Rushes

STRANGE BREW

Smart people can make the dumbest moves. Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis were the two brightest lights of SCTV, who stumbled into celebrity by impersonating a couple of Canadian oafs named Doug and Bob McKenzie. These Two Stooges of the Great White North sprawled about in parkas, plaid shirts and toques, guzzling their beloved Molson's and calling each other "hosers." Now they have been given 90 minutes of screen time and a license to steal children's lunch money. Strange Brew, which the two stars also directed, sets the Cheech and Chong of malt into an informal remake of Hamlet and includes "quotations" from Star Wars, Superman, W.C. Fields movies and Polish jokes. (Sample dialogue, Bob to heroine: "Hey, you're real nice. If I didn't have puke breath I'd kiss you.") On TV Thomas and Moranis are sophisticated parodists; on film they are clod farceurs.

CUJO

Cujo takes its ill-natured time getting its potential victims, a mother (Dee Wallace, who played a less anxious mom in E.T) and her young son (Danny Pintauro), isolated from help and into deadly conflict with a possessed spirit. But it is worth waiting for the careful logic of Novelist Stephen King's plot to work itself out. For their demon is not from outer space or the weirder reaches of the occult. No, Cujo is a junkyard dog. But he is huge. And maddened by rabies. And thoroughly implacable in his need to kill. As he proved in Alligator, Director Lewis Teague is a sly and stylish merchant of fear; as she proved in The Howling, Wallace knows how to play a scared lady; and as he proves on the spot, little Danny Pintauro is an actor of uncommon appeal.

LIQUID SKY

Oddity-of-the-month honors go to this low-budget ($400,000) marriage of science fiction and punk. As if herpes and AIDS weren't enough to worry about, we now learn that aliens have come to earth to kill and vaporize horny humans during intercourse. Like Strange Invaders (a much better movie), Liquid Sky says that there is nothing more alien than an earthling circa 1983. The victims here are denizens of New York's underground--zombies of the spirit, existing on quick fixes of drugs and sex--for whom death is just the ultimate high. This kinky, doggedly erratic comedy was made in the city by Soviet Emigre Slava Tsukerman in a style that suggests a head-shop fire sale: garishly painted faces, a closeup of a heroin needle doing its dirty work, clever special effects computerized colors bright as an acic dream. Liquid Sky, now playing tc packed houses in a small Manhattan theater, is a two-hour act of imagination undisciplined by talent. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.