Cinema: Animal Crackers FUNNY FARM

Andy Farmer (Chevy Chase) sits by the fireplace; his lazy, lovable pet, Yellow Dog, dozes at his feet. An odor catches Andy’s attention — hmmm, something’s burning. The master of this Vermont farmhouse eases on over to the hearth, extracts Yellow Dog’s tail from the cinders and gently stubs it out like a spent cigar. The pooch barely opens one glazed eye. This scene, briefer than a minute, is a vagrant moment of unforced drollery in Funny Farm’s carnival of sylvan horrors.

Welcome to Redbud, Andy and Elizabeth (Madolyn Smith). He hopes to write that big novel; she’s looking for peace and quiet. Instead they find a snake in their living room, a corpse in the garden and a mailman who thinks he’s Mad Max in a pickup truck. The deepest injury is to Andy’s authorial ego, when his book turns out stinky and she writes next year’s best seller. In Smith’s bruised glare you can see the befuddled pain of anyone married to a blockhead with writer’s block. But that’s just subplot. The main plot is barely sodded: sound effects in place of wit, and rural goofuses who wouldn’t dare show their faces on Newhart.

Some bigwig at Warner Bros. must have been traumatized by a move to the ‘burbs; Funny Farm is Warner’s third comedy in a year to deal with New Yorkers who find angst in New England. (Another film, Moving, exiled Richard Pryor from New Jersey to darkest Idaho.) But The Witches of Eastwick and Beetlejuice had infernal satire in mind and an intelligent eye for the grotesque. Funny Farm is mostly just a country store stocked with stale notions and antique gags: Mr. Bland Builds His Dream House.– R.C.