Directed by: Spencer Gordon Bennet
Starring: Kirk Alyn, Noel Neill, Lyle Talbot, Tommy Bond, Pierre Watkin
Superman battles Lex Luthor who has assumed the guise of "Atom Man".
By the early fifties, the Saturday morning serial format was on it's knees. Television had swept across American homes and parents were more likely to plonk little Johnny in front of the goggle box rather than pay for a cinema ticket. The producers of this second Superman serial obviously bore a grudge as they made the character of Lex Luthor, the very definition of evil, the head of a TV network. Of course Luthor, or "Loothorr" as everyones seems to call him here, has other tricks up his sleeve and poses as the masked villain Atom Man to unleash terror on Metropolis. At his disposal is a variety of, ultimately useless, weapons such as a "Space Transporter", "Disintegration Machine" and (no laughing at the back) "Sonic Vibrator". This means we get much more lavish set-pieces than the first serial although they employ a liberal amount of stock footage. One sequence is hilarious in it's incorporation of clips from a flood which obviously occurred a good thirty years previous, given the dress styles on display. Luthor seems to have a very slow way of raising funds for all this as at one point his henchman are sent to hold up a "Payday Checks Cashed" outlet. I guess global terror has to start somewhere.


7/10