Who's That Girl

WHO'S THAT GIRL
(PG, Warner Bros. Pictures, 92 mins., theatrical release date: August 7, 1987)

Who's That Girl has been marketed since its 1987 debut without a question mark, thus leaving it open for various interpretation or the simple implication that it is Madonna "who's that girl." Nobody uses that query throughout the film's script, even though Madonna's Nikki Finn is a prime egotist who demands the attention of anyone within a 100 yard radius with her atomic baby doll whine. This lack of coyness is something you could never accuse Madonna of, especially in the mid-1980s, which saw intense interest in the pop goddess' married life, private parts and maybe even the dry-cleaning bills for her gaudy outfits.

But since even Madonna wants to know based on the English and Spanish chants of said inquisition in the chart-topping tune which shadowed the film, I think I have an answer we can all agree on.

Who's That Girl? The answer is: Marlo Thomas. Duh!

You probably expected me to say Nikki Finn, who's that girl Madonna plays here, and you wouldn't be wrong. But whereas Marlo Thomas was the Everygirl of 1960s television, Madonna was a decidedly shrewd personality of her own fabrication. Teenage girls grasping for personality went from the Pat Benatar look popularized in Fast Times at Ridgemont High to dressing like punkettes at a Salvation Army nuptial, as dictated by either Madonna or her contemporary Cyndi Lauper. Think back to TerrorVision and the character Diane Franklin played in that one, Suzy Putterman, and you've got a mirror's reflection of the fad in all its pink-tinted, peroxide-damaged glory.

Remember how I said that Diane went from playing dimwitted sex objects to actual characters with quirks and their own skewed intelligence? Well, I called it "going to Camp" in short, but watching Madonna in Who's That Girl made me pine for a VHS-style tracking error to reveal the other film. Not only had the teacher become the apprentice, but she was bringing home report cards dire enough to get her legally disowned let alone grounded for a month.

Shanghai Surprise should have been a lesson, but Madonna decided to try her hand at old-fashioned comedy and romance once more by pursuing a role in a project initially called "Slammer." She even tried to get an ever-combative Sean Penn onboard to no avail. Madonna did manage to influence the choice of director in James Foley, a friend of the couple who directed Sean in At Close Range and also helmed Madonna in that film's tie-in music video for "Live to Tell" as well as her subsequent "Papa Don't Preach" promo. And compared to Shanghai Surprise, in which she was hired solely as an actress, Madonna was more hands-on in the exposure of Who's That Girl by connecting it to her musical career, cutting four songs exclusive to the compilation soundtrack (which also featured dance pop label mates Club Nouveau and Scritti Politti) and embarking on her first worldwide concert tour to boot.

Alas, more people paid to see Madonna in the stadiums than in the cinemas. Who's That Girl failed to capitalize on the Material Girl's clout and became her second bomb in a row, complete with Worst Actress Razzie Award and plenty of damage control in the meantime as Madonna collected herself for the Like a Prayer/Truth or Dare media juggernaut to follow.

In the tradition of the same year's Mannequin, the movie opens with a cartoon credits sequence that depicts the fateful events which landed Madonna's Nikki Finn in jail on a seven-year sentence. Drawn by April March, who later worked on The Ren & Stimpy Show and became a singer (her "Chick Habit" was memorably used at the end of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof), we see that Nikki's boyfriend was involved in some kind of duplicity which left her with a key to some incriminating photographs and a dead lover in the back of her trunk which she takes the fall for. Eventually, we learn that Nikki has been sprung from the slammer after four years on the condition she travel to Philadelphia to meet her parole officer.

The megalomaniacal, multi-millionaire Mr. Big who orchestrated her disgrace is Simon Worthington (John McMartin), who is about to marry off his daughter Wendy (Haviland Morris) to one of his underlings. That lackey is Loudon Trott, a bespectacled tax attorney with a tight schedule and a tightwad. In the course of the next 24 hours, time which is booked to do all sorts of preparations for his ceremony with Wendy, Simon demands Loudon to pick Nikki up and see her off on that bus to Philly.

Now we get to the inevitable point in the review where we have to talk about Madonna the Wonder Thespian. Oh, boy.

When she played conniving Christian treasure hunter Miss Tatlock in Shanghai Surprise, Madonna betrayed the spark and sexiness she demonstrated in Desperately Seeking Susan with a stiff, confused central performance. Not only was she out of her element, she didn't even appear to have one to begin with, as the vexing screenplay couldn't even commit to allowing her to play a flaky femme. She helped to drag the movie's energy level down just as much as the director, the writers and her co-star did, and Madonna took a very public hit for her efforts of lack of them.

But the opposite works, too.

This time, Madonna goes from having too little personality to smothering us with her presence. I read a review over at DVD Verdict which gets to the heart of Madge's newfound miscalculation. Madonna was already blessed with a live wire presence that made her the premier female icon of the 1980s, even more so than Cyndi Lauper. "Like a Virgin," both the video and her VMA performance, are legendary in cementing this compelling, carnal image. And though Madonna actually did go on record as confirming Rob Lineberger's later suspicion that Nikki Finn was meant to be "a tough-on-the-outside, kind-on-the-inside oddball with camouflaged good looks and street smarts," the resulting attempt at Billie Dawn (from Born Yesterday) isn't even as good as Billie Jean [Davy], let alone anything Judy Holliday or Melanie Griffith could accomplish.

I'm trying to be as polite as I possibly can in my criticisms, because if I weren't so civilized, I'd come right out and say this: Nikki Finn is the least loveable, most overbearing and downright ANNOYING heroine of any film I've ever seen in my life!

What the hell, Madonna?! Were you trying to be the gender inverse of Pee-Wee Herman? Were you so threatened by Cyndi Lauper that you felt you had to one-up her with a persona that would make even the King Ad-Rock turn and run? I mean, Lauper herself didn't lay it on this thick when she made her own star vehicle with 1988's Vibes. Let's ignore the fact that Madonna's painfully forced Brooklyn patter often kills the fast-paced banter to such a degree that her co-stars seem just as mortified as the audience. All you need to know is that she skips...she SKIPS! And not in a playfully sexy way, either, nothing that would endanger the movie's PG rating. No, she SKIPS like a kindergartener!!

Come back, Diane Franklin! I'll take back almost every negative thing I said about The Last American Virgin if you'll please just save me from Nikki!

So...Loudon makes the rendezvous to intercept Nikki, who dutifully begins her campaign of free-spirited (read: mentally-impaired) anarchy by taking control of his mother-in-law's Rolls Royce and damn near causing a catastrophe on the expressway just so she can go the mall and shoplift a few cassettes. A half-hour into the film, Loudon has to be hospitalized in response to Nikki's sociopathic, stunted arrogance, the better for her to hijack the Rolls and go to Harlem to pick up a gun on his stolen credit card.

And there's a wild puma.

Its adopted name is Murray the Tiger (Nikki can't even make the obvious distinction based on his lack of stripes), and Loudon had previously stowed it in the back of his Rolls as a favor for a client named Montgomery Bell (Sir John Mills). He takes a liking to Nikki and pops up to roar at various interlopers from time to time, kind of like an Amazonian car alarm. But anyhow, Loudon becomes essentially a hostage in Nikki's grand scheme to get revenge on the thugs who deceived her, eventually being so enticed by the wild, wild life that he becomes romantically entwined with her.

So far, I've avoided naming the actor who plays Loudon Trott because I feel like I'm trying to preserve some kind of Witness Relocation bargain. That would be Griffin Dunne, who prior to this endured burial under some macabre Rick Baker prosthetics as the mauled schmuck Jack in An American Werewolf in London. But more crucially, he is also best known as the wound-up yuppie stranded in Soho from Martin Scorsese's After Hours.

I like Griffin Dunne a lot. He can be side-splittingly funny in a deadpan manner and has a propensity for physical abuse which is reminiscent of vintage screwball comedy without forcing it. A vast majority of the film's chuckles and guilty pleasure guffaws come from Griffin's commitment to the material, whether he's humping a hospital door in a frenetic escape attempt or trying to gain control of his situation with the sardonic strictness of a disappointed parent. He has the Cary Grant-as-nerd look down pat, but there's nothing misguided about Griffin's characterization.

Aside from Griffin Dunne and Sir John Mills, who have the timing and precision to make even the hoariest one-liner seem fresh, nobody comes across well, not even Haviland Morris, who I praised to the high heavens in a previous assessment of Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

The biggest trouble with Who's That Girl is that it strains to be a classic screwball farce in contemporary drag. The 1980s weren't very dry as far as this conceit went. Romancing the Stone, The Sure Thing and A Fish Called Wanda were all highly entertaining and immaculate pastiches of successful romantic comedies of yore. And Who's That Girl could've joined the ranks if only more discipline and taste had been applied. As it stands, writers Andrew Smith (The Main Event) & Ken Finkleman (Grease 2) are allergic to genuine wit. And poor James Foley, whose specialty is brooding character drama, the best being his adaptations of edgy writers Jim Thompson (After Dark, My Sweet) and David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross), shows little finesse in trying to orchestrate the madcap proceedings. Howard Hawks he will never be.

As if taking a cue from Madonna's fatally broad wannabe-broad, Who's That Girl confuses shrillness with satire and falls smack into the smug trappings of most dopey comedies of its era. It's sound and fury typifying nothing, clumsily edited and hardly as cute in its chaos as it purports to be. Whether it be the Harlem gun dealer firing machine gun rounds over the head of Loudon, who has just tried to field a call from Wendy over the sounds of his Rolls being vandalized, or Nikki screeching for her precious key in a jewelry shop, Foley continually undermines a scene by having some random extra scream bloody murder.

Even when the volume does drop, the jokes are as hackneyed and telegraphed as ever. Of course, it will be revealed that Wendy was the village bike of Scarsdale, or that the two detectives tailing Nikki will have the kind of catty repartee which outs them as gay lovers, or that the gangsters Nikki shakes down for information will plummet into the river and return dragging seaweed behind them like the tided-over zombie lovers from Creepshow. The pace may be speedy but since the timing and the imagination behind such gags is transparent, these are further noisy distractions. By the time Wendy's bridesmaids are kidnapped, those who haven't experienced tinnitus will have groaned loud enough to have done the job.

The few decent gags include a prenuptial agreement which doubles as the anti-Kama Sutra, but I, for the life of me, can't remember anything else. I was damn exhausted at the end of it all, and less in the mood for love than the need to get a physical.

I recently bought Bloodhounds of Broadway on DVD, which is impulsive in non-hindsight, but it's actually one of Madonna's more tolerable efforts. That troubled film's reputation only grows as I find myself being inundated with more ephemera from Madonna's abominable marquee name past.

Who's That Girl, eh? Well, if I may end it like Ricky Roma, maybe the better question to ask is "What's the point?"

Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989)

BLOODHOUNDS OF BROADWAY
(PG, Columbia Pictures, 93 mins., theatrical release date: November 3, 1989)

It's "The Broadway Melody of 1928" as produced by PBS, but Bloodhounds of Broadway ended up swallowed whole on The Great White Way. Surprisingly obscure for something which boasted an ensemble of once and future movie stars, the disastrous release of the film in late 1989, nearly two years after it began filming, was particularly bittersweet in recounting the sad fate of its director, Howard Brookner. The NYU-schooled playwright and two-time documentary filmmaker finally got his gamble in the Hollywood racetrack. Unfortunately, Brookner was living in the early stages of AIDS for months before production, the chilly Jersey climes and tight schedule weakening his defenses as he refused his AZT regimen. Initial editing of a rough cut version had to be carried out whilst he was hospitalized in the summer of 1988.

Columbia Pictures waived final cut, though, and would impose post-production chicanery after Brookner's inaugural edit was deemed incomprehensible. It was also unceremoniously sold to fledgling Vestron Pictures only for the rights to boomerang back in the wake of 35-year-old Brookner's passing on April 27, 1989. To add further indignity to the late artist, according to former Tri-Star Pictures chairman Mike Medavoy, the film's theatrical rollout saw an entire reel go missing which nobody apparently noticed. The critical consensus was unkind, and despite being made for roughly $4 million, it netted close to $43,500 at the box office in limited release.

Plus it gave Madonna, who took a supporting role as a favor to Brookner instead for any hefty salary, her third consecutive Golden Raspberry nomination, although this time she mercifully lost the dishonor to Brooke Shields' mile high flub from Speed Zone! It's safe to say that unlike her previous failed grasps at leading lady credibility in Shanghai Surprise or Who's That Girl, Madonna is much less of a problem this time around. Indeed, like in Desperately Seeking Susan, her character of Hortense Hathaway, Flapper Queen, makes no demands other than her natural wattage, and chances are you could remember her fondly either doing a Mummy Dearest striptease or belting a decent if anachronistic take on the 1931 Bing Crosby hit "I Surrender Dear."

Or you could remember it if Bloodhounds of Broadway itself didn't get treated like a major studio's Poverty Row refugee. With its reshuffled yet still dysrhythmic footage and tacked-on narration worthy of Blade Runner in its thudding literalness, Brookner's supposed intention for a dense, intertwined anthology culled from the Damon Runyon catalog instead plays as if an entire miniseries was chopped down to 90 minutes. Based on four of the Roaring Twenties wordsmith's romanticized paeans to les années folles, this has a lot more going on than the 1952 Harmon Jones musical of the same name, albeit detrimentally.

As scripted by Brookner and Colman deKay, Bloodhounds of Broadway ostensibly charts the fates of four schlubs and the dames who enflame their hearts:

a) Schlub #1 is Regret (Matt Dillon), a cocky bettor nicknamed for the only pony who delivered. His paramour is Lovey Lou (Jennifer Grey), a solemn showgirl whose patience is wearing thin in her pining for the skirt-chasing Regret. Their strained courtship is further beset by a murder rap which leads Irish-brogued Inspector McNamara (Gerry Bamman) to suspect Regret.

b) Schlub #2 is The Brain (Rutger Hauer), Broadway's top mobster and wry gentleman about town. At Mindy's café, which is where all of the main cast are gathered for introduction, The Brain treats Regret and stranger John Wangle (Alan Ruck) to a hearty meal, accompanied by Wangle's two hungry bloodhounds. But it's the impresario's last supper before getting shivved by Daffy Jack (Brookner), emissary to rival Mafioso Homer Swing. The Brain's henchmen seek out his various mistresses hoping for safe haven, but they all reject him. However, his karma could change if his act of kindness to a poor flower girl named Mary (Madeleine Potter) goes rewarded.

c) Schlub #3 is Basil Valentine (Ethan Phillips), a Nervous Nelly who falls under the amorous eye
of socialite Harriet McKyle (Julie Hagerty). After giving Inspector McNamara the slip by introducing him to Wagner's hounds, Basil makes his way to Harriet's posh New Year's bash and bluffs his way into convincing her he's a thug. But when humiliated playboy Handsome Jack (Esai Morales) takes a shot at her prized parrot in a fit of rage, Basil finds himself an accidental assassin.

d) Schlub #4 is Feet Samuels (Randy Quaid), an honorable, hapless goofball "lousy in love" with Hortie Hathaway (Madonna), the star attraction of Missouri "Mizzoo" Martin's (Anita Morris) nightclub and niece of type-writing confidante Waldo Winchester (Josef Sommer). In his suicidal desperation, Feet sells his body to quack Doc Bodeeker (Robert Donley) for $400, which he invests in craps and poker games which make him even richer. Torn between his gradually requited love for Hortie and his impending obligation to Doc, Feet is forced to welsh for the first time in his life, either for true love or an end to his misery.

The movie crisscrosses between these four primary stories in a rather unwieldy manner, relying on Waldo's voice to make the necessary transitions and color commentary. After Feet hits it off with Hortie at Harriet's and Regret woos fellow lonely heart Miss Maud (Dinah Manoff) to Lovey's confused chagrin, the two schlubs are immediately transported to a poker table presided over by Big Shelley (Herschel Sparber), a temperamental goombah who tries to grease the wheels in his favor against the improved odds favoring Feet. These sudden shifts are indicative of much of the film's structure, which sacrifices any real breathing room or compelling flow for simple whimsy.

Judged on their own merits, only a couple of the stories truly retain their power to charm. "The Brain Goes Home" segment is carried along by appealing turns from regular rogue Rutger Hauer, who is a thrill to watch even pale-faced and dragged around in near death, and the beatific Ms. Potter. As a simple morality play, it gets the job done. But the most pathos is mined from the most pathetic character in the lot, Randy Quaid's Feet, in an overlooked showcase for the cracked comic talent to truly flaunt his character chops. Quaid's so physically vibrant and devoted to the role, he makes Waldo's narration surrounding him all the more redundant.

The dalliances between Basil and Harriet as well as Regret and Lovey unfold with a more comedy-of-errors tone, replete with copious double-crosses and misunderstandings, which demand a certain momentum this movie cannot achieve. The catchall ending which resolves the four stories tries to link these two particular strands together with equal indifference. The twists they offer up are shrug-worthy, at best. Better to just appreciate Hortie's fantasy of the simple life, replete with chicken farm and an overnight wedding ceremony in Hackensack that doesn't require a blood test.

Brookner's not entirely without promise, though, especially in the handling of his wide variety of performers as well as the periodically perfect production design. The likes of Matt Dillon and Jennifer Grey don't appear to be stretching beyond their comfort zones (rascally and angsty, respectively), thus making for easy amiability. But Julie Hagerty builds upon her reputation as a grand comedienne (honed from Airplane! and Lost in America) with a chameleonic abandon as the politely repressed Harriet. And in taming the wild Madonna, here with a brunette bob reminiscent of Louise Brooks, Brookner coaxes the superstar into an honest-to-goodness performance, cheekier and less grating than either of her previous cinematic disasters.

As well as reliable turns from Esai Morales, Dinah Manoff and Ethan Phillips, Brookner's film is loaded with plenty of recognizable mugs even in the margins. There's a boyish Fisher Stevens as a practical joker named Hotfoot Harry, always on the lookout for shoes to torch; Richard Edson (Super Mario Bros. flashbacks, anyone?) as dice parlor emcee Johnny Crackow; Steve Buscemi as one of the bums Feet bests at the card game; Michael Wincott as Soupy Mike, the smirking fugitive tending bar at Harriet's Park Avenue palace, plus William S. Burroughs (the subject of Brookner's first doc) as her butler; Tony Longo as Crunch Sweeney, The Brain's right hand man and love interest for Miss Maud; Stephen McHattie as Red Henry, the gunsmith who antagonizes Handsome Jack; and Louis Zorich as Mindy, the restaurateur with the wavering policy towards serving bloodhounds.

Brookner also shows some humorous compositional flair, whether it be the sight of Hortie slow dancing with Feet, using his oversized cleats as a cushion, or the actual countdown to 1929 heralded through a montage of ticking clocks and barking dogs alongside the usual revelers.

But even after giving Brookner the benefit of the doubt, what Bloodhounds of Broadway reminds me most of is another screen adaptation made over a decade later, Rent. The original stage production was notoriously overcast by its creator Jonathan Larson's early death and the film version was so belated that by hiring both mainstream mogul Chris Columbus and the same actors who originated their roles, it was played way too safe. Brookner's legacy seems to parallel Larson's in as morbid and misfortunate a way. It's not a total bust, and I would watch this over Shanghai Surprise any day, but I don't feel like giving Bloodhounds of Broadway my love, my life, my all.

Shanghai Surprise

SHANGHAI SURPRISE

(PG-13, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/HandMade Films, 97 mins., theatrical release date: August 29, 1986)

Should Panda Express ever introduce a new entrée called Mandarin Turkey, Lionsgate Films ought to immediately negotiate a tie-in deal to offer free DVD copies of Shanghai Surprise. I'm serious about that.

I say this after NetFlix has decided that the best way for me to view this was via Artisan Entertainment's pathetically outdated 2003 release. In case you weren't an avid video collector back then, Artisan were to digital video what SLP mavens Avid Video [ahem] were to the VHS contingent. They were catalog title distributors who offered up low-grade transfers basically selling unsuspecting consumers VHS dupes transferred to disc, freed from the tyranny of original aspect ratios and special features. The standard retail prices for their titles were hardly worth the effort, and unless you really needed to revisit Watchers or Shadows Run Black out of your own masochism, well...just watch Dirty Dancing again. That was all they were good for.

Lionsgate rectified this by issuing an actual "special edition" several years later, complete with all manner of tacky talking heads showcases and a "Fans Unite!" audio commentary from a quintet of male Madonna scholars. NetFlix didn't get that memo, and thus I am in the temporary possession of a stagnated piece of plastic which may as well represent Madonna's own presence in the film.

What a hell of a way to see China.

Howard the Duck, at least, had actual contemporary interviews with accessories to the crime, chiefly creators Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz as well as stars Lea Thompson and Jeffrey Jones. Nobody wanted to reflect upon the making of Shanghai Surprise, meanwhile, Howard's immediate contender as the biggest flop of 1986 and cutthroat multiple Razzie nominee, which may as well be a given since, as it is now as it was then, its real legacy rests squarely on its long-estranged leading actors, Sean Penn and Madonna.

Oh, the 1980s, you worked in mysterious ways. How did two of the most disparate egos in show biz manage to tie the knot for a bated-breath audience of tabloid junkies and industry insiders? What circumstances led the Me Decade's premier Method actor to declare his vows to the Queen of Pop? What was going through George Harrison's mind when he pursued this project despite the baggage associated with this diabolical duo?

Yes, Shanghai Surprise was produced by the Quiet Beatle himself, the same man who got into film simply because he felt Monty Python's Life of Brian was too precious not to be shared with the wide world. Harrison's HandMade Films also helped produce a slew of British cult classics such as The Long Good Friday, Time Bandits and Withnail and I. And if Harrison had not taken out that mortgage on his own humble abode, the UK would never know the discreet charms of The Burning, which HandMade distributed theatrically alongside Venom, the movie which pitted Klaus Kinski, Oliver Reed and a Black Mamba against each other in a grudge match for the ages.

The prospect of a George Harrison/Madonna duet would go unfulfilled, sadly, as evident in the opening credits of Shanghai Surprise, which were animated by none other than Maurice Binder. If Madonna's British affectations had kicked in before her dalliance with Guy Ritchie, then by rights she'd be the one taunting George with the line "You must be crazy/You got no money/And you're a liar."

And George...oh, dear: "My straits are dire from the wok into the fire/I'd like to trust you but I've broken my rickshaw." I didn't think he could make Paul "Spies Like Us" McCartney sound hip, but it happened. I can't find my brave face, and I haven't even made it to the man's musical credit.

Enough time lapses for me to think about the bizarre choice about having Sean Penn inherit Sir Roger Moore's mantle before the movie takes us to 1937, the year when the Japanese occupied China. There we meet Walter Faraday (Paul "Belloq" Freeman) enjoying a hearty, crunchy dinner with what looks like steel chopsticks. Because heaven knows, you never smuggle 1000 pounds of opium on an empty stomach. Ironically, the morbidly obese man sitting across from him demands he get a move on, as there are Jap soldiers outside their door. "Their beef's with the Chinese," Faraday counters, savoring the taste of his own plate of delicious Alpo. The Chinese's beef is with him!

As the rickshaws pull Faraday and his loot towards international waters, the self-described "Opium King" (have it your way, Faraday) decides to pay a visit to a certain China Doll. We never see his supposed maiden, instead being treated to the first of many double-crosses as Wu absconds with the bounty and both Faraday and his fat companion, a journalist named Willie Tuttle (Richard Griffiths), are cornered by the foot soldiers of Chinese official Mei Gan (Kay Tong Lim), who wants returned to him what he feels is rightfully owned. In lieu of that, Mei Gan confiscates Faraday's utility belt and starts emptying out its contents, only to trigger the explosive within its final compartment and have his hands blown clean off. Faraday and Tuttle make a run for the nearest harbor and dive right in, but the secret police open fire and apparently murder Faraday. I say "apparently," because...well, you'll see.

One year later, the whereabouts of the opium treasure, or "Faraday's Flowers," continue to remain unknown. A pair of missionaries tending to wounded Chinese troops have a rendezvous with destiny when they seek a bilingual stooge to bankroll for investigative purposes. Their salvation comes in the form of an unkempt drunkard, Glendon Wasey (Sean Penn), booted off his boat to Los Angeles for insufficient funds. The elderly Mr. Burns assigns his associate Gloria Tatlock (Madonna) to watch over Wasey, who will receive a ticket back home provided he locates the father of a mortally wounded rickshaw carrier, one Wu Ch‘En She.

You can tell that what Miss Tatlock is really interested in are Faraday's Flowers, as the opium within them could be used as morphine to administer to her patients. Wasey catches wise to the deception, but stays on the search though coercion and thus leads us into a veritable slew of shady ancillary characters and dead ends. Wasey encounters Faraday's beloved China Doll (Sonserai Lee), a concubine with delusions of empress-style grandeur, and thus piques the curiosity of Mei Gan and porcelain replacement hands. He is also shadowed by the lanky Justin Kronk (Philip Sayer), who is in cahoots with Mr. Tuttle, and there is also a baseball-obsessed entrepreneur named Joe Go (Clyde Kusatsu) and his Oddjob-esque muscle (Professor Toru Tanaka). All of these characters also have their fingers in the pie, and it's up to Wasey and Tatlock to navigate these interlopers if they hope to uncover Faraday's Flowers.

Shanghai Surprise was a fiasco from the word go, as George Harrison (who worked with Michael Kamen on the film score and manages a couple of decent original tunes such as "Breath Away from Heaven" and the especially salvageable "Someplace Else") himself admitted in interviews where he grieved over the poor choice of script, director and leads. Infamous stories abound over Sean Penn's ill temper and the constant friction on set. If only these anecdotes amounted to a camp classic, as this is more a confusing and slapdash assemblage of worn-out adventure movie clichés reliant entirely on the superficial novelty value afforded by putting Penn and Madonna into a period play date.

Penn tries to make the best of the situation, but the nature of his particular acting style contradicts the film's supposed fluffiness. Even as early as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Penn's Methodical meticulousness put him squarely in the lineage of Robert De Niro rather than Clark Gable. The role demands a playful, roguish charisma which he instead plays way too sour-faced and stoic. Given his beginnings as Jeff Spicoli, the precursor to the likes of Bill & Ted & Wayne & Garth, you'd think Sean could make lemonade out of the material, but he seems to be out of his element and doesn't commit with the same compelling brio he reserves for his dramatic roles. That being said, Penn does endeavor, particularly when he consoles a regretful, drunken Miss Tatlock after she places him under "obligation."

If it's not love that you need, then he'll try his best to make everything succeed, I suppose.

The real weak link throughout is, no surprise and all shanghai, Madonna. In only her second major film role following Desperately Seeking Susan, she is making a dreadful reach in the kind of role you expect from one of the Old Hollywood fixtures she rapped about in "Vogue." Alas, she proves no exception to the rule that being an established pop icon doesn't automatically make you a star actress. Madonna is perpetually frigid and awkward as Miss Tatlock, her appalling inability to mine humor or honesty in any situation marking her as fatally unfit for a farce, let alone any movie trying to sell her as a 1930s missionary. To be fair, it's not as if the screenplay gives her an arc, making half-hearted references to a phony identity and a loose morality which are not followed up on. This disingenuousness is emblematic of both the character and the performance.

Put these miscast lovebirds together and you got a movie that doesn't so much sing as yowl like a cat with a stiletto through its tail. The romantic heat between them is vaporous, a form of anti-chemistry which invites more speculation on their notoriously erratic private lives than any investment in their celluloid personalities. I mean, compare this to Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing, released a year before Shanghai Surprise, which deliberately modernized Frank Capra's It Happened One Night with two then-unknown actors who weren't real life items. That John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga clicked charmingly whilst Penn and Madonna flounder from one crummy confrontation to the next shows up the utter famine of faith on behalf of all involved.

Shanghai Surprise disgraces all of its varied lineages, not just the Casablancas and The African Queens of rosy vintage, but even the more contemporary James Bond and Indiana Jones sagas. The supporting players don't even compel on the most rudimentary level of exposition, and their motivations are contrived to the point of abject confusion. The plot, adapted from a novel published in 1978, has all the meticulous structure of a fifth-rate Choose Your Own Adventure book, with threads involving bogus diamonds and the sanctioned intimidations of Mei Gan going absolutely, implausibly nowhere. The recreated Chinese backdrop, which should be distinctly colorful, is staged with dispiriting drabness by director Jim Goddard, who makes even mid-eighties John Glen (Octopussy, A View to a Kill) look like classic Terence Young (From Russia with Love, Thunderball).

Going back to Howard the Duck for a second, and the mention of Lea Thompson and Jeffrey Jones. That movie is terrible, yes, but at least one could feel duly ashamed that actual talent went to waste, as Thompson was so beguiling in Back to the Future and Jones was in peak form in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Shanghai Surprise offers no such luxury, with the slight exception of Sean Penn, and even then his off-screen cockiness put merciful paid to any notions that he and Madonna's presence alone was publicity enough. They weren't working actors who managed to find themselves in a flop, these two willed it upon themselves and have done little to lighten up in the meantime. Shanghai Surprise stinks of a massive ego trip to this day even if its principals continue to ignore it, and so should you.

Still my guitar gently weeps.

Of Unknown Origin

OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN
(R, Warner Bros. Pictures, 88 mins., theatrical release date: November 24, 1983)

You have to respect the audacity of a major studio like Warner Bros. back in the early 1980s. Whereas all of their competitors were clamoring to capitalize on the slasher movie boom launched by the success of Paramount's Friday the 13th series, the company rolled out a steady stream of genre movies that didn't revolve around horny adolescents getting hacked to bits by rotting bogeys. Ignoring Eyes of a Stranger from 1981, Warner released anything but the typical Dead Teenager Movie, be they anthology films (Creepshow, Twilight Zone: The Movie), adult psychodramas (Altered States, The Hand) or nature's revenge sagas.

That latter subgenre was surprisingly prevalent for Warner, especially with Stephen King's Cujo, Aussie import Russell Mulcahy's hog wild Razorback and not one but two Canadian productions involving killer rats. The first was the loose James Herbert adaptation Deadly Eyes, which was directed by the same man who made the Joe Don Baker vs. mad mongrels obscurity The Pack for Warner Bros. back in the 1970s.

Apparently seizing upon a non-existent trend, the studio followed the April Fool's Day debut of that film with Of Unknown Origin in late autumn of 1983. Compared to Robert Clouse's predecessor, this particular chiller seemed scaled back and somewhat riskier in several regards. For one, Deadly Eyes depicted a horde of homicidal rodents of the legendary "Dachsunds dressed in rat costume" variety running amok around Toronto. Secondly, that film's screenwriter Charles H. Eglee made no secret about his derivations from John Sayles' script for Piranha, and indeed the multiple subplots involving love triangles, political greed and steroid-polluted grain dates it as a relic of the post-Peter Benchley school of schlock you could call Jaws-ploitation.

Thirdly, as the presence of a Bruce Lee screening in that film makes plain, Clouse was an established journeyman filmmaker whose career was launched by Lee's posthumous Enter the Dragon, securing him steady work for both the Warners and Hong Kong production outfit Golden Harvest for many years, including Deadly Eyes.

Of Unknown Origin, meanwhile, differs not only from Deadly Eyes but also the prior likes of Willard and Ben in that there is but one lone furry foe to deal with instead of a swarm of them. And it ain't no upholstered dog, neither. The screenplay by Brian Taggart, also based on a published novel called The Visitor by Chauncey G. Parker III, confines the action to a single building instead of loosing it on the city at large. And instead of a successful American filmmaker, Canuck impresarios Pierre David and Claude Héroux tapped an unknown European by the name of Yorgo Pan Cosmatos in his first cross-Atlantic project. Best known as George P. Cosmatos to the Anglican public, he would later go on to make a name in the United States with the Stallone collaborations Rambo: First Blood Part II and Cobra.

Also thrown into the mix was an up-and-coming actor named Peter Weller in his first lead role, following an acclaimed turn as Diane Keaton's new beau in Alan Parker's domestic drama Shoot the Moon. Subsequent roles as Buckaroo Banzai, RoboCop and William Lee (from Cronenberg's film version of Naked Lunch) turned Weller into a reluctant genre icon, but his characterization of proud businessman Bart Hughes here is pretty meek compared to the more forceful personalities of his later fan favorite characters. There's still a sardonic intellect and stoic tension to be admired in Weller, and although the lack of wider location use smells of staginess, Weller is a bracing presence who remains collected within the confined spaces of the narrative.

The resulting film is like a cross between Herman Melville and Hanna-Barbera, with Weller playing the Tom to the sewer-dwelling Jerry and taking repeated thwacks to his equilibrium in the process. The movie opens with Bart Hughes seeing off his gorgeous wife Meg (Shannon Tweed, hardly modest in her pre-soft core debut) and cutesy son Peter (Leif Anderson) as they leave for vacation to visit her father out in Vermont. The workaholic Bart stays behind to focus on the grain deal he's excelling at for his Manhattan trust company post, only to learn that he's been reassigned with a bank branch merger which could signal instant promotion and a hearty raise, provided he meets his two-week deadline.

The newfound privacy in his self-renovated brownstone ought to clear up Bart's anxieties about the sudden transfer, but he is startled by the leaking water pipe behind the dishwasher. The plumber he hires, Cleve (Louis Del Grande), deduces that the marks on the busted vein could have come from an army of mice, or at least one iron-toothed rat, something Bart scoffs at but takes heed of anyway when he starts placing mousetraps that are soon mangled beyond repair. Cleve tells him that whatever he's dealing with possess a frightening survival instinct, and may God help Bart if that rat turns out to have babies.

Bart also starts to show signs of distress at his bank office, taking lunch breaks to research the history of rat infestations and voicing his knowledge at a dinner party, almost as a rebellion against the grain project being taken over by his insidious rival James Hall (Kenneth Welsh). Bart's boss Eliot Riverton (the ever-prolific Lawrence Dane) and faithful secretary Lorrie Wells (Jennifer Dale) watch with shock at his increasing instability, and as the battle of wits between Bart and the vermin escalates, complete with ransacked pantries and mutilated kitties, Bart becomes a fanatical yuppie Ahab who must finally take matters in his own hands.

Cosmatos' direction is a tricky mix of the somber and silly, stylistic enough to effectively portray the rat as a shadowy menace capable of a few uncomfortable surprises (you might think twice before you ever lift your toilet cover again) but also drawn out to ludicrous degrees. It's all designed to illustrate Bart's slow-burning insanity and the violent deconstruction of his civilized demeanor, and there are even a couple of domestic nightmares and allusions to Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea. But the plot progresses with lackadaisical leisure, to the point where even the proverbial final straw is rendered mundane.

But maybe that's part of why the movie works as well as it does, its anti-supernatural gravity, urban ennui and pervading isolation going against the typical community-minded terror of its brethren. It's a character piece first and foremost more than a mere string of shopworn shock, kind of like Roger Christian's overlooked and astute The Sender (1982) which benefited from a multi-dimensional lead performance by Kathryn Harrold. In that regard, Peter Weller's performance is all the more entertaining and credible, his constant lapses in mood from enervation to nonchalance consistently amusing given how economical the conflict is.

The film grasps at metaphor by depicting Bart's frustrations at work ("This isn't a trust company, it's the court of Louis XIV") as a parallel to the rat chase which consumes him. The dinner party spiel, where he prattles off a series of queasy statistics and cultural idiosyncrasies involving rats, is the cornerstone of his alienation from his stuffy social standing. Eventually, in the midst of his mania, he delivers an ultimatum to his manager, who demands he sort out his affairs at home, and nearly makes a pass on his typist, a cursory nod to the allure of "while the cat's away" infidelity. The latter aspect has no true repercussions, though, and comes across as padding.

Beyond that, Cosmatos ratchets up the tension between homeowner and home wrecker, employing a diversity of POV shots, split-diopter widescreen framing and some excellent camera tracking to break up the monotony. But there comes a point where Bart makes such blunders as sending a stray cat in to do his bidding, leaving a check for an exterminator which is duly clawed or fishing in his townhouse's model for a steel trap (thus fulfilling the meager gore quota after it snaps) that the film grows repetitive in the worst way. Of course, it's all in service of the nutty final ten minutes, where Bart gears up in miner garb and augments a baseball bat with sharp objects to violently swat at the rat and thus destroys his architectural pride and joy.

Of Unknown Origin may not have been as easily marketable as Deadly Eyes or earlier animal attack films like Piranha, Tentacles or Ants! The trailer itself grandstands to a degree where it could be misconstrued as yet another Amityville film. Maybe it's a result of the film's inherent dryness, as it is far from the broad comedy of the later Mousehunt and less sensationalist than any of Pierre David's other horror co-productions. Yet Cosmatos' foreign sensibilities do work to his advantage here, especially compared to the hackneyed slickness of his subsequent Stallone actioners. And in Peter Weller's infallible commitment, Cosmatos has hit the rare jackpot in championing character over carnage. Let this be unknown no more.

Shakma

SHAKMA
(R, Quest Entertainment, 100 mins., release date: October 5, 1990)

This is an Orlando-shot killer monkey film with the name Shakma.

Shakma!

Shakma!!

Watch the monkey get hur...

No, I promised myself I wouldn't reference a certain Peter Gabriel song which was previously the opening credits music for another film about scared simians. There's more that needs to be said about this film than just a mere slam-dunk, MST3k-style allusion. God help me to hold out long enough to find the right words to discuss Shakma, of all things.

Well, first off, the film's alternate, international title is Panic in the Tower, whose cover art superimposes a shrieky monkey over what appears to be the Nakatomi Plaza. That gives the impression that the movie makes cunning use of its particular architectural coup, which is something that does not happen at all throughout the 100 minutes of this lame attempt at a Showtime original movie. At no point does the mad mandrill chase its victims through ventilation ducts or up to some cryptic, undiscovered floor of the building. The monkey doesn't corner anyone on the roof, which seems wrong considering it's a vital cliché for a movie of such stunning originality as Shakma.

It's just a group of people forever stuck on the fourth floor, no climbing or swinging required. You could almost call it existential given how restless the movie makes you feel.

Secondly, the filmmakers went to the trouble of casting a credited animal performer named Typhoon the Baboon. Sadly, he never would act again before or after this, but he fares better than his slumming homosapien co-stars, among them Ape-man Roddy McDowall and Blue Lagoon maroon Christopher Atkins, going from Beaks to Cheeks. The method acting going in Typhoon's primitive brain whenever he hurls himself against a door, which comprises much of his role, is a wonderful thing. Compare him to Roddy McDowall, who appears to have been in the early stages of Alzheimer's throughout. At least he's not living the self-fulfilling prophecy of standing idly by as a demented madman in a ski mask runs around, hacking up young virgins.

There's also Amanda Wyss and Ari Meyers as the dueling eye candy, Wyss being Atkins' primary love interest and Meyers the infatuated younger girl, respectively. Amanda Wyss has the edge because she was involved in three seminal 1980s films: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Better Off Dead... The former Kate & Allie teen starlet, meanwhile, went from playing Al Pacino's fictional daughter in the overlooked Author! Author! to starring alongside The Barbarian Brothers and a chicken bone. And I also kept confusing her with Lori Loughlin.

Shakma begins with some tender scenes of graphic brain surgery, no doubt intended to shock you to life (sorry), but also to introduce us to Roddy McDowall as Dr. Sorenson, chief of staff for the medical school situated in this ten-story office building meant to be a tower. Sorenson and his charges also apparently have a proud weekend tradition involving a Dungeons & Dragons-style LARP game called "Nemesis," where they adopt secret identities and wander aimlessly throughout the rooms collecting clues to help rescue the princess situated on the fifth floor, like they're Gleep Glop and the Floopty-Doos.

Enter the monkey in the wrench, Shakma, the titular baboon who reacts harshly to having his naked brain injected with corticotropin. He attacks the students, drawing blood from one of them, and is sedated by his trainer Sam (Atkins) before Sorenson arrives in a fit of exasperation and demands Shakma be put to sleep. Sam realizes he made a mistake by injecting the wrong substance into his prized pet, but shrugs it off and decides to let the resident lackey Richard (Greg Flowers) dispose of the damned, dirty ape.

Vague statements of scientific purpose aside, the game remains on, with Richard's sister Kimberly (Meyers) playing the fair maiden and Sorenson as the Game Master, tracking their progress through homing devices and walkie-talkie updates. The players in this case are Sam, his feisty girlfriend Tracy (Wyss), token black Gary (Robb Morris), and noxious nerd Bradley (Tre Laughlin), who sounds like the Comic Book Guy doing a John Malkovich impression.

But Shakma is far from dead, which Bradley learns the hard way when he goes into the specimen room to find Shakma having killed and/or eaten nearly all the caged critters before experiencing a fatal monkey pile. Sorenson sends Richard to investigate, and he too gets assaulted by Shakma despite arming himself with a glass of hydrochloric acid. Sorenson leaves his post to discover Richard's melted corpse, but cannot hitch an elevator ride to safety in time before he gets his own demise. This leaves Sam and Tracy to ponder all manner of failed distractions and escape plans, with Shakma poised to attack around virtually every corner.

Did I mention that this simian slasher film takes up 100 minutes of film? That's nearly two hours of screen time, all in the service of a thinly-plotted excuse for bloodletting which is as mediocre in its supposed scares as it is presenting the contrived scenario which isolates the various characters. It runs about as long as either King Kong Lives or Link, only without the bracingly apeshit inanity of either film. Shakma just dawdles along in its dumbness, especially in the overlong attempts of its erstwhile heroes to take charge of a situation that should not be so difficult to control.

The situation is that Sorenson has locked up the entire building, including every office where a phone may be conveniently accessed, and apparently even the windows prove inconvenient for any rescue. All this for a silly LARP more than any sense of security. Whenever Sam suggests escaping from the ground floor or Tracy produces a strobe light, the results fizzle out ridiculously. A tremendous deal of the chasing involves the duo holding the stairwell door closed as Shakma bounces repeatedly off it before scampering away. The only real moment of tension is when Tracy hides herself in a wooden bureau, Shakma clawing away murderously, but even this is defused by Sam's utter impotence as a hero, something which the finale tries to subvert by activating his own primal instincts, but instead provokes half-hearted chuckles much like the rest of the endeavor.

You'd think there would be some kind of novelty to a baboon as bogeyman, but directors Hugh Parks (another cautionary tale in exploitation history) and Tom Logan fail to capitalize. With the exception of the acid-burned Richard, Shakma's pouncing upon the human cast is dull and reliant on big reveals rather than bloody wrestling (the scenes of which you do get are reliably laughable). Furthermore, given how many times it tries to break through the stairwell door, you wonder how come Shakma's doesn't lose an arm in the struggle, or at least experience some minor injury when confronted with acid. Even the allegedly trained monkey doesn't appear to be directed properly, which further discredits the supposed bond between Sam and Shakma.

Poor Christopher Atkins, a frequent Razzie regular (A Night in Heaven, Listen to Me) who was even up for the "Worst New Star of the Decade" prize the year Shakma was released, makes for a bland male lead, routinely overshadowed by Typhoon as well as the likes of the charming Amanda Wyss (who gets away with the movie's crowning achievement in dopey dialogue with the line "You are sooo male!") and the coasting Roddy McDowall. The rest of the cast is wholly negligible given how keen the movie is to have them bumped off, which could constitute a series of mercy killings given how much color they add to the proceedings, if only the film weren't so boring.

The trailer for Shakma, however, is truly legendary. Not only does it compact the essence of the main characters in a tighter way than the movie proper, but the Percy Rodrigues stand-in doing the narration really goes bananas by the end. I mean, seriously..."Christopher Atkins, two-time winner of the National Association of Theatre Owners' 'Star of the Year' award, first for Blue Lagoon, now for Shakma." You don't even have to watch this amateurishly-edited preview to ask yourself, "What theaters did this ever play in?" But I recommend you do...

Stakeout

STAKEOUT
(R, Touchstone Pictures, 117 mins., theatrical release date: August 5, 1987)

I must have been nice this year, because St. Netflix has deemed fit to send me another John Badham-directed cop comedy from my DVD queue so shortly after the last. God bless us, everyone!

So in 1986, the Englishman who once directed WarGames and Blue Thunder decided to shake things up by delving into lighthearted family fare with Short Circuit. Badham was known as a dramatist ever since Saturday Night Fever was a disco-era smash, but the success of that cuddly robot caper seemed to give him the freedom to work a clearer comedic angle into his films. The result was Stakeout, a late-summer farce which was less Lethal Weapon and more "Pop Gun Blues."

Put it this way: one film had Mel Gibson pressing a single-shot Beretta to his head (and over the holidays, natch), desperate to end his mad dog existentialism; and the other has Emilio Estevez throwing a stray cat in the car of his blustery rivals (Forest Whitaker & Dan Lauria, marginally magnificent), thus chasing off a pet bulldog, as a prank.

There is still plenty of lonesome angst to contend with in Stakeout, although here it belongs to Richard Dreyfuss as feisty Seattle detective Chris Lecce, who is frazzled but far from Martin Riggs' suicidal mania. Badham previously worked with Dreyfuss during the actor's cocaine-addled downward slope on the euthanasia tract Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981). Stakeout helped to renew Dreyfuss' post-sobriety popularity by becoming the eighth biggest blockbuster of 1987, even edging out Lethal Weapon by a couple grand.

Scripted by Jim Kouf, who also wrote same year's disreputably grand The Hidden under his nom de pulp "Bob Hunt," Stakeout blesses Dreyfuss with a whale of a role, or at least one which serves his fast-talking, quick-thinking reflexes very well. It also requires him to get dirty with fish residue and sawdust in contrasting chase sequences, as well as play off Emilio Estevez as stern sidekick Bill Reimers, who resembles one of the comically mustachioed Beastie Boys from their mid-1990s "Sabotage" video.

The human condition to Det. Chris Lecce is that he's frequently restless, highly combative and newly single after his beloved Bonnie leaves him with little but the bed he loses sleep on, having taken the shades with her. He's such the model of mid-life misery that when he's ordered to pull the night shift in surveying the ex-girlfriend of a fugitive, he has no choice but to get closer to his subject than he or his partner hoped for.

The woman is Maria McGuire (Madeleine Stowe), a lithe Irish-Mexican bombshell whom the policeman peepers duly admire from across the street in their grimy headquarters. Chris bugs her phones by masquerading as a repairman, but fatefully approaches her at the supermarket away from Bill's own watchful eye. It isn't long before the two become romantically entangled, a dalliance which not only throws a wrench into his assignment but may as well put him over his head with Maria's cop-killing squeeze, Richard "Stick" Montgomery (Aidan Quinn), who is coming to collect a hefty sum of cash stashed away at her digs.

When I wrote about Badham's The Hard Way, which preceded the proper sequel to Stakeout by two years, I was quite impressed by James Woods and Michael J. Fox creating such a rambunctious rapport given their tightly-focused characterizations. Revisiting Stakeout, though, I have to admit that though I found Fox more humorously adept than Estevez, Richard Dreyfuss is better than even Jimmy Woods. It's enough to make me mildly embarrassed.

"I don't think I realized until just now the size of the hole I dug for myself," Chris reluctantly confesses at one point in embrace with Maria, and Dreyfuss is in top form getting us to squirm as much as he does at his own randy deception. Coincidence dictates that Maria will encounter Chris at his "office" when he pulls strings to get her free good-hearted brother on work release. Dreyfuss gives it his all, darting his blue eyes from behind his cap, stammering himself silly upon their encounter and finally retreating with tractor beam humiliation.

Not that being at a distance keeps Chris from finding fresh ways to make a fool of himself. After doing Maria said favor at the precinct, he phones her up in solitude as he spies on her in the kitchen, struggling to remember his flimsy alibi and damn near blowing his cover when he sees her skillet catch fire. All the while, Chris tries to assert himself as a loverman beyond his perceived Mr. Nice Guy timidity. He sees it as a stigma, "like medium," and gets a whole new identity to fabricate in his final confrontation with Stick.

Richard Dreyfuss is a joy to watch at his most nervous and such an intuitive actor that he overcomes the dubiousness of playing a mensch with a badge. By contrast, Emilio Estevez can't help but seem hopelessly green having to essay Dreyfuss' opposite number. I can't be unfair to the former Repo Man, ultimately, as he navigates sublimely between the puckish and the parental, establishing a more well-adjusted presence than his earlier roles suggested (no stalking in the rain a la St. Elmo's Fire).

The casual nature of their performances also accounts for why they work well together in the movie. The scene where the duo pass the time with trivia games, with Chris having to guess movie quotes and Bill the history of American ex-presidents (with a Playboy centerfold used as a hint for one of them), is a good barometer of their chemistry. It's also a shrewd joke at the 40-year-old Dreyfuss' expense. Nowadays, male-oriented comedies have pushed the "bromance" angle as far as they can go, so there's something retro-actively innocuous about the bickering between Dreyfuss and Estevez, which is more Homer and Marge Simpson than anything in buddy cop history. But they never compromise their integrity, and this combined with their priceless jesting ("So, did we practice safe sex?") gives me a better understanding of this film's amiable popularity than, say, Wild Hogs.

Still, the threat remains of Stick's encroaching reunion with Maria, as the felon and his cousin drive towards Seattle in bullet-riddled conflict with the law. The Hard Way lacked for an interesting villain in the admittedly goofy Party Crasher, whereas the dryly charismatic Aidan Quinn shows a more volatile, unique menace. Relishing his freedom with childish disbelief and a wicked grin, Stick is also sufficiently brutal in his big getaway and intriguingly petty in the realms of both crime and love. His psychotic jealousy lingers in Bill's mind, even though he cannot help falling in love with Maria and risking the suspicion of his superiors.

John Badham incorporates thriller and action elements rather programmatically, and, like The Hard Way after it, there is a slight feeling of tonal dissonance when things kick into gear. But he at least understands that they are obstacles in service of a smarter perception of lovesick foibles. Madeleine Stowe rises above what could have been purely an objectifying archetype to give Maria homely pluck and perception, her intimate moments with Dreyfuss utterly engaging. Jim Kouf's screenplay is actually quite generous in giving its principal characters equal integrity and workaday empathy, using shorthand and shared understanding in just the right ways to make mundane "shit detail" surveillance jobs as well as impromptu dinners register with warmth.

Stakeout is one of the more humble films to have ever eclipsed the $100 million mark at the box office, even with its studio pedigree and star actors. When Another Stakeout reunited all of its key players in 1993, it felt not only arbitrary but past its time. The Hard Way underachieved theatrically, Lethal Weapon already spun out two increasingly profitable sequels and Estevez got involved in the National Lampoon spoof Loaded Weapon 1. The buddy cop formula got lost in the adrenaline-fueled mid-1990s until Rush Hour arrived, with the only real quirk coming from the science fiction-oriented Men in Black. Not to say Stakeout is trend-setting, since 48 Hours from 1982 remains the catalyst for all that would come, including this, Lethal Weapon, The Hidden, Midnight Run, Downtown, etc. etc.

It does hold up despite its reputation as disposable cable fodder, though, especially with the mature love affair at its spine and the revitalizing performance by Richard Dreyfuss. Not too many of those aforementioned films were eager to defuse their machismo with the mundane devotion to romance and procedure Stakeout provides, so it does stand out in a positive way. That it thinks forwardly enough to allow the heroes to live by their own established groove makes it feel like it's a cozy fictional sequel in its own right. Badham may have shown an increased propensity for comedy, but more than that, he finally made a movie that is straightforwardly charming, no assembly required.

Ernest Saves Christmas

ERNEST SAVES CHRISTMAS
(PG, Touchstone Pictures, 95 mins., theatrical release date: November 11, 1988)

Ernest Saves Christmas is a film title of holly jolly irony. Even with all of the goodwill in the world, as befitting a simpleton who is "at one with the Yuletide, kno-wut-I-mean," it seems that throughout this second vehicle for the late Jim Varney's hayseed man-child, Christmas needs to be saved from Ernest. In rescuing a pine tree from the back of a truck, he causes a multiple-car collision. Taking the reins of Santa's reindeer-guided cart, Ernest is given the Jack Skellington treatment by Air Traffic Control. And his perennially overwhelmed neighbor Vern, seen as always through the camera eye, has his living room demolished by Ernest's mercenary party-planning. You feel like hiring Pee-Wee Herman for damage control.

In 1987, Ernest Goes to Camp was the first major spin-off for Varney's persona of Ernest P. Worrell, the rambling yokel who spent the better part of a decade filming one-take commercials out of Nashville for companies both regional and national, although primarily the former. Under the Disney Studio subsidiary Touchstone Pictures, the Ernest brand stretched out to four theatrical releases, the fifth being 1993's independently-released flop Ernest Rides Again. From thereon out, it was DTV all the way, with Disney's only affiliation being Slam Dunk Ernest (1995), co-starring Kareem Abdul-Jabbar during the short-lived craze for casting NBA heavyweights in family movies (Kazaam, Space Jam).

Varney found greater success in Disney's own Toy Story films as the voice of Slinky Dog, and was duly cast as Jed Clampett in Penelope Spheeris' early 1990s feature revival of The Beverly Hillbillies. Alas, Varney passed away from lung cancer in 2000 and never made it back on the marquee biz. But according to both Varney and directing partner John Cherry, Ernest Saves Christmas has held up as their favorite of the series, no doubt because of it being the most, well, earnest.

A lot of the film's benevolent gravity, however, is in the casting of stately Douglas Seale as the Santa Claus of this story. The twist herein, which surely lent itself to a future hot Dis-cember property, is that Santa's mythology and magic must be properly transferred to a willing mortal man. Like many an aging detective in a gritty cop thriller, even Santa gets too old for this stuff, although no policeman ever had to work the beat for almost an entire century.

Seale's Santa arrives in Orlando, where a businessman engages him in idle chatter, or mingle with the Kringle. Of course, the clues soar over him like a sleigh, whereas even the most jet-lagged tot is keen to the presence of their holiday hero. Santy Claus is away on business, though, and that is to christen children's entertainer Joe Caruthers (Oliver Clark) as his descendant. To get to him, Santa will have to hail a taxi and thus enters Ernest P. Worrell himself into the plot, having dropped off a catatonic passenger at the luggage conveyor belt.

En route to their destination, Ernest picks up the 1980s equivalent of a Dickensian street urchin, a teenage runaway nicknamed Harmony Starr (Noelle Parker) who takes in stride both the bad John Wayne impersonator behind the wheel and the genuine St. Nick riding shotgun. It doesn't end well for either men when Ernest is fired for giving Santa a free ride and Santa is diverted from his conversation with Joe by hotshot agent Marty Brock (Robert Lesser), who is grooming the unemployed Uncle Joey for the lead role in a movie and has his competitor, "Mr. Santos," arrested for vagrancy.

Ernest accidentally forgets to unload Santa's magic bag of toys, thus becoming enough of a believer to take Harmony along on a mission to rescue the imprisoned St. Nick before Christmas Eve, 7 p.m. But the complications snowball when Harmony keeps the sack for herself, Joe remains skeptical about his great promotion and a pair of helper elves arrive to gather up the reindeer only to end up chauffeured by the hapless Ernest, who commandeers the sleigh literally around the world and back.

Jim Varney, by all accounts, got taken at face value a lot by fans of the doltish Ernest character, when he was actually a very learned, gentle man away from his alter ego. There are intimations that Ernest himself is working on an intellectual level more cunning than his slapstick stupidity implies, especially when he disguises himself as a double-talking governor's aide or a mangy snake wrangler. Add this to his guileless warmth and self-confident malapropism, and it's clear that Ernest P. Worrell is deserving of his cult status and position in a Christmas fable.

It's just that Ernest Saves Christmas pitches itself so firmly in the middle ground, punching its weight with corny bathos and overeager farce. Ernest is such a live-action cartoon, with his elastic mandible and wide-eyed "Aw, shucks!" demeanor, that he thrusts himself into an alternate dimension that no one can keep up with, not even reliable supporting players Gailard Sartain & Bill Byrge doing their own bickering, rattled comic shtick as the weary warehouse watchers. Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey each understood when to let their guard down even in the wildest abandon, whereas there isn't a barn door broad enough comparable to Varney's mugging.

The rampant sentimentality is just as wearying, with Harmony set up as such a sarcastic, selfish anti-foil that her dramatic turnaround could immediately prompt the kind of exaggerated eye-rolling Sartain is called upon for. Ditto Joe Carruthers' arc, where the good-mannered and genteel TV personality is shooed into a schlock horror film incorrectly referred to as "Christmas Sleigh." Although its childish wonder and innocence is a very noble ingredient to preserving the benevolence of the Christmas season, you can imagine less dancing sugarplums and more Ernest decking the hells with a sledgehammer way too easily.

Thank goodness Douglas Seale makes the best of his role, clearly demonstrating the right attitude akin to original Miracle on 34th Street actor Edmund Gwenn in his appealing characterization of Santa Claus. A lot of the comic moments involving Seale hint at a cleverness the rampant product tie-ins undermine, with particular bits involving a customs check-in and his carousing his cellmates into caroling seeming rictus-proof.

And yet what to make of a fleeting glance at a "Keep Christ in Christmas" dashboard sticker in Ernest's cab which is of less significance than the triangular advert for Bic's Metal Point Roller pens atop it? It kind of defeats the purity of your modest Christmas comedy to remind viewers of Ernest's commerce-minded origins, as if to give viewers the impression that Santa's jelly belly is actually beer gut resulting from too many bottles of Bud Light (although the Coke ad credits suggest otherwise).

Ernest Saves Christmas isn't the lumpen coal many have made it out to be since its release, but it rarely shines in the way you'd hope. There is as much goodwill as there is ineptness, as this is the kind of movie where Jim Varney desperately loops random one-liners over non-existent lip movements for that extra pinch of annoyance. And even though comedy is notoriously subjective no matter what the demographic, whether they involve sex, splatter or satire, Ernest P. Worrell still comes across as polarizing despite the valiant Varney. If both the actor and alter ego aren't as dumb as they look, though, then maybe Ernest Saves Christmas is pleasantly aware of its single best joke. It's a shame the rest of this caper wasn't let in on it.