TELEVISION REVIEW : Not Quite a Stardust Memory : Woody Allen Revisits ‘Don’t Drink the Water’ on Small Screen

Here is Woody Allen as you may remember him--before he became the accomplished filmmaker that he is today.

But Sunday’s reworked “Don’t Drink the Water”--a comedically futile ABC movie that he has squeezed from his 1966 Broadway play, which was made into a theatrical film starring Jackie Gleason three years later--is not from that early-work-in-progress, catch-me-when-I’m-really-good Allen. It’s from the Allen of the present. The Allen who should know better. The Allen whose current, dead-eye funny theatrical feature, “Bullets Over Broadway,” affirms that he does know better.

It’s inexplicable why he would choose to make this screeching U-turn, which returns him to his neurotic schlemiel mode as a hapless American tourist fleeing police in a fictional Iron Curtain country during the Cold War era.

After taking some innocent snapshots of locations that are off-limits, vacationing caterer Walter Hollander (Allen) and his wife (Julie Kavner) and daughter (Mayim Bialik) take refuge from the Commies in a U.S. embassy temporarily headed by a young diplomat (Michael J. Fox), also hapless.

It doesn’t take long for the diplomat to fall for the daughter and for her boisterous parents to make a shambles of the embassy, to say nothing of the movie, whose awkward grafting of slapsticky sight gags and cheap one-liners (plus a nasty camel joke about Arabs) revisits a lower rung in Allen’s career, when his films were in large part an extension of his stand-up comedy.

That was years ago. And at least in “Take the Money and Run” and “Bananas,” for example, his raw excesses coincided with glints of brilliance that made those missteps forgivable.

There’s rarely redeeming humor in “Don’t Drink the Water,” the one amusing component being Dom DeLuise’s turn as a priest who does magic tricks. Otherwise, though, no rabbits in the hat.

* “Don’t Drink the Water” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on ABC (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).