GUILTY AS CHARGED Rod help us The much-abused concept of the horror-comedy gets one of its most tedious runthroughs yet here, with Rod Steiger playing a religious zealot who's big on the law, but bigger on The Law, if you know what I mean. He kidnaps capital criminals who got off on technicalities and keeps them in a dungeon where they await his own personal electric chair, because according to him, "The Holy Spirit is electricity, and the electric chair is God's instrument of justice and salvation!" How much does he like the chair? He thinks it should be on TV. On Saturday mornings. "With the Smurfs and the Muppets." His captives include "The Veg-O-Matic" slayer (whose confession, blurted out on Love Connection, was inadmissible because there wasn't a lawyer present), and Mitch Pileggi, pretty much playing Horace Pinker again. Inevitably, he's going to grab an "innocent" man, here played by Michael Beach - I put innocent in little quotes because he might be innocent of murder, but he's not above armed robbery. Anyway, a lecherous, "right-wing" politician (Lyman Ward) figures into things, along with a pretty assistant (Heather Graham) who believes every fucking thing everybody tells her. I put right-wing in little quotes because I don't believe such concepts as right- and left-wing are valid, and they mostly exist to sell concepts to sheep. But that's a whole other essay. Lauren Hutton plays the politician's wife, and not only does she look great for her or any age, but gets the only role in the film which is the slightest bit interesting. She considers herself his "punishment", for some past indiscretion. Sure, she gets the movie's biggest groaner ("Shocking, isn't it? Mmmm, well done. Literally."), but still, more of her and less of just about everything else we see could only have helped. I mean, Steiger at one point asks a fully-grown (if, apparently, mildly retarded) assistant of his to come over here and sit on his knee. What the hell is that? This is comedy? Maybe not; the gags, for the most part, just aren't there. Is it a horror movie? Not one that works. A crime drama? Not one that works either. It doesn't even matter WHAT it is, what matters is that it doesn't do a good job at it. As one often sees in some movies, the script (by Ernest Scared Stupid scribe Charles Gale) tries hard to avoid any negative racial connotations, so hard that of course it ends up with ones Gale never intended. There are a lot of criminals in this movie, and there are exactly two kinds: the white ones, which are either insane or just plain evil, and the black ones, which are victims of their disadvantages in society and, well, quite pathetic, often spending much of the movie sobbing. Even Steiger's assistant, played by Isaac Hayes and speaking about an octave higher than usual, is misguidedly made out to be some sort of "nice guy", but damn, I kept expecting him to blurt out "Yes, massa!" There are exactly three gags in this movie which DO work - Hayes' Bible, Steiger cheerfully admitting to his operation while discussing a campaign contribution, and an oddly-framed shot where the politician is standing in front of a poster of himself, giving Nixon's "V for Victory" sign, right over his head. And I should have known better than to have laughed at that last one, I mean, I'm not six years old anymore. Maybe THAT should be on TV, on Saturday mornings, with the Smurfs and the Muppets. It's directed with some style by Sam Irvin, who once worked as an assistant to Brian De Palma, but I don't think even De Palma could've saved this script. And this guy produced Ancient Evil: Scream Of The Mummy! The horror, the horror... A near-total wipeout. Leave it alone, and it'll leave you alone. BACK TO THE G's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE