Review of The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened? (2015) by Jeff R — 22 Nov 2015

Incompetent documentary makes the idiotic decision to foreground the off-putting personality of its filmmaker. There are amusing nerds and then there are the ones you want to back slowly away from; Schnepp is firmly in the latter category.

All the interviews are filmed in two-shots, as if we have any interest in watching this schlub nodding away like a bobble-head, instead of focusing on the subjects. In the interview with Jon Peters, he (and his cinematographer? Did he even have one, or just set up mom's video camera himself?) is even so clueless about filmmaking that he positions himself so that his huge, hairy noggin is reflected in the glass tabletop's surface, so we have to watch TWO versions of his head nodding up and down! (Oh, wait - perhaps this is a subtle illusion to the ridiculous two-headed villain idea Burton had for the Superman film!) Compounding this, he doesn't even consider that if he's going to insist on being seen in these interviews, he should at least wear something nondescript that won't draw attention to himself, instead of loud, distracting, illustrated t-shirts that should be reserved for his ComicCon wardrobe.

Please note that the Tomatometer score for this film is inflated by almost exclusively representing reviews from geek websites, NOT professional critics. (How a Hollywood Reporter writer was hoodwinked by this crap is beyond me.

) If you're hoping for something on the order of Jodorowsky's Dune, this is to that as Turkish Star Wars is to the original - and that's an insult to Turkish Star Wars. And frankly, the scrapped movie it's discussing looks like it would have been absolutely God-awful, so maybe the subject deserves a documentary this obnoxiously inept.