A "steamy thriller" with the dubious enticement of supporting performances by comic actors Harvey Korman and Alan Thicke, BETRAYAL OF THE DOVE turns out to be a direct-to-video fowl of a different sort. This turkey does little but deliver strange turns from a cast of celebrity names who
had, apparently, nothing better to do that week.
Winsome Ellie West (Helen Slater) is separated from husband Jack (Thicke), a menacing, philandering alcoholic. When Ellie enters the hospital for a tonsilectomy she senses danger to her and daughter Autumn (Heather Lind). Fortunately gallant Dr. Jesse Peter (Billy Zane) is the attending
physician, and he heroically pulls Ellie back from the brink of death during a suspicious accident with the anaesthesia. Soon they are lovers. Ellie has another admirer, however platonic, in nerdy Norman (David L. Lander), lawyer-cousin of her boss Sid (Korman). Probing the surgical snafu, Norman
determines Jack wants Ellie killed to gain control of a company she partly owns. He further finds Ellie's slinky gal pal Una (Kelly LeBrock) part of the scheme, but a car bomb takes out the lawyer before he can unmask duplicitous Jesse as the third conspirator. The doctor is already preparing
Ellie for a second tonsilectomy/murder attempt when the sedated heroine fights her way off the operating table, and Sid leads a cavalry of cops to save Autumn from Una.
A thriller that can't make situations and circumstances feel real is in trouble, and BETRAYAL OF THE DOVE never recovers from a silly opener of little Autumn outlining the plot in allegorical terms via a school essay about a mama dove savaged by marauding crows. So no viewer misses the metaphor
a dove flaps around the title credits, and the anaesthetized Ellie suffers delusional attacks by big, black (obviously stuffed) birds. A dark and stormy night is all that's missing from the script by actor Robby Benson and his wife, singer/actress Karla DeVito. Strathford Hamilton's direction is
lumpy and graceless, with mismatched sound adding a veneer of amateurism. The movie looks like a series of screen tests spliced together; with that in mind, the one thespian who passes the audition is Alan Thicke, a fixture in TV sitcoms as a lovably befuddled dad. But here, unshaven and
unsmiling, he channels his smug, curt mannerisms into loathsome villainy, and does well considering the level of the material and the fact that his character gets iced by the treacherous Una (LeBrock--Mrs. Steven Seagal--doing a Cruella De Ville act) without logging much screen time. The meaty
role given to Lander (Squiggy from TV's "Laverne & Shirley") is undermined by a foolish treatment that puts him first in a gorilla suit, then into a nudie bar for gratuitous T & A. (Adult situations, sexual situations, violence, substance abuse, nudity, profanity.) leave a comment
