There are two movies in here, not so much fighting for dominance as playing a drunken game of musical chairs. One is a surprisingly sincere and faithful Supergirl movie that might've been somewhat good if it had landed in the hands of a creative team who cared or at least knew what they were doing. The other is whatever the hell campy nonsense Faye Dunaway, Peter Cook, and Brenda Vaccaro are in. I doubt either of these movies would've been good on their own, and they are certainly worse together, and yet I was surprised to find I actually ended up enjoying this more than Superman III and IV.
We open in Argo City, which is like a cross between a hippie commune and a dorm for broke art students who have been forced to sell all their furniture to make rent and have to sleep on bean bags. Now, I know that this is a city from Krypton that survived the planet's destruction by being placed in a force field because I've read the source material, yet weirdly the film makes no mention of it. The word Krypton isn't even said once. There's a lot of exposition in this scene, but none of it really has anything to do with explaining what Argo City is or where it came from. Most of the talk is about the Omegahedron (a thingamajig that does stuff), inner space, and binary chutes. I wonder if the filmmakers were trying to tone down all the references to the wider Superman lore since there wasn't going to be any Superman in the movie. Might've been better if they just cut all references completely and let this stand as its own thing.
Argo City is home to Kara (Helen Slater), who is an apprentice (I think) of
We take a quick break from Kara's journey to introduce the film's villain, a witch named Selena (Dunaway), who is having a picnic on a tiger skin rug (yes, she is that camp) with her lover Nigel (Cook). He's supposed to be a warlock, but looks more like the type of guy who picks up women on airplanes by dazzling them with tales of the yacht he doesn't actually own. I don't blame Selena for ditching him the first chance she got. I doubt she's the first woman he's tried the whole "I can teach you the dark arts from the ancient grimoires" routine on. She picks up the Omegahedron and swans off back to the abandoned amusement park where she lives to plot world domination because she's fully committed to the bit.
Cut back to Kara, who has somehow undergone a make up and costume change during her journey. Is this an effect of travelling from inner space to outer space? Does travelling through the binary, through the warp, into another register of gravitational radiation give one superpowers? That's what this film seems to be suggesting, that Kara's powers (which are whatever the plot needs them to be) are a result of her journey and not because she has the same biology as Superman. Either that or that costume was already on the ship, which does beg the question of just what the hell Zaltar was planning to do when he got to Earth. I'm not judging, I'm just curious.
Even though her mission is extremely urgent with the lives of her parents and everyone else in Argo City at stake, Kara takes time out of it to enroll herself in an all girls boarding school so she can experience what life as a typical Earth teenager is really like. Despite only arriving on Earth yesterday, she manages to talk her way in by giving herself an alias inspired by Robert E. Lee (ugh) and doing what any decent Kansas farmer would do in her situation: forging some documents. Conveniently this is also the school that Nigel teaches at as well as the one Lois Lane's kid sister Lucy (Maureen Teefy) goes to, who also happens to be dating Jimmy Olsen, who has clearly grown tired of life and decided being brutally beaten to death with a baseball bat by Lois for dating her teenage sister would be one hell of a way to go.
As contrived and hackneyed (and a little icky) as all these school scenes are, I actually quite liked the friendship between Kara and Lucy, mostly because it highlighted what an adorable little weirdo Kara is. She's not putting that bra on over her school uniform and stuffing it because she's an alien and don't know how they work. She's just like that. The girl is a complete freak and Lucy matches her (those Lanes and their Kryptonians). Shame the movie had to lumber them both with terrible love interests so they'd spend less time together.
Even though Supergirl and Selena have a legitimate reason for being at odds with each other, I'd like to remind everyone at home that this movie was still written, directed and produced by men. So naturally, Supergirl and Selena end up fighting over a guy, a shitty guy, played by the cokehead yuppie douche from Die Hard. What makes him so shitty? Well, even after the magical roofie has worn off he still chases after a teenage girl he has known for all of five minutes, and infuriatingly she starts to return his feelings, which still isn't even the worst interaction between a man and a woman in this movie. The first people Kara meets on Earth are a pair of red-neck truckers who instantly try to rape her. The film's attempt to turn this into a girlboss moment where she beats them up doesn't erase just how gross and out of place the whole scene is.
The rest of the film is a mix of poorly handled fight scenes and FX sequences as Selena uses the extremely unclear abilities of the Omegahedron to send various magical threats to get rid of Linda/Supergirl so she can have the cokehead yuppie douche from Die Hard all to herself. This all culminates in them blowing what was left of their budget on a final fight that admittedly isn't as bad as it could've been. It wasn't good, but I've certainly seen worse.
If I'm completely honest, despite a lot of the primitive effects on display, there are a few sequences in this movie that I really liked and wish had ended up in a much better movie. I loved the first scene of Kara mastering her powers and taking sheer joy in being able to fly, dancing on air and across the water before soaring into the sky. It just might be the best flying sequence in all the Reeve era movies and ends with a lovely shot of her silhouetted against the setting sun. I also liked her earlier battle with the shadow monster and her reunion with Zaltar in the Phantom Zone, but his ultimate sacrifice so she can escape is made unintentionally hilarious by how poor the effects are and how uncommitted O'Toole is.
As Kara, Slater is sweet and likeable, if also somewhat bland and wooden, but I'm going to cut her some slack there because she was only 19 when cast, fresh out of high school with virtually no experience. The producers wanted an unknown for the title role, like they had done with Superman (probably because they were cheaper) who they would surround with more experienced (and more expensive) stars. While O'Toole phones it in, Dunaway goes all Mommie Dearest, hamming it up to all the way to eleven and never once looking back. It is a masterclass in OTT acting that should be studied by future generations. It is exactly the kind of performance a film like this needs, because without it Supergirl would be just a really dull and dumb superhero adventure film. It needs that dose of pure unfiltered camp to lift it up to at least the level of ironically entertaining.
Notes and Quotes
--The only reason it exists in the first place is because Superman III underperformed and Christopher Reeve didn't want to make another movie and refused all offers to even cameo in this one.
--Zaltar says the Omegahedron is one of the city's two great power sources, but never says what the other is or how it is useless without the Omegahedron. Kara also calls it "an Omegahedron" implying that there's more than one.
--Argo City should not be confused with Kandor, the Kryptonian city that Brainiac shrunk and put in a bottle.
--Why does the ship hatch like an egg and shoot Kara out in the middle of a lake? And without the ship how does she get back to Argo City?
--Despite being trapped in a realm they cannot leave, the residents of Argo City are surprisingly well informed about the outside world. Zaltar talks about all the planets of our solar system while Kara knows her cousin was sent to Earth, became Superman, and his secret identity is Clark Kent of the Daily Planet.
--Three versions of the film exist. The 105 minute American cut, the 124 minute international cut, and a 138 minute director's cut. The international cut is the version most widely available and the one I watched for this review.
--How does time work in Argo City since the first movie established that Krypton's destruction was thousands of years ago? Does living in inner space make everyone immortal?
--As with the first two Superman films, the main villain gets top billing over the title character because their actor is more famous.
--While it's a silly place, I think more time should've been spent in Argo City. We get no sense of what Kara's life there is like there or her relationship with her parents.
--The score is John Williams-lite despite coming from a someone like Jerry Goldsmith, who was very much at Williams' level.
--Along with Brooke Shields, Demi Moore was considered for the title role and was eventually cast as Lucy Lane, but left to make Blame It on Rio instead.
Selena: "I'm considering nothing less than world domination."
Selena: "Don't call me your sweetness. I am not sweet. I am Selena. And I am a bitter, bitter pill to swallow."
Nigel: "Oh, terrific. The old dangling-in-a-cage routine. Pathetic, Selena."
Zaltar: "Our city has two great power sources. This is one of them. Look."
Kara: "An Omegahedron. The Guardians let you have it?"
Zaltar: "Not exactly. I borrowed it."
Kara: "You stole it. Oh, Zaltar, they're going to..."
Zaltar: "No. Borrowed it, for the afternoon. For inspiration."
Bianca: "My dear Nigel, the way to a woman's heart is through the elimination of her rivals."
Supergirl is a bad movie, but thanks to some likeable performances and a truly camptastic villain, it can at least be a fun bad movie at times. ⭐⭐
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
To be fair, enjoyment of anything more than Superman III and Superman IV is a pretty low bar.
ReplyDeleteMark, I must have laughed ten times while reading this review. I don't remember the movie that well, although I'm fairly certain I saw it in the theater, but you brought it back for me. Thanks for taking this one on, since we have a new Supergirl on its way. Which will hopefully be much, much better.
ReplyDeleteNomadUK, you have a valid point. :)