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DTH Omnibus Page 7 Thursday November 1, 1990 Turkey hunting and gratuitous Jack Repossessed Linda Blair, Ned Beatty and Leslie Neilsen drdr 12 ince it's turkey-hunting sea son again, I know I'm gonna get major flak from Wanda Bodine as soon as I whip out the old full-choke twelve- gauge, jump into a camouflage jumpsuit and put on my hat with the little ear flaps. For the last three, four years, Wanda's been on this animal-rights binge which includes turkeys. Like they're not gonna die anyway! I told her, "Wanda, there is noth ing strange or perverted about blow ing the head off a gobbler and splat tering a little turkey flesh on a tree trunk. The whole country was founded on this principle. The Pilgrims did it." But she won't listen. She thinks a human being with a twelve-gauge shotgun has an advantage over a tur .key. And I've told her, "Wanda, there's more turkeys that escape than there are getting wasted. We only kill the stupid ones. It's important that the stupid turkeys die. Darwin said so." But you can't use logic on this woman. So this year I'm gonna set down the complete rules and proce dures of turkey hunting so that all you un-American Pilgrim-haters can un derstand. 1 ) We don't chase the turkeys. No man could move that fast while luggin a beer chest. We sit in a hollowed out tree-log with bushes on our head, and we make a female turkey noise with a little reedy rubber gizmo that sounds like a fat man blowing his nose. If you're a male turkey, this sounds like female turkey is saying, Hey, Cheers to Sibling Rivalry Kirstie Alley, Bill Pullman, Scott Bakula, Ed O'Neill - directed by Carl Reiner Plaza 967-4737 cooo nrj irstie Alley playing a neu- rotic, uptight, repressed wife ? Unbelievable! f Okay, not so unbeliev- able. How about this: Married with Children's Al Bundy, Ed O'Neill, as a caring, sensitive, romantic police of ficer? Unbelievable! But true! Alley and director Carl Reiner have scored a hit with Sibling Rivalry, a comedy of corpses, conspiracies and communication breakdowns. Any Joe Bob Briggs Rambo, wanna party ?' When you hear a gobble, that means a torn turkey is answering back and, as soon as he gets close to you, you unload both barrels of buckshot and watch him crumple to the earth and bleed to death. In other words, it's like work ing Times Square. 2) But let's say you don't want a torn turkey. Most females are smarter than the males, so about the only ones you have a chance with are the jail-bait female turkeys, the ones that were hatched this spring. You can buy a honker that will make em think they're going to an M.C. Hammer concert. Sometimes ten or twenty of em will run up to you together, like you're the New Kids on the Block road manager. You can kill a lot more of these, because they're smaller. We professional turkey hunters call this the Roman Polanski Technique. 3) But the true turkey-hunting experts want to get the old gobblers, the ones that are so old they don't mate anymore, and so you don't have a chance using the singles-bar line. They're just like human old people, though. All they wanna do is sit around and talk to other turkeys and complain about their children. So what do you do? You make these hcxrrible yelping sounds, which is what old gobblers sound like whan they're whining, and makes the elderly tur keys think you are an elderly turkey, too, and so you might be willing to listen to him. You're making these noises that, to the turkey, sound like, "Have I told you about my kidney problem?" And so they slowly wander over to you, but they re ornery. 1 hey don't trust you. You've got to keep Chip Sudderth doubts about Alley's ability to carry a movie vanished with the success of Look Who's Talking, in which she not only shone, but helped resurrect John Travolta's career. This time Reiner gives her sole possession of the lime light, and she pulls it off again. The producers of Cheers deserve a round of applause for "discovering" Alley, otherwise this talented actress might still be stuck on the Starship Enterprise as Star Trek II's Lt. Saavik. Instead, she has emerged as a gifted comedienne whose characters rede fine "hysteria." Alley's character Marjorie has a great deal to be hysterical about. She's stuck in a passionless marriage with Harry (Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap), a mama's, papa's, sister's and talking forever and it's worth it, because they're the biggest turkeys you can kill. And so you throw in stuff like "There hasn't been any decent music since Tommy Dorsey died," and "That Sid Caesar now there was a comedian." And pretty soon the turkey comes over to bore you only, as soon as he does, he gets three tons of shotgun pellets in his cute little elderly Mr. GrandpaTurkey face. And Wanda thinks this is cruel to animals. This is an art form. And speaking of huge turkeys, Repossessed sounded like a great idea: Leslie Neilsen performs an exorcism on Linda Blair. But it's one of those deals that can't decide whether it wants to be a pure-dee Naked Gun rip. ff , with 9,000 sight gags, or have a real honest-to-God comedy plot, and so it's neither fish nor fowl, turkey nor carp. It's got some horse laughs in it, but you keep going "Shouldn't I be laughing again by now?" I don't wanna be too hard on it, though, because Linda Blair is the ultimate drive-in star of the eighties. Even when she's spewing vomit all over her family, like she is in this movie, she gets more attention from red-blooded American males than Playboy Playmates do. Whenever we wanna pump up the ratings on my cable show, we show a Linda Blair movie. I'm not kidding. Something about that East German shot-putter look that just drives the guys wild. For once in my life I'm stumped. I can't figure it out. Four breasts. Chunk-spewing. Poodle dog ground up in a tree-branch compactor. Fire-breathing. 745 sight gags. Evian holy water. Gratuitous rap song. Gratuitous Wally George. Gratuitous Jack Lalanne. A 54 on the Vomit Meter. Split pea soup Fu. Drive In Academy Award nominations for Anthony Starke, as the Catholic priest Alley's mixed-up family frenzy brother's boy. His familial devotion frustrates Marjorie, because Harry's family refuses to accept her or even acknowledge her presence. When Marjorie's sister encourages her to have an affair and dump Harry, Marjorie surprises herself by hooking up with some guy in the grocery-store checkout lane. Complication No. 1: Eight years of repressed passion cause her to give her one-night stand a fatal heart at tack. Complication No. 2: She discov ers afterward that she's just killed her brother-in-law Charles (Sam Elliot). It's too much for a sweet Catholic girl to-take. It gets worse. Complication No. 3: Nick (Bill Pullman) , a hapless purveyor of verti cal blinds, sneaks into the hotel room that was the site of Marjorie and Charles' ill-fated tryst. (The door happened to be open, and his job hinges on getting a demonstration r - M b'Z tJf' Linda Blair, seen here after she possession by Ned Beatty and his lipstick lizard wife, Lana Schwab, in the holiday classic 'Repossessed' who motivates himself by reading ratting her hair, puckering up again Believe in Yourself, by Charles Manson; after all these years, turning herself Leslie Neilsen, as Father Mayii, for into a giant ice-cream cone and saying "Luke, remember, when you screaming"Lickmc! Lick me!" What fall on your face, you're still moving an actress. forward;" and, of course, Linda, for Two and a half stars. Joe Bob says caking on the cracked-skin makeup, room set up.) He slips and crashes a heaw bar onto Charles' "sleeping" body. He therefore believes he killed Charles. Under an inexperienced director, a plot driven by mistaken impressions, breakdowns in communication and conspiracies will turn out no better than an average Three's Company episode. But Carl Reiner's success stems from his effective pacing; as Alley becomes more frenzied, so does the rest of the picture. Martha Goldhirsh's script doesn't seem to take particular advantage of Alley's abili ties, but builds to a climax steadily and effectively. The only major fault lies in an overlong epilogue which makes for some nice sentimental drama, but just isn't as funny as the rest of the picture. Things to watch for in Sibling Ri valry: The scene where Marjorie and Nick, in an effort to destroy the evi dence of the one-night fling, search Lalanne has been fully healed of demonic check it out. for a missing "article of protection." Watching the repressed Alley retrace her steps in the hotel room and recre ate poses, trying to find where she and Charles might have left that article, is hilarious. Ed O'Neill playing a gentleman. No kidding. He wants to date Marjorie's sister because "She makes me feel good about myself." Al Bundy, what's happened to you? The reason this movie is called SiblingRivalry, when the plot has little to do with sibling rivalry. If you figure out why, you're one up on this re viewer. Despite that little problem, this is a must-see movie. - wait for the video OO go to the dollar theater COO only pay matinee price OOOO pay full price OOOOO take your sister, too
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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Nov. 1, 1990, edition 1
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