From the San Francisco Examiner: ``There are a lot of movies struggling to get out of Crazy in Alabama, and most of them are bad.''   The Toronto Sun: ``Giffith's performance is daffy and endearing, but the twisted comedy of her half of the tale eventually drives the movie right off the rails.''   Newsday: ``Watching Crazy in Alabama is like dating someone with a split personality, each side of which is competing jealously for your attention.''   The Dallas Morning News: ``Mr. Banderas fills his movie with lots of overbrearingly stylized imagery. The results are something like a big-budget student film.''

But, just as had been the case with Dirty Dancing, there was something about the reviews which made me want to see the movie.

This is not a movie for film buffs, or movie buffs, or film fans. This is a movie for film freaks, those who love not only the ways in which movies can be wonderfully good but also the ways in which they can be wonderfully bad. The reviews didn't begin to plumb the depths of what is dreadful about this movie. This movie may have a great future as a midnight feature in cities like San Francisco where there are many movie freaks. It is one of those movies that will come up over and over again in conversations in bars where people say, ``Do you remember X, with A and B in it? It was SOOO bad!''

It is To Kill a Mockingbird meets screwball comedy, with occasional touches of Ed Wood (Plan Nine from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda) and Pedro Almódovar. Roger Ebert's review points out the most conspicuous flaw (oh, I need a much stronger word than this here) in the conception of this film. You cannot make a movie in which a woman in an appalling black wig (Melanie Griffith, no less) carries around the head of the husband she has murdered in a hatbox and hears it talking to her (other people occasionally hear it too) and, in the same movie, have a civil rights theme in which a teenage Black protestor gets killed by a Southern sheriff. You cannot do this. You must not do this. Anybody who has been to film school knows this. Anybody who has sat in lots of theatres on Saturday nights knows this. There is nothing funny about Blacks getting killed protesting segregation. You cannot make this the major subplot of a zany comedy and keep jumping back and forth between the two plots.

This movie is directed by Anthonio Banderas, who happens to be Melanie Griffith's husband. How else could a director convince an Academy Award winning actress, a beautiful woman who I have always loved ever since I first saw her in Jonathan Demme's film Something Wild, to put on a one of the world's worst wigs and dress in clothes that represent California supermarket couture at its worst and play the lead in a movie where one of the big jokes is that everyone in the movie thinks that this woman is beautiful whereas in fact she is the ugliest trashy divorcee one might ever expect to come across in Santa Monica or Waikiki?

Jennifer Jason Leigh (another of my favorite actresses) could have been right at home with this role. But Melanie Griffith? Melanie Griffith???    I mean, really!

There have been many instances in movie history of directors making movies to give their wife or girlfriend the chance to for a sort of starrring role they could never have got otherwise. Need I mention Peter Bogdanovich making Daisy Miller just to give his girlfriend (at that time) Cybill Shepherd the chance to prove that she could be a real dramatic actress and not just another pretty face (as she had been in The Last Picture Show, and would be in Taxi Driver, among others)? Well, what Shepherd proved conclusively was that she was totally incapable of acting (especially with a Southern accent!). Bogdanovich's career survived the movie, but hers was almost wrecked by it until television gave her a second chance with Moonlighting.

But here we have the opposite case, where an Academy-award winning actress is willing to make a sacrifice bunt in order to give her husband's first attempt at directing some chance of success.

This is one of those movies where one just throws everything in the pot that happens to be in the refrigerator. It's one of those movies where the entire point is for the director (and producers) to prove that they are actually capable of making a movie and completing it. Whether it's any good or not is a luxury the makers clearly couldn't afford to worry about.

Roger Ebert's review quotes a few of the really atrocious lines from the screenplay. The sheriff at the swimming pool that the Black teenagers are trying to integrate says, ``You are trespassing on public property.'' Clearly this line was intended to be funny, but given the situation, one has no inclination to laugh. In Melanie Griffith's completely bizarre courtroom speech at the end, she justifies having murdered her husband by saying, among other things, ``You spend all day making a beautiful meal for your husband and he comes home and gobbles it down and a little piece of you dies.'' To which Ebert comments, ``Yeah, and big piece of him does.''

But I was disappointed that Ebert, who, after all, wrote the screenplay for Beneath the Valley of the Dolls, did not notice all the myriad ways in which the script for this movie is gloriously dreadful. This movie is camp at its best. Not camp that self-consciously sets out to be camp, but camp made with complete seriousness.

A check of Rotten Tomatoes shows a number of favorable comments about this movie. This certainly makes me doubt the competence of the critics who wrote these comments. And yet.... And yet....

I was tempted to walk out after the first half hour of this film, something which I never do. But there are some beautiful outdoor scenes --- something which is pretty much inevitable in any movie shot in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana. And if you stay with the film and give up being a critic and just let yourself have fun, by the end I think you'll find that in its own way it has its charm. I was glad I saw it while I had the chance.

-- Lee Lady <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>