Outrageous sight gags

Press, 22 September 1987, Page 24

Outrageous sight gags

By

DAVID CLARKSON

One of her fellow dinner guests has just leaned

across to Gilda Radner and whispered conspiratorially, "Don’t be frightened dear, she’s a little bit eccentric.” It is a scene from “Haunted Honeymoon,” and it is one of the few instances of understatement to be found in this completely over-the-top horror/farce.

What prompts the line is the dinner table repartee from the family matriarch, Aunt Kate, who has just announced: “I know that one of you is a werewolf.”

That was almost as startling as her grand entrance down the sweeping staircase of this anything-but-ordinary family manor. She proclaimed: “This house is cursed.” It is one of the film’s strange quirks that Dom DeLuise, who plays Aunt Kate, is not in the role of the character who likes to dress in women’s clothes. He is a magnificent Great Aunt, though viewers might be forgiven for wondering when that gag is going to end. It is not a role like the ones Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis played in

“Some Like it Hot,” or Dustin Hoffman played in “Tootsie.”

Tm not a guy dressed in drag. I’m one of the female leads in this picture. So it takes a whole different thought process,” he explained. He got the role after having dinner one night with Gene Wilder, who was writing, directing and starring in the film. What clinched it, was DeLuise’s devastating impression of Ethel Barrymore in “The Spiral Staircase.” Wilder telephoned him with the offer soon afterwards. “He said he was writing a new movie and wanted me to play the eccentric 83-year-old matriarch of a weird family. I was sure it was a gag, but I went along with it I said, “Great Gene, anything you say. Do I bring my own gown? Who’s the leading man, Maria Ouspenskaya?” DeLuise remembers. This 80 minute video, rated PG, has just been released by RCA, Columbia and Hoyts Video.

It is enormous fun, cleverly written, well

made, packed with the most outrageous sight gags, and some nice special effects. The plot is far too complicated to describe in any detail. The bare bones of it are that Larry Abbot (Wilder) and Vickie Pearle (Radner), stars of the 1939 radio programme “Manhattan Mystery Theatre,” are planning to be married. Larry’s career is being ruined by sudden outbreaks of irrational fear. His Uncle Paul, a psychiatrist, believes he can cure him by scaring him to death. While the mayhem happens around him, Larry is left to try to convince himself, "Whoops, there goes my imagination again.”

It is about that stage that things start to get complicated.

The film is Wilder’s tribute to the whole raft of horror movies set around ancient manors where the guests dressed for murder. At one level, it is a study of a kind of Hollywood folklore. Wilder says it is also

youthful taste in entertainment — Saturday film matinees, or the shows from the very end of radio’s golden era. “When radio! did crime thrillers like ‘The Shadow* with his hypnotic power to cloud men’s minds, or ‘The Inner Sanctum’ with its creaking door and homicidal host, there was no one there to protect you,” he said. “You were alone in that haunted house where no one had ever survived a night in the blue room. Radio took you into the scariest place on Earth, your own mind. Today’s hack and chop pictures don’t compare.” Gilda Radner, who plays Wilder’s fiancee, is his real life wife. She is a veteran of “Saturday Night Live,” the show that also provided a vehicle for John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. “Haunted Honeymoon” is her fourth film.

Another feature of the video is the dour butler with the hilariously surreptitious drinking habits, Pfister, played by Bryan Pringle with a set of the largest eyebrows since Chewbacca.