Supergirl (1984)

I was away on holiday last week in the beautiful, but incredibly warm, country of Italy, getting shitfaced on Peroni and white wine at a wedding before trekking around central Rome for a few days. And yes, it was lovely thanks. But unfortunately didn't have time to fit a movie in. Although we are back to regular service this week, or at least for the time being; July is a busy month for me, and I want to visit something a little bit off tangent from the usual projects. Spoiler alert; a little bit further down the line we will be coming to Superman IV but in 1984, preceding the production of the worst Superman movie ever made, was one of the first female superhero movies ever made; 1984's Supergirl staring Helen Slater as the titular superhero. Serving as a kind of spin-off following the 3 Superman movies before it, it was a bold idea at the time to focus on a female superhero lead. That really being a very controversial and unpopular decision to make for... some reason... Something which if you follow the MCU discourse, is sadly still a thing in 2023... The movie was a critical and financial failure resulting in the Superman film rights being sold to Cannon Group in 1986 which lead to them producing arguably one of the worst superhero movies of all time... so in a way Supergirl is something of a milestone movie production and although not technically considered amongst the annuls of one of the worst movies ever made it does currently sit at a paltry 4.4 / 10 on IMDB with an 8% score on Rotten Tomatoes. I am, genuinely, quite excited about watching this! I love superhero movies, although recently am admittedly feeling a bit of superhero fatigue from the recent slightly lacklustre MCU offerings (GOTG3 was great though by the way), and I love kitschy 80's movies and from what I can gather this movie has both of those things. In spades.

Kara Zor-El (Helen Slater), cousin of Kal-El (better known as Superman) and resident of Argo City, a surviving Kryptonian community, accidently ends up losing the city's main power source; a tiny palm sized sphere known as a Omegahedron, when entrusted with it by the wizard Zaltar (Peter O'Toole). Deciding to take it upon herself to recover the Omegahedron, Kara steals a ship and galivants off into space in pursuit. Meanwhile on Earth, the Omegahedron just so happens to land in the picnic of one Selena (Faye Dunaway), an all round bad apple and wannabe witch hell-bent on world domination (OF COURSE!) and entranced by the Omegahedron, she packs it away, dumps her boyfriend Nigel (Peter Cook) on the spot and speeds away in her fancy car as the car radio announces that Superman is away on a peace keeping mission several million galaxies away...  Arriving on Earth, Kara emerges from a lake now decked out in her own red and blue outfit and quickly comes to release she has been blessed with the same powers bestowed upon her famous cousin. As she does a bit of flying around the world, her first encounter with humanity results in her having to take care of a pair of rapist truck drivers... Selena meanwhile throws a little party to assemble her "footsoldiers" and gives them a demonstration of her new found power; the ability to seemingly manipulate reality at will thanks to the Omegahedron which she passes off as magic, despite protestations from Nigel that she should tread carefully. The following morning, adopting the disguise of a schoolgirl from a nearby all-girls school; Midvale, Kara attempts to blend in by developing the persona Linda Lee and enrolling as a pupil. The school just so happens to be the work place of Selena's squeeze; Nigel who is infuriated that one of the pupils has nailed his school desk drawers shut... and the school JUST SO HAPPENS to be the place where Lois Lane's sister; Lucy Lane (Maureen Teefy) is studying! What are the odds!? Principal Danvers (David Healy) ends up arranging for Lucy and Kara/Linda to share accommodation and the pair bond over their association with Clark Kent. Kara, using the school to hide undercover whilst she searches for the Omegahedron, does a lousy job of blending in when she comes across as completely naïve but incredibly intelligent which rouses the suspicion of teacher Nigel. Selena meanwhile gets to work on brewing a love potion and after spotting an attractive groundskeeper; Ethan (Hart Bochner) outside of Midvale, she lures him to her apartment / novelty haunted house under the guise that she needs some landscape gardening before bewitching him with a love potion. The plan backfires however and Ethan ends up lumbering through town like a zombie whilst Selena tries her hardest to bring him back by using her magic to bring construction equipment to life and rampage through town. During the rampage, in an attempt to stop the machine Lucy climbs onboard but gets knocked unconscious causing Kara to spring into action as Supergirl and use her powers to prevent disaster, and rescue Ethan who making eye contact with Kara for the first time, instantly falls in love with her instead thanks to the potion! All of this witnessed telepathically by a maddened Selena who swears she will get her revenge... Using the Omegahedron, Selena sends some kind of invisible creature after Kara, believing her to just be a wimpy schoolgirl but when her creation instead encounters Kara as Supergirl she is dumbfounded. Even more so when Kara easily destroys the creature by using a lamppost as a lightning rod to zap it with electricity. As Selena begins to struggle to contain the power of the Omegahedron, and the trinket she holds it in begins to grow and grow, Kara picks up on the energy signature's trail and begins to follow it. All the way to the spooky abandoned carnival and almost to Selena's haunted house hideaway. But Kara is distracted when she realises Ethan has been following her the whole time. They end up on the waltzers and there is then some pretty cringey, cheesy romance stuff which... the less said about the better, but their kiss is interrupted by Selena and her sidekick; Bianca (Brenda Vaccaro) when they arrive on the scene. Using her power she makes the waltzers move at an incredible speed but when they stop, Kara is missing and behind the pair lands Supergirl, confronting Selena for the first time. Despite Selena's increasing adeptness with her magic, Kara easily gets the better of her and whisks Ethan away to safety, seemingly starting to become more attached to him herself. Bianca suggests that perhaps Selena could do with Nigel's help, Nigel apparently being something of a warlock himself on the side... and Selena asks him to bring her Ethan, believing that Kara will inevitably follow. Back with Kara and Ethan and when Ethan comes to, the spell over him broken he is still infatuated with 'Linda' and not recognising Kara as Linda, he begs Kara to take him with her back to the amusement park so that he can find her. When he refuses to accept Linda is fine, Kara leans in to kiss him, that being enough for Ethan to deduce that Kara and Linda are the same person somehow... but the moment is shortlived when the combined magic of Selena and Nigel is enough to teleport Ethan to the haunted house and chain him to a bed in the blink of an eye! And using that same magic she transforms their humble amusement park hideaway into a massive mountaintop fortress. Kara zooms through the city skyline before arriving at the fortress and letting herself in to search for Ethan immediately finds herself trapped by Selena's magic before being forced to witness Ethan bewitched by Selena and then being banished into the phantom zone way out in outer space. Coming to, Kara learns that she has lost her powers and almost dies when she stumbles into a weird tar-like pit, but she is rescued by Zaltar, who himself has been banished there for losing the Omegahedron. Back on Earth and Selena who is now Queen of everything takes Lucy and her on off boyfriend; Jimmy (Marc McClure) hostage, as well as betraying and locking up Nigel with them, with Ethan now being completely subservient to her. After a bit of a pep talk, Zaltar agrees to attempt and escape with Kara in order to try and make it back to Earth but in doing so, sacrifices himself so that Kara can escape. Returning to Earth and to the fortress, Kara bursts in, confronting Selena and rescuing her friends. Using her magic Selena summons a massive shadow creature thing to destroy Kara and appears in the beginning at least to have the upper hand but after a bit of an assist from Ethan, Kara is able to break free and turning Selena's own magic against her banishes both her and Bianca to the shadow zone before retrieving the Omegahedron, saying goodbye and returning to Argo City.

Yeah... I don't know about this one really. I mean it wasn't terrible but it was distinctly below average. I thought Helen Slater and Faye Dunaway did good as the movies hero and villain respectfully but I really felt like the whole thing was just floundering from the beginning. It's incredibly light on actual action parts and what felt like a very thinly applied plot. I also felt it was kind of a copout reducing Supergirl to just another love interest, and almost being beholden to Ethan and feeling a duty to rescue him. I understand it was kind a central plot point but it did feel a bit like it reduced the importance of the character to be honest. Like you couldn't have made the movie without her having to have a love interest? I know it's the 80's and maybe not as progressive as today, but it felt a bit cliché.

Whilst I felt lie Helen Slater did a pretty good job, especially for being relatively little known at the time of casting, I feel like Faye Dunaway is really running the show here. In terms of screen time she definitely occupies as much of the movie as Helen Slater does as Kara and it's clear the movie is relying on her strength as an actor in order to hold things together. I feel like she did a pretty decent job with it, maybe at times being just a little bit over the top but never descending to overacting or coming across with an inconsistent tone. She is the glue holding things together and I think without her the movie would have suffered terribly.

And although the plot here is pretty thinly veiled, I can at least credit the movie with having a consistent and complete narrative: Kara goes to Earth to find the Omegahedron, confronts the villain to retrieve it, wins and leaves. That is pretty much it in a nutshell and they built the kind of love tri-angle for Ethan's affection around it which, to me, felt a bit un-necessary, but there was a least some semblance of a plot that made sense and therefore something to build the movie around. Despite it being pretty barebones and there being a lack of action, there was at least enough going on to build that story that I don't feel like the movie ever really meandered off course or got difficult to sit though. It could have been more exciting and interesting yes, but it didn't really get boring or laborious at any point either really.

There was though, some pretty ropey special effects. Even in retrospect. And there was a fair few moments where a distinct lack of budget in that area became painfully obvious. Especially in the final 10 odd minutes with the final showdown. There were moments that were reasonably impressive but they were very much in B-Movie territory with most of the special effects here and it really damages the movies credibility. It wasn't all terrible, but when it was, you could feel the prestige of the movie starting to wane and as a result it became a bit more difficult to take things seriously.

And I know, I've touched on it in almost every paragraph so far, but the whole love-triangle angle with Ethan just hit a bung note for me. It didn't help that the Ethan character was basically about as interesting as wallpaper paste and aside from being just a chunk of man meat for Selena and Kara to fight over he served no other real purpose. I just hated it as a plot point I guess, like Supergirl can't stand on her own two feet without it? That you feel the need to sandwich in a male love interest? I'm sure there are other ways it could have been done and maybe more effectively.

In terms of soundtrack and cinematography though, I mostly have no complaints there. The cinematography had to step up in order to compensate for the lack of budget in the special effects and practical effects region, and it did so mostly effectively. The flying scenes actually were shot pretty well, even in retrospect, and when it had to cover up for a lack of practical effects it did so well. Equally the soundtrack, whilst pretty basic, was fitting enough for the movie that it filled the gaps. There was quite a few too many 'whimsical' kind of moments as Kara discovers and falls in love with Earth for me, that by the 3rd or 4th moment it had gotten a little grating, but I'll give it a bit of a pass if that's all the material they had to work with.

Disappointing I think is the first word that comes to mind if I have to sum this up in just a word. You had the potential here for this to be more than the sum of it's parts, and more than just: a female Superman movie. Helen Slater did a good job coming from being relatively unknown to stepping into the shoes of Supergirl, but the rest of the material built around that wasn't really enough to make this a more prestigious picture. Even with the bountiful assistance of Faye Dunaway. And it's a shame because despite the attitudes of the 80's, I feel like it could have been more if it had been given the chance. But I feel like the whole concept of the movie never had that much faith in it to begin with really. And that becomes obvious as you work your way through the movie. It wasn't terrible, but lacked any kind of substance to go with it. Despite the best efforts of the 2 leading ladies. Weak 2 out of 5.