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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie Oleson" data-source="post: 444064" data-attributes="member: 8">Supergirl (1984)[ATTACH=full]59573[/ATTACH]And then suddenly, things are not so funny anymore.I didn't have much memory of this film but I know that my 1980s standards were different from today. The third season of Batman '66 (it was probably 1968) introduced the Batgirl character and even though I appreciated the visual flair I thought most of her scenes happened at the expense of Batman and Robin, and with more  alias cover-ups.Ironically, the most merciful thing to do is to remove these spin-off characters from the original narrative and put them in their own spin-off story.And yet that still is not the solution to ignore these characters simply because we must know what that spin-off looks like. What if it turns out to be surprisingly good, and you're the only person who's not aware of it? It's just not an option.I'm watching this as an unofficial follow-up to Superman II but in reality it followed Superman III. It makes me wonder if it would have affected my opinion of Supergirl.Story-wise, Supergirl is just fine, it's not as if the first two Superman stories were complex masterpieces. I find most of the special effects entertaining except for the Phantom Zone stuff which is now a planet with Peter O'Toole on it. Did he insist on wearing his own 1980s knitwear? Supergirl's temporary defeat is heavily emphasised by her moment of falling in the mud. "And the whole world gasped".Actress Helen Slater is certainly watchable as the wide-eyed protagonist but that doesn't change the fact that Superman's cousin has very little reason to exist. Not even in the film itself unless we're extremely worried about what happens to Argo City where Mia Farrow lives and she  is never any good in this type of films.It's very obvious to me that Alura and Lara are cousins, and that they hate each other.Superman, on the other hand, had been nurtured and intertwined with real-life American history long before the Salkinds decided to put him en film ciné.The icony is deserved.Everything about her schoolgirl alias Linda Lee is insufferably boring and it doesn't help that most of the dialogue in this film is below par, Hart Bochner's poetic lines notwithstanding.The school looks like the school from Gregory's Girl, not American at all.Selena & Co fare a little better as the plotting and cackling villains, but I don't think Faye Dunaway spoke in unfinished lines because she forgot  them.Also, there's no rhyme or reason in the way her magic works. She just interprets the Omegahedron in a way she likes it to be, and then later she combines it with a voodoo object of sorts. That works because it works, and in fact it works so well that she now controls North & South America and   Canada.The most iconic sorcery sequence happens when an excavator, magically manipulated by Selena, tries to take a bite out of Hart Bochner's ass.Well, who wouldn't.The film score by Jerry Goldsmith is actually very lovely - unless I suck at rating film soundtracks. If Mel O'Drama has it on Deluxe Edition CD then I have nothing to worry about.Supergirl  is bad, but it's too cinematic to be a bona fide cult classic. The special effects are not consistently good but I think it looks more "real" than any of the CGI dross in modern superhero movies.If the writing had been funnier and sharper and more sexist it could have been a throwback to sixties Batman.</blockquote>

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