Quick Cuts

By J.C.

WEDDING IN BLOOD. Two married lovers (Stephane Audran, Michel Piccoli) are driven by their shared need and the transports of passion to commit murder. This woebegone plot, written and directed by the sometimes masterly Claude Chabrol (Le Boucher), needs all the voltage it can stand. From Chabrol and his stars, it gets only a few anemic charges. The paramours are intrepidly bourgeois, their longing for each other so squalidly selfish and narcissistic that every time they paw each other they seem to be polishing a mirror. They lavish the sort of affection and attention on each other that no one else could ever devote to them. That is no small part of the reason Wedding in Blood seems so overwrought, without the tension or the wit that marks Chabrol's best work. He adds, almost desperately, an echo of Greek tragedy in the plot's bleak resolution, but this only serves to make the film portentous. It lurches ahead in predictable little bursts of motion, like a trolley on old tracks.

ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN Carries only the master's name. It is signed by his epigone, Paul Morrissey, who was responsible also for Heat, Trash and Flesh. The movie features the usual Morrissey crew: harpies, fag hags, neuters and no-talents clutter up the screen and pop out of it in 3D, which is two more dimensions than they would provide without technological assistance. The prevailing notion is a retooling of Mary Shelley, en cumbered with dismal sex and heaping portions of grue. Limbs, entrails and corpses come whizzing over the heads of the audience, along with various bats and other creatures of horror fiction. As so often with Morrissey, the joke wears thin fast, destroyed by its own spareness of invention and crudity of spirit. The novelty of Frankenstein is that it was made under more elaborate commercial auspices than usual for the Warhol crowd, but this makes for only sur face differences. Morrissey always made horror movies. This time, he has come out of the closet.

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