Say It Isn't So

Produced by the Farrelly brothers, this terrible comedy stars Chris Klein as an asinine but sweet animal-shelter guy who woos and marries an inept but curvaceous hairdresser (Heather Graham), only to be told that they're brother and sister. All is saved when their propinquity turns out to be a fiction (hatched by an evil marijuana tycoon who wants Graham for himself): probably director James B. Rogers and writers Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow realized that it is, in fact, more tasteless for a comedy just to tease an audience with the threat of incest than to portray incest itself.

Orlando Jones does a contempo variant on the comic black servant from the `40s, and Sally Field, probably assuming that no one old enough to know her will see this film, trashes out as Graham's mom. Everything's played for rock-bottom scatological yocks, except for some Klein-Graham interludes in which the mawkishness is so flat-out inane I assumed the filmmakers were putting us on -- except that the punch line never comes. The movie's like an animated Hallmark card with Tourette syndrome. At the Flagship, Harbour Mall, Holiday, Hoyts Providence 16, Showcase, Swansea, and Tri-Boro cinemas.
-- Chris Fujiwara