MOVIE REVIEW : ‘NICE GIRLS DON’T EXPLODE’ IS A DUD

In an era of witless, tasteless high concepts, the one in “Nice Girls Don’t Explode” (selected theaters) ought to be eligible for some kind of award: maybe the Golden Bomb as “Terms of Endearment” collides with “Carrie.”

The result is a would-be satire that gouges your ribs, irritates your eyes, dulls your mind: the saga of clinging Mom Flowers (Barbara Harris) and neurotic daughter April (Michelle Meyrink), who apparently sets telekinetic fires whenever she’s sexually aroused.

The film maker’s malicious intent toward “Terms of Endearment” becomes immediately apparent. We’re shown the credits over cutesy-poo photo albums. We see a decor of pure Wonder bread and a prologue that has tyke April strapped in a harness by domineering Mom. Topping off everything is Harris’ archly fluttering, steel-pixie parody of Shirley MacLaine’s Augusta Greenway.

Finally we get the film’s notion of clever cultural satire: April Flowers’ dates inevitably erupt into a Hades of exploding cars, burning bushes, flaming restaurants--all, it seems, because her psyche goes haywire under hormonal stimulation. Is this supposed to be bland Middle America, blowing itself apart from sexual repression?

It’s a bad idea to begin with and it gets steadily worse. As we’re just settling into expectations of an evening of crass special effects and lame dialogue, the film makers pull a switch in miscreants.

No movie, not even “Hellzapoppin,” could survive this kind of turnabout, much less the dimwitted complications that ensue. But director Chuck Martinez and writer Paul Harris have a few more bad ideas up their sleeve. They’ve cast Wallace Shawn as a malevolent, nerdy little pyromaniac who becomes incensed at the constant mishearing of his real name “Ellen” for “Helen”--after which he throws Bic-flicking snits and tries to set his tormentors on fire.

The film makers have also dreamed up a stalwart, Ping-Pong playing boyfriend Andy (William O’Leary), and endless confrontations between him and Mom Flowers. In most of them, Mom drops in suddenly on Andy, chirps “Silly me! I overbaked!” and proceeds to offer the nearly naked Andy oatmeal-raisin cookies, while interrogating him. Are you amused at this cookie concupiscence? You’re still likely to flinch at the climax: Andy frantically covering his private parts with shaving cream, the discovery that the cream is actually a depilatory and his eventual arrest as a sex deviate?

The movie seems both underwritten and overdirected, the lighting has a fluorescent sheen, the camera set-ups are overemphatic and Martinez has encouraged all his actors into extravagantly stretched-out line readings and double and triple takes--although the dialogue is so weak, the only way to play it is probably to throw it away or make it inaudible.

“Nice Girls Don’t Explode” is rated PG, despite its nonstop, raunchy innuendoes and all it’s missing--to attain complete fiasco level--is a title song, to the tune of “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” in the Four Seasons’ best falsetto: “Ni-ice girls . . . Don’t exploh-oh-hode! They go boom!”