Superdome

This TV movie goes to show that bad films do exist. The only reason I saw this was it was covered on a KTMA MST3K. It's Super Bowl at the Superdome in New Orleans. However, no football is played whatsoever and we see the behind the scenes look at basically nothing. With the many stars in this film, it made no difference. I really don't know why I watched this.

This is a TV movie made in the golden age of TV movies, not an overhyped commercial sporting event. Hence, you shouldn't watch this if you're expecting a loud, obnoxious waste of time and money such as the Super Bowl. Like most TV movies from its time, this is a collection of A, B, and C actors, as well as some pro athletes, telling the background story of these brainless sports extravaganzas and all the human drama-and crime-that supposedly goes along with them. If you watched this expecting an hour and a half of overpaid jocks grunting, you don't understand TV movies and shouldn't be handing out 1-star ratings like they were watery beers.

Like many, I was lucky enough to see this because of MST3K. Gladly, it was from their very early years, so they didn't hav much to say and showed the film without so many cuts like would become standard later on.

And no, not everyone watches the Super Bowl every year. Less than one third of the US population wastes their time on it. The majority of us have lives and good taste.

I, like everyone else in the country watch the Super Bowl every year. I'm not even a sports fan, but I don't think most people are. Anyway, it's still weird how this is a movie all about and yet the movie stops right before the game even starts! Yeah, I don't even think we see a single football in this movie! I'm not the biggest fan of sports movies. I was at least expecting this to be a story about how a guy worked hard to be in the Super Bowl. There's this weird pointless plot involving a bunch of people dying that has nothing to do with anything.

I barely remember anything that happened. I never realized how much Tom Selleck looks like Burt Reynolds. It's amazing they had anyone recognizable in this. This movie is just plain boring and needlessly padded. There's just nothing memorable in its extreme blandness. It seems to go on too long and it has mostly nothing to do with the Super Bowl. They could have just had it about any football game and it would be the same! *

I've seen a lot of really bad movies. Superdome isn't good buy anymeans, but it's not a 2.5. I;m giving it a 5 to boost it. It's actually about a 4. It's starts out slow and you really don't know what's going on, but it comes around. David Janssen and Donna Mills make it interesting in the second half. Try watching Little Rita or Buffalo Bill, Hero Of The West and then tell me this a 2.5.

A lot of the television films made in the 1970's with sizeable all-star casts, with a handful of exceptions, are fairly cheesy by today's standards (and almost certainly were in their own time as well). The 1978 entry SUPERDOME is a case in point.

With a fairly robust line-up of all-stars, both actors and athletes-as-actors, SUPERDOME involves the intrigues behind the lead-up to the Super Bowl, being played at the Superdome in New Orleans (as it indeed was around the time this film aired on January 9, 1978 [Super Bowl XII). The intrigues involve a player (Ken Howard) who is less occupied with his bum knee and his worries about how he will hold up in the Big Game than he is with his wife (Susan Howard); a quarterback (Tom Selleck) who is being courted by a management firm; and a few other minor things. But when a couple of employees of one of the teams turn up dead in somewhat violent ways, that team's manager (David Janssen, one of the most underrated actors in history) has to find out who the assailant is before the Big Game starts. As he remarks to someone: "We've got seventy five thousand people in The Dome, and a psycho on the loose". It turns out that the assailant's bosses don't want Janssen's team to win, and it's up to him to find out who it is.

As cheesy as SUPERDOME looks, and as so obvious as it is a made-for-TV clone of two previous big-screen films, TWO-MINUTE WARNING and BLACK SUNDAY, which mix the violence of football with actual violence, it is, if no better than most TV fare of its kind, at least not any worse. In large part, it is because, even if he felt the part he played was kind of beneath the abilities of someone who has portrayed Dr. Richard Kimble in "The Fugitive" ion TV in the 1960's, Janssen does exude a goodly amount of credibility and professionalism in that part. The cast includes a lot of luminaries, including Edie Adams, Ed Nelson, Van Johnson, Donna Mills, and Jane Wyatt, and cameo roles by NFL legends Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus, plus the fact that it was filmed entirely on location in New Orleans and even inside the Superdome itself.

Jerry Jameson, who directed SUPERDOME, is no stranger to this all-star "multi-jeopardy" format, having helmed similar made-for-TV films like 1974's HURRICANE, TERROR ON THE 40TH FLOOR, and HEAT WAVE, among others, as well as the very good 1975 TV film THE DEADLY TOWER (about Charles Whitman's infamous 1966 sniper spree in Texas), and the 1977 big-screen disaster film AIRPORT '77, does a competent job here. He doesn't get too terribly bogged down in the melodramatics, though one can understandably be disappointed by the idea that the film itself ends right as the Super Bowl itself is about to start.

I'll be willing to give this a '6' rating for effort, being aware that it had the potential to be as scary as the films it attempts to be a clone of.