Comic Steve Martin and director Carl Reiner hash over roughly the same idea of their previous The Man with Two Brains. The beautiful body with the ugly personality remains constant, except that the body in this case is Victoria Tennant's instead of Kathleen Turner's. But the beautiful disembodied brain has here become a beautiful disembodied soul -- and not entirely disembodied at that. A Tibetan swami (your standard Eastern holy man caricature) has power over afterlife transmigrations, but the hocus-pocus goes haywire and Lily Tomlin's departing soul is misdirected into Steve Martin's body. It's an equal partnership. He still controls his left side, but she now controls his right, which leads to some lively but inconsistent physical comedy, in the Jerry Lewis spastic mode. Even more inconsistent is the verbal comedy. Sometimes the two occupants converse telepathically; sometimes she talks telepathically and he talks out loud; sometimes he does the talking for the both of them, in his own voice and in a feminine falsetto -- whichever is most convenient for the comedy writers. Clearly this distinction between body and personality has some significance for Martin/Reiner, but there is less incentive this time to ask what and why. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd