Supergirl (1984)

Supergirl (1984)

Directed by: Jeannot Szwarc

Starring: Helen Slater, Faye Dunaway, Peter O’Toole

Apparently this movie was a huge box office bomb, and it’s possible that a big part of that is that Christopher Reeve was too busy to do a cameo in it as Clark Kent or Superman. I mean, otherwise it’s still kind of a dumb movie, but that little cameo is a pretty important part of the spinoff formula. Instead they got Jimmy Olsen. Woo-hoo.

While fooling around with Peter O’Toole’s magic ball (try to get THAT visual out of your head! HA!), Kara Zor-El accidentally throws it out the window of the magic space city she lives in. Without it, apparently the entire city will explode and everyone will die, so she steals Peter O’Toole’s spaceship (TRY TO… wait) and goes after it, to Earth. There she becomes Supergirl (as she is Superman’s cousin) and thwarts the plot of Faye Dunaway, a fortune teller who gets the ball and becomes a super evil witch bent on taking over the world.

There are actually some pretty decent special effects in here, and I really like Helen Slater as Supergirl. Even Peter O’Toole as the ruined inventor stuck in the Phantom Zone (oh yeah they send him to the Phantom Zone because some dumb girl stole his stuff and killed them all) is pretty great. Mostly what’s bad about this movie is the villain and the weird sense of humor that never quite manages to work right. Oh, and the romantic lead is just terrible. It’s mostly bad. Slater is really cute and plays a good naive alien, though.