While looking up some links for the Star Wars Holiday Special
(see these posts), I stumbled across Stomp Tokyo’s review of a terrible
Bollywood rip-off of the Christopher Reeve Superman movie. How could I possibly resist a movie with a review that is best summarized like this?
Faced
with the daunting task of bringing a legend to life for the Hindi
film-viewing populace, these actors do their utmost to defile the
source material in every way imaginable. The only way they could have
made it any worse would have been to stuff things down Christopher
Reeves’ breathing tube.
Better
still, they link to a clip from the movie, which is summarized below:
In
an attempt to let Superman do something in the movie, the scene moves
to an airplane. Both Gita [the “Lois Lane” character] and Mr. Odious [The reviewer’s nickname for the mandatory obnoxious comic relief character] are on it for some reason, so
it is naturally hijacked minutes later. But first, wackiness ensues!
Mr. Odious needs to go to the bathroom, but it’s occupied. Ha! He
stands there for a few minutes, his face in positions of anguish as his
bladder distends. (We think that was anguish — it’s difficult
to separate all of Jagdeep’s [the actor who plays “Mr. Odious”] different facial contortions, since they
mostly resemble what any one of us looks like after a hammer has been
dropped on our foot.) When he is finally released from his watery
torture, he is waylaid by an amorous woman who introduces herself, in
English, as “Ms. Muscle Woman from Zambia.” Hilarious! Kill us!
When the hijacking arrives, it is a great mercy. One of the baddies
punches Mr. Odious! Yay! Mr. Odious falls into Ms. Muscle Woman’s arms
and a full two minutes of “comedy” follows. Boo!
Superman saves the day by dragging the plane to an airfield, as
represented by shots of a transparent airliner superimposed over aerial
shots of Bombay at night, inter-cut with shots of Jor-El casting his
arms about. It must have taken a while to get the plane to the airfield
— by the time they land, Bombay’s nighttime has become mid-afternoon.
Superman then enters the plane, dispenses some poorly edited justice to
the terrorists, and the scene ends abruptly without an encounter
between Superman and Gita. What the –?
Unlike Spider-Man India, this isn’t an authorized Indian version of a popular American hero.
A scene in which Superman rescues a hijacked plane. Note
that Superman can’t be seen and the plane is shown at a ridiculous
angle in relation to the background.
Herve Villechaize taunts Superman: “Welcome to my Kyptonite Kitchen, Man of Steel!”
I downloaded the movie clip and posted it to the temporary download locations listed below. Enjoy!
3 replies on “The Indian Superman”
The concept (and your earlier post) reminds me of Turkish Star Wars, part of which was shown as a warm up to a screening of the Star Wars Holiday Special at a local bar. It was pretty bad, but as the emcee pointed out, it was the best movie they showed that night.
Am I the only one that thought that the guy who played Jor-El looked strangely like David Byrne in a blue satin shirt?
–Kim (Mizzkyttie)
“And you may find yourself
Flying up to save a large airplane
And you may ask yourself
‘How did I get here?'”