Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 18, 1995 TAG: 9502220024
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``The Brady Bunch Movie'' is hilarious.
Just when the moviegoing public ought to have lost hope in Hollywood's ability to apply something other than a blunt instrument to the TV-show inspired movie, director Betty Thomas - who got her start as Sgt. Lucy Bates on "Hill Street Blues" - comes through with a dead-on spoof of the '70s most inane show.
The screenwriters - Laurice Elehwany, Rick Copp (a seasoned TV writer), and Bonnie and Terry Turner, who co-wrote the "Wayne's World" movies and won Emmys for their work on ``Saturday Night Live'' - seem to have understood that no one really ever LIKED the Bradys. Brady-watchers suffered from a form of entertainment masochism. Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby and Cindy were so weird, so stupid, so geeky-clean, you simply could not look away.
But there was something else about them, besides their freak appeal. The Bradys created their own safe, interplanetary space. Maybe after the chaos of the '60s, the Bradys represented something that would never change.
"The Brady Bunch Movie," which has them still living behind the privacy fence in now '90s Los Angeles, still dressing in polyester bell-bottoms and having family potato-sack races to cheer themselves up, makes them more alien than "The Coneheads" and even less assimilated.
The casting is astounding. Shelley Long and Gary Cole as Carol and Mike Brady are perfect, and Cole nails Robert Reed's voice and intonation - especially when he's telling Cindy, for example, "When you tell on someone, you're really telling on yourself, and what you're telling them is that you're a tattletale."
Uh, yeah.
And then there is Christine Taylor as Marcia, who looks and sounds more like Maureen McCormick than Maureen McCormick.
If it wasn't weird enough, Jan is hearing inner voices (one of which is telling her to kill Marcia, who gets all the attention), and RuPaul plays the guidance counselor at Westdale High who tells Jan to "come back when you're pregnant."
Marcia doesn't know it, but she has a lesbian friend; alcoholic Mrs. Ditmeyer (Jean Smart) next door has her eye on the Brady boys; and Alice (Henriette Mantel) apparently likes to dress up in leather for Sam the Butcher.
Yes, reality is edging up on them, but they're still the old Bradys, and as long as they can hang onto The House That Mike Built (oh, there is something like a plot), they will be fine. And if they have to move on, well, ``As a wise man once said,'' Dad Brady intones, ``No matter where you go, there you are.''
And that's pretty heavy stuff for a Brady.
The Brady Bunch Movie
***
A Paramount release showing at Valley View Mall 6 and Salem Valley 8.
rated PG-13, 100 mins.
by CNB