HOLLYWOOD VICE SQUAD

LOS ANGELES TIMES, 6/3/86, Calendar/p. 2, Patrick Goldstein

Is truth stranger than fiction? 'Certainly when it comes to ''Hollywood Vice Squad," a dull, dopey movie that claims to have been based on actual police cases. Normally we'd write that off as Hollywood hyperbole, especially since most of the vice officers in the film behave with all the cool precision of the Three Stooges gone undercover. Yet, the movie's script was written by James J. Docherty, a 22-year LAPD veteran and currently a commanding officer for the city's vice division.

Docherty says in the production notes that he's "taken certain dramatic license," which perhaps accounts for why most of the bumbling detectives do everything but wear a big placard around their necks saying "Hollywood Vice: Please Keep All Important Evidence in Your Pockets." One vice team, assigned to discreetly follow an important suspect, scrambles into a car, dams the doors and screeches off in pursuit, all in full new of the criminal. (The crook, gliding along in his limousine, glances in his rear-view mirror and grumbles, "They must be cops. Who else would be following us?")

The film's creaky story line revolves around a pretty Midwestern runaway who (surprise!) has turned to prostitution and drugs while in the clutches of a sleazeball pimp (Frank Gorshin) who wears more gold chains than Mr. T. While her mother and the local police join in the hunt, we see the vice squad in action, chasing transvestite hookers, nabbing PCP goofballs, raiding bookies and breaking up teen-age pornography rings.

You'd think, with her wonderful feel for gritty authenticity and obsessive characters, that this would be lively material for director Penelope Spheeris, who did "Decline of Western Civilization" and "The Boys Net Door." But despite an occasional unsettling touch (the pimp's secretary is a ghoulish-looking woman confined to a wheelchair), Spheeris seems bored and disinterested, as if she were directing with one eye on the camera and the other on the clock.

The film's one potentially intriguing character is a rookie woman cop (Carrie Fisher), but we never see enough of her rude introduction to Sin City to really care about any moral dilemmas she might have. The rest of the oddball cast (which includes Ronny Co, Leon Isaac Kennedy, Joey Travolta and Trish Van Devere) is uniformly forgettable. You could excuse the vice cops, who after all, spend most of their time masquerading as pimps and johns, but the bad acting bug seems to have infected the rest of the cast as well.

If Mr. Docerty is going to try his hand at more script, our advice is to read some Joseph Wambaugh or George V. Higgins. The dialogue here sounds suspiciously like Hollywood shoptalk. When a police captain hears a new plan to capture a scuzzy pimp, he beams, "Slavery. I love it!" To our untrained ears, that's not vice lingo. That's something a studio executive would say if he were pitched a story about a wacky gang of 19th-Century Brat Pack plantation owners.

last updated August 29th 1997