Flak Magazine: Review of Cecil B. DeMented, 08-11-00

After a slew of bad movies (Bonfire of the Vanities, anyone?) and scads of embarassing, publicity driven appearances, Melanie Griffith decided to repair her sinking career. But starring in two well-received, low-budget pictures (Crazy in Alabama and Another Day in Paradise) didn't do the trick, as neither film scored big at the box office.

So what's a girl to do? There's always self deprecation.

Griffith seems a natural fit for the starring role in gross-out guru John Waters' latest feature about a has-been A-list actress who's kidnapped by an independent filmmaker (Stephen Dorff) and his friends and forced to star in their low-budget, anti-Hollywood film. But these strokes of casting perfection — for reasons of scheduling, budget or, more often that not, ego — rarely work together in the way they do here.

As the bratty Honey Whitlock, Griffith is dead on. It's not much of a stretch to imagine Waters modeling the preening, power-flaunting Whitlock of the film's opening sequence after the actress who twice married Don Johnson, appeared on "Hollywood Squares" and hosted a TV special to celebrate the opening of EuroDisney.

Despite the fact that she's helping Waters skewer careers like hers, Griffith — along with the always-amusing Dorff — dominates the action, hamming it up while her hair is bleached with some harsh chemical probably only recently invented. When Honey proclaims her naive belief that Hollywood makes the best movies in the world and that she's proud to represent that tradition, Griffith might as well be winking and elbowing her co-stars.

Of whom there are slightly too many. It's clear that a film populated by Dorff, Griffith and a bunch of relatively unknown young actors should play to the strengths of its two stars. Yet at times, Cecil seems to be more of an ensemble flick. Unfortunately, these same moments are also the points in the film during which the least amount of shoot 'em up action is taking place.

The result of this is a sense of over-padding. There's little question that the film's best scenes are the guerrilla filmmaking sequences, like an early one in which Cecil, Honey and the Sprocket Holes (Cecil's name for his band of accomplices) crash a cineplex screening of the director's cut of Patch Adams. Guns are fired into popcorn machines. Tear gas canisters are thrown the aisles. A bad film is humorously parodied with a host of sniveling, pathetic looking children incessantly whining, "Dr. Patch, Dr. Patch", while the audience reaches for the Kleenex.

But once the scene ends, Waters takes the focus off of Griffith and Dorff and spends far too much time setting up the next stunt. The extra 10 minutes added to the film by this sort of monkeying around could easily be better spent on more zany guerrilla filming sequences and additional parodies of Hollywood films, such as the not-quite-fleshed-out-enough Forrest Gump II: Gump Again, starring Kevin Nealon.

It's a problem that plagues all but Waters' best films. In Pecker and Polyester, Waters most resembled that cleverly ironic kid at the back of the classroom who was always ready with snide sarcasm or a quick quip. But in this film and others, Waters seems not to know which jokes work. While Cecil contains no disaster on par with the eternity-long "toe-sucking" scene from Mondo Trasho, the boredom that results from Waters's failure to self-edit turns what could have been a hilarious film into something that's somewhat amusing.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)