ROVIN’ AND RAVIN’ WITH MIKE

Copyright © 2000 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved

Klumps Lie Beneath

I welcome Nutty Professor II: The Klumps and What Lies Beneath because they give me a chance to answer a question I hear frequently. Why do you pick on one of my favorite movies? Or, phrased a little differently, Who do you think you are, to put down a film that is going to make a gazillion dollars? A follow-up question is, Didn’t you laugh? Didn’t you get scared? Yes, I did, and yes, I like scary movies and funny movies, but—

What Lies Beneath comes into the megaplex with great credentials, with Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer starring in a film directed by Robert Zemeckis (of Forrest Gump fame). The film starts off in Hitchcock country, although it is set in a lovely college town in Vermont (how many films have you seen set in Vermont?), with strong recollections of Rear Window. Ford presents himself as a middle-aged hunk—no stretch of the old acting muscles this time around. For acting, however, look to Pfeiffer, who deserves so much better material than she has to work with.

This time last summer, we were enjoying a blitz of scary films, The Blair Witch Project, The Haunting, and The Sixth Sense, and I was in horror heaven. But, we are missing a lot if What Lies Beneath is the best we have this summer. The problem with this film is that the scares don’t grow out of development of character or unfolding of plot. Instead, they are simply cheap gimmicks, like a jack-in-the-box or a carnival funhouse.

A pattern is numbingly repeated. A little more story unwinds, the music signals that Something Is About to Happen, a chord crashes, and we are programmed to jump. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there is not much more to the film. In a great horror film, the music enhances the whole effect; in this film, the music pretty much is the whole effect. There are only so many times you can sit on the edge of your seat and then slump back in disappointment, before you get tired. Before this film was halfway through its more than two hours, I was very tired, even bored.

With its various twists and turns, the film makes it hard for a reviewer to discuss it without giving away something. But, to give you an example of the manipulative use of these mechanical scares, at one point, the orchestra has churned up its usual warning signal, everyone onscreen and off is tensed for the inevitable Something… and the lovable old family dog walks through the door.

The last ten or is it fifteen or maybe twenty minute stretch of this film is one of the most sadistic sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie. Much as I appreciate Pfeiffer’s work here, I was hoping for her character to die, Ford’s character to die, somebody to die, so we could put this film and its audience out of their mutual misery. The plot’s contrivances are stretched so thin that it snaps before the audience’s nerves do, and the sadism is not so much seen in what the characters are doing to each other as in what this movie does to those of us who pay our good money to see it.

In The Nutty Professor (1996), a remake of Jerry Lewis’s (1963) film of the same title, Eddie Murphy first introduced us to Prof. Sherman Klump, a man whose heart and brain are as big as his body. In a memorable passage, memorable not so much for virtuoso acting as for virtuoso makeup, Murphy played Sherman’s oversized and foul-mouthed family: his father, his mother, his brother, and his grandmother, all gathered around the table with Sherman. These minor characters were such hits that they have been recycled now in the sequel. (By the way, it’s all over Internet movie sites that the zeppelin-shaped triplets of Me, Myself, and Irene are going to be given their own film.)

The problem is not with the characters but with the film itself, which is as padded as Murphy is in any of his Klump personae. Nothing shows a lack of imagination and development in a film as much as extended dream sequences, and this film has three of them. The first is a recurring nightmare that Sherman is relating to his psychiatrist. Then there is a true nightmare, a parody of a science-fiction movie, in which Sherman, in zero-gravity, propels himself with his flatulence. Finally, there is Grandma’s sexual fantasy... enough said.

Speaking of psychiatrists, another sure sign of sloppy story-telling is having characters narrate/summarize in a session with a shrink—appropriately named, since he is a convenient plot device to shrink a director’s responsibilities. Both of these films, by the way, have scenes with psychiatrists.

If you haven’t suspected it sooner, when you first glimpse the 500-pound hamster, you know the film has problems. Just as when I told you about the rain of frogs in Magnolia, I wish it weren’t so. In a bid for the grossest scene award (currently held by the chicken scene in Me, Myself, and Irene), this film lets us see how a giant hamster defends itself, as well as how and with whom such a beast makes love. All I’ll say is that the next time I’m trying to get away from a quarter-ton hamster, you can be sure that I won’t hide under a fur coat.

Then, there is the character who is regressed to infancy, who, as he jumps off a table, tears off a woman’s clothes, before turning into a shimmering glob that shapes itself into a hand (and you’ll never guess what gesture that hand makes) before affixing itself to the predictably broad rear end of a woman who (will wonders never cease?) is suffering from flatulence.

What a grinch! Didn’t I laugh? Well, I’ll admit that I’ll laugh at a whoopee cushion, but truthfully, I expect a little more from a film than I expect from a whoopee cushion. This film needs a little more whoopee and a little less cushion.

And so, who wants to be a m……ovie-reviewer? (Is that your final answer?) I don’t, as I’ve been asked, watch movies as a critic, but as a person who really cares about movies. I don’t always toe the critical party line, since after watching American Beauty a second time, I still don’t see any beauty at all in that pastiche of Married with Children and off-off-Broadway. Movie-reviewers are consumer advocates of a sort, warning you about the cinematic equivalent of faulty wiring or insurance scams, and, when we are all lucky, singing the praises of a great product.

This week, since I’ve turned these reviews into a kind of primer about film criticism, let me direct you to the Online Film Critics Society. This is a group of over a hundred film critics who, like your humble rover and raver, make their work available mainly on the Internet rather than on paper.

Keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and, oh, yes, your kids away from Klumps. I could not believe how many toddlers were in the audience for some of the grossest “humor” I’ve ever encountered in a film.