a review of 超级少女

2020 Cult Movie Challenge Week 44: Best of the Worst Week I'd completely missed seeing this one when I was a kid, and had always heard that it wasn't very good, even in comparison to the later Christopher Reeve Superman movies. What I didn't expect was just how disconnected this movie feels from those other films, to the extent that they could have removed all references to Superman or the iconic costume and just made an original movie about a teenage superheroine and it would have been much the same. There's some odd choices in the writing and directing around Helen Slater's portrayal of Kara Zor-El. Sometimes it's just not clear whether she's playing her actual age (late teens/early 20s), slightly younger, or *much* younger, because the script saddles her with some business that sounds like it was written for a literal child. Which makes the later scenes in which she has to play out a weird brain-scrambled romance with a much older-seeming Hart Bochner seem extremely creepy and wrong in the moment. At the very least, it seems like the villains (Faye Dunaway as a witch who lives in an abandoned carnival funhouse, Peter Cook as her on-again/off-again boyfriend/co-conspirator, and Brenda Vaccaro as Otis) are having some fun. The movie suffers from some weirdly low stakes, in which the villain literally does silly party tricks with the unspeakably powerful McGuffin for the first 3/4 of the movie before suddenly deciding to go full evil overlord for five minutes before being immediately defeated by Supergirl. It's not a good movie or even a movie that I particularly enjoyed, but I'm kind of glad to finally have the full context for its badness. It's one to watch with friends and have some fun with.