TV REVIEW : MTV Movie Awards Filled With Gags

If the annual MTV Video Music Awards seem to have gotten a little too big for their britches lately, there’s now a better party in town: the fledgling MTV Movie Awards, the second annual of which airs tonight at 9.

It’s certainly a ridiculous excuse for trophymongering, but a great excuse for shameless stargazing. And get your VCRs ready, hoot hounds, because it has some definitive home-taping hall-of-fame moments.

First, let’s get out of the way what the two-hour show doesn’t have: a funny host. Instead, it has Eddie Murphy, who apparently decided he wasn’t getting paid enough to crack wise or else was just too hip for the room, and warns the audience as much at the beginning: “I’m not gonna be doing a lotta too much jokes, I’ll just be introducing cats, keeping the vibe smooth.” Sure, whatever, Eddie.

Fortunately, everyone else is on , or at least trying hard to irreverently send up the awards show format. The opening production number incorporating all the nominated movies, for starters, is by the Village People. Jon Lovitz spoofs the Oscar tradition of presenters’ political speechifying. The lifetime achievement award goes to the Three Stooges.

Most Desirable Female designee Sharon Stone vamps it up and parodies Sally Field, purring, “You desire me. You really, really desire me.” And director Richard Donner uses his Best Action Scene acceptance speech to give a breathless save-the-whales spiel. (Oh, wait, that was a serious moment.)

The best stuff, though, comes in two prerecorded running gags. One, a recurring series of “MTV Movie Awards Moments,” has older stars such as Charlton Heston, Angie Dickinson and Merv Griffin recalling scandalous moments from nonexistent ceremonies of decades past. Tony Curtis recalls winning Most Desirable Female in 1958 for “Some Like It Hot”: “Marilyn was furious . But (bleep) her if she can’t take a joke.”

But the best reason to tune in is for four riotous bits in which four original cast members from “The Brady Bunch” re-enact key dramatic scenes from the best movie nominees in character. You haven’t quite lived till you’ve seen Florence Henderson in a short skirt doing the “Basic Instinct” interrogation scene (“What was the nature of your relationship with Sam the butcher?”), or Barry Williams as “Greg X,” proselytizing a grown-up Cindy who’s wearing an Afro with blond pigtails.

For variety, Rod Stewart, Duran Duran, the Stone Temple Pilots and Dr. Dre all perform live, and decently, but Flo steals the show.