Quick Cuts

By Christopher Porterfield

THE CAR roars out of the desert like some mustang of the legendary West -- but it is no horse, only modern horse power gone loco. Driverless, with a diabolical will of its own, it invades a Utah town and mows down a bicycling couple, the sheriff and a passel of deputies and a pert young teacher. Among the other victims: plot, dialogue and characterization. Deputy Sheriff James Brolin leads the counterattack, but it is an unequal contest: the car steals all the scenes. The ancient nightmare of machines turning against their masters has in recent years become something of a staple of made-for-TV movies. This model offers nothing new. It seems headed for the summer drive-in trade, where it can play to an appropriate audience -- the blank, staring faces of hundreds of other cars.

LOVERS LIKE US brings together Yves Montand, as a brilliant perfumery chemist playing hooky on a Venezuelan island, and Catherine Deneuve, as an ex-nightclub hostess on the lam with a stolen Toulouse-Lautrec. She nearly gets the chemist killed in a highway chase, invades his island and sinks his boat, so naturally he falls in love with her. He locks her out of his house, tries to deport her bodily and finally knocks her out with a pineapple, so naturally she falls in love with him. All this, in the right hands, could make a diverting screwball comedy. These are not the right hands. The film is a noisy, pell-mell piece of work. Deneuve has so little flair for physical comedy that the frequent closeups of her stunning face are more enlivening than her knockabout scenes. Montand is a cannier performer; his offhand Gallic charm offers a study in how an actor can operate at a safe distance from his material. Even his smile is pained, as well it may be.

WIZARDS, the new animated feature by Ralph Bakshi (Fritz, the Cat), falls between a visionary epic and the conventional mayhem of Saturday-morning TV. Neither a kiddie cartoon nor an adult entertainment, the film is a whats it. Set in A.D. 2,000,000, it projects a world left over from a nuclear holocaust.

The land of Scortch, peopled by animalistic mutants, revives the lost art of war and attacks Montagar, a pastoral realm of elves and gentle wizards. "They have weapons and technology," an elf says of the attackers. "We only have love." Bakshi's visual effects at times are striking -- stylized war footage superimposed on animated battles, pastel medievalism for Montagar, an updated, bombed-out Piranesi look for Scortch.

But he makes a hash of his already soppy theme when the leaders of the warring realms meet for a climactic duel of good magic v. bad. Bakshi has the kindly wizard of Montagar pull out a Luger and drill the evil sorcerer of Scortch.

Moral: all you need is love -- plus a loaded gun.

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