| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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BRENDA STARR
Rating: 
USA. 1991.
Director – Robert Ellis Miller, Screenplay – James David Buchanan, Noreen Stone & Jenny Wolkind, Story – Buchanan & Stone, Based on the Comic Strip Created by Dale Messick, Producer – Myron A. Hyman, Photography – Freddie Francis, Music – Johnny Mandel, Visual Effects – Illusion Arts (Supervisors – Syd Dutton & Bill Taylor), Animation – Colossal Pictures/SRSFX (Supervisor – Gary Gutierrez), Special Effects Supervisor – Joseph A. Unsinn, Production Design – John J. Lloyd. Production Company – Tribune Entertainment/New World Pictures/AM-PM.
Cast:
Brooke Shields (Brenda Starr), Tony Peck (Mike Randall), Timothy Dalton (Basil St John), Diana Scarwid (Libby ‘Lips’ Lipscomb), Jeffrey Tambor (Vladimir), June Gable (Luba), Charles Durning (Francis I. Livright), Nestor Serrano (Jose)
Plot: Comic-book artist Mike Randall is working on the ‘Brenda Starr’ comic-strip, about the adventures of girl reporter Brenda Starr, when Brenda turns around and starts to disagree with the way he is drawing her. And so he draws himself into the strip and ends up joining her adventures. Brenda is assigned to find scientist Gerhard Von Kreutzer who has created an ultra-powerful new rocket fuel. Heading to Brazil, she is aided by the handsome and mysterious Basil St John and pursued by both the Russians, who want the formula, and her rival Libby Lipscomb, who wants to outscoop her.
This adaptation of the 1940s newspaper comic-strip character is a disaster that has been reviled by almost everybody. Its distributors, even in this age of instant video dumping shelves, held it up nearly six years before giving it a video release. The original Brenda Starr strip was routine and pedestrian. Most of the people involved probably realized they were dealing with dated material but their only way of dealing with it is to treat it with outright derision.
It is clear that nobody involved in the exercise is treating it with the slightest shred of seriousness. The film reaches some execrable depths – all of the villains are played as incompetently bumbling slapstick Russians; all the editors in the film are shown as bawling tyrants who fire reporters at a moment’s notice for failing to turn out screaming tabloid headlines. The climax with most of the various goodies and baddies in the water engaging in a game of catch with a handbag, with Shields waterskiing in to save the day on the backs of two crocodiles, quite defies belief.
On every level Brenda Starr is a bad film. But it almost discovers itself as camp. Both Shields and Scarwid choose to play it as a sort of duel of high-fashion bitchery. During a chase sequence Shields rips a dress and has to stop at a conveniently located dress shop to buy several new outfits; or there is the moment she uses a nail-file as a convenient lockpick and then stops in her rescue attempt to file a nail. Her finest moment is surely when she gets up out of hospital bed to open an entire wardrobe full of clothes (located in her hospital room) with the breathy line, “Now let me find something nifty to wear.” And each of the ludicrously colourful outfits is paraded through the film as the total absurdity it is.
The best humour the film creates for itself is the intertextual play between Brenda and her cartoonist, with she constantly complaining to him how her handbags are never big enough to carry her notepad, or how she would never in reality be able to afford her wardrobe on a reporter’s salary. Or how she responds to his challenge to toughen her language up with a barrage of ‘hecks’ and ‘creepers’, or regards him as a pervert upon seeing a navel for the first time. The running battle between the two at least proves amusing, even if Peck’s character is a total wimp.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1994
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