Reportedly the most expensive turkey ever to bypass theatrical release, Theodore Rex cost $35 million and was scheduled to open last Christmas in theaters. Apparently someone took a good look at it, because the big-screen debut was canceled.
New Line Home Video is trying to recoup its costs this week by going straight to video – complete with guarantees that the tape will get “mondo marketing support” from television commercials.
Whoopi Goldberg, who has had better luck at the Oscars than in her choice of scripts lately, plays a futuristic police officer who is forced to accept as her partner a cute dinosaur (voice by George Newbern) who bears more than a passing resemblance to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
The creation of Armin Mueller-Stahl, a mad scientist who clones dinosaurs and plans his own apocalypse, Teddy does tired impersonations of Schwarzenegger and Jack Nicholson when he isn’t nonchalantly using his tail to swat passers-by. Carol Kane turns up as a singing dino named Molly Rex, who performs at the Extinct Species Club (“If a species shows up here, it’s history”).
Directed by Jonathan Beteul, who gave us the equally horrid My Science Project more than a decade ago, T. Rex is a humiliating vehicle for Goldberg, who is afflicted with unflattering costumes as well as dismal sparring dialogue with Teddy. Surely her ad libs would have been zingier. (For the record, she did try to get out of making the picture, but found herself legally compelled to finish it.)
Also going direct to video are the first Welsh-language film to be nominated for an Academy Award, Hedd Wyn, and two European comedies: Anne Fontaine’s Augustin and Maurizio Nichetti’s Stephano Quantestorie.
Shown two years ago at the Seattle International Film Festival, Hedd Wyn lost the Oscar to Spain’s Belle Epoque. It’s a lyrical treatment of the life of a pacifist poet, Ellis Humphrey Evans (well-played by Huw Garmon), who died in World War I. In the most memorable sequence, his mother valiantly tries and fails to hide him from the draft.
Augustin is a comedy about a would-be actor (Jean-Chretien Sibertin Blanc) who researches a movie role by becoming a waiter at a Parisian hotel. Stephano is about a police officer who falls in love with the chief suspect in a robbery case.
Also bypassing theaters:
— The Dogfighters. Nuclear terrorism is the subject of this R-rated thriller starring Robert Davi, Ben Gazzara and the late Alexander Godunov, who plays an outlaw physicist trying to convert uranium to weapons-grade plutonium.
— Wavelength. Romantic drama about a philandering Oxford physicist (Jeremy Piven) who is on the verge of solving an Einsteinian riddle.
— Tollbooth. Fairuza Balk, who recently had a minor hit in theaters with The Craft, plays the girlfriend of a tollboth operator (Lenny Von Dohlen) in this comedy about her search for a missing parent.
