LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 10

'Film Review by Ginger Varnay and Michaal Ventura ALIEN This thing scared the shit out of me. Alien's a masterpiece of fright. It's sensory overload and its weirdness may be to a purpose. On the Conradesque spaceship Nostromo, a very human crew encounters the perfect organism which is also perfectly evil. Director Ridley Scott knows the prototechnics of fear.

What makes Allen emotionally draining as well as thrilling, is that its people are people their, reactions, their emotions, their relationships, are much too close for comfort. We feel no distance frorn them. So their terror is especially infectious. Dan O'Bannon's script has done something rare in science-fiction: projected how we really day-to-day, out to the stars. Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kot-to and the others are excellent, and Sigourney Weaver is something more than excellent the precision, the shadings, the force of her acting, are extraordinary.

(MV) BATTLESTAR QALACTtCA I'd like to have been a fly on the wall when this deal went down just to see how straight the executives faces stayed while the rip-off was plotted and planned. Battlestar Galactica was the most expensive television series ever filmed. It was also unspeakably dull and dim-witted and did disasterously in the Nielsen ratings. Four weeks into the season and only small boys murderously fatigued from a weekend's. -rigorous play were willing to watch a Star Wars copy cat.

Apparently Universal thinks the same small boys will rush right out, allowances at the ready, to see a re-edited, sensurround version in theatrical release now that ABC has cancelled the costly mess. Unfortunately, they're probably right. Anyway, a little kid's money is just as good as anybody else's. (GVI THE CHAMP Eight-six minutes ought to be ample time for any kid to weep his way through a movie. But director Franco Zeffirelli saw fit to tack another 30 minutes crying time onto this remarkably slow remake of the 1931 release.

Of course, without that extra half-hour, an audience wouldn't get to see nearly so often Florida's fabulous flamingoes in flight or wonder why Southern skies seem so saturated with soft mist no matter what time of the day or night the camera catches their gauzy sweep. Then, too, there's that trembly flute that fires up well in advance of every emotional outpouring. It's not that I don't enjoy a good cry; I just don't like to see it coming so far ahead of time. Jon Voight as the broken-down boxer, Faye ftAfNIVERBAI. STUOIOB TOUR liJ MCA COMPANY OPtN 900 Ml UST TOUR 00 PM HWSOf CORPORATION PRESENTS having nothing but contempt for the play Surprise.

(MV) HANOVER STREET It's incredible that a film meant to showcase so-called "hot prospects" like Lesley-Anne Down and What's-his-name from Star Wars, should be tnis lousy. Now, I'm as willing as any man to believe that World War was the best time to fall in love and make babies, being a World War II baby myself. But this film has the look and interest of a compilation of aftershave commercials. (MV) THE LAST WAVE Of all the newish directors, Peter Weir alone is taking us out to the very edges of our senses, where what is called "dream" and what is called "real" meet and fructify each other. The Last Wave is not a horror film, not even pro-.

perly a thriller; it's much more subtle and disturbing. To myself I call it, an exposure. The mysteries are there, they don't need embellishment: Peter Weir has created a filmed fiction that exposes us to them. And so The Last Wave joins those rare works of art that border on being acts of magic. The plot: a corporate lavyyer (Richard Chamberlain) becomes obsessed with prophetic, apocalyptic dreams, and in them he sees aborigines (Gulpilil, of Walkabout, and the tribal leader Nandjiwarra Amagula).

The mere expressions on Gulpilil's face will take you places that are off-limits for most movies. And the succession of images -literally moving pictures that Weir exposes to you will make most films look like mere moving glossies. (MV) A LITTLE ROMANCE The first Orion release is presided over by the spirit of Walt Disney. Diane Lane and Theolonious 8ernard expertly play two sweet 12-year-olds who fall in love in Paris, of all places; run away to Venice, of all places; and take Lord Olivier, of all people, in tow. While he does his best to play the very, very, very sweetest old man who ever lived, you gag on the visual sugar.

And you keep wishing that the spirit of W.C. Fields could materialize just once (and where more aptly than in the person of Olivier?) and give the little bastards a boot in the butt. Only an ogre could fail to find some pleasure here, but only a fool could fail to be disappointed Everyone was expecting better intentions from Orion. It's a first-rate Disney film, though. Kids'll love it.

(MV) LOVE AT FIRST BITE Low-rent fun that exuberantly lives off its own junkly juices. George Hamilton's fastidious Dracula possesses a perfect pallor and a sense of comic timing that even Noel Coward might envy as he elegantly offers Susan St. James eternal affection and care-free death. But first he must outfox her ardent suitor, Richard Benjamin. Benjamin is a vampire-hating psychoanalyst loathe to lose his best patient and the woman he might worship, Besides, she owes him a lot of money.

She's also one of the sloppier high-style models likely to strike a pose in the polished pages of Harper's Bazaar. But Hamiton learns to overlook her littered life and loves her anyway. For all its brainless intentions, the fun sometimes turns sour when it focuses stupidly on ethnic humor. Still that's only occasional and the rest is all unabashed fun. (GV) PEOPLE SOUP It's "only a short," and it's playing with The Ravagers, which is too bad.

Alan Arkin has written and directed a small talking funny-piece that can stand with the best of the old silent shorts. It's too short to summarize without giving its effects away, but you laugh and hoot and you don't want it to end. I write this in the hope that UA Cinema Center, or whoever owns the thing, will run it with more popular films than The Ravagers so that more people can get to see it. And in hopes that Alan Arkin will make a feature of it. (MV).

THE PRISONER OFZENDA This comic retelling of Sir Anthony Hope Hawkin's Victorian adventure story is as shameless in its pursuit of slapstick laughs and the limits of PG groin-humor, as the original novel's romantic treacle was naively silly. Buffoonery amidst the roccoco splendors of Vienna makes for cheap sure laughs, but old hand Quine directs at a pace that too often lets the audience stay a joke ahead of the film. Although Elke Sommer should leave her Barbara Eden imitation in the bottle, most of the cast leers and cackles and smacks its lips with suitable, if not memorable, relish. Peter Sellers plays a set of clownish dopplegangers: King Rudolph of Ruritania, played as a cross between Marcel Proust and Tweetie Bird, and the London working-stiff who impersonates the king. But Gregory Sierra steals scene after scene with his looks, and his impeccably timed performance that suffers exploding croquet Dunaway as his ex-wife, and Ricky Schroder as the weepy kid are all horribly miscast.

True, it's worth a tear or two, but those should be shed for the wasted talent, including that of Strother Martin and Elisha Cook who com? on camera only long enough to give Ricky a big hug. Of course, in this movie that sort of thing takes a while. (GVI CHINA SYNDROME Stunning. One of the great thrillers. Not only because it succeeds in scaring the daylights out of you and not only because its subject (a nuclear accident) is serious and possible.

What gives this film distinction is that it works so well as entertainment while catching our American speech (or attempts at speech), our work-a-day ways, and reflecting our ambivalent personal reactions to our national diiemmas. It's refreshing beyond hyperbole to see such suspense generated not by distortions of human perversion andor hedonism, but by well-portrayed human reactions in a terrible but not exaggerated situation. All the stars contribute some of their best work of their lives Jane Fonda has never been more touching. But the eye of the hurricane is Jack Lemmon, giving his best performance since The Apartment and Days of Wine and Roses. (MV) DAWN OF THE DEAD Whatever director George Romero does back there in Pittsburgh is always worth watching anywhere.

Nobody now working the horror genre says as much as successfully. This is Chapter Two of Night of the Living Dead and here the humans aren't half so effective at ridding themselves and their world of the creatures they conquered in the first film. Romero is a dead shot with social satire and as such is a pretty dangerous man. He would have us realize that horror is home-grown and that no society, however satisfying its surface life is said to be, is safe from the trap of unexamined living. (GV) THE DEER HUNTER Insidious.

Its excellences overpower your emotions while its evasions subvert your thought. Nobody ever says "gook," but the Vietnamese all look like "Japs'' in a World War II war, and these incredibly idealized Americans are virgin to American changes; they've never heard of drugs, rock 'n' roll, or The CBS Evening News. So The Deer Hunter fulfills the deepest fantasy of mainstream America: that 1972 be magically transformed into 1942. Yet while director Cimino lies like Kissinger he films like Ford: Deer Hunter is incredibly powerful to watch, and DeNiro, and Christopher Walken, John Savage and Meryl Streep are excellent. So Cimino supplies us with a powerful new memory, less threatening and far more exciting than our dimming, dismaying memories of what happened to us all.

Horrific history remembered as noble fantasy can only create more horrific history. Cimino bids to become our own Leni Riefenstahl. (MV) HAIR Somehow Milos Foreman has transcended the pap of his material to produce a lively, infectiously sincere film that dances you along. There are a hundred moments of beautiful quick exchanges between these players which touch you, involve you, make you smile. Each moment is small but each is genuine, grounded in understanding and observation; their effect is cumulative.

The dancing, choreography by Twyla Tharp, is perfect loose, light, hardly stylized at all (or so it looks), less like a chorus line and more like a lot of people romping across a field. Most of the music is just as dumb as it ever was, but in the one good musicalmoment of the film, Cheryl Barnes sings ''Easy to Be Hard'' with the force and punty of a young Aretha. Hair could have been as grotesque a depiction of the '60s as Grease was of the '50s frankly expected it to be. A WALTER M1RISCH PRODUCTION LYNNE REDBACK UOUEL JEFFRIES ELI SOMMER GREGORY 9EI9W JEREMV KEMP CATHERINE SCHELL is Orjmjlmd ty EDWARD ROSE Him ty HENRYMANCINI ALBERT WHITLOCK WALTER MIRISCH RICHARD QUINE A UNIVERSAL PICTURE SDCS NC RES6vD P(jf PNMfcMMi MilTIM MANN CHINESE Hollywood 464-81 1 1 DAILY 315 5 30 8:00 -1015 PM MIDNIGHT SHOWS FRI. wd SAT.

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