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Friday, February 23, 2001
Video briefs

By Mike Pearson
Scripps Howard News Service
BEDAZZLED: Fox. VHS-DVD. 108 min. Rated PG-13. Rental. In stores Tuesday.
   Brendan Frasier is good at playing dumb, which makes for a delightful performance in "Bedazzled," an update of the 1967 Dudley Moore-Peter Cook comedy about a guy who dances with the devil.
   Frasier's Elliot is a sad sack who sells his soul for seven wishes. Not a hard sell when the devil is Elizabeth Hurley, who promises happiness at the snap of a finger. So why do none of his wishes pan out? When he wants to be sensitive, she makes him cry at sunsets. When he wants to be an athlete, she makes him a dumb jock. When he wants to be rich, he's suddenly a Colombian drug lord.
   And all because he wants to impress the prettiest girl at work, who doesn't even know he's alive.
   Harold Ramis is at the helm of this disposable confection, which means it's shallow yet fun. Some scenes hinge on silly sight gags, others on Frasier's fish-out-of-water charm. Hurley's devil adds sensuous flavor to the Faustian motif, and the finale unfolds with no-harm-no-foul tidiness.
   The DVD ($24.99) comes with above-average extras: trailers, set design sketches, commentaries, a documentary, costume designs, a deleted scene and two snippets of orchestral scoring sessions.
   In the end, "Bedazzled" will leave you bemused, nothing more and nothing less.
   THE ORIGINAL KINGS OF COMEDY: Paramount. VHS-DVD. 115 min. Rated R. Rental. In stores Tuesday.
   One could argue about the amount of originality displayed by the four black comedians showcased here, but there's no denying that parts of this pseudo-documentary are very, very funny.
   Director Spike Lee hops between backstage glimpses of the comics on tour - Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer and Bernie Mac - and their onstage routines. Much of the film was shot in North Carolina, and the largely black audience clearly came to have a good time. Trouble is that all comics aren't created equal. Hughley and Mac deliver blistering routines; the other two are merely OK.
   At times, the documentary footage seems staged. The comics playing poker. The comics at a radio session. The comics in the wings. It's needless filler that should have been left in the cutting room.
   Still, how many films are guaranteed to have you rolling in the aisle at least part of time?
   NURSE BETTY: USA. VHS-DVD. 96 min. Rated R. rental. In stores Tuesday.
   The appeal of "Nurse Betty" lies in its quirky disposition. It's a black comedy that doesn't quite play by the rules. Everyone's got a screw loose here, beginning with the title character.
   That would be an abused housewife (Renee Zellweger), who slips into an alternate personality after watching two hit men (Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock) off her husband. In her fragile mind she's now Betty, the former flame of a famous soap-opera star (Greg Kinnear), destined to be reunited with him.
   Betty hits the road. The hit men follow. And it all culminates in a seedy Hollywood apartment and on the set of a hospital soap opera. Murder? Madness? TV star tantrums? That's "Nurse Betty."
   Zellweger offers a sweet, daffy performance, while Freeman and Rock anchor the wings. Comedy is an opportunistic genre, quick to recycle cliches. At least these cliches have an edge to them.
   HIGHLANDER: END GAME: Dimension. VHS-DVD. 101 min. Rated R. Rental.
   Oh, what a paradise this idea must have seemed to the people at Dimension films: Merge the main characters from a shopworn film series and a long-in-the-tooth TV spin-off and see what kind of fireworks you get. Thus, Christopher Lambert reprises his role as Connor MacLeod from the "Highlander" films, while Adrian Paul weighs in as Duncan, his TV ancestor. They come together for a final showdown, because, as anyone remotely familiar with the "Highlander" saga knows, there can be only one.
   Pity that same principal didn't apply to sequels.
   "End Game" is filled with the requisite flashbacks to the various lives these immortals have lived, yet its main focus is the present, where one particularly nasty immortal threatens to rule the world. Can Connor and Duncan best the devil at his own game? And if so, at what cost?
   Lots of explosions, swordplay and glorious costumes. But the plot is a mishmash - a fragmented mess that expects newcomers to know far too much, and rewards the faithful with far too little.
   They say this is the last sequel in the series. It should never have come to this.

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