MOVIE REVIEW : ‘VICE SQUAD’ SHOULD STAY UNDERCOVER

Is truth stranger than fiction? Certainly when it comes to “Hollywood Vice Squad” (citywide), a dull, dopey movie that claims to have been based on actual police cases. Normally we’d write that off as Hollywood hyperbole, especially since most of the vice officers in the film behave with all the cool precision of the Three Stooges gone undercover. Yet, the movie’s script was written by James J. Docherty, a 22-year LAPD veteran and currently a commanding officer for the city’s vice division.

Docherty says in the production notes that he’s “taken certain dramatic license,” which perhaps accounts for why most of the bumbling detectives do everything but wear a big placard around their necks saying “Hollywood Vice: Please Keep All Important Evidence in Your Pockets.” One vice team, assigned to discreetly follow an important suspect, scrambles into a car, slams the doors and screeches off in pursuit, all in full view of the criminal. (The crook, gliding along in his limousine, glances in his rear-view mirror and grumbles, “They must be cops. Who else would be following us?”)

The film’s creaky story line revolves around a pretty Midwestern teen runaway who (surprise!) has turned to prostitution and drugs while in the clutches of a sleazeball pimp (Frank Gorshin) who wears more gold chains than Mr. T. While her mother and the local police join in the hunt, we see the vice squad in action, chasing transvestite hookers, nabbing PCP goofballs, raiding bookies and breaking up teen pornography rings.

You’d think, with her wonderful feel for gritty authenticity and obsessive streetwise characters, that this would be lively material for director Penelope Spheeris, who did “Decline of Western Civilization” and “The Boys Next Door.” But despite an occasional unsettling touch (the pimp’s secretary is a ghoulish-looking woman confined to a wheelchair), Spheeris seems bored and disinterested, as if she were directing with one eye on the camera and the other on the clock.

The film’s one potentially intriguing character is a rookie woman cop (Carrie Fisher), but we never see enough of her rude introduction to Sin City to really care about any moral dillemmas she might have. The rest of the oddball cast (which includes Ronny Cox, Leon Isaac Kennedy, Joey Travolta and Trish Van Devere) is uniformly forgettable. You could excuse the vice cops, who after all, spend most of their time masquerading as pimps and johns, but the bad acting bug seems to have infected the rest of the cast as well.

If Mr. Docherty is going to try his hand at more scripts, our advice is--read some Joseph Wambaugh or George V. Higgins. The dialogue here sounds suspiciously like Hollywood shoptalk. When a police captain hears about a new plan to capture a scuzzy pimp, he beams, “Slavery. I love it!” To our untrained ears, that’s not vice lingo. That sounds like something a studio executive would say if he were pitched a story about a wacky gang of 19th-Century Brat Pack plantation owners.

‘HOLLYWOOD VICE SQUAD’

Producer Arnold Orgolini & Sandy Howard. Director Penelope Spheeris. Writer James J. Docherty. Camera John Hendricks. Editor John Bowey. Art Director Michael Corenblith. With Ronny Cox, Ben Frank, Frank Gorshin, H.B. Haggerty, Julius Harris, Marvin Kaplan, Leon Isaac Kennedy, Evan Kim, Joey Travolta, Trish Van Devere, Cec Verrel and Carrie Fisher.

Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).