Goldengirl (1979)

If you look just at the poster for Goldengirl, you have only a slight hint at what it might be about.  If features blonde and beautiful Susan Anton wearing an Olympic uniform and waving apparently to an adoring crowd.  Meanwhile in small inserts there are pictures of five uptight, middle-aged men leering at her.  The caption reads: “These five men have developed and programmed this stunning blonde to accomplish feats not human being has ever done before.  They all stand to make a fortune, if they can keep her together.”

Based on that tagline, you might think that this was some revision of The Bionic Woman.  But no, it has nothing to do with robotics, actually Anton’s character Goldine has been conditioned since childhood for the goal of winning three gold Olympics medals in the sprinting events.  She doesn’t do this based on skill – no no! – she’s part of an experiment by her adoptive father, an obsessed German scientist named Serafin (Curt Jergens), who has been using her as a lab experiment since she was a toddler to be the best athlete in the world, a project that began as part of the Third Reich’s eugenics experiments.

 The men on the poster who aren’t Curt Jergens stand to win massive endorsement money if Goldine can pull of the triple-medal feat at the Olympics (are you following this!?).  Serafin’s goal isn’t the money but proving his weird theories about human evolution.  He’s been pumping his subject full of dangerous hormones ever since she was a child to make her stronger and faster.

You might presume that Goldengirl could be a well-made cautionary tale about money and greed and the win-at-any-cost spirit of the Olympic Games, but the filmmakers simply don’t have the confidence.  Instead of dealing with the ways in which athletes are pushed to inhuman extremes, this movie twists the material into lurid trash and sells it on the success of The Bionic Woman.  This is a terrible movie, made for terrible reasons.