This sets up the body of the movie, in which Clifford’s uncle Martin (Charles Grodin) agrees to take the lad for a week, partly to convince his girlfriend (Mary Steenburgen) that he does, indeed, like children. But no one could like this child, who grows enraged when his uncle won’t take him to Dinosaur Park, and plays a series of practical jokes, beginning with filling his uncle’s drink with Tabasco sauce and ending with the destruction of his uncle’s plans for the Los Angeles transportation system.
Many of the jokes are of a cruel physical nature, involving a hairpiece worn by the uncle’s boss (Dabney Coleman), or face-lifts, or phony bomb threats. What they boil down to is, little Clifford is mean, vindictive, spiteful, and cruel. So hateful that if a real little boy had played him, the movie would be like The Omen filtered through The Good Son and a particularly bad evening of Saturday Night Live.
But Martin Short is clearly not a little boy. He is a curious adult pretending to be a little boy, with odd verbal mannerisms, like always addressing his uncle with lines like “Oh, yes, My Uncle!” and fawning to strangers like a horny spaniel. If Clifford is not a real little boy, then what is he? The movie doesn’t know and neither does the audience, and for much of the running time we sit there staring stupefied at the screen, trying to figure out what the hell we’re supposed to be thinking.
Grodin emerges relatively unscathed, because as a smooth underactor he is able to distance himself from the melee. Steenburgen is given a scene where Coleman assaults her in the back of a limousine, for no reason that the movie really explains. Short has a couple of dance routines that have more to do with his SNL history than with this movie.
And then there is the “climax,” in which Uncle Martin finally does take little Clifford to the Dinosaur Park. The movie treats the sequence as a bravura set piece, but actually it’s an embarrassing assembly of shabby special effects, resulting in absolutely no comic output. At one point the movie sets up an out-of-control thrill ride, and we in the audience think we know how the laughs will build, but we’re wrong. They don’t.
To return to the underlying causes for the movie’s failure: What we have here is a suitable case for deep cinematic analysis. I’d love to hear a symposium of veteran producers, marketing guys, and exhibitors discuss this film. It’s not bad in any usual way. It’s bad in a new way all its own. There is something extraterrestrial about it, as if it’s based on the sense of humor of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe. The movie is so odd, it’s almost worth seeing just because we’ll never see anything like it again, I hope.
Color of Night
(Directed by Richard Rush; starring Bruce Willis, Leslie Ann Warren; 1994)
Color of Night approaches badness from so many directions that one really must admire its imagination. Combining all the worst ingredients of an Agatha Christie whodunit and a sex-crazed slasher film, it ends in a frenzy of recycled thriller elements, with a chase scene, a showdown in an echoing warehouse, and not one but two clichés from Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary: the Talking Killer and the Climbing Villain. I am compelled to admit that the use of the high-powered industrial staple gun is original.
The film stars Bruce Willis as an East Coast psychologist who loses his faith in analysis after he talks tough to a patient and she hurls herself through the window of his skyscraper office, falling to the ground far below in the best suicide effect since The Hudsucker Proxy. (The pool of bright red blood under her body turns black, as Willis develops psychosomatic color blindness right there on the spot.)
Desperate for a change, Willis heads for Los Angeles, where his best friend (Scott Bakula) has a psychiatric practice that finances a luxurious lifestyle. He is a guest one night at a group therapy session run by the friend. The group is an updated, kinky version of one of those collections of eccentrics so beloved by Dame Agatha, who in plot exercises like The Mousetrap introduced a roomful of weirdos so that all of them could have their turn at being the Obvious Suspect.
In no time at all a suspect is required: Willis’s friend is found murdered in his high-security mansion, and of course there is a reason why each member of the group seems guilty. The group includes Sondra (Lesley Ann Warren), a nymphomaniac with a nervous giggle and a careless neckline; Clark (Brad Dourif), who lost his job at a law firm after he started compulsively counting everything; Buck (Lance Henrickson), an ex-cop who foams at the mouth with anger at the least provocation; Casey (Kevin J. O’Connor), a neurotic artist; and Ricky, a young man with a gender identity problem, of whom the less said the better.
Willis, who wants to retire from psychology, takes over the group at the urging of Martinez, the detective in charge of the murder investigation, who is played by Rubén Blades as an anthology of Latino cop shtick (during a chat with Willis on a sidewalk, he slams a passerby against a car and frisks him while continuing the conversation). The therapy group is of course a seething hotbed of neurosis and suspicion, and the screenplay (by Matthew Chapman and Billy Ray) sends Willis to visit each of the group members in turn, so they can spread paranoia about the other members while establishing themselves as possible suspects.
Meanwhile, a beautiful young woman materializes in Willis’s life. She is Rose (Jane March, from The Lover), who seems to come from nowhere, who is lovely, who adores him, and who quickly joins him in a swimming pool sex scene that contained frontal nudity by Willis before the film was trimmed to satisfy the MPAA’s censors. (The best possible argument for including Willis’s genitals would have been that the movie, after all, contains everything else.)
Readers of Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary will guess that Rose is explained by the Law of Economy of Characters, which teaches that there are no unnecessary characters in a movie. Either she is there simply to supply him with a partner in the sex scenes, or she is somehow involved with the mystery surrounding the murder. How and why and if this is true, I will not reveal.
There is, indeed, not much I can say about the rest of the movie without revealing plot points so subtle and cleverly concealed that they would come as astonishing surprises to Forrest Gump. So let’s move on to the chase scene, in which a bright red car with blacked-out windows tries to force Willis off the road. It fails, but comes back for more, and there is a scene where Willis’s car is driving on a street next to a parking garage, and a high-angle shot shows the red car on the roof of the garage, stalking him.
It is clear that from this angle the driver of the car cannot possibly see over the edge of the garage, and thus could not have any idea of where Willis’s car is, but wait, there’s more: A little later, the red car pushes another car off the top of the parking garage, so that the falling car barely misses Willis. How could the person in the red car know where a pedestrian six floors below would be by the time he pushes a car over the edge? Answer: This movie will do anything for a cheap action scene, and so we should not be surprised, a little later, when people who should be perfectly happy to remain at ground level go to a lot of trouble to climb a tower so that one can almost fall off, and the other can grab him, during and after heated dialogue in which the plot is explained.