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ICEMAN
Civilization stinks. This is the message of virtually every nature-vj.-nurture parable to hit the screen lately, from Splash to Greystoke to this feral melodrama about the encounter between a group of Arctic scientists and a prehistoric man they find miraculously preserved in ice. Tenterhook anxiety builds in the film's first hour as the scientists (led by Timothy Hutton and Lindsay Crouse) discover and then thaw out the creature (played by the gifted actor-director-choreographer John Lone). But once Hutton and the creature establish contact, moviegoers must make a great leap of faith, or surrender to the influence of an illegal hallucinogen, to watch the proceedings with a straight face. By then Director Fred Schepisi and Screenwriters Chip Proser and John Drimmer have all surrendered to Neanderthal sentimentality, and the rest is silliness. —R.C.
POLICE ACADEMY
It is the solemn annual duty of film critics to explain why some feckless movie like Animal House or Caddyshack, Stripes or Porky's is, ahem, not really a very distinguished work. And perhaps express concern for the fate of American thought and culture when such films achieve blinding commercial success. The shame of the nation this year is Police Academy.
Yet aside from its most obvious defect—the absence of Bill Murray from the cast led by Steve Guttenberg—the picture does not awaken the denunciatory spirit. Like others of its ilk it is solidly grounded in three great traditions of low comedy: it is cheerfully contemptuous of authority; it is leeringly respectful of the shapely female form; and, above all, its director, Hugh Wilson (who wrote the film with Neal Israel and Pat Proft), understands that you can go a long way in comedy on sheer energy. His picture seethes like a study hall when the teacher has stepped out of the room. Everywhere you look someone is making funny noises or thinking about wrecking a car. There is even something for the odd adult here: a dreamily delicate performance by George Gaynes as the academy's superintendent, a man whose mind went AWOL a couple of decades back. In other words, Police Academy's gains at the box office are not entirely ill gotten. Mack Sennett would have understood them. —R.S.