MOVIE REVIEW : An Entertaining ‘Midnight’ Loses Control of Its TV Spoof

With “Midnight,” which appropriately enough is the new Saturday midnight show at the Royal, writer-director-producer Norman Thaddeus Vane has tried to juice up a spoof of TV’s Elvira/Vampira with borrowings from “Sunset Boulevard.”

Vane’s passion for outre Hollywood, so effective in his “Frightmare,” gets the better of him here. “Midnight” should be heading for the finish in 90 minutes, yet runs on for nearly two hours.

Even so, the film is fascinating for going over the top so totally, so deliriously in every way possible. Lynn Redgrave, in a portrayal of description-defying extravagance, has the title role as a TV late-show hostess with bizarre dead-white makeup and elaborate black finery. A one-time waitress and failed starlet named Vera Kunk, Midnight is a tough cookie of gnawing vulnerability and pretensions to self-importance that lapse into delusions of grandeur. (Who does she think she is anyway, Meryl Streep? And Norma Desmond, after all, had been a great star of the silent era.)

When we meet her, she is in a foul-mouthed, all-stops-out battle royal over the copyright to the Midnight character with her one-time lover and current producer (Tony Curtis, ever-reliable). At just this moment, she commences an affair with the latest stud (Steve Parrish) to hit Hollywood with dreams of stardom and plenty of Brando/Dean attitudes.

Vane, who on one level is taking these people seriously, gets in trouble in not being able to do so while maintaining the brisk, cool detachment and the rigorous sense of economy of, say, Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust.” As the film lurches out of control, Redgrave, newcomer Parrish and Karen Witter (as Redgrave’s younger, ambitious, hard-edged rival) act up a storm. (On a lower but consistently amusing key are Gustav Vintas and Rita Gam as Midnight’s very Germanic butler and maid.)

“Midnight” is being shown in the director’s cut, Vane having objected to a previously shortened version. That the film regains its equilibrium at a deft and amusing finish suggests all the more that what it really needs is an imaginative editing job.