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Show Scorsese's 'After Hours' is a bizarre urban fable Quickies by Rick Brough . it's a shame to see them buried in a picture filled with silly or tasteless jokes. For example, when they hear grunting and snorting behind a bush, they fear it's a werewolf. What they find is a local villager engaged with a local maiden. The picture is most comfortable with geek humor. Thus its most typical performer is comic Michael Richards, who drools and moans a lot. He also carries around a lot of fake hands and arms, which he uses to pretend he's been dismembered. The film also features two hunchbacked hunch-backed servants (John Byner and Carol Kane) ; a nice country doctor (Joseph Bologna), who turns mad in a blink as soon as he sets foot in his laboratory; and a werewolf (Donald Gibb) who wants nothing more than a good electrolysis treatment. in the middle of the night, Johnson is suddenly stricken. And while his horrified little boy watches, he begins stalking his living room with a knife. Johnson brings a searing reality to these scenes. Lisa Blount Debra Winger's flighty girlfriend in "An Officer and a Gentleman" is effective effec-tive as the wife who is impatiently baffled, then frightened, then angry enough to fight back. However, the storyline often gets bogged down in conventional elements from social-problem pictures. pic-tures. The most familiar character is the lovable best friend (Robert F. Lyons) who is cocky, resilient and, of course, doomed to die from the syndrome. Lyons plays his role so well, though, that he almost steals the picture. The story also simplifies the Vietnam Viet-nam experience by saying Johnson's problem boils down to One Traumatic Moment that is often hinted at in flashbacks. If he can recall it and purge it, he'll be OK. The picture still leaves you wondering why the Vietnam war should haunt its veterans in a way other wars didn't. It's too bad the picture didn't find a way to illustrate the subtle points made by news ar ticles on delayed-stress syndrome. For instance, Vietnam veterans were thrown back into society pretty much by themselves. Past veterans went through de-mobilization in a group. "Cease Fire" is a few years old, but it can serve as an effective antidote an-tidote for those who forget "Rambo" is a fantasy. Transylvania 6-5000 The title of the movie is a pun on the old Big Band song "Pennsylvania "Penn-sylvania 6-5000." And indeed, the spooky Transylvanian castle in the story has a phone that plays the tune, instead of ringing! This raises not one snicker from the audeince, which is two generations too young to appreciate the joke ! The pointlessness of this gag is typical of the whole film. A National Enquirer -style magazine, seeking a story on monsters, sends two reporters to Transylvania. Ed Begley Jr., conscientiously cons-cientiously sleazy, is haunted by a sexy vampiress (Geena Davis) and tends to play Lou Costello to the Abbott Ab-bott of Jeff Goldblum, who aspires to more serious journalism. Both lead actors are appealing, so AfterHours Martin Scorsese dark comedy is inspired by his customary black urban ur-ban milieu, plus a little Kafka, a dash of Hitchock and most of all a healthy dose of Alice down the rabbit hole. Alice, so to speak, is a New York computer programmer (Griffin Dunne) who meets a woman (Rosan-na (Rosan-na Arquette) in a coffee shop and casually accepts her invitation to look her up at her flat in Soho. The mood of the evening is leading toward bed,' but Dunne, looking around her apartment, finds personal per-sonal effects that hint she is a burn victim. This seemingly triggers some old childhood phobia. And he quickly and somewhat callously skips out. Unfortunately, he also has lost most of his money, stranding him in Soho.- But when he goes back to Ar-quette's Ar-quette's apartment to apologize or get cab fare, we're not sure which she is dead by suicide. Did his rejection push her skittery psyche over the edge? As he bounces from one person to another in Soho, his own vague guilt reflects on the neighborhood.'s paranoia, until each is feeding on the - A Now Showing i At the Holiday Village Cinemas: Better off Dead Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins Once Bitten ( not yet rated ) other. The neighborhood comes to suspect him of being the culprit in a rash of burglaries, while the real thieves (Cheech and Chong) slip in and out of the area unscathed. As the evening wears on, Dunne is desperate to get home, not merely for practical reasons, but to escape the cloak of sin he feels weighing down his shoulders. He becomes a walking plague, setting off even picayune disasters. In a stranger's bathroom, for example, he uses a tissue, throws it into the toilet, flushes it and the toilet overflows. Dunne is the only character we stay with all through the movie. And maybe this accounts in part for a certain coldness in the film. Dunne has an off-putting personality that keeps us from completely identifying identify-ing with him. Meanwhile, the alien characters he encounters are played by actors with more warmth than he has. The best of them include Arquette, Teri Garr as a restless waitressaspiring artist, Catherine O'Hara (of "SCTV") who leads the neighborhood vigilantes in an ice cream truck, and even Cheech and Chong. This is only a minor flaw in..fhe persistently demented fable of "After Hours." Cease Fire The sincerity in "Cease Fire" fights against the cliches of the story, as Don Johnson plays a Vietnam Viet-nam veteran, recently unemployed, who is suddenly plagued by nightmares and flashbacks to the ugly days in Indochina. Without knowing its name, he's going go-ing through "delayed-stress syndrome" syn-drome" and the movie's best scenes illustrate its abrupt horror. Arising k A Classic Recommended Good double feature material Time-killer For masochists only |