Under the category of "Signs Your Movie is Going Bad": Superman leaves a press conference with Richard Pryor and decides to hit the bars.

Nuclear Man: you're telling me Superman can't beat this chick?

Nothing like bestiality with an alien duck pervading your summer blockbuster.

Sure, all of us fanboys are wetting ourselves over this spate of comic book movies that have been coming out over the past several years. But for every "Superman" and "Spider-Man 2," there are at least a couple of correspondingly awful entries, just enough to show us once again that yes, there are movie studios behind these films, and no, they do NOT know what we want to see on screen.

A disclaimer: I haven't seen Elektra or Catwoman, tho films which are widely reviled and considered among the worst of the genre.

With that, here are some of my picks for the worst of the comic book movie genre:

Superman III (1983)/Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987): They get lumped in together because both were almost equally bad. In III, with Richard Donner's calming influence officially gone, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind decided that what a Superman movie needs is Richard Pryor. So they dumped Lex Luthor, created a cheaper version in billionaire megalomaniac Ross Webster (played by Robert Vaughn), with Pryor as a computer genius of ambiguous moral standing. They used watered down versions of Bizarro (in the guise of an "evil" Superman who splits from Clark Kent after exposure to manufactured Kryptonite), and Brainiac (an AI supercomputer that Pryor builds). Love Richard Pryor, love Superman, hate them in the same film. In IV we get a Christopher Reeve-penned story about nuclear disarmament, and "Nuclear Man," a glammed-up Superman clone. Canon, the studio that produced the fourth film, ran out of money, leading to a horrible idea that turned into an even worse finished product, with cheesy fight scenes and bad effects.

Steel (1997): The film that fed Shaquille O'Neal's Superman complex. Shaq has always loved Superman, and was no doubt giddy as a school girl when the 7-foot John Henry Irons character was created sometime around the famous "Death of Superman" arc in the comics. He wears a cape and Superman's iconic S shield, but wears a suit of armor ala Iron Man. In the comics he's a cool-looking character, but the big screen result was a junkyard-inspired number that looked something like hubcaps and scrap metal snapped together, not to mention it lost the cape and the S altogether. Add in Shaq's wooden acting and a terrible plot and you have a bona fide stinker.

Howard the Duck (1986): One of the most famous bombs of all time is the George Lucas-produced story of an alien duck that talks like a person and loves human women. Lea Thompson ("Back to the Future") stars as Howard's love interest (who apparently digs the duckies), and Tim Robbins co-stars as well. Looking back, isn't this film one more clue that we should have had no confidence in Lucas making the "Star Wars" prequels?

Batman and Robin (1997): The penultimate example of studio greed turning a viable franchise into a complete joke. Arnold Schwarzenegger took a very bleak, depressing (and somewhat sympathetic) character and turned him into a lame quip-spewing comedian, and what kind of match-up of villains is it where Poison Ivy, who wants to turn the whole world green, teams with Mr. Freeze, who wants to ice over the whole world? Tries to do too much with too little effort, and there's always the infamous Bat-nipples. One worthwhile note: director Joel Schumacher's DVD commentary details what the hell they were thinking when they made the movie (hint: $$$$).