MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Gothic’ Has Ma, Pa and a Family <i> Noir</i>

Devotees of mindless, squalid movies might find something to enjoy in the consciously camp shocker “American Gothic” (citywide). So might people trying to get away from the summer heat. Anyone else is in trouble.

It’s another slash-up-the-kids horror saga. Three matched couples--including a young woman suffering from hideous bathroom traumas--are stranded on an island with a demented family, including three somewhat elderly “children,” for whom time stopped somewhere back before TV. While Ma (Yvonne De Carlo) stuffs them with food and urges them to have fun and dance the Charleston, Pa (Rod Steiger) waves a shotgun and gives dour sermons on sexual abstinence, sister Fanny (Janet Wright) cavorts with her mummified baby and brothers Woody and Teddy (Michael J. Pollard and William Hootkins, respectively) leer evilly and invite the guests into deranged childhood games: rope-jumping with a noose and swinging over a seaside cliff.

If anyone survives these bloody frolics--and the vast majority of the cast doesn’t--Pa is ready with more shotgun sermons and Ma with a vicious pair of knitting needles.

Writers Burt Wetanson and Michael Vines--who deserve to have their their word processors washed out with soap--are trying for black humor here: a satire on arrested development and the current infatuation with nostalgia--in which old Grant Wood-Norman Rockwell archetypes turn crazily grim and murderous. But the script’s development seems more arrested than the killer family’s. Patched together out of drably recalled dribbles of “Friday the 13th,” “Psycho,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” it creaks and reeks. It’s both callous and callow.

The writers’ inventiveness is limited to devising cute new murder methods. We never learn who’s been bringing food or clothes to this island and, at one point, allegedly sympathetic characters break into someone’s house, then stay overnight without informing another friend--left behind to guard their stalled plane--what they’re doing. When Steiger stumbles on a particularly bloody mess, carefully sets down his gun and wanders outside to complain to God, you can really feel for him.

In God’s absence, John Hough seems to be directing “American Gothic” (MPAA-rated R for language and violence) with eyes askance. But, under the circumstances, the actors playing the maniacal family--Steiger, De Carlo, Wright, Hootkins and Pollard--probably deserve backhanded praise. To be good with a good script is relatively easy. To be reasonably good with material this atrocious is a sign of true professionalism.