My World of Flops Superman-Free Case File #115/My Year of Flops II #12 Supergirl (1984)

https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-place/2019/3/13/my-world-of-flops-case-file-115my-year-of-flops-ii-12-supergirl

Supergirl’s fascinating miscalculations begin with big-eyed waif Helen Slater playing Kara Zor-El, AKA Linda Lee, AKA Supergirl as a ditsy, bumbling, barely legal space hippie. She’s a super-girly lover of beautiful, delicate things. This is no steely, determined Captain Marvel. It’s closer to a Lisa Frank puffy sticker version of Supergirl where the “girl” part matters as much as the “Super” component.

Kara Zor EL leads a peaceful life admiring crystal butterflies and shit on her home terrain of Argo City, where she hangs out with Zaltar (Peter O’Toole), an artist and wizard type who “borrows” an all-powerful doo-hickey/MacGuffin called the Omegahedron that, through a series of errors, ends up on earth in the possession of Selena (Faye Dunaway), a witch who was just talking about her monomaniacal focus on taking over the world.

That’s an ambitious #Squadgoal no matter how powerful you are. Luckily for Selena, a ball of ultimate powerful straight up lands in her laps and immediately gives her what little confidence she needs to give partner Nigel (Peter Cook), the aforementioned warlock/computer teacher the heave-ho.

For this column I once covered an officially branded direct-to-video Thomas Kinkade Christmas movie, Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage in which the Oscar-winning Lawrence of Arabia star committed himself to the role of Kinkade’s mentor, particularly the part about him howling for Kinkade to “Paint the light, Thomas! Paint the LIGHT!” with such misplaced conviction that you’d think O’Toole was performing for God himself rather than an undiscriminating audience of Christians and terrible art enthusiasts. So you better believe O’Toole commits to an unhealthy degree to gibberish dialogue about “six-dimensional geometry” and the “Omegahedron” and clumsy exposition about inner space versus outer space as if it were lost Hamlet monologues.