THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 3, 1994 TAG: 9411020067
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Movie Review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, MOVIE CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
IS THERE A CRYING need for a comedy about enemas?
``The Road to Wellville'' is a movie in which we are asked to laugh heartily about such things as stool samples, belching and body functions.
Just when I had written off ``Raidioland Murders'' as the worst movie of the year, along comes THIS to top it. Mind you, ``The Road to Wellville'' is not a cheapie. It features an all-star cast, a big budget and a noticeable, and admirable, effort to recreate the aura and costuming of early 1900s. An adaptation of the novel by R. Coraghessan Boyle, it purports to chronicle the eccentricities of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of Corn Flakes as well as the electric blanket. To a generation of kids who mailed off box tops to Battle Creek, Mich., to seek prizes and club membership, it is quite an awakening. Did Dr. Kellogg really snap, crackle and pop this much?
As portrayed by Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins, Dr. Kellogg looks, and sounds, like a mixture of Bugs Bunny and Jerry Lewis as ``The Nutty Professor.'' Dr. Kellogg runs a health spa in Michigan that is frequented by the rich and naive.
His treatment includes numerous enemas for each patient daily, as well as things like ``electrically erotic stimulation.''
Perhaps the late Clifton Webb could have brought off this role. It is more likely that no one could under the present conditions. In any case, Hopkins is ludicrous.
Matthew Broderick and Bridget Fonda, looking far too young for the wedded roles, are a couple who come for treatment - and get it. He has digestive problems - actually brought on by her feeding him a dosage of opium and alcohol. He fantasizes about his gorgeous nurse (Traci Lind) and climbs in bed with the hapless Lara Flynn Boyle, who plays a woman suffering from what she calls ``the green sickness.'' Meanwhile, Fonda, who sounds like her Aunt Jane when she becomes overwrought, seeks ``therapeutic massage'' from a quack doctor on the sidelines.
John Cusack, in another bow to too-young, brat pack casting, plays a man who wants to produce rival cereals, but has money problems. Dana Carvey, looking a great deal older than ``Wayne's World'' would allow, plays Kellogg's degenerate, adopted, son who hates Daddy and is willing to lend his Kellogg name to the new, bogus, cereals.
Perhaps Federico Fellinni, with extensive rewriting, could have made an outrageous and absurd entertainment out of this. For Alan Parker, who actually wrote and directed, it is a case of unbridled tastelessness. His heavy-handed approach never provides one wink to let the audience know that perhaps this is a put-on.
Here, Parker trots out old lines like ``With friends like you, who needs enemas?''
All is, obviously, not well in Wellville. If you manage to sit through the entire two hours of this smelly movie, you'll need two weeks at a spa. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by COLUMBIA
Matthew Broderick and Bridget Fonda in ``The Road to Wellville.''
by CNB