Supergirl (1984)
Supergirl is the most laughably awful film of the Superman franchise yet – a spinoff that not only recognizes the increasing campiness of the sequels, but shows an apparent reverence for it. Here, superpowers are pitted against witchcraft, an entire civilization exists in another dimension, and the most heroic actions of the title character are falling in love, taking revenge against school bullies, and humiliating chauvinist-pig truck drivers who don’t take no for an answer. You’d think that, given what she shares with the Superman character – X-Ray vision, the ability to fly, super strength, a blue suit, a red cape, an S insignia – she would be just as driven to fight for truth, justice, and the American way. I guess not even an advanced Kryptonian society is above gender roles.
How there even is a Kryptonian society is something no one saw fit to explain. Despite the explosion of the planet Krypton, which we all witnessed at the beginning of 1978’s Superman, there somehow is a futuristic city populated by Kryptonians, one of whom, in a rather confusing example of genetics and impossible family trees, is Superman’s teenage cousin Kara (Helen Slater). To add even more confusion, the futuristic city is located within “inner space,” helpfully explained as the opposite of outer space. In theory, this could mean anything from another dimension to the space between atoms. In practice, it means at the bottom of a lake on Earth. I don’t pretend to understand how this would be possible. It would seem the filmmakers didn’t, either.
Kara’s adventures – now set in the Chicago area instead of Metropolis, despite what the film’s poster shows us – begin when a baseball-sized metal orb, a sort of power source/life-support system, escapes by accident from the confines of the inner space city. Why it’s her job to retrieve the orb and not Superman’s is easily explained via radio: He has left Earth to embark on an intergalactic peace tour. How convenient. Anyway, upon emerging from the lake in the trademark blue-and-red suit and cape, Kara learns that the orb is in the clutches of Selena (Faye Dunaway), a witch who wants to use its Kryptonian properties to take over the world. She lives in, of all places, an abandoned carnival spook house, which is fully furnished and somehow still receiving power. The livable furniture notwithstanding, a working ride vehicle remains, and all the scary animatronics and sound effects function behind an automatic door as if the park was still open.
Kara, meanwhile, adopts the alias Linda Lee and poses as a new student at an all-girls’ boarding school. In the kind of extraordinary coincidence rarely seen outside the pages of a screenplay, her dormitory roommate is Lucy Lane (Maureen Teefy), the much younger sister of Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane. Although a bit of a tomboy, Lucy harbors a crush on photojournalist Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure), also of the Daily Planet, visiting from Metropolis for reasons known only to the filmmakers. I suspect his appearance was purely about securing this film’s connection to the Superman films. As for Kara, she falls for a hunky school groundskeeper (Hart Bochner). He falls for her too – albeit because Selena tricked him into drinking a love potion that would make any person he first lays eyes on the object of his affection.
Given everything I’ve said so far, does this sound like a movie you can take seriously? I’m aware comic book adaptations are by their very nature unserious. Still, there’s a fine line between aiming for entertainment and not even trying, and this movie crosses it. It’s most evident in the casting and dialogue. Dunaway, once a reliably good actress, now only seems capable of overacted caricature roles. In Supergirl, setting aside how foolishly the script’s opaque and inaccurate witchcraft forces her to perform, she delivers every one of her lines with the nuances of a villain in a Saturday morning cartoon. She’s given two comedic foils. One is a fellow practitioner of black magic played by Peter Cook. The other is a curiously unmagical constant companion played by Brenda Vaccaro. Neither actor seems able to account for their casting, to say nothing of the fact that their characters have no apparent narrative significance.
The most baffling casting choices, however, were Peter O’Toole and Mia Farrow, both in small roles as inner space Kryptonians. The former plays a pseudo wise elder who can build organic structures with a strange wand. The latter plays Kara’s mother, but I won’t rehash what I’ve already said about impossible family trees. I understand that a paycheck is a paycheck, but really, don’t they have higher standards than this? Don’t the filmmakers? Director Jeannot Szwarc – also the director of Jaws 2, another sequel no one asked for – only seems to understand the technical side of Supergirl. When it comes to the narrative side, he seemed to be utterly adrift. Was he under the impression that the lighthearted nature of comic books automatically negated anything related to an effort?
As for newcomer Helen Slater, while it’s never good for your film debut to be a disaster, there seems to be enough talent there to take her past this. She just needs to be allowed to show it. Half of the problem, I believe, was how she was directed; it seemed less about finding the hidden humanity within Kara and more about fulfilling an obligation to comic book cliches. In other words, Szwarc didn’t allow her to be her own character. He only let her be a female version of Superman, and as a result wasn’t given too many heroic things to do – unless they involved something campy like a carnival ride spinning uncontrollably fast, or something superficial like falling for the story’s designated hunk. While Supergirl would never have been a masterpiece, it definitely had the potential to be escapist fun. Unfortunately, it’s just ridiculous.
