Movie Reviews : Come and Listen to a Story ‘Bout a Movie ‘Bout Jed . . . : ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ is a trip back in time for boomers. The Clampetts hit the big screen with their corn-pone humor intact.

You can feel your IQ plummeting while watching “The Beverly Hillbillies” (citywide) but since you lose 10,000 brain cells a day anyway, why not have a few laughs?

It’s not exactly a ringing huzzah to say this film lives up to the long-running TV show. While that series, which ran on CBS from 1962-1971, was never as awful as its detractors claimed, it wasn’t exactly Congreve either. It was a deliberately airhead sitcom with some expert comic actors--Buddy Ebsen and Irene Ryan--poking through the corn. Some of the routines were as old as vaudeville, but its staying power in syndication isn’t undeserved: Some of those routines still have their nutball clout.

The film version, directed by Penelope Spheeris, lately of “Wayne’s World,” doesn’t try to “enlarge” the show. Thank God. It plays on the audience’s familiarity with the TV series, starting out with “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” and that’s a canny commercial approach; there are no jarring new incidents or characters, no serial killers or flying saucers, although Beverly Hills is smoggier than it used to be and Jed has now been upgraded to billionaire status.

The superannuated boomers watching this film can re-experience their childhood gooniness without too much strain while the teens who currently catch the show in syndication can feel as if they’re playing with a bigger and brighter version of an old toy. A movie like “The Beverly Hillbillies” (rated PG for “off-color humor”) has a way of turning audiences into connoisseurs of pap. You sit there and actually begin to compare the virtues of Buddy Ebsen’s Jed versus Jim Varney’s, of Lily Tomlin’s Miss Hathaway versus Nancy Kulp’s, of Cloris Leachman’s Granny versus Irene Ryan’s.

Of such distinctions are film critics--and madness--born.

Spheeris and her team of writers (Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal, Jim Fisher, and Jim Staahl) aren’t real big on plot, which is probably all for the best. In this version of the legend, Jed treks to the hills of Beverly to find a wife--someone with the finishing-school finesse to make a lady out of his tomboy daughter Elly May (Erika Eleniak). Elly is first seen wrestling a bear (the bear loses). Her predilection for critters doesn’t seem to extend to most of the male population at Beverly Hills High, where she pins the wrestling team captain. (The gibes at Bev High are sharp, like the shot of the cappuccino cart in the school hallway.)

In the TV show, Donna Douglas’ Elly was tastefully bodacious, but Eleniak is closer to hubba-hubba. In fact, the whole revamped Clampett clan seems pumped and Nautilicized. Varney, in a bold departure from his “Ernest” movies and “Hey, Vern!” TV commercials, gives Jed a coiled humor. When he sizes up a prospective wife you get the feeling he might want to do more than just listen to Hank Williams records with her.

Diedrich Bader’s Jethro is even more galumphingly cloddy and manic than Max Baer’s. Traipsing about in his jeans and work-boots, he seems like a refugee from the Village People. (He also plays Jethrine, Jethro’s twin brother in drag. Don’t ask.) Cloris Leachman, from some angles, is a dead ringer for Irene Ryan, and she has the same vim, though she doesn’t really come into her own until the film winds up. She has her best moment in the afterglow of an electroshock therapy session--her hair is buzzed out and she has a supernal glow on her face. She went up against electricity and electricity lost.

Dabney Coleman mostly mugs up a storm as Mr. Drysdale, the banker who--you know this already, don’t you?--sucks up to the Clampetts. Rob Schneider, in cahoots with Lea Thompson playing a fake French tutor, mugs even more. Subtlety isn’t exactly the order of the day in “The Beverly Hillbillies”: These actors must have decided that underplaying would be heresy. There’s stiff competition for overplayers, including an orangutan that bowls perfect strikes.

Best in the cast is Lily Tomlin, who brings out Miss Hathaway’s furtive, randy side--her thing for Jethro thaws her out. Tomlin is such a whiz at tight-mouthed, officious loons that the role might have been created for her.

Tomlin is a good reason to see the movie even if you’re not a “Hillbillies” nut. But there are enough good dumb jokes scattered throughout to keep it fairly funny anyway, even if the shadowland between good dumb and just plain dumb dumb is often unclear in this film.

See it with someone you love--but not with someone you are trying to impress.

‘The Beverly Hillbillies’

Jim Varney: Jed Clampett

Dabney Coleman: Mr. Drysdale

Cloris Leachman: Granny

Lily Tomlin: Miss Hathaway

A 20th Century Fox release. Director Penelope Spheeris. Producer Ian Bryce, Penelope Spheeris. Screenplay by Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal, Jim Fisher, Jim Staahl. Cinematographer Robert Brinkmann. Editor Ross Albert. Costumes Jami Burrows. Music Lalo Shifrin. Production design Peter Jamison. Art director Marjorie Stone McShirley. Set designer Lawrence A. Hubbs. Set decorator Linda Spheeris. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG .