THREE AMIGOS!
Gene Kelly in The Pirate, Peter O'Toole in My Favorite Year, Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo -- each played an actor forced to project his romantic persona into real life. There are few things funnier or more touching than the sight of a performer's image slipping down around his knees while he tries to yank it into place before anyone notices he is only human.
To the ranks of those who have braved this indignity in the cause of laughter must be added Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short. They play a team of silent movie heroes who from a distance look like just the fellows to save a Mexican village from the depredations of El Guapo and his bandidos. Alas, the telegram inviting them to jump down off the screen and into the dusty Mexican streets is garbled in transmission; to the trio it reads like a bid to make a profitable personal appearance. And it arrives when they need money; their studio boss (Joe Mantegna) has fired them for making an outrageous salary demand: payment in cash rather than in freebies.
As usual, Martin (who wrote the script with Co-Producer Lorne Michaels and Songwriter Randy Newman) plays a fellow with misplaced confidence in his own shrewdness; Chase, for a change, plays a stupid man; Short is pretty much along for the ride, though he has the best actor's moment, choking himself up as he tells some bewildered children about the high point of his life, when Dorothy Gish praised one of his performances. There is a lot of good, broad comedy in Three Amigos!, notably an encounter with a singing bush that knows only public domain songs and Martin's turning an attempt to escape from a dungeon into a parody of a Nautilus workout. Under John Landis' slaphappy direction, the movie does not always bounce that wildly off the wall. But Monty Python would not entirely disown it either.
By Richard Schickel
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS
Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis) is a skid row nerd, languishing in Mushnik's Flower Shop. He loves the tramp goddess Audrey (Ellen Greene), but she too willingly suffers the bondage and discipline of the notorious Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. (Steve Martin). Not until Seymour strikes a Faustian bargain with a talking plant he calls Audrey II does our hero find the girl of his dreams. And the killer vegetation of his most festering nightmares.
You can try not liking this adaptation of the Off-Broadway musical hit -- it has no polish and a pushy way with a gag -- but the movie sneaks up on you, about as subtly as Audrey II. The songs are neat pastiches of '60s pop. The plant is an animatronic wonder, all blue gums, naughty tendrils and mighty mouth. Moranis and Greene make for a comely-homely pair of thwarted lovers, and Martin is his hilarious self, libeling all dentists who had just managed to forget Marathon Man. Then Bill Murray shows up as the perfect dental patient, sublime masochist to Martin's cheerful sadist, and strolls away with ; the picture. Little Shop never quite recovers its bearings; the viewer may not either. Death by laughter. -- By Richard Corliss
THE MORNING AFTER
Here it is, the worst nightmare of the singles scene: you go home with someone whose name you didn't quite catch in the bar, spend the night with him or her, and wake up to find your brief encounter permanently dead beside you.