Supergirl - The Movie. Worse Than I Remembered.

How on earth (or Krypton) does a movie starring Faye Dunaway, Peter O'Toole, Mia Farrow and Peter Cook wind up soooo bad?

Honestly, I could have invited those four to my house for a weekend and made a better film.

Poor Helen Slater gets her big break in Hollywood in this absolute mess of a movie. While she's hung around as an actress, I honestly think this film stigmatized her for so long that it actually destroyed the career it started.  She does still get some Supergirl stunt casting work from time to time, so there's that.

The plot makes exactly zero sense.  Somehow an artist in Argo City (a Kryptonian city existing in another dimension, post Krypton's demise) gets his hands on a palm sized power source that keeps the city alive, manages to let Kara Zor-El (Supergirl) let it fly out of a window made of Saran Wrap and kicks off the dumbest of the five Salkind produced Super-movies.

This power source happens to land in the guacamole (seriously) of a picnicking (seriously) warlock and witch (seriously).  Peter Cook and Faye Dunaway have the dubious distinction of being the silliest villains in the Salkind-verse.  That includes the time that Superman battled Richard Pryor.

When she arrives on earth, Kara somehow has a super-costume and winds up with a secret identity that lands her at a girls school with Lois Lane's little sister, Lucy.  Where her costume comes from, how she knows about her cousin being on earth, being Superman and being Clark Kent and why she needs a secret identity at all are never explained.  Turns out it's possible to completely fail to tell the origin story of your character while telling the origin story of your character.  Who knew? 

The big action sequences involve a runaway front end loader, an invisible monster and a high speed carnival ride.  In the big finale, Supergirl (who can fly, remember) is almost done in by rocking floor tiles.  Again, I could have made a better film in my garage with a few action figures and a stop motion camera.  It's exactly as bad as it sounds.

The villainess goes from plotting world domination to total obsession with banging the gardener after the first 15 minutes and spends fully half of the movie failing to wrestle him away from Supergirl's alter ego.  Basically this is Supergirl vs. Faye Dunaway's raging libido.  As the main plot of a piece of erotic cinema it has promise, but in a superhero film it's just weak.  By the time we get back to Dunaway trying to take over the world, my interest has waned dramatically.  

 

Supergirl Vs. Faye Dunaway's Raging Libido would have done bigger Box Office.

The only highlight I can point to is the flying sequences.  While it's still obvious to the modern eye that it's all done with wires, the blue screen work (I'm pretty sure they were still using blue screens and not the more common modern green screens in 1984) is noticeably improved from the Superman films that preceded it.  Slater trained for weeks to pull off the first flying sequence in the forest and it looks both athletic and balletic, even if the constraints of the wires are pretty obvious.  The other flying sequences actually look pretty great, too.  That's about 4 minutes out of a 2 hour plus run time that's worth watching.

Marc McClure's Jimmy Olsen is the only direct tie in to the other Salkind movies except for a Superman poster in the dorm room Supergirl shares with Lucy Lane.  While he does get to kiss the girl, it's Lucy Lane, not Supergirl.  McClure does nothing to improve the overall film and if you happened to be getting a snack in the kitchen during his screen time, you would miss nothing of the plot.  Not that there's much plot to miss...

IMDB currently has this film at a 4.4 out of 10.  I'd love to say that's unfair since I really love the Supergirl character, but in truth 4.4 is probably generous.