more of a thinking person’s movie.
The stories of the first few season of Game of Thrones were much more contained than the ones in the series are now. At first there were stories of Winterfell, Westeros and the Targaryen’s across the sea and that was about it. And even then those stories were interconnected with the likes of the people of Westeros and Winterfell meeting and coming together to the point where there were really only two story locations for a while. But with each season the stories have fragmented more and more and more, to the point where no single episode of Game of Thrones can contain everything going on at once with stories having to be spread out between multiple shows. And even then some stories only get five or ten minutes an episode and one character even went missing an entire season only to pick back up with his story a year later since there wasn’t enough room for him.
So, one weekday my brother and myself rode our bikes to the theater and saw Superman IV. When you’re a pre-teen kid Superman IV isn’t a terrible movie. It’s got the humous Lenny (Jon Cryer), Lex Luthor’s nephew, and even has ol’ Lex himself (Gene Hackman) back in the role he originated after missing out on Superman III. And let’s not forget Mariel Hemingway co-stars who was one of the most beautiful women on the planet in 1987 which didn’t hurt the movie either.