DVD HUH? Brenda Starr

Hey there, fans of Brenda Starr! What? You’re not a fan of the comic strip Brenda Starr? I should have known, since you’re reading UGO.com, which means you’re probably not 85 years old, the target audience for Brenda Starr. Still, in the late '80s, enough fans of the comic strip were alive to warrant a movie. A really awful movie.

Brenda Starr, the comic, was about a plucky female reporter in the 1940s. A novel concept in equality, back then. Brenda Starr, the film, is mostly about Brooke Shields changing outfits and embarrassing close-ups of her enormous, late-'80s eyebrows. The plot is so flimsy that the film actually sat on the shelf for something like four years, completed, before finally being released in the theaters. Where it did predictably badly.

The film is sort of a fantasy thing where the comic strip character comes to life and her artist must track her down before... I dunno, something bad happens. There’s this big plot where she’s flying down to Brazil to find a scientist, but enough misadventures with a circus, alligators, and Russian spies happen so that you don’t really care about finding the scientist, and when they finally do he dies and his invention is worthless. Jeffrey Tambor makes a fool of himself and Timothy Dalton pops up every so often for no tangible reason.

I can’t stress enough how this film is for old people who are unfamiliar with film technology. Seeing Brenda Starr on the big screen might have been fun in the 1940s, when you came home from a long day of working the munitions factory or hoarding scrap metal, but in 1989, it's just a sad, sad piece of flop. But hey, if you like Brooke Shields and want to see her dressed like a Barbie, this is your film.