Brain Donors

PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO

RELEASED A dozen years ago, Brain Donors was an attempt to replicate the innuendo-laced, acquired-taste comedy of the Marx Brothers for a modern age. It was, of course, doomed. The original tagline-"In the tradition of Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges, and the Reagan Administration"-was anachronism cubed, even back in the halcyon days of 1992. Condemned to theatrical death and disemboweled by critics, Donors was snapped up by the cable networks at a welfare price. Repetition turned it into a cult object with a chorus of vocal enthusiasts, and now Paramount, answering customer demand, has repackaged the flop for a threadbare DVD.

Short and scrappy, Brain Donors is little more than a watchable curio. The plot's a screwball cliché, overtly patterned after A Night at the Opera: Three charlatans take over the management of a prestigious ballet company and hijinks ensue. Director Dennis Dugan has no confidence behind the camera and no understanding of the verbal humor in front of it, but his unrefinement is almost a mitigating factor. From the ratio of inspired versus leaden bits to an obligatory romantic subplot, Brain Donors emerges as a reasonable simulacrum for the 1930s Marx esthetic. The great bookend sequences (by Claymation wizard Will Vinton) are so lustrous and first-rate that they seem out of place.

More than anything, John Turturro's sublime, insane performance warrants a retrospective look. Turturro is the rare contemporary film actor with access to his inner vaudevillian, and he releases it like a basket of rattlesnakes in the histrionic Groucho role. Ostensibly borrowing the same cheap suit, specs and pompadour from Barton Fink (shot within the same year), he plays ambulance chaser Roland T. Flakfizer as a classic comic hellion. He mesmerizes everyone he talks at. (Regrettably, he doesn't sing.) When he proclaims, "I have ballet running through my veins," the word "running" merits its own paragraph. Putting the moves on a blond ballerina, he is both cute and lecherous: "Someday you'll have my children-in fact, they're out in the car if you want them."

The camaraderie between Turturro and his idiot accomplices-Bob Nelson and Mel Smith-doesn't click, but he and Nancy Marchand, as the widow he's trying to fleece, are a synergetic slapstick pair. As a scary doppelganger for Margaret Dumont, the clueless "fifth Marx Brother" who never understood Groucho's raunchier jokes, Marchand is smart mimicry and parody mixed.

In one typical exchange, Turturro purrs, "Ah Lillian, I could make love to you right here and now."

"Roland, please, let's keep this on a professional level," she replies.

Which brings his snivel, "Alright then, I'll charge you 50 bucks a pop."

It's hard to shrink from actors having such a blast. Buffoonery becomes them.