Supergirl (1984)

Helen Slater returned to Supergirl in the form of Melissa Benoist’s CW Supergirl (2015) as her adoptive Earth mother, unfortunately saddled to be married to a fat ICE agent and the least popular Superman, Dean Cain. Good job on the obstacle course, bud! You unemployed loser!

The now 62-year-old Supergirl actress is still stunning enough to launch one thousand escape pods from an exploding Krypton. As far as I can tell, she is a proper stewardess of the Reeve Superman continuity and “universe” from a time when there could be only one. She also was incredibly close with Reeve during his life.

She also played Clark’s Kryptonian mother in Smallville, wrote a story for Supergirl #50 in 2005, voiced characters in the DCAU, has starred in many movies such as City Slickers and the underrated Michael J. Fox “greed is good” send-up The Secret of My Success (1987).

Slater herself holds a PhD in mythology. Meaning, she literally ponders orbs!

This movie is pure camp, not just for co-stars Peter Cook, Peter O’Toole and Faye Dunaway’s performances. They may have left the set every night with inscrutable cheek splinters only to be salved by dirty martinis at a Four Seasons bar. And I like it.

Mia Farrow plays Kara’s mother Alura, and Simon Ward plays her father Zor-El.

The tradition of cousins of familiar names and connections to The Daily Planet continues to this day in Smallville, the CW Arrowverse, and of course the comics. Marc McClure similarly seems to be proud to continue the work beyond Superman’s Apple-Watch-summoning pal Jimmy Olsen. He’ll later return as Dax-Ur in Smallville and ‘Jerry’, the Metropolis cop saved by Cyborg in Justice League. Perhaps Jerry was named for one of Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel (and Joe Shuster).

Effects and props are practical. Illusions and looking glasses to other dimensions are masked and optical. This movie sits comfortably, and not just in release order between III and IV.

The silliness of III. The earnestness of Clark, the innocence and trying to fit in on Earth. There is a funny scene of Kara as the new kid at Midvale School for Girls as the brunette Linda Lee (as a necessary third alias) putting on a bra outside of her clothes. Madonna was everywhere in 1984!

Maureen Teefey befriends this native of Argo City as Lois’ cousin Lucy Lane. She helps her around school and if I were in high school with these two stunners, I would have risked it all in the cafeteria and offered them a chocolate milk ‘on me’. If I replay this potential outcome, like I do with all of my real-life grade 7-12 attempts at romance, the chocolate milk would certainly have landed “on me”.

And hey, this was a girls’ school anyway, and by my back-of-the-napkin math, I was in third grade when the movie came out and in sixth grade before ABC broadcast this on one of the 10-12 channels we got. We were late to the Cablevision party in my house but among the first on our street, so that’s something! Still an unreachable age gap to be honest.

“No, Lemon, Cablevision, not Kabletown.”

Kara has been struck with a love potion from Dunaway’s Selena to crush on Midvale’s groundskeeper Ethan. She’s acquired Argo City’s power orb for survival, the Omegahedron.

In this Krypton origin story, Kara’s city of Argo exists in a pocket dimension after the planet’s destruction. Gunn uses pocket dimensions as well in the recent DCU films.

Speaking of pocket dimensions, another exists in the 1984 Supergirl. She finds herself floating on a 12-inch vinyl cover into space after being trapped in the familiar Phantom Zone! Banished there by the witch Selena! At least Selina Meyer only wanted a fucking vagina-shaped Presidential library, not unlimited sorceress power grabs!

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I mentioned this before, but this light movie seems to just work with the other Superman movies. Before shared universes became the style of the day, we had this.

The 2026 Supergirl seems to be sharing something with its 1984 counterpart.

People don’t seem to like it, and the proof is in the numbers. Abysmal Rotten Tomatoes scores of 19% and 26%, this one doesn’t get enough attention. Unless you recall her CGI spaghetti recreation in 2023’s The Flash. The studio wasn’t happy either spending $35 million to only get $14.3 million in return. And that’s for the last movie in the Salkind group quiver. Tri-Star even cut out 19 minutes from the film from poor test scoring results.

The effects are Zardoz-level keying in video clips. The same sound effect used in Transformers keeps cropping up, but hey, the flying does look 1984 cool, employing all they learned from Reeve. Selena’s hideout is quite literally a familiar-looking 1980s haunted house with a pillow of a spider dropping down on poor Ethan’s head. And there are skeletons and cobwebs made out of thin sheets. This isn’t Agatha All Along, more like Jessica Fletcher opens a haunted house.

What I can appreciate 42 years later is that this lands me in the time of 80s movies and Star Wars on UHF channels and just watching TV. Not that I’ve slowed down, but the kind of ‘watching teevee’ that required newspaper TV listings, planning, coordination with siblings, and the perfect snack to grab between commercials.

Is this a great movie? No. But entirely watchable, funny, charming and just plain weird. I mean this is one of those superhero movies that you can picture on the page, with John Byrne’s words coming out of Jimmy, Selena, and Kara’s mouths. Maybe Byrne is recency bias. How about Julie Schwartz?

Selena uses her Power of Shadow to attack Kara, and it mostly looks like this could be a Whitesnake video at points. In the final battle, she’s puppeting the Power of Shadow to twist Kara into a pretzel, and even with 1984 standards, it looks pretty bad.

But do I get excited every time I see Helen Slater make a fist and go flying at her enemy? Yes, yes I do. Gendered or not, a Kryptonian flying into someone is peak action. It’s all you need.

Groundskeeper Ethan, portrayed by actor Hart Bochner, is giving good face throughout the movie. Something for the ladies and gays I suppose!

Would I watch this again? Probably not, but with the caveat of doing one of my unhealthy completionist rewatches of Reeve films. If I’m going that deep, may as well!

Let me contrast this RT scoring with my own. As critics of movies and films, we’ve only recently in our history given films letter grades. And as a straight C student (hey, I ended up in art school!), I will honor Supergirl 1984 with a straight B. Points added for nothing else than the most toxic of pop culture reviewer traits, nostalgia.

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I’m 50. This movie is 42. The movie is an 85 from ‘84.

Life, the universe, and everything.

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