Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 25, 1995                   TAG: 9503270063
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`DOLORES CLAIBORNE' GIVES EVIL A FRIGHTENINGLY FAMILIAR FACE

In fact, it's almost downright subversive.

Forget the movie ads, which quote a line from the film: "An accident can be an unhappy woman's best friend."

Remember, instead, the movie's real credo, a line that the three female principals utter with a mixture of pain, hope and irony as the story unfolds: "Sometimes being a bis all a woman's got to hang onto."

When Dolores Claiborne (the amazing Kathy Bates) first speaks those words, she's angrily defending herself against an accusation of murder. She is a suspect in the death of Vera Donovan, the woman she has worked for as a maid - then caretaker - for more than 20 years.

As the movie begins, Dolores and Vera are shadows on a wall at the top of the stairs in the latter's palatial home. Then, Vera is falling, crashing through a staircase and bleeding from her mouth. Dolores searches frantically for something in the kitchen, dropping pots, pans and knives to the floor and finally settling upon a rolling pin.

It is the rolling pin that she is holding over her head - poised to hit Vera - when the postman arrives. He takes in the scene, feels for a pulse in Vera's wrist then looks at Dolores with revulsion. "You've killed her," he says.

Has she or hasn't she? She looks guilty as sin, and to make matters worse, there is another "accidental" death in her past: the death of her alcoholic, abusive husband Joe (David Strathairn). Not even her daughter Salena (the equally amazing Jennifer Jason Leigh) believes her mother is innocent.

But this isn't a murder mystery. Taylor Hackford, who directed "An Officer and a Gentleman," had a real grip on how to scare us with this story: Flashbacks are shown not as distant memory but as hallucinations of a much more immediate and jarring nature.

This movie, based on a Stephen King novel, is really a horror film. The evil - the almost supernatural, demonic force that haunts Dolores and Salena - is of a more familiar kind, the familial kind.

And in terms of real horror, nothing is quite as frightening.

Dolores Claiborne ***

Castle Rock film showing at the Salem Valley 8. Rated R for profanity and adult situations, 2 hours and 13 minutes.