Supergirl.

Review #2397: Supergirl.

Cast: 

Helen Slater (Kara Zor-El / Linda Lee / Supergirl), Faye Dunaway (Selena), Peter O'Toole (Zaltar), Hart Bochner (Ethan), Mia Farrow (Alura In-Ze), Brenda Vaccaro (Bianca), Peter Cook (Nigel), Simon Ward (Zor-El), Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen), Maureen Teefy (Lucy Lane), and David Healy (Mr. Danvers) Directed by Jeannot Szwarc (#555 - Jaws 2)

 

Review: 

“Physically it’s not at all the prototype of a superhero the way Superman is. Superman was the man of steel and he’s big, he’s got muscles et cetera…she has superpowers [that] are the same…but where Superman is power and strength, [Supergirl] is more like style and elegance.” 

You might wonder where Supergirl came from. Well, it only took a few years (read: 1959) for Otto Binder and Al Plastino (the two credited creators of the character as writer and illustrator, respectively) to introduce the original character to Action Comics that had a cousin to Superman arrive from a doomed place that ended up raised as "Linda Lee" (later adopted to add Danvers) in an orphanage. Basically, the character was created in the same headspace that created super-powered pets to accompany the hero. Anyway, you might remember that when the Salkinds (Alexander, Ilya) bought the film rights to Superman in 1975 by paying money to Warner Bros to license the intellectual property, it also included the character of Supergirl. The Salkinds actually wanted to use the character in Superman III to maybe make a spinoff movie....but Warner Bros. apparently vetoed it (pity, good luck settling with Richard Pryor). At any rate, the two announced their plans to do a Supergirl movie in 1982 and had ideas in mind to maybe have Christopher Reeve appear in a bit role to set up a quest...and then he didn't want to appear in the movie. At least he suggested Jeannot Szwarc (who he worked with on Somewhere in Time [1980]) should direct the movie, since the Salkinds couldn't even get Robert Wise to do the movie. The screenplay was written by David Odell (well, it was re-written heavily, but still), who had written for films such as The Dark Crystal (1982) and later Masters of the Universe (1987). There somehow exists three different versions of the film to consider. The original cut of the movie was 138 minutes long, but test audiences apparently thought it was a bit too long, necessitating cuts. So, you would think it would be settled at having 124 minutes for the runtime...but no! The 124-minute version was released internationally, but somehow, American audiences got a version that lasted just 105 minutes (namely by trimming more sequences from Argo City, Midvale, etc). By 2000, one could finally check out the director's cut and International Cut on home media. Made for roughly over $30 million (as distributed by Tri-Star Pictures, who bent to the Salkinds wishing to release the movie in the winter of 1984 rather than in the summer), the movie was a general flop with audiences. Interestingly, in the comic books, the character was killed off (for a number of years, anyway) in the famed series Crisis on Infinite Earths. Slater never played the character again on film, but she appeared in the Supergirl TV series a few decades later. This was the last hurrah for the Salkinds and Super-people on film, as they sold to the Cannon Group in 1985 for the disaster that became Superman IV in 1987*.

Basically, if you didn't care much for Superman III (1983), you will find the exact level of disinterest for Supergirl (1984). Both are tired efforts that show clear strain in all of its flabby flatness, which starts with the movie looking like a failed TV movie production and ends with a climax that does not exactly warrant further adventures. They clearly wanted to have their big-name stars lift up a young would-be name just like six year prior, but the cracks are apparent everywhere. Imitating how they cast Christopher Reeve years earlier in looking for an unknown, Helen Slater had quite the qualification of having been in exactly one TV episode and zero movies prior to Supergirl (hey, they also tested out folks like Demi Moore and Brooke Shields). Honestly, she does fine with the material that shows a naive but charming would-be hero that you could definitely like for other adventures (okay maybe not with the school stuff, that whole "changes hair color and costume" BS only works when stoned). Bochner, on the other hand, has nothing to work with as the romantic interest, and it doesn't help that a chunk of the time sees him under a love potion. Teefy and McClure (the only link to the Superman films) aren't worth talking about. Evidently, Dunaway must've loved Mommie Dearest (1982) so much that she decided eating the scenery in hammy acting needed seconds. Sure, we know she is a worthwhile actress, but the material she is given here is so weak that she has no choice but to ham it up to try and distract the viewer that is barely above the middling villainous comic book movie presence you saw in the aforementioned third Superman movie. She's supposed to be self-centered and a terror with what power can do to someone, but she just seems more man-hungry than anything, considering that she is first wrapped up in getting a man to drink some love potion and when her powers of persuasion fail, she needs the guy she ditched to do the job for her (oh but then she sends a woman into a phantom zone). Incidentally, she gets stopped only when a man intervenes (first when one of them fiddles with the magic ball thing and the second when the warlock that she decided to betray after getting his help in the first place tells our hero, who had to be told that she could go on *twice* beforehand, how to get the villain trapped). Honestly, they might've done better if Cook or O'Toole were the villains. It isn't even worth giving Vaccaro criticism beyond saying that Ned Beatty could've done this goon shtick in his sleep**. It's funny that Cook is supposed to be playing both a warlock and a teacher but looks like he would rather being doing a bit instead. In theory, Farrow was meant to be a big name to draw attention to the film and deliver drama to the movie...and she gets less time on screen than O'Toole, a far more talented actor even when he is phoning it in. The effects are okay, but in general, the movie looks too tired to be anything other than campy cheese. It might work out for those who love to view the films of camp or the old days of failed franchises, but it probably was for the best that it went by the wayside.

Overall, I give it 5 out of 10 stars.

*Interestingly, the Salkinds still had the chance to do other things away from Superman, they developed a television series based on the character of Superboy later in the decade.

**Beatty and Vaccaro were both nominated for Academy Awards, you know. But Beatty had a hell of a speech in Network (1976), so we salute him. And I guess we will find a worthy Mia Farrow movie to watch that isn't made by the overrated Woody Allen someday.

Rosemary's Baby.

Review #2118: Rosemary's Baby.

Cast: 

Mia Farrow (Rosemary Woodhouse), John Cassavetes (Guy Woodhouse), Ruth Gordon (Minnie Castevet), Sidney Blackmer (Roman Castevet), Maurice Evans (Hutch), Ralph Bellamy (Dr. Abraham Sapirstein), Angela Dorian (Terry Gionoffrio), Patsy Kelly (Laura-Louise McBirney), Elisha Cook Jr (Mr. Nicklas), Emmaline Henry (Elise Dunstan), and Charles Grodin (Dr. Hill) Written for the Screen and Directed by Roman Polanski (#631 - Chinatown)

Review: 

Ira Levin was a prolific writer in his day before and after Rosemary's Baby. He had written the 1953 novel A Kiss Before Dying and the play adaptation of No Time for Sergeants. By the 1960s, he had come up with the reasoning that the most suspenseful part of a horror story was "before, not after, the horror appears" and came up with a fetus as the idea for said target. Dealing with a flop in the mid 1960s on Broadway, Levin returned to the idea and reasoned that between making a fetus with impregnation by aliens or the Devil, one basically was stuck with the latter because The Midwich Cuckoos already had dealt with aliens and children. The resulting book (worked over starting in 1965) ended up being so interesting that director William Castle mortgaged his house to buy the rights for the book before it was even published (which occurred in March 1967), as Castle was that confident in a book even in gallery proof form was the one that would make a fine film, and the book ended up as one of the most noted horror novels of its decade. While Paramount Pictures was interested in doing the film, studio head Robert Evans insisted that Castle serve only as producer while having Roman Polanski as director. The French-born director had grown up in Poland and survived the brunt of the Holocaust to study at the National Film School in Łódź before he became a feature director with Knife in the Water (1962). His next three films, made in Britain, involved either horror or thriller aspects with Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-Sac (1966), and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). This was the first Hollywood feature for the director, which he also wrote the screenplay that hewed fairly close to the book in several respects. The film was a hit, but Castle dealt with kidney problems after the release that ailed him for a time when he should have basked in the moment of being right. Famously, the ending of the novel/film got William Peter Blatty in a twist that saw him get onto the road to doing his own book about demons in people with The Exorcist (1971). A television film that served as a "sequel" came with Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby (1976). Levin saw a variety of his books and plays turned into films over the years, such as The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, and Deathtrap. In 1997, he wrote a follow-up book with Son of Rosemary. A TV miniseries adaptation of the original novel alongside the sequel book happened in 2014.

Do you ever watch a movie and have that feeling in your stomach that a film with a high reputation really is "just good, not great"? Oh, it happens sometimes (such as the overrated Hereditary or The Invisible Man [2020]), where a film seems to ride really hard on being disturbing in the realm of overt possibilities and so and so on (that, and relying on a short haircut that inspires a chuckle each time I see it). It is amusing that Paramount Pictures distributed this film and Targets in the same year when it comes to horror films hinging in plausibility and the cheaper production (and the one screwed over in marketing) outclasses the former when it comes to flat out getting to the damn point (I find it strangely amusing that the coven is left to blinding actors and being 98% effective in making a man go into a coma in their plans of the whatever). Plus, it doesn't seem to drag its runtime unlike the 137 minutes present here. Sometimes I wondered what would have been if Castle (you know, the guy behind productions such as The Night Walker [1964]) was allowed to have made the film within his own ideas rather than just be the producer. Don't get me wrong, the movie is good and all of the things that come with trying to build suspense with something that you have a good grasp is going wrong earlier than the film believes the viewer thinks they will figure that out. But hey, the film itself, particularly with its one key sequence of lady in bed seeing what she sees and hears in the dark, does make a quality impression in the terror of life under siege to others barging into their lives and their homes. The mental and physical pain that comes out in the film makes for an experience that requires a presence to make it more than words, and it is Farrow (best known previously for her two years on the soap opera Peyton Place in the mid-1960s) that lifts the film as well as one can do with making an involving lead that we can feel for in the realm of reacting to ever-shifting terror (it might seem interesting that a horror film got Academy Award nominations for acting, until you realize Gordon received one and won while Farrow didn't even get a nomination). Gordon of course is effective in that shroud of uneasy weirdness that could only inspire the best type of paranoia and curiosity to go with Blackberry. Cassavetes makes an assuring accomplice, one who is assured even in the face of pathetic qualities that only could come from this (complete with an apt reaction at the end). Evans and Bellamy are on opposite sides of the coin in veteran presences that work out well against Farrow in the shades of doubt and query. In general, the film does work out pretty well in the idea of terror lurking around and possibly inside one's own self, complete with worthy staging to make it feel real. Of course, the ending is a bit on the offbeat side (or for others, perhaps sacrilegious), but as a moment of total acceptance of the scenario that arises from ambition in the face of people that call themselves human, it works. As a whole, it isn't nearly the classic that others might wish to bestow when compared to various others in the 1960s for horror, but it is watchable all the way through with a carefully crafted story that is undoubtedly on there for any horror person to watch at least once.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Next: Anthology horror, double-packed.