MOVIE REVIEW : ‘WILD THING’: A TALE OF CLASSIC CONFRONTATION

“Wild Thing” (at the UA Coronet), set in a surrealistic ghetto called The Zone, is an amiable and inventive urban fairy tale whose particular virtues are its script by John Sayles and its sumptuous photography, shot in Montreal by Canadian Rene Verzier.

The film opens in 1969, with the death of a young hippie couple, an act that forces their 3-year-old son to flee for his life from the pair of murderous drug dealers responsible, Chopper (Robert Davi) and Trask (Maury Chaykin), a corrupt policeman.

Mute and traumatically withdrawn, the child spends his next decade with a garrulous street lady (Betty Buckley), whose sociopolitical delusions seem to have come from Lily Tomlin’s brain-scrambled Trudy the Bag Lady.

After Buckley’s departure for the great Park Bench in the Sky, the boy’s final transition is into Wild Thing, played now by Rob Knepper, a nocturnal and almost legendary force for right in The Zone. Cross Spiderman with Tarzan and add a soupcon from “The Warriors” and you get the general idea of Wild Thing.

And once you add Kathleen Quinlan as an amazingly dense Midwesterner, newly arrived to help with the teen-agers in the Zone’s one ecumenical halfway house, you have the skeleton cast. There are also a few more street people, all nicely cast and bracingly well-acted.

The trick is not to expect too much and you may be agreeably surprised. Once you begin to brood on details like Quinlan’s body-hugging, above-the-knee dress, her sometimes uniform for working at night among The Zone’s mother-rapers and father-stabbers, you’re lost.

So don’t brood. Instead, enjoy Max Reid’s crisply directed action, done with so little bloodshed that the film actually deserves its PG-13. Or revel in Sayles’ little inside jokes, like the one about alligators in the sewers--a self-send-up from the infamous Sayles science-fiction thriller “Alligator.”

Or admire the sweetness that Knepper brings to the resourceful, humorous Wild Thing, in addition to the role’s physical demand--everything from rappelling down a smokestack to back flips down a rain-shiny night street. (This will inevitably take you to the scene where the uncarnal but not unwatchful Wild Thing describes love-making as “belly-bumping.” Well, perhaps you could go in search of popcorn, come belly-bumping time.)

Inevitably, our half-naked lone wolf will have to take on all the forces of evil in The Zone, but the workings-out of this classic confrontation are really refreshingly smart. So’s the movie. ‘WILD THING’

An Atlantic Entertainment Group in association with Filmline International, Inc presentation. Producers David Calloway, Nicolas Clermont. Executive producers Thomas Coleman, Michael Rosenblatt. Director Max Reid. Screenplay John Sayles, from a story by Larry Stamper, Sayles. Co-producer Pieter Kroonenburg. Editors Battle David, Steven Rosenblum. Camera Rene Verzier. Music supervisor Steve Tyrell. Stunt coordinator Peter Cox. Costumes Paul-Andre Guerin. Sound Henri Blondeau. With Rob Knepper, Kathleen Quinlan, Robert Davi, Betty Buckley, Maury Chaykin, Guillaume Lemay-Thivierge, Robert Bednarski, Sean Hewitt.

Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned to give special guidance for attendance of children under 13).