Supergirl

I don't like superhero movies. The big exceptions are the 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman and its first sequel Superman II, which this movie is a kinda-sorta-sequel to. But Jeannot Szwarc and David Odell's Supergirl isn't a superhero movie as much as it's a high school melodrama about an adorable alien girl who has to face off against an insane sex witch who tries to steal her boyfriend, sicks an invisible dragon puppet on her, and banishes her to the Phantom Zone hang out with her drunk uncle!

Shameless French producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind were gonna milk their hit property Superman for all it was worth. After destroying the tone and consistency of their wildly successful series with the almost unwatchable "comedy" Superman III, Papa Salkind left his son Ilya to go off and make a little movie about one of the extra characters they got when they optioned the Superman character from DC Comics. The reputation of working for the Salkinds was pretty much in tatters by the end of production on the third Superman film. So much so that even that film's director Richard Lester, who never seemed to turn down a job, said no to doing this. Enter Jeannot Szwarc, the French TV director Richard Zanuck and David Brown had put in charge of the commercially successful Jaws 2. Szwarc had just scored a significant critical success with a different type of Christopher Reeve picture, the 1980 era-hopping romantic fantasy Somewhere in Time. Szwarc hoped to convince Reeve, who had enjoyed his experience working on Somewhere in Time, to do a cameo as Superman in Supergirl, but Reeve was so sick of playing the character and of the Salkinds that he ultimately said no. A sequence of Superman welcoming his cousin and the two going for a fly-around was cut and replaced with Kara, now Supergirl, engaging in a kind of aerial ballet as she familiarized herself with her newly gained powers. Incidentally, the aerial ballet is one of this movie's best sequences. With Superman now only appearing in a poster hanging on a dorm room wall, the one piece of connecting tissue between this film and the official Superman series (aside from the producers) is actor Marc McClure, who reprises his role as Jimmy Olsen.

The plot of Supergirl is so convoluted it defies any attempt at a summary, but I'll give it a shot… Young, pretty Kara Zor-El is the niece of Jo-El, which makes her Superman's cousin. Kara lives with her mom, Alura In-Ze (Mia Farrow), in Argo City, a random community of Kryptonians who survived their planet's destruction by being transported into an area of trans-dimensional space. A wizard named Zaltar (Peter O'Toole) shares with Kara the secret of the Omegahedron, a magical orb that powers Argo City, which he has "borrowed" to make his crystal formation art projects a bit more psychedelic. But when he loses the Omegahedron, and it flies out of the paper-thin walls of the fortress and into a kind of cross-dimensional space wormhole, he realizes he's damned himself to the Phantom Zone and doomed his people and the city he created to certain death. But Kara takes off after the Omegahedron, traveling somehow to Earth, where she instantly transforms into "Supergirl." While she tries to recover the orb to save her home, she creates a secret identity for herself as Clark Kent's 'cuz Linda Lee and enrolls at a private all-girls boarding school where she's assigned to be roommates with Lois Lane's younger sister Lucy—what are the odds? The school’s hunky groundskeeper, played by Hart Bochner (the future scuzzy, handsy, cokey, Yuppy executive in Die Hard), takes an interest in Kara, which distracts her from her mission a bit. Meanwhile, a powerful, power-hungry, Stevie Nicks-wannabe witch-in-training named Selena (Faye Dunaway) and her feckless, female-Otis assistant Bianca (Brenda Vaccaro), who live together in an abandoned amusement park, discover the Omegahedron when it flies into their picnic basket. They use the orb to one-up themselves from their half-assed warlock mentor (Peter Cook), who also happens to teach computer science at Kara and Lucy's school. Selena realizes the Omegahedron is so powerful it can give her far better magical powers than she'd dreamed of, and it's up to Kara/Linda/Supergirl to prevent the power-mad witch from taking over the Earth.

The screenplay is by Muppet Show writer David Odell, who also wrote The Dark Crystal and the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie. I love trying to imagine how this script got approved and put into production. It's really something. The cast is also an absolute hoot. Dunaway is in full-on cocaine mode here, overacting even more than she does in The Eyes of Laura Mars and Mommy Dearest. It's wild to think the Salkinds had initially tried to get Dolly Parton to play this role, which would have changed the entire tenor of the picture. Peter O'Toole was well into his 1980s phase in which he only played drunks, which pretty much everyone assumed was because he was constantly drunk. His scenes with Kara after they’ve been banished to The Phantom Zone are downright depressing, but at least he's ok in them playing a martyred drunk. But in the opening scenes in Argo City, he delivers some of the worst dialogue ever written with some of the most comical, straight-faced acting ever filmed.

As for Supergirl herself, after considering Brooke Shields, the producers went with 20-year-old High School of Performing Arts grad Helen Slater, which was absolutely the right call. Not only does she achieve the most important aspect of playing a comic book superhero, which is not only to not look stupid in the outfit but to look better in it than in any other possible costume you could wear (something only Christopher Reeve and Gal Gadot have ever accomplished), Slater's perky, wide-eyed, combination of innocence and maturity, kindness and strength make her the perfect fit for this tonally bizarre picture. We just like seeing her on screen, which makes the movie go down much easier than it has a right to. Slater made her film debut here and would go on to a short but notable career, perfectly cast in a trifecta of lead roles in ultra-'80s movies that required a similar combination of qualities—The Legend of Billie Jean, Ruthless People, and The Secret of My Success, before fading into TV purgatory—her supporting turn in City Slickers was her last major screen appearance.

The movie leans heavily into '80s fantasy movie tropes mixed with Eurotrash techno-pop music video aesthetics. It sometimes looks as expensive and state-of-the-art as its Super-predecessors (the flying scenes are as magical as those in the original Superman), but other times it looks as cheap as a TV sitcom spin-off. I may not be a queer fashionista or a lover of high camp, but this is a movie that arrives at its so-bad-it’s-good qualities 100% organically, and the outfits in this picture are simply…. fabulous. We get Dunaway's flowing loungewear, Vaccaro's loose-fitting middle-aged pastels, Cook's leather multi-zippered leisure suit, Bochner's crushed velvet jacket over an unbuttoned high-collar shirt, and the unexaggerated yet smokin' way Slater's figure fills out the iconic blue and red spandex. The film was sold with the tagline, "Adventure runs in the family!" but it really doesn't. This was definitely a major box-office bomb, though (I gotta admit). I loved it as a kid.