'Four Rooms': Don't Go Knocking

The selling point of "Four Rooms," now playing at the Americom House of Cinema, is not supposed to be the plot or the stars: The movie is actually comprised of four different short films, and stars such as Madonna, Bruce Willis, Marisa Tomei and Antonio Banderas make merely brief appearances.


No, it's the four hot young directors -- Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, each of whom wrote and directed a segment of the movie -- who are meant to lure audiences. But instead of the hip and stylish black comedy they're aiming for, the artists (save one) come up with nothing more than miserable blends of scatological humor, sophomoric sexual innuendo and self-aggrandizing displays of egotism.


The short segments, which all take place on New Year's Eve in a faded Los Angeles hotel, are linked only by the appearances of Tim Roth as Ted the bellboy. Roth plays a prominent role in each segment, which makes the way he carries it off such a disappointment. The usually deft English actor mugs as if he's being paid by the facial tic, loading on the grimaces, twitches, mincing and eye-rolling, and interspersing the whole wiggling mess with occasional bursts of an inexplicable Cockney accent.


The first segment, Anders' "The Missing Ingredient," sets the unfortunate tone. Involving some nonsense about a witches' coven that takes over the honeymoon suite so they can resurrect the goddess Diana, the plot seems merely an excuse to get the women to take off their shirts and undulate over the hapless Roth, whose fluids are needed to supply the missing ingredient for the witches' brew.


Madonna turns in a typically vampish performance, while Valeria Golino, Ione Skye and Lili Taylor -- fine actresses all -- merely look uncomfortable, as well they should, waving their arms about and chanting crude ditties in their "resurrection" ceremony.


Rockwell's segment, "The Wrong Man," makes by far the least sense, as Roth becomes involved in a sexual drama staged by David Proval, a manically jealous husband, and Jennifer Beals as his wife. As she spends most of her screen time bound and gagged in a chair, Beals' opportunities to demonstrate that she has matured artistically since her "Flashdance" days are limited. The humor in this one is limited to a slow-motion shot of Roth being punched and falling to the floor, and a joke -- inevitable, probably, in a dumb comedy set on New Year's Eve -- involving vomit.


However, the third segment, "The Misbehavers," by director Rodriguez, does provide some genuine laughs. Banderas is hilarious as a slick gangster who pays Roth to baby-sit his annoying children, with appropriately calamitous results. The two children give the most unaffected, restrained performances of the whole show.


Tarantino's segment, "The Man From Hollywood" is perhaps the one that had the most potential for dark comedy: A movie producer and his friends persuade Roth to help them complete a gruesome wager -- a recreation of an Alfred Hitchcock episode, "The Man From Rio," involving the unsettling combination of a cigarette lighter, a finger and a hatchet.


And if not for the presence of Tarantino himself playing the movie producer, the segment would be a good deal less grating and much more amusing. As an actor, Tarantino is, much like an itchy skin rash, a minor inconvenience when present in small doses, hugely irritating when spread around -- and most pleasurable when not there at all. The braying director does no more than simply play his Cool Movie Bigwig Self, and his loud, jittery, petulant air of command just gives the audience an indication of what he's probably like offscreen.





"Four Rooms" is showing through Thursday at 9:30 p.m. at the Americom House of Cinema in the Radisson Slavjanskaya Hotel, 2 Berezhkovskaya Nab. Nearest metro: Kievskaya. No showing on Tuesday. Phone: 941-8890.