MOVIE REVIEW : ‘SALVATION’: SOME CHEAP CHURCH CHAT

Few recent movies have had more fortuitous dumb-lucky timing than Beth B’s “Salvation” (Beverly Center Cineplex). This steamy little melodrama about a TV evangelist entrapped in sexual blackmail comes only months after the Jim and Tammy Bakker PTL revelations; you’d probably have to stretch all the way back to “The China Syndrome” and the Three Mile Island disaster to find a comparable example of current headlines weaving a movie publicist’s dream.

“The China Syndrome” was a heavily advertised major release. “Salvation,” as its writer-director’s pseudonym would imply, is a B-movie--a self-conscious B, with cheap sets, lurid dialogue, off-the-edge violence and acting that suggests a daytime soap opera with the entire cast unhinged and free-associating on camera.

It’s an erratic, heavy-handed movie, but there are some good things about it--not the least being its audacity and iconoclasm, the fact that it’s tackling the kind of contemporary subject matter we ought to see more often. There’s also some good, grungy, gutter rock, a nice song from Exene Cervenka of X and a fine method-creepy acting job by Stephen McHattie as Rev. Edward Randall--who seems to blend Jimmy Swaggart’s genial, cutting swagger with Gene Scott’s glowering intensity.

But the movie suffers from its cheap origins, its cheap fix on things, even its cheaper shots. Satire needs to sting a little deeper into its subjects than Beth B does here; though she’s deliberately mixing up the worlds and jargon of rock and religion, she has a much firmer grasp on the former.

The movie is divided into three sections--”The Dream,” “The Nightmare” and “Salvation.” Best of them is the first, a mean little satire contrasting the lightly sadistic, blown-dry pomposity of Rev. Randall’s TV image and a hopelessly downtrodden household, the Stamples, which has become obsessed with him. Beth B’s ambitions are smaller here. She isn’t trying for the lunatic melodrama of the second section (Randall’s nightmarish sexual encounter with the Stample sister-in-law) or the grandiose sendups of the third (the joint Randall-Stample heavy-metal ministry and its dolorous fate).

Concentrating on a narrower target, she tends to hit it more squarely. Later, though she’s gotten into potentially richer territory, she and co-writer Tom Robinson can’t develop the right kind of backdrop, characters or dialogue; they always take the easy way out. As in “Vortex,’ a cheapie political thriller that she co-directed with Scott B, the brutal, cold imagery of camera setups is undercut by a lot of blunt-fingered satire and naive, paint-by-the-numbers melodrama.

But Beth B deserves points for prescience. In the better parts of “Salvation” (rated R for sex, language, and violence), art and life join in a sordid chorus of off-key hallelujahs.

‘SALVATION’

A Circle Films release. Producers Beth B, Michael H. Shamberg. Director Beth B. Script Tom Robinson, Beth B. Music New Order, Cabaret Voltaire, the Hood, Arthur Baker. Camera Francis Kenny. Editor Elizabeth Kling. With Stephen McHattie, Dominique Davalos, Exene Cervenka, Viggo Mortensen.

Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

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