What happens when you slash $20 million off a $35 million budget production of a movie which, by its very nature, is heavily reliant on convincing and impressive special effects? Unfortunately for fans of Superman, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is the end result - a messy, incoherent car crash of a movie which has gone down in history as one of the worst ever made. A huge cut to the budget might not have had such a devastating effect on the end product if the creative team behind the movie had been passionate about delivering an entertaining Superman movie - unfortunately, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace boasts one of the most dreadful scripts in the history of Hollywood. Nobly attempting to question the folly of nuclear war, it quickly descends into a festival of cheese from which the only escape is the end credits. Still, there's something uncomfortably charming about some of the action sequences (using the term very broadly) - they tend to resemble the deliberately bad sets and special effects normally found in low budget, tongue-in-cheek B-movies, almost as if someone had discovered an incredibly trashy straight to video movie and superimposed Christopher Reeve's face onto another actor. Had it been a fan movie, perhaps audiences would have been laughing in appreciation at such a noble failure - as it happened, it was a catastrophe which signaled the end of Superman movies for some years.
