The Kansas City Star from Kansas City, Missouri • 60

in i A lovely but empty landscape Catherine Deneuve magnetic in French film about crumbling empire but its beauty skin deep MOVIE REVIEW By ROBERT BUTLER Arts and Entertainment Editor How it rates a melodrama is rated PG-13 for violence and brief nudity In French with English subtitles Running time is 2 hours 35 minutes most dramatic elements) and fiery intensity from Perez As Camille Linh Dan Pham makes virtually no impression whatsoever Admittedly is a visual wonder filled with arresting armada of boats in a funeral procession the steamy beauty of the rubber-tree plantation the swank sophistication of Saigon under the French the otherworldy beauty of the island outpost to which Jean-Baptiste is exiled You could cut this movie up frame by frame to make exquisite postcards but not sure there's an honest emotional moment in it parents were best friends Enter Jean-Baptiste (Vincent Perez) a dashing young naval officer who has an affair with Eliane and then attracts the attention of Camille When he is posted to a distant outpost Camille follows much to distress The two become fugitives taking refuge with Communist agitators They even produce a child before fate separates them a son who like his mother will be reared by Eliane is played at a melodramatic fever pitch careening from one crisis to another like an old Saturday morning serial never a pause for the players to take a deep breath never a moment when the characters can be observed in a state of non-agitation and as a result virtually no character development Who are these people? What do they really think and believe? What is their inner nature? The film is too busy to bother with such petty concerns At best we get cool elegance from Deneuve (her appearances in a large wardrobe of stunning period costumes are by far the As visually splendid as it is dramatically lightweight Regis is like grand opera stripped of its music plenty of pageantry and spectacle much noise and fireworks but in the end it has no real reason for being Clearly Wargnier envisioned this as a sweeping epic in which intimate romance would unfold against a background of unrest The setting is Indo-China in the 1930s and as colonial empire crumbles and the nation of Vietnam emerges the sort of thing that worked well for Bernardo Bertolucci in and Last probably because Bertolucci is a true believer in socialist ideals But hard to tell if Wargnier believes in anything centers on Eliane (Catherine Deneuve) a beautiful tough-willed woman who rules her rubber plantation with an iron hand in a velvet glove and who above having the native workers beaten when they misbehave Her one soft spot appears to be her adopted daughter Camille (Linh Dan Pham) whose late Bruce Campbell in of Making horror fun of goes overboard but it also gives its audience what it wants By ROBERT BUTLER Arts and Entertainment Editor How it rates Vt of Darkness" a horror comedy Is rated for language and violence Running time is 1 hour 17 minutes Catherine Deneuve (below) received an Academy Award nomination for her role in which also features Vincent Perez It also was nominated for Best Foreign Film MOVIE REVIEW Sam of is a great bad movie an extravaganza of B-movie sensibilities a kinetic pigout of go-bonkers cinematic overkill a non-stop orgy of violence and low humor In short the movie every nerdy adolescent wanted to make someday a sequel to over-the-top Dead 2: Dead by (1987) that visually crazed spoof of horror movies featuring brainless college kids a remote cabin in the woods and a malevolent spirit that picks them off one by one The sole survivor of the weekend Ash (Bruce Campbell) was sucked into a vortex that deposited him and a Olds in the middle of a barren landscape populated by knights in armor of picks up at precisely that point Ash who has a chainsaw instead of a right hand (see Dead is quickly enslaved as a prisoner of war Taken in chains to a castle by Prince Arthur (Marcus Gilbert) thrown into a pit inhabited by gruesome monsters He uses his chainsaw appendage to fight his way out and the resident wise man (Ian Abercrombie) suggests that Ash may be the man foretold by a prophecy who will rid the land of the evil spirits that haunt it Our hero travels to a graveyard to recover a vile book of incantations that will send him back to his own time But he remember the spell he is supposed to cast over the volume Verada which of course was spoken by Michael Rennie to the huge robot in Day the Earth Stood Fumbling the words Ash succeeds only in raising an army of skeletons who lay siege to the castle Our boy also finds time to romance a castle maiden (Embeth Davidtz) with endearments such as some sugar and has the local blacksmith build him a mechanical hand The sensibilities are pure Loony Tunes At one point Ash engages in a classic Three Stooges routine of physical comedy except his tormentors are resurrected corpses forever swearing under his breath and delivering comic asides And never see a more unrestrained performance than begin to cover all the eye-rolling yelping and outrageous doubletakes he engages in On the one hand of is puerile atavistic silliness On the other it's a tour de force of action moviemaking Whether you will enjoy it depends upon how many personality traits you share with a 1 4-year-old boy The Kansas City Star Friday February 19 1993.