Virtual Reality provides the window-dressing for Wild Palms, the meandering six-hour "Event Series" starting April 24 on ABC. I've seen the first three hours, which are more of a non-event - Twin Peaks at a crawl. James Bleach stars as a patent attorney who is hired by a billionaire media creep (Robert Loggia), who wants to market virtual reality like a TV network: The characters from your favorite sit-com will appear right in your living room. The story is set in the year 2007, when a major 1960s revival seems to be underway. Men wear neo-Edwardian fashions, women dress like Jackie Onassis, and the cars, songs, and movie references are all from the period ("Tell me that you love me, Junie Moon," Dana Delaney whispers to Belushi.)
Holograms look as real as the rest of the characters in this story, and the confusion between reality and VR will apparently play a major role in the concluding three hours. But will anyone still be watching? Bruce Wagner's screenplay seems almost willfully lethargic, and Ryuichi Sakamoto's musical score drones mournfully beneath the sleepy-eyed suspense. Executive Producer Oliver Stone should have known better than to sponsor this watered-down David Lynch clone, with its deliberately unexplained plot developments, quixotic asides, and melodramatic revelations involving a killer mother (Angie Dickinson), cradle-robbers, brainwashing cults, and secret trapdoors that may or may not lead from the bottom of Belushi's swimming pool to a network of tunnels beneath Los Angeles.
Belushi struggles manfully to seem involved in a plot built on the principle of random contrivance. He is tortured throughout by nightmares about a hippopotamus. Delaney, as his wife, drinks too much and wonders if her son is really someone else's child. David Warner has some wonderful speeches as her long-lost father, and Dickinson travels with Loggia's hit squad in a Range Rover, paying a midnight visit to artist Nick Mancuso and pulling on rubber gloves before blinding him, setting up the obligatory next scene, in which Mancuso of course screams "My eyes! The bitch blinded me!" If only more of the plot were explained as carefully.
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