San Diego Reader

Movies

Cecil B. Demented

The sloganeering title figure ("I'm a prophet against profit!" "Celibate for celluloid!" etc.) abducts at gunpoint a bratty Hollywood superstar called Honey Whitlock. And in short order, he ungently "persuades" her to join his band of underground-cinema guerrillas -- The Sprocket Holes -- on a hit-and-run production titled Raving Beauty, an art-imitating-life affair (or vice versa) about a repertory-house proprietress bent on the destruction of mainstream cinema -- i.e., shopping-mall cinema -- after no one turns up for her Pasolini festival. The parallels to the case of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army would be apparent even if Hearst in the flesh -- by now a member in good standing of the John Waters stock company -- were not on hand as the uptight bourgeois parent of one of the rampaging guerrillas. (The role of the Hearst-ian proselyte, meantime, goes to Melanie Griffith, a bigger name with a wee high girlish voice, stretched well past its limits in the firebrand bits.) Waters himself, for his present purposes, holds a strategic position on the banks of the mainstream. He's enough of an outsider to be guiltless of hypocrisy, and too much of an outsider to jeopardize any "career." Something, nevertheless, holds him back; something internal. He has a good deal of fun -- fun, for once, of a type that can be widely shared -- with the theater marquees of his beloved Baltimore ("Pauly Shore Marathon," "Patch Adams: The Director's Cut," and the like), and there is doubtless something to be said for a movie that, at the dawn of the 21st Century, still bandies about the names (tattooed on the forearms and biceps of the guerrillas) of Otto Preminger, Sam Peckinpah, Sam Fuller, William Castle, Herschell Gordon Lewis, R.W. Fassbinder, et al. Then again, there is something to be said against a movie that simply and merely bandies them about. Waters brings up these names, as he brings up Aesthetic Issues, in a spirit of take-it-or-leave-it and don't-mind-me. And the sheer listlessness of the enterprise -- the flat-footedness, the lameness -- is its last line of defense against outrage. However ready you may be to take up arms, or at least to plunk down dollars, in opposition to Hollywood gloss and glitter, it's hard to rally round ineptitude. Stephen Dorff, Alicia Witt, Adrian Grenier. 2000.

— Duncan Shepherd

Reader Rating: 1.0 stars

• MPAA Rating: R

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