Radioland Murders

Supposedly, George Lucas would occasionally scare his staff by threatening to produce Howard the Duck II. Lucas was joking about the project, but his wretched spirit of adolescent excess that resulted in this earlier fowl disaster is amply present in Radioland Murders. This movie's mind-numbing sense of waste underlies a frantic sense of energy. It's like watching a little kid getting all wound up on five bowls of sugar bombs and cutting loose in an incoherent babble.

Radioland Murders is set in 1939 at WBN of Chicago, which is about to hit the airwaves as a fourth radio network. As the clock ticks off the final seconds before broadcast, the station undergoes the usual fits of first night jitters. The unpaid staff writers (Bobcat Goldthwait, Robert Klein, Harvey Korman and Anne De Salvo) are ready to revolt. The sponsor (Brion James) is threatening to pull the plug. The network's head writer (Brian Benben) is being divorced by his wife (Mary Stuart Masterson), who just happens to be the executive secretary to the network's owner (Ned Beatty).

Everything is in a state of confusion as script rewrites are handed to the performers while they're on the air, and commercial breaks starring a dancing cigarette girl are stretched past the five-minute mark to cover the dead air space. Air space isn't the only thing dying around WBN – so are some of the performers. A murderer strikes repeatedly throughout the broadcast. By the time the cops arrive (in the form of Michael Lerner), most of the station's key personnel have already received a rude form of cancellation.

Radioland Murders tries hard to mix murder and mirth. Too hard, in fact. The movie works overtime at its pratfalls and delivers three punchlines to every joke. In one scene, Benben is sent rushing down a hallway only to be repeatedly knocked over. By the third fall, you wish that the idiot would break his neck and get it over with. None of the gags in Radioland Murders are particularly funny in the first place, and the numerous repetition of every frenzied stunt merely confirms the movie's bankruptcy of imagination. It's as if Lucas felt that every joke got better if you simply yelled it louder.

But they don't get any better – they become even more annoying. Radioland Murders is capable of giving viewers a headache; it scrambles madly through its lackluster story, unable to give pleasure. It's all white noise on the AM dial with the volume pumped way too high.