TURN-ONS AND TURN-OFFS IN CURRENT HOME ENTERTAINMENT RELEASES : Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor : AUDIOCASSETTES

“My Cousin Rachel.” Caedmon. Two-cassette abridgement. With the occasional distinctively Australian short “a” intervening, Mel Gibson reads Daphne Du Maurier’s classic Gothic novel in an appropriately upper-class British accent--now bearing down in breathless urgency, now shifting into cadences as coy and feminine as the mysterious Rachel should be. The eerie story of a young man’s obsession with his cousin’s widow lends itself well to the cassette medium. Gibson’s accent is too studied, however; he must have sat through more than one screening of Richard Burton’s smoldering, dark performance in the 1952 movie version. Information: (800) 223-0420.