One doesn't expect a project nurtured within the Disney family -- the Touchstone branch -- to be fertile soil for themes of necrophilia and cannibalism. Nor does one expect to hear the adolescent heroine therein address the camera in such double-meaning terms as "Don't you want to eat me?" -- not even in a dream scene. The cheering section for subversives, if anyone can be found sitting in it, will begin to take an active interest. But it is a tough assignment for director Bob Balaban (Parents) to pursue his established predilection for dark humor, always a minority taste, and at the same time to broaden his audience to acceptable commercial dimensions. (Pursuing his predilection for the dollhouse décor of suburbia is less of a hindrance, and although he doesn't pursue it to the extremes of Parents, he goes a good long way with it.) The vehicle for this assignment is a teen romance about a timid young suitor who finally gets the attention of his object of desire by stepping between her and a convenience-store bandit and absorbing a chestful of bullets. The night of his interment, he crawls out of the grave, looking a little peaky, in fact a lot peaky, but still intent on asking the girl to the prom. The humor gets very dark indeed around the problem of physical decay (the finger inserted into a bullet wound and inquisitively wiggled around, or the ear that comes off in the mouth of a nibbling girlfriend), and still a shade darker around the proposed solution to the problem: snacking on human flesh. The party-line surrealist might at some point, or at several, find his lips forming the fond expression l'amour fou -- the love that overcomes barriers not just of proper etiquette but of the laws of nature. In that light, the afterlife tribunal that, at the end, literally undoes everything that has happened in the movie is a bitter disappointment, a hat-in-hand retraction of all previous outrages. With Andrew Lowery, Traci Lind, Mary Beth Hurt, Edward Herrmann. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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