No Slumming in Summertime

By RICHARD CORLISS

MANHUNTER

Watch out, America, full moon's coming. That's when a wily psychopath -- a werewolf of modern paranoid fantasies -- turns some idyllic suburban home into a slaughterhouse. And when anyone wanders too close, the psycho (Tom Noonan) festers into action. A tabloid journalist (Stephen Lang) ends up flambeed in a runaway wheelchair. A photo-lab technician (Joan Allen), whose blindness has not inhibited her taste for sexual adventure, invites the psycho home and is soon in mortal peril. His only nemesis is Will Graham (William L. Petersen), an ex-FBI agent who uses a kind of Method forensics to identify with a killer's motives and thus predict his next move. But Will has much to lose as well: a wife, a son, a family life just like those the psycho loves to explode. And thanks to a tip from another serial killer (Brian Cox), the psycho has Will's home address.

Manhunter, based on Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon, is a police procedural with some smart new fangles. The FBI uses all the sleuthing techniques of the computer age, yet its most sophisticated device is Will's brain, trancing itself into the psycho's psyche. Will is the typical tough-cop hero -- a loner whose awareness of his own checked rages makes him see the killer as his evil twin -- but he is also a decent family man; a supermarket chat with his son, about the bad things bad men do to people, is one of the film's surprise highlights. The killer is both monstrous and pathetic: a sad, overgrown child. Only when he springs into violent action is he imposing, graceful. He becomes a Baryshnikov of derangement.

With Miami Vice and his terrific debut feature Thief, Writer-Director Michael Mann honed his nouveau slick style: a strong silent leading man with a superb supporting cast, a flair for intelligent camerabatics, a bold, controlled color scheme, an assertive avant-rock sound track. Here he has found another subject to suit that disquieting style. Manhunter should keep viewers riveted throughout, and queasy through the next full moon.

STAND BY ME

Here is a movie about twelve-year-olds that was made for 40-year-olds. It's The Hardy Boys as filtered through the sensibility of Judy Blume. It's The Goonies with angst but without the pirates. It's S.E. Hinton's rewrite of Leave It to Beaver. It is, in other words, a self-conscious elegy to the reckless dreams of youth. The film's four young friends -- sweet, smart Gordie (Wil Wheaton), take-charge Chris (River Phoenix), feisty Teddy (Corey Feldman) and fat Vern (Jerry O'Connell) -- are forever stopping in their tracks to proclaim, "I'm in the prime of my life," or "Kids lose everything unless there's someone to look after them." Does any twelve-year-old talk with such analysand self-awareness? The boys may be just scruffy outsiders in the small-town '50s, but they sound like a Classics Illustrated version of Bruno Bettelheim.

Based on a Stephen King novella and written by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans, Stand By Me sends these pint-size paladins on an excursion to find the body of a boy crushed by a train. They swap insults and anxieties, muse on the enthralling Mousekebosom of Annette Funicello and finally face down a gang of toughs, with Gordie threatening to blow away the leader. Director Rob Reiner (This Is Spinal Tap) knows which buttons to push on the nostalgia synthesizer: the movie is wallpapered with '50s artifacts and a terrific score of oldies. But Stand By Me is a shuck. It trumpets its sensitivity while reveling in coarseness. And at its climax it suggests that manhood can be found through the barrel of a gun. Maybe this is how Rambo discovered puberty. Maybe real kids should be discouraged from following his example.

EXTREMITIES

The most obscene phrase a woman can utter is "I love you" when it is forced from her at rape point. Once her privacy has been invaded so brutally, every flirtatious glance will feel like an assault, every friendly caress will be evidence of sexual harassment. She may recoil each time she hears words of endearment, or tries to speak them, because the violation has so grotesquely twisted the verbal and emotional vocabulary of love. Rape is a toxic parody of lovemaking that, for the victim, may poison all memories and all expectations of physical intimacy. It is a Damoclean sword hanging over a woman's sexual life.

Extremities, William Mastrosimone's off-Broadway play about a rape victim who dares to fight back, was not much as dramaturgy. Its subsidiary characters were liberal placards, and for whole scenes it could fall asleep standing up on its soapbox. But it found primal energy in the tragic simplicity of its subject -- getting raped -- and its solution: getting even. For the movies, Mastrosimone has expanded and improved his text. Marjorie (Farrah Fawcett) now knows the rapist (James Russo) when he enters her rural home; he had assaulted her the week before. His sick seduction is now a burlesque of an ordinary couple's ordinary day: dressing up, making up, making dinner, making love. And the debate over the need for revenge that ensues among Marjorie, who has managed to overcome and confine her attacker, and her two roommates (Alfre Woodard and Diana Scarwid) has been trimmed of some rhetorical fat, while still allowing the rapist to woo the women with his new vulnerability.

Director Robert M. Young (Rich Kids, Short Eyes) nicely uses the camera's innate voyeurism -- it rapes with the eyes -- to promote a complicity between villain and viewer. The audience is challenged to be fascinated by the barrage of sexual violence without being aroused by it. Russo, a rude insinuator in the Brando mold, gets all the preening menace and depraved humor from his role. Fawcett, who appeared in the stage version (as did Russo), looks wracked and great here. Facing every sordid challenge with a schoolgirl's stern concentration, she gives herself to the bullying demands of her role like a virgin martyr. Her unadorned artistry singes.