Sunday, January 31, 2016

Superman (1987)



Superman battles villains amidst confusing dance sequences in this Bollywood film fashioned from chunks of the film Superman: The Movie starring Christopher Reeve.

A rickety tin-foil spacecraft carrying a baby lands on earth, and a couple takes the baby for a ride. Meanwhile the film crew's light reflector is visible in the car's window. A truck catches a flat, and the boy lifts it, then he break dances to Michael Jackson's Beat It.

Years pass. The now adult costume-less Superman runs near a speeding train and keeps up with it through the magic of forced perspective, then everyone dances by a fire and camera shadows. A bunch of movie happens, and the Fortress Of Solitude is created from parts of the original Superman movie. Christopher Reeve and Marlon Brando do not appear.

After a musical interlude, a man has stomach distress aboard an airplane which causes badly-edited laughter and hysteria amongst the passengers. Men with guns hijack the plane. With the help of more borrowed movie chunks, Superman comes to the rescue of the badly superimposed plane, where one shot of the interior of the plane has windows and in another shot it doesn't. Then Supes walks underneath the moving plane where it's daylight, while within the cockpit it's dark.  Then there's a terrific battle, and by 'terrific' I mean 'awkwardly choreographed and confusing'.

Suddenly, women wearing t-shirts that say 'Superdad' on them battle some men. I'm not sure why. After a high-speed chase between a Corvair and a motorcycle, Supes leaves a woman at the mercy of three threatening men as he goes and takes a leak behind a tree. Sometime later, Supes is in a building where day and night seems to be haphazard and random, and it explodes, then there's another musical number.

Supes displays one of his many superpowers, which is the ability to fill a basket with bread at the wave of his hand. Then a helicopter crashes a few times. A woman gets kicked, then there's another terrific battle amongst cardboard boxes. Don't worry, there's another musical number.

Utilizing obviously different film stock of chunks of the 1978 film of Superman starring Christopher Reeve, distracting comic relief, not-especially-special special effects, haphazard editing, and an abundance of unbuttoned shirts, this Bollywood adaptation of the Superman story is too long at over 2 hours, and it's very boring. Fans of continuity errors will find much to be thrilled about in this less-than-thrilling Superman story, and it's mildly recommended if you like stuff that sucks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwA9l2L1UgQ

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