All I’m saying is that you can’t go nuts over a landscaper and a teenager in a blue suit!

Supergirl? Good lord, what am I doing to myself? A glutton for punishment, it seems.

Well, I’ll focus as much as possible on the positive, which means that I will occasionally have a positive thing to say, but precious little. The first is this – the opening credits are pretty damn slick. They’re rather different from the ones in the Superman movies while retaining their epic flavour, with shiny, 3-D looking titles gliding through the clouds catching reflections of red and blue light. Really cool. However, we also come to our first big problem right here, in the credits sequence before we’ve seen anything. It’s the score. Oh, it’s a serviceable knockoff of the great Superman score, but for one thing – this weird period electronic shriek periodically makes itself heard in the score. Horns and all that blazing then SCREEEEEEEEEEEE! What the hell was the composer trying to do?

Speaking of what the hell were they thinking, Peter O’Toole! What’s wrong with you, man? First Caligula, now this? Why? The money couldn’t possibly have been enough to justify it. I’m so disappointed in you.

Anyway, we start out in Supergirl’s home… planet… comet… plastic bag in space… whatever. They avoid any attempt at explaining how this Krypton outpost survived the planet’s total destruction, because they certainly didn’t have the talent or imagination to come up with something new and lord knows the insane and convoluted origin story DC used was just not going to work out. She’s wandering around and encounters Peter O’Toole as Zaltar, an eccentric artist or something, who is making a sculpture of a tree, using a glowing magic stick, er… I mean, high-end Kryptonian technology (a side note – my spell-checker recognizes Krypton but not Kryptonian. Huh). ‘A tree. What’s a tree?’ Kara (that’s Supergirl, by the by) asks. Now, hang on. Here they are, talking about how her cousin, Kal-El has gone to Earth and is known there as Superman, and has the secret identity of Clark Kent, where he works as a news reporter for the newspaper The Daily Planet. Of course, any explanation of this knowledge is nonexistent, but even putting that aside, she knows all of that, yet doesn’t know what a tree is?

Oh God, this is going to be a very annoying movie, isn’t it?

The whole exchange between Kara and Zaltar feels strange. Peter O’Toole’s kind of grand and Shakespearian, but way overstated, and he comes off as a sexual predator. Helen Slater as Kara is not a bad actress at all, but the tone of her character is played with such extravagant wide-eyed innocence (a fault of the script and the direction as much as anything) that she seems mentally deficient. The scene has an uncomfortable awful feeling like we’re watching an elderly creep trying to seduce a 13-year-old retarded girl. We’re off to a rough start. He shows her the nifty magic (technological!) ball that he’s stolen, the Omegahedron, power source for their world-bag-city. It’s kind of a dopey special effect, a spinning Christmas tree bulb with a light in it. He gives it to Kara to play with when her mother shows up, to distract attention from the fact that he was trying to seduce her, I guess. She uses it to sculpt and bring to life a super-fake giant dragonfly that tears the plastic wall and dooms her entire society, because the Omegahedron gets sucked out into uhhh we’ll call it space for simplicity’s sake, but that’s not quite it.

The line readings are all pretty stilted and unsure, partly because the dialogue is written that way, and partly because one could assume the actors were kind of unsure of what was going on here, because it’s not even slightly explained, and also this is just pure, bad, self-conscious exposition. ‘I KNOW!’ Zaltar shouts at one point. Adlib? Anyway, Kara realizes, shit, I’m in trouble here, and she gets into this nifty little traveling ball and takes off after the Omegahedron through ‘the binary chute’ which looks like a journey through some pretty obvious experimental water photography. Zaltar is sentenced to the Phantom Zone and everyone else kicks back and waits for death.

The End.

Oh I wish…. So, to Earth! We meet Nigel, the warlock, and Selena, the evil novice witch who are having a picnic next to a lake. Selena is complaining about how she’s been at this for a couple months already and is furious that she’s not ruling the world. These are the kind of villains we’re to be given. This is one of those idiot world situations, you know, where motivations only make sense if the world is entirely populated by morons. So, they sit there, drinking champagne and planning world domination through black magic, and lo and behold, the Omegahedron comes hurtling out of the sky and lands in their fondue. I’m not kidding. That’s particularly odd given that Supergirl arrives on earth out of a lake and not through space, but she leaves the same way and arrives in roughly the same spot on earth. Selena immediately grasps the astonishing power of the Omegahedron so she grabs it and steals Nigel’s car. The car radio notes briefly that ‘Superman has embarked on a peace-seeking mission to a distant galaxy.’ Nice. Good ol’ Chris Reeve, after the disaster that was Superman III, took a page from Margot Kidder’s book and said ‘just write me out of it. I’m not appearing it, so say I went on vacation somewhere, I don’t care how.’ Good call, dude.

So Supergirl emerges from a lake, in costume somehow, and without that nifty traveling ball that she left in. I like Helen Slater. She’s very cute and playful in the role, and she does the flying quite well. It’s done in a very different way than in the Superman movies, like an aerial ballet, she really glories in the freedom of movement that flying allows her. I dig that, it’s a nice change that fits the character well. The blue-screen stuff is not as well-done as in those films, but it’s not terrible, and certainly miles better than it would come to be in Superman IV.

We meet up with Selena driving home, home being of all things an abandoned carnival haunted house dark ride. You know, the sort of thing where you’re in a little car on rails slowly going through the dark and cheap-looking ghosts and animatronic Frankenstein’s light up as you go by and make spooky sounds. She lives there with fellow witch Bianca, her slightly more logical counterpart, and she shows her the Omegahedron, explaining it will solve all their problems. Could you use it to fix the script? No? Okay, then.

Supergirl, meanwhile, has been out flying around all day, because it’s dark out now as she flies over the city and her bracelet starts beeping. This bracelet is one Zaltar made for her in the opening scene, using his magic (Kryptonian!) wand and the Omegahedron, so I guess it detects the Omegahedron as its original power source. Lucky, that, but shouldn’t it mean that anytime she’s in the vicinity of the Omegahedron it will beep incessantly? That would be pretty annoying. Also, she’s many miles up in the sky when it beeps so she lands and she’s nowhere near the thing. This bracelet must secretly be a scripted location detector. Supergirl lands in the middle of a really nasty neighbourhood. We know it’s really nasty, because there are police sirens in the distance and barking dogs and it’s totally abandoned, with a big pile of trash to one side, and the only business is a bar, where no one appears to be. A semi pulls up and two horrible hillbilly truckers step out to try and rape her.

Now, a few things about this scene really bother me. First off, why were there two truckers in the truck? Is it their traveling rape-mobile? I’ve dealt with some trucking companies in my time and there’s usually only a driver. What’s the second guy for, ballast? Also, hick rapists aside, how old is Supergirl supposed to be anyway? Thirteen or fourteen, maybe? We’re about to comically deal with two disgusting truckers trying to rape a fourteen-year-old girl. I don’t know what to make of that. ‘Why are you doing this?’ Supergirl asks, and one of them answers, bizarrely, ‘It’s just the way we are.’ What does that even mean? So she uses her powers in light little ways, and even with them recognizing her as wearing the same outfit as Superman and clearly possessing some similar powers, they are not deterred, so she’s forced to beat them silly, although not as severely as one would hope for such terrifying scum. Lying on the junk heap after she takes off, one of them says, ‘I think we should keep this to ourselves.’ Well, yeah, I suppose attempted rape of a minor probably isn’t something you’d want to be all that chatty about even if you pulled it off with great success. Idiot world!

So there’s a party going on at Selena’s carnival/home, because Bianca wants to enlist some more witches into their coven to help pay the rent. The rent on their abandoned carnival ride, please note. Ack! There’s that stupid electronic screech from the opening credits again! Stop it! Selena tells Nigel that she’s putting together a witch army to take over the world. She’s a little one note, huh? Nigel, being the only logical being in the movie, says, ‘World domination? So you start by letting Bianca get on the phone to the local psychical research society and say ‘Hello, got anyone over there wants to join a coven?” At least someone realizes this is stupid. Of course, Selena is one of those child-minded villains who cannot accept any criticism, constructive or otherwise, so she wrecks up her own party and most people agree with Nigel that she’s trying to go beyond her means, although a couple join her coven anyway.

The next morning, we find Supergirl sleeping in the woods next to a cute bunny. Awwwww. There’s a baseball diamond nearby, and we get this really weird scene that reminds me a lot of the “Stars of Track and Field” sequence in Election, where Tammy sees the Catholic schoolgirls playing field hockey and falls in love. There’s even a P.O.V. shot of Supergirl looking one of the girls up and down, which really seems weird and inexplicable until you realize she’s scanning the uniform somehow with her eyes because apparently one of her super powers is to make her clothes and hair colour magically change, which she does to blend in and join the school (because she wants to get with the cute field hockey girls, I guess). Her being able to make her hair change colour is a useful addition to her secret identity, I suppose, but still, just weird. Also, now that her hair’s brown instead of blonde, everyone thinks she’s unattractive. Sorry, brunettes. Anyway, she goes into the school and deals with the apoplectic headmaster who has some sort of inferiority complex. It turns out Nigel is the geometry teacher here, and while he has the headmaster out of the room, there’s a reeeeeeeeally exciting bit where Supergirl (now calling herself Linda Lee) super-tampers with school records! Oh, so BAD ASS. This movie is fucking stupid. Who is this even directed at? I honestly can’t figure it.

So continuing the weird lesbian vibe, the headmaster puts Linda in with Lois Lane’s butch sister, Lucy Lane. They hit it off right away, and it really, really feels like they’re setting them up as a couple. ‘This is your bed, but we don’t sleep around here,’ Lucy says slyly. Superman and his family are just magnetically attracted to people named Lane (and vice versa). Lucy’s got a Superman poster over her bed, too.

Meanwhile, Selena has started to put her world domination plan into production, currently involving making everyone fall in love with her. Ehhhh yeah. As such, we get kind of a creepy scene of Selena and Bianca ogling the school’s groundkeeper guy. What’s worse is this means we’re going to have to see a lot more of this brawny dimwit and when she decides to cast a love spell on him, we already know that some completely insane twist will make him fall in love with Supergirl instead and hilarity will most certainly not ensue. Selena pulls the Omegahedron out of its lead box and over in Nigel’s geometry classroom, Linda’s bracelet detects it in the vicinity and spying the witches through the wall with her x-ray vision, she gets up to leave and gets herself in trouble, but then there’s that hoary old cliché of the new student solving The Impossible Mathematical Equation on the side blackboard and with Nigel flabbergasted, she and Lucy leave. When Lucy walks away, Linda is absolutely just standing back at the door looking at her butt. I’m not imagining this.

They go play field hockey. OH COME ON… Okay, they play field hockey, and the school bullies target Lucy and Linda. Why them, do you figure? One of the bullies tries to hit Lucy in the head with the field hockey ball and Linda jumps in front to block it and that must have been one HELL of a swing, because it explodes in a ball of dust. Time to hit the showers, girls. Ahhhh yeeeeah. Wait, what? Again, who is this movie directed at? Anyway, after the bullies get some shower comeuppance (which sounds a lot dirtier that way, so I’ll leave it at that), Lucy and Linda go back to their room and Lucy invites Linda to come home with her while Linda tries on one of Lucy bras. Uh-huh. Refraining from comment. What’s really odd is that for some reason, Jimmy Olsen is coming to visit Lucy. Presumably because Margot Kidder was no more willing to be in this than Chris Reeve.

Selena, meanwhile, has bogged down her world domination plan in favour of trying to get laid by that dumb gardener dude. She calls him to her house and tries to seduce him, then gives him a roofie and he passes out. That sound again! It turns out that’s the sound the doors make in the haunted house ride when they open. Doesn’t explain why we hear it in the opening credits, but at least that’s why we hear it at Selena’s place all the time. Anyway, this guy is an idiot. He’s apparently illiterate, he can’t even read Selena’s name off a card. Anyway, he’s knocked out on the floor and the spell dictates that the first person he sees when he wakes up, he’ll fall in love with. We all know where this is going, but how absurd is it going to be? Oh, pretty damn absurd.

See, Nigel shows up and while Selena and Bianca are distracted chatting with him, Goofus wakes up and wanders out through the ride having some kind of wicked acid flashback. Then he stumbles around sort of sleepwalking, but eyes wide open, looking around and clearly seeing things, all the way to town. Which, coincidentally, is right where Lucy is having lunch with Jimmy Olsen, and right about the same time, Linda shows up by chance and runs into them all. Gang’s all here. Meanwhile, Selena has noted his absence and learned how to use her mirror to track him. So… instead of going after him and bringing him back, she’s just watching him stumble around lots of people and she commands ‘dark forces’ to bring him back to her. She has an excavator chase him to bring him back to her. Where to begin with the stupidity of this? ‘Hey,’ the people thought. ‘That drunk maniac was just picked up by a piece of heavy industrial machinery that destroyed some cars, driven by no one, and headed to the amusement park. Well, it’s probably not worth noting.’ Of course, in all this time, somehow while looking right at lots of people, he never falls in love with one of them, I guess because it would be dramatically inconvenient.

For no rational reason, Lucy runs and jumps into the excavator to stop it and gets knocked out. So, after a pee joke, it’s Supergirl to the rescue! Of course, now she saves the idiot gardener, and changing back to Linda, she opens up the bucket and lets him out, whereupon, of course, he falls in love with her. All while the watches are watching on their magic mirror and even so, they don’t put together that Supergirl and Linda are the same person. Selena even says, ‘She just happened to be in the wrong place and the wrong time, materializing in a bulldozer.’ Leaving aside the fact that this is not a bulldozer, HOW DO YOU NOT GET THIS?! She’s wearing different clothes and has different hair, but you also just saw her fly and tear metal with her bare hands, and you were just controlling industrial machinery from miles away with magic! Selena is officially one of the dumbest villains I’ve ever seen.

So anyway, rubbing her lips gently thinking of kissing Ethan the Idiot Gardener (does anyone really do this?), Linda arrives back at the school, and Selena sends an invisible dark force after her. She is practicing kissing herself in the mirror when it arrives outside. I… honestly, now, come on. So she flies out the window as Supergirl to fight the invisible monster, and watching on their magic mirror, Selena and Bianca STILL don’t get it. ‘What’s she doing here?’ How stupid can you be? After the fight, she goes inside, and even the drunken schoolmarm recognizes her in her Supergirl get-up as Linda. They’re just trying to piss me off now.

Thwarted, Selena decides to unleash the full power of the Omegahedron and lets it out of the lead box., which means Linda can track it with her bracelet, and of course, Goofus follows her with flowers and chocolates. Now, even with Linda showing up at their lair, they’re still not quite putting it together. Idiot world. After a painful, stupid romance scene between Linda and the gardener (who’s like, in his twenties, which makes this kinda skeezy), there’s a painful, stupid fight scene between Supergirl and Selena, which is cut short when Supergirl decides to fly Dumbo off out of harm’s way to a beach somewhere and there’s another long, painful bit of him wanting to know where Linda is. Aaarrrrgh. I hate you. I hate you so much.

The witches, finally made somewhat cognizant of their towering idiocy, decide to call in Nigel for help. He brings them the Burundi Wand, which looks a lot like Zaltar’s magic (Kryp-ah forget it) wand from the start, and as Idiot Boy realizes that Linda is Supergirl when they kiss, they materialize him away back to her lair, which she reconfigures as a big castle, on top of a huge mountain. She also enslaves the town with secret police, and within minutes, there’s a protest with signs drawn up and everything. This is so nonsensical it’s getting surreal. They have picket signs reading ‘STOP SELENA’ as she rides through town with her coven arresting Jimmy and Lucy. Also, she turns on Nigel and imprisons him too. As the only moderately intelligent person in this entire dog mess, you’d think he would have seen that coming.

Supergirl arrives to have a final showdown, but Selena magically traps her in a plastic bag which turns into that Phantom Zone flying mirror that Zod was trapped in at the beginning of Superman, except when it flies off away from earth and breaks open on a rock somewhere, instead of freeing her, it deposits her in the Phantom Zone. So… the thing Zod was trapped in wasn’t actually the Phantom Zone but a Phantom Zone transport vessel? And they got freed from it at just the right time because in minutes they would have been in the actual Phantom Zone? No, sorry, that’s stupid. Stricken from the record. Zaltar is waiting there in the Phantom Zone, of course, where he’s addicted to some aerosol spritzer. Man, that didn’t take long. It’s been like, a couple weeks at most, hasn’t it? That’s being generous, the way the movie is edited, it would appear to be only four or five days. Well, fortunately, Supergirl is here to make a silly, histrionic speech to rally him so the two of them can escape.

Back at the castle, hanging in cages from the ceiling, Jimmy reveals that he’s in love with Lucy. Too bad for him her heterosexuality is merely a flimsy pretense. On their magic mirror, the witches are watching Supergirl escape the Phantom Zone with Zaltar through the vortex (which is actually kind of a nifty effect). Zaltar sacrifices himself for no really discernable reason, and then Supergirl escapes, and flies in through the window of the castle and frees her friends and there’s another big silly magic fight where Supergirl mostly just gets pushed around until, losing confidence and stammering, ‘I… I can’t’ Zaltar’s voice comes echoing in her memory saying ‘YOU CAN’ and then she wins. That reminds me of some other movie about wars. Anyway, Selena and Bianca get tossed in the Phantom Zone, Jimmy and Lucy hook up (wahey!?), Nigel hooks up with one of the girls from Selena’s party earlier, and Supergirl goes back home through the lake somehow.

THE END AND FOR REAL THIS TIME THANK GOD

Favourite Character: Well, I’m inclined to say Nigel (played by good ol’ Peter Cook, probably best known as The Impressive Clergyman in The Princess Bride), because he’s a super-genius by the standards of this idiot world. Then again, Helen Slater as Supergirl is really cute and hard to dislike, as much as the movie surrounding her is utter garbage. A toss-up then.

Favourite Scene/Moment: When Nigel quite accurately tells off Selena, I suppose.

Favourite Line: Same as the moment above, and the only memorable line in the movie – ‘World domination? So you start by letting Bianca get on the phone to the local psychical research society and say ‘Hello, got anyone over there wants to join a coven?”

~ by jshopa on September 10, 2008.