IRREVERENT Magazine - Movie Reviews

I'll be honest with you; I'm a fan of devil movies.  I liked Al Pacino in "The Devil's Advocate," loved all of the "Omens," and I'm a big fan of "The Crow" franchise (happened on "Devil Night" remember?).  So my expectations for "Bedazzled" with Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley were high, almost surely a sign of imminent disappointment. I thought to myself: "How can you go wrong with a sexy devil and wimpy guy?"  Well, as it turns out there are lots of ways.

First off, fairly true to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's original 1967 script you've got a guy squandering 7 wishes trying to bag a babe way out of his league, wishes much better spent IMHO spicing up the lackluster dialogue and breathing life into the movie's 33 year old plot.  This would definitely improve things, if only the audience could temporarily remove their eyeballs from Elizabeth Hurley's breasts long enough to notice.� In the movie biz this is rated NVL: Not Very Likely.

The newest 'Bedazzled' stars Liz Hurley and other people, we think. Who cares?

Here's something I love even more than registering for websites I'll never, ever visit again before the world is consumed by a supernova: a movie that tosses in a couple of breasts and takes a nap while writing the script.  In Cook and Moore's original script, Peter Cook was the sunglass-clad devil, which meant visions of his bare breasts would only occupy a slim minority of the men in the audience and titillate women would weren't buying the tickets in 1967 anyway. However, these days a breast-less movie better contain a highly respectable (read: 'ludicrously overpaid') lead actor/actress if it hopes to do anything more than play the 19 theaters composing the "artsy" theater circuit and then be lovingly smothered by the distributor.  One wonders what happened to the women's liberation movement in three decades that has actually INCREASED the exploitation of women in the movies.  I'll make that vast generalization because, goddammit I can. If you don't like it, get your own column.

There's more I could say about the 2000 version of "Bedazzled" but frankly I think I've spent enough time on this sad piece of celluloid, so I won't.  I heartily advise you to avoid my mistake.