MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Delirious’: Good Dream, Bad Picture

Ever have a really bad dream?

“Delirious” (citywide) plays like one. Yet, superficially, it’s a movie that shouldn’t have gone so wrong, so completely.

Imagine it: John Candy, in a comedy about a TV soap opera writer who gets bonked on the head and dreams he’s inhabiting his own show. Isn’t that a vaguely funny idea? And doesn’t the cast of “Delirious”--Mariel Hemingway as the sweet dream girl, Emma Samms as a prime-time witch, Raymond Burr as a rumbling patriarch, David Rasche as a love-addled doctor, Jerry Orbach and Renee Taylor as TV sharks--sound somewhat amusing?

Yet this is a movie that has no pace, no point, no laughs, no sense: a real bona fide stinker, next to which the other recent soap opera comedy, “Soapdish,” looks like “Smiles of a Summer Night.” It’s a movie about a nightmare, but instead of turning into some kind of bad dream itself, it just turns into a bad movie.

The gimmick is simple. Once Candy’s Jack Gable dreams himself into his own soap opera town of Ashford Falls, he’s a kind of god: He can determine everything merely by writing it all up beforehand on his typewriter. His daydreams are fairly banal--rescuing beauties on runaway horses, playing magnificent piano cadenzas--yet, jarringly, we also keep seeing scenes that take place when he isn’t around.

There’s a feeble excuse, involving another writer, Jack’s real-life rival. Then there’s a feeble device to generate tension: Jack suddenly fears he’s becoming a power junkie and breaks his typewriter.

Everything about the PG-rated movie seems formula-bound or slapdash. When Robert Wagner shows up playing himself as the actor actually intended for the “role” Jack is playing, the writers strangely have Candy acting like a burbling fan instead of a writer pitching him a project.

“Delirious” writer-producers Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman have plenty of tube experience; their credits include “Dick Van Dyke” “Bewitched” and “Gilligan’s Island.” But TV may have tamed them. They’re not wild enough; they never string out their premise to the limit. And director Tom Mankiewicz (“Dragnet”) shows so little visual wit, style or control, it’s as if he wanted everyone to forget he was working on the movie: an understandable impulse.

‘Delirious’

John Candy: Jack Gable

Mariel Hemingway: Louise/Janet

Emma Samms: Laura/Rachel

Robert Wagner: R.J. Wagner

A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presentation of a Richard Donner production. Director Tom Mankiewicz. Producers Lawrence J. Cohen, Fred Freeman, Doug Claybourne. Executive producer Richard Donner. Screenplay Cohen, Freeman. Cinematographer Robert Stevens. Editor William Gordean, Tina Hirsch. Costumes Molly Maginnis. Music Cliff Eidelman. Production design Angelo Graham. Art director James J. Murakami. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG.