MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘BAD MEDICINE’: A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW

“Bad Medicine” (citywide) is bad news.

This feeble comedy is set in a 5-year-old south-of-the-border medical school run by a corrupt, pompous Latin nerd (Alan Arkin) who accepts Americans who can’t make the grade at home.

Arkin has a penchant for generating publicity by sending his students to remote pueblos in a show of free medical treatment for the poor, yet he denies them any medicine. (Never mind that his students aren’t qualified to diagnose, let alone prescribe.) The school’s newest pupil (Steve Guttenberg) leads a rebellion of the American contingent against Arkin’s cruel policy. (The faint ghost of “Police Academy,” also starring Guttenberg, seems to haunt the film.)

You may wonder what’s funny in all this. Nothing. In the absence of any genuine humor, “Bad Medicine” rapidly lapses into an offensive burlesque of Latinos, who are depicted as craven, ignorant, oversexed and largely indifferent to human suffering. (Guttenberg’s cause is specifically an American undertaking.)

Writer-director Harvey Miller, inspired by a chapter in the Steven Horowitz-Neil Offen novel “Calling Dr. Horowitz,” seems to sense the queasiness of the enterprise. When Guttenberg’s father (Bill Macy) drops by the school on his way to a plastic surgeons’ convention, Arkin criticizes him for his cultural arrogance. But considering what we already know of the school’s founding director, Arkin simply comes across as a self-righteous hypocrite.

The sweet, loony naivete that Guttenberg and co-star Julie Hagerty have displayed in previous comic predicaments wears thin here, and it’s painful to watch comedians of the high caliber of Arkin and Taylor Negron (as a greedy cab driver) thrash about in such hopelessness.

Filmed in Spain, “Bad Medicine” takes place “somewhere in Central America,” which right now is about as appropriate a locale for broad comedy as Beirut or Belfast. Since it is so insensitive a film we can only be grateful that it is oblivious to the strife and turmoil currently besetting that region.

‘BAD MEDICINE’ A 20th Century Fox presentation of a Lantana production. Executive producers Michael Jaffe, Myles Osterneck. Producers Alex Winitsky, Arlene Sellers. Director Harvey Miller. Story and screenplay Miller; based on the novel “Calling Dr. Horowitz” by Steven Horowitz and Neil Offen. Co-producer Jeffrey Ganz. Camera Kelvin Pike. Music Lalo Schifrin. Production designer Les Dilley. Costumes Rita Riggs. Film editors O. Nicholas Brown, John Jympson. Featuring Steve Guttenberg, Alan Arkin, Julie Hagerty, Bill Macy, Curtis Armstrong, Julie Kavner, Joe Grafasi, Robert Romanus, Taylor Negron, Candi Milo.