Low-Level Wastes

THE PLUSH SLIGHTLY SEEDY lobby of the Suck Cheri (near the Sheraton) has a pretty good selection of video games to the right of the entrance; on the left is counter where for the price of 14 chances to save the maiden from Donkey Kong. You can purchase a ticket to see Surved. For suspence, excitement and interesting characters the choice is clear Turn right.

Hollywood's trash, like all rubbish comes in two categories. First there's the stuf which, like nuclear waste, refuses to decay quickly and gives off a weird glow for years. Films like this have been pretty scarce since the early '60s, but every so often, a camp classic like Momance Dearest reminds its just what wonderful depths the genre can stuck to Then there's the mundane trash-strictly binde granddble which is dumped on the public one day, carted away the next and never seen aging.

Bette Midler's new film, Jinxed, like countless others churned out every year belongs in this latter heap not really had, just completely for gettable Quick as you can say, "Network Television Predict, it will probably make its final bow as a Wednesday Night Movie of the Week. The problem is, it belonged on the tube in the first place Like too many other movies today, Jinsed resembles nothing so much as the average T.V. movie, smoothly made, predictable, bland, and incapable of arousing any interest or excitement whatsoever.

Bad movies, for the most part, are no longer amusingly cheap, gloriously incompetent or outrageously trashy. Via television, Holly wood has fallen from innocent ineptitude into experienced mediocrity, we'll never get another They Saved Hitler's Brain.

Jinsed's basic premise is that a petty gambler named Howard (Rip Torn) has somehow managed to put a "jinx" on a young blackjack dealer. Willy (Ken Wahl), and is now chasing him from casino to casino trying to break the bank. Whenever Howard smokes a certain magically lucky brand of cigar, he's sure to win any hand Willy deals him Howard is a rather sleazy character with a seemingly infinite wardrobe of polyester Stetson hats, and this is his first chance to win big.

To help break the bad luck streak Howard is inflicting on him, Willy enlists the help of Howard's girl, Benita (Bette Midler). Together, they plot against Howard. Willy because he will lose his job it Howard wins big one more time, and Benita because she's tired of Howard's drunken abuse and of life in they aluminum trailer outside Reno.

"HOWARD DOESN'T JUST best you at blackjack," Benita warns Willy in one of the film's more tensely dramatic moments; "he seats you at life!" "I just don't know when I'm at," is Willy's sullen reply. She: "You're at the end of the line!" And so they decide together to murder Howard, trump it up, as an accident, and collect on the insurance.

Harnessed to what is not a terribly fresh scenario to begin with, the preposterous premise of the "jinx" certainly can't pull a reasonably adult audience through a full-length feature film. Unfortunately, the redoubtable presence of Bette Midler can't either. She doesn't get a chance to act seriously, as she did in The Rose; for can she turn the whole thing into a high-camp parody, as in her wonderful stage shows. The material is simply too bland to get hold of, Even Midler's trademarks, the peroxide hair and fluorescent clothes, don't glitter as they usually do.

Rip Torn nicely captures the brash vulgarly of Howard, but he is only really comfortable after the murder, when, a Howard's corpse, he no longer has to deal with the film's wooden dialogue: immobilized, he wears an unearthly look of relief, Ken Waht plays the macho easy-going Eric Estrada type of guy who seems to crop up in almost every cop and adventure show on T.V. he mumbles his way through his lines adequately, and when the going gets rough, he takes off his shirt to reveal his true assets.

Blame cannot be laid at the feet of the director, the veteran Don Siegel (Dirty Hurry), who does his best to keep Jinxed moving along smoothly. But he has nothing to work with, not even good trash. Sitting through Jinxed is like staring at your T.V. when nothing decent is on but there's nothing better to do. At least here, if your sensibility overcomes your stupor, the Donkey Kong in the lobby is better than anything you can get on your Atari.