LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 228

CALENDAR FILM C4 LA WEEKLY FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22-THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1989 working for Tipper Gofe. Music may have influenced kids to do many strange and stupid tilings, but cough syrup addiction is beneath the intelligence of even the MTV generation. Nevertheless, Hellbent tries to conjure up the old rallying cry that the path to true knowledge lies in excess. As Lemmy progresses into white fringe and machine guns, his satanic role models kidnap babies and execute people, In the end they all die (the only moment of relief in the film), then Lemmy sells his soul and comes bade as a blind flower child. If this is true knowledge then there is no doubt feat ignorance is blik (New Beverly, mid) Melanie Pitts) JIMI HENDRIX UVE This film opens with footage of the youhg Hendrix in London, Hes already notorious for doing unheard-of things to the blues, as John Phillips announces with morbid hindsight "By fee time we got him to play Monterey he was the hottest thing around.

Two years later he was dead." But watching Hendrix onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, one is struck by the soul and Intelligence, not by the decadence, that too easy to miss, because the visual material is so captivating, (fee can't help but compare mental notes with fee folks as they reminisce about their own early tussles wife boys, girls, kissing, making out and going all the way. The project begun in 1982, is fee result of painstaking research, editing, teamwork and care, and co-editors Judith Sobol and Edith Becker's crackerjack timing creates a flow and a wholeness feat pulls all the elements together into a sweet funny and intelligent look at a pre-free-love, pre-AIDS age of innocence. (Nuart Sept. 22-28) Deborah Klinger) HELLBENT Hellbent is! a brainless regurgitation of sappy punk angst It follows the adventures of tommy, a struggling bandleader who writes gripping songs such as "Van Goghs Ear." He somehow gets his band involved with a Mr. Tannis, lurker at the Bar Sinister and apparently Satan's alter ego here on Earth, He and his biker cronies get lemmy and his girlfriend Angel addicted to cough syrup, and soon they're cutting off boa constrictor heads on stage.

This made me wonder if fee filmmakers were secretly spurs his music. Hendrix rolls through a handful of songs; he's less concerned with fee lyrics than wife the salacious promises his guitar can make. The Experience Mitch Mitchell, drums; Noel Redding, bass makes a great deal of sound, but Hendrixs Strat is a restrained and argumentative voice. The bill opens with Shake, Otis Redding's brief, simmering Monterey performance. Backed by Booker and the MG'S, Redding slides through hits and covers including "Respect, Tve Been Loving You Too Long" and "Try a Little Tenderness," his feet skittering, his voice ecstatic.

The same spirit torched Hendrix and Redding, then put fee fire out all too soon. (AMC Centviy 14, AMC Mainplace 6) Arion Berger) MUTANT ON THE BOUNTY The sci-fi genre has always been honored with a surfeit of rip-offs, pseudo-science-fiction movies that flow out of the studios like excrement. Mutant on the Bounty fits right into feat category: it's an inane space flick featuring a scab-faced mutant named Max (Kyle T. Heffner), who is beamed aboard fee starship Bounty a low-budget Enterprise. The entire Aide looks as though it was filmed in someone's two-car garage.

And 10 minutes into the film you know tbs saxophone-playing mutant who doesn't seem to care that he looks like a shiitake mushroom) is going to get the prettiest girl, triumph over fee bad guys and live happily ever after. A droid-tumed-cross-dresser is supposed to add comic relief, but he's too late. Even an insomniac scanning the cable-TV menu would switch channels. (AMC Century City) Maji Florence) NIGHT GAME Night Game is a cheap version of the suspense-thriller genre, the kind found on Saturday-night television. Set in fee beach town of Capitda, Texas, it stars Roy Scheider (Jaws) as Seaver, an ex-ballplayer turned police detective who's looking for a serial killer with a passion for baseball and blondes.

Like TV, Night Game offers plenty of cheap thrills, suspense and violence. A woman runs from the killer into a construction site, where she steps barefoot onto a huge rusty nail. Another victim's blood smears a mirror as she dies. No clues are given; this is purely for our enjoyment. And as in the bad TV movie, we know 1 what's happening next when Seaveris girlfriend Roxy Karen Young) wanders off alone on the beach where the killer is known to strike.

Director Peter Masterson (A Trip to Bountiful jhas created a misogynous film in which the women are helpless victims or pouting girlfriends, and fee men well, they're just doing their job. (CitywideMoma Gullon) SCREENINGS NOT AVAILABLE AT PRESS TIME Heart of Dixie bum Mbs Cameron's high-tech sentimentality leaves you drowning in his sea of love. (Citywide) (EM) THE ADVENTURES OF MILO AND OTIS Milo and Otis are barnyard buds. Not so unusual, except that the orange kitten's friend, Otis, is a dog a pug to be exact. Together, they romp, hatch a chicken egg and generally lead their farm community.

Until one day Milo gets carried downstream in a box he was using as a hideout. The bulk of the film follows Otis chasing Milo through forest, swamp, valley and finally to fee ocean. In rapid-cut montage scenes Milo falls off a cliff and Otis gets into a brawl with a brown bear. Dudley Moore narrates as the voices of Milo and Otis and the dozens of other animals they encounter. One of the few kids films this summer that kids actually like more than the adults who accompany them.

The Adventures of Milo and Otis is for the "littler" ones. (Citywide (MF) BATMAN Batman dies to span the uncharted area between Haiders of the Lost Ark and Blue Velvet, which is worthy of notice. That it fails may be because of director Tim Burton's lack of narrative cohesion. He and his design team were more interested in creating a Gotham City that looks like Fritz Lang's Metropolis as reshaped by H.R. Giger, and also has touches of the comic world as made up by the character's inventor.

Bob Kane. Despite the lack of momentum Batmarfs scenes feel draggy and episodic fee picture's unyielding, formidable tone and the performances almost put it across. (The key word is almost.) Jack Nicholson's Joker is gaudily, insanely suave; there's never been a self-infatuated lunatic quite like this in a movie. But Batmarfs center is Michael Keaton's subtle and wily Bruce Wayne, the most understated and nimble starring performance you're ever likely to see in a big-budget action- adventure film. (Citywide) EM THE BIG PICTURE This satire of Hollywoodland standards and practices works in bits and pieces.

Actually, only in pieces. Kevin Bacon stars as a young filmmaker whos swept from the innocent ambitions of student directing into the corrupt and mendacious world of the film studios. There are some very funny gags in the movie, but you feel that most of the people wholl like The Big Picture will have seen it for free at industry previews The parody elements are quite confident but too specific, except for Martin Short's bonelessly, ridiculously fey talent agent the vertebrae in his neck disappear and his eyes roam in totally different directions. The conventional story elements are handled in the most desultory manner possible thrown away, really. Director Christopher Guest doesnt play to his strengths, and the movie finally becomes ripe enough for parody itself.

(Universal City 18, AMC Century 14 (EM) CAGE In Cage, Reb Brown plays an L.A. bar owner whose muscle-bound buddy (Lou Ferrigno) suffered brain damage while saving Brown's life back in 'Nam. After a long, slow, violent exposition, Ferrigno is tricked into participating in fee "ancient" sport of cage fighting, a no-rules human cockfight run by gangsters in Chinatown; he and Brown then have to kill their way out of the cage and out of fee building. The cast includes a full complement of L.A. ethnic archetypes: sinister Asians, bad-ass Latinos, bellicose Italian mafiosos; there's even a cute girl reporter who skulks around downtown warehouses in high heels and a bright blue pantsuit.

Director Lang Elliott unabashedly exploits the Ferrigno character's handicap in an all-out effort to make us enjoy seeing the villains get slaughtered in various painful ways. The cage fights are observed by a surrounding mob of dehumanized, hardened spectators; with remarkable success, fee film attempts to make us that mob, eagerly awaiting fee savage, visceral release that comes from every bloody death. What fun. (State) (BK) BLACK RAIN A fish-out-of -water story; bet its been a whi le since you saw one of those, huh? Black Bain is wr based on John Hersey's story of Hiroshima survivors. Instead it's Michael Douglas, sporting a bad perm and a jawline that suggests a high cholesterol level, as a two-fisted New York cop sent to Japan.

Mercifully, Andy Garcia is his partner; otherwise we might wonder when the star is going to show up. In the early New York sequences, director Ridley Scott cuts down on the moody, charcoal-sky flamboyance and moves toward something different, a lower-key storytelling style. i When the story shifts to Japan and the world darkens and gleams simultaneously, he's back to remaking Blade Bunner. Black Bain has more narrative coherence than most Scott films although it lacks the sweet anguish of Someone To Watch Over Me). but it's ultimately unsatisfying.

(Citywide) (Elvis Mitchell FUNNY If you're like me, you couldn't remember a joke in a pinch even if your life depended on it, Bran Ferren's anthology film makes it easy for us, recording 120 jokes that his camera subjects consider to be the funniest they've heard. This could easily have i become 83 minutes of comic burnout you are happy when the final gag is told, though) had the jokes been told by professional comedians. However, 99 percent are related by ''amateurs" everyone from actors and writers (i.e., Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, Gene Saks) to bus drivers and bartenders. It's this democratic spin that gives funny its charm. It would have been more effective if most of the "celebrity jokers came not from show business but, say, from politics, the sciences or any other non-entertainment field.

Also, the many presentations that are shot on sound stages seem somewhat stiff. Nearly all the jokes are "adult" in some sense, and run the track from ethnic to religious to sexual. One even raises the level to historical'anecdote as Australian journalist Murray Sayle recounts Kim Philby's penchant for the well-intentioned lie. Two things become apparent during Funny. One is that you've already heard most of the jokes they are, in fact, the very ones you always mean to remember for parties).

The other is that most of the joke tellers are at least middle-aged, leading to the uncomfortable speculation that baby boomers and theif offspring are not equipped with the sense of humor of their parents generation. (Monica 4-Plex)Steven Mikulan) Jimi Hendrix ip HEAVY PETTING Producerdirector Obie Atomic Cafe Benz's "docucomedy about American sex in the '50s and 60s is a delightful sprint down a pubescent memory lane. Benz and co-directoreditor Josh Waletzsky intersperse cuts from sex education films feat sport titles like Dating: Do's and Oon'ts and Perversion for Profit, feature films of the era and vintage Ozzie and Harriet episodes, wife personal disclosures from a bevy of today's people, including David Byrne, Sandra Bernfardt and Abbie Hoffman, The classic oldies soundtrack is all A DRY WHITE SEASON iiiinun derous. The movie keeps jolting us by raising the level of violence, and we arent spared Stolzs brutalities. But Euzhan Palcy, the director and coscreenwriter (with Colin Welland, from Andre Brink's novel), also cannily uses the thriller structure to fill us in on all sorts of details about how apartheid works, in domestic as well as political life.

The movie has its share of overexpiicit dialogue (Sutherland even has to say, "Tve been too naive for too long to the journalist played by Susan Sarandon), and it may err more seriously in singling Stoiz out as a psychopath, undermining its own point about the systematic nature of South African oppression. Even so, Palcys narrative drive and the phenomenal editing (by Sam OSteen and Glenn Cunningham) make the story so kinetic that we accept its simplifications. A Dry White Season may wear its heart on its sleeve, but at least its pulse races. Tom Carson We also recommend: A Chorus of Disapproval; Dead Poets Society; Distant Voices, Still Lives; Do the Right thing; In Country; Romero; Star Trek The Final Voyage; Young Einstein. Eschewing the movies usual hand-wringing over apartheid, this is an all-out political thriller in the tradition of I It also marks, after a decadelong absence, Marlon Brandos return to the screen; but even Brandos marvelous extended cameo as an anti-apartheid barrister doesnt distract from the agit-prop suspense story.

Donald Sutherland is unexpectedly engrossing as the myopic Afrikaaner schoolteacher whose conscience is pricked when his black gardeners son dies in police custody after the 1976 Soweto massacre. The teacher becomes involved In the quest to see Justice done, estranging his frightened pro-apartheid wife (Janet Suzman) by collaborating with the boys family and their activist friend Stanley (played by the enormously engaging Zakes Mokae, all gusto and happy rage). Gathering evidence and outwitting the police, hes not only revived by his sense of purpose, but happy to be living dangerously (Sutherland Is plainly overjoyed at no longer having to play the simp). But as the teacher and his companions inch closer to the truth, the countermoves by their main official antagonist, Capt Stoiz (Das Boot Jurgen Prochnow) grow more mur CURRENT RELEASES Reviewed by Tom Carson, Marl Florence, Ben Halle Helen Knode, Steven Mikulan flWs Mitchell John Powers, Ron Stringer, Ha Taylor, Andrea R. Voucher and Michael Ventura.

THE ABYSS Writer-director James Cameron shows admirable ambition in this submerged fantasy-suspense story about a naval crew and an underwater oil-rigging bunch who discover otherworldly life in fee ocean depths. He tries to play against fee audience expectations of his martial-artisan work and make a movie thats the opposite of Aliens and The Terminator. And this is the best cast straining to behold special effects machinery since Alien's actors were gobbled up by a mobile mass of rubber, wire and hydraulics; The Abyss stars Ed Harris. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Todd Graff and John Bedford Lloyd. But fee movie is briny doggerel, a mismash of El, The Day the Earth Stood Still and 2001.

among others. (The underwater aliens look like one of those neon-airbrush jobs from a Journey album cover.) The movie's hardly disreputable actually, it's a huge expenditure of time and resource to create a mostly negligible result. In the end..