MOVIE REVIEW : ‘CRYSTAL’: ALL BEAUTY, NO BRAINS

“Crystal Heart” (citywide) offers the movie equivalent of a gorgeous, stunningly dressed woman--setting hearts aflutter and rooms ablaze--who opens her mouth and begins spewing unbelievable, laughable gibberish: a frantic mixture of Rod McKuen, Sidney Sheldon, the “Pina Colada Song,” the National Enquirer and “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” It’s a paradox: You can’t take your eyes off her, but as she keeps talking, you wilt, wilt.

There’s no way you can recount what happens in the film--a sort of MTV variation on the 1976 John Travolta TV movie, “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble”--while keeping a straight face. The ideas are ludicrous, and the script unfolds them with a mix of starry-eyed sobriety, and the slapdash, get-on-with-it manner that’s become endemic in lower-budget movies.

We have Chris Newley (Lee Curreri), a lonely, sensitive young composer with soulful eyes and curly locks, imprisoned in a glass room because of an immunity deficiency. (Who does his hair, by the way?) We have his chic French nurse, and the idol he loves from afar: seductive, lynx-eyed video singer-dancer Alley Daniels (Tawny Kitaen), a “happening” kind of girl, with laser-beam energy, who usually has seven friends in bikinis scattered pool side at her hilltop L.A. digs.

We have her unscrupulous manager, the slimy, manipulative high-and-low-life Jean-Claude--who wants to trade Chris’s love for a cover story in the National Enquirer, and then a tour with the world’s No. 1 rock band, the Cats. (Alley and the Cats, get it?) We have Chris’s fearful, domineering mother, his sage, tolerant old dad. We have hard-shelled producers broiling steaks and deals on their patios. We have paparazzi. We have rock clubs and sleek cars and moonlit nights --and all those elements that quicken pulses and tighten throats in shopping malls from Paducah to Pawtucket.

And, finally--blam!--we have Chris blasting out of his bubble after a slimy taunt from the perfidious, sex-crazed Jean-Claude. And a picturesque ride with a wisecracking delivery man, and then a wonderful glossy-lit roll in the sheets with the breathtaking Alley. And a night on the town, and a stroll on the beach and the two lovers dropping into splendiferously satiated slumbers in each others’ arms, while the Pacific Ocean gently laps at their naked heels like a warm and frolicking puppy. But, comes the morning, Chris seems to have developed a cough. . . .

As we said, a ridiculous movie. But director Gil Bettman makes it look so good you can almost, but not quite, forgive him. Bettman has a good eye, energy, style and a quirky visual wit, and he keeps “Crystal Heart” rolling along sinuously, in a glittery, glamorous, satiny swift blur. He’s like a man lighting dacron, so for the briefest instant, you imagine it’s silk. One scene--where Chris and Alley strip and undulate against the glass of his prison in a kind of autoerotic variation on the old vaudeville double-mirror routine--qualifies as low-rent high camp.

Bettman and his cinematographer, Alexander Ulloa, make this nonsense watchable, and for an instant or so at the end, Curreri even makes it touching. It’s probably one of the best-looking dumb B movies you could imagine; occasionally, it knocks your eyes out. A pity it can’t knock your mind out as well; mindlessness is the story’s only real chance. Because, as with the gibberish-spouting siren in her stunning off-the-shoulder gown, you could hate yourself in the morning.

‘CRYSTAL HEART’

A New World Pictures release of a Carlos Vasallo presentation. Producer Carlos Vasallo. Director Gil Bettman. Script Linda Shayne. Music Joel Goldsmith. Editor Nicholas Wentworth. Camera Alexander Ulloa. With Tawny Kitaen, Lee Curreri, Lloyd Bochner, Simon Andreu.

Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

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