Scorchers

Stars: Faye Dunaway (Chinatown, Network, The Handmaid's Tale), James Earl Jones (Field Of Dreams, Soul Man), Emily Lloyd (Wish You Were Here, Cookie, In Country), Jennifer Tilly (Let It Ride), Denholm Elliott (A Room With A View), James Wilder (Equal Justice). Trash. Serious trash. If TV soap opera had no restrictions and smarter writers, the result would be Scorchers, writer-director David Beaird's adapted stage play about the underbelly of small-parish life down in Louisiana. They're calling this a comedy, but you can rest assured that the Reverend Donald Wildmon would find nothing funny about it. Scorchers opens with the local preacher (Anthony Geary, formerly "Luke" on "General Hospital") with his frock up, so to speak, making whoopee with the town whore (Faye Dunaway). Arriving late for a wedding he's supposed to conduct, the preacher receives a serious tongue-lashing from Jumper, the bride's father, who calls him a "butthead" and much worse, setting the verbal level (in the gutter) early on. Splendid (Lloyd), the bride, and Dolan (Wilder), her new hubby, spend their wedding night at cross purposes (he's all for consummation, she ain't)--until the father, Jumper, joins them for an evening of persuasion (sometimes vocal, sometimes with a large wooden paddle). Meanwhile, across town, bartender Bear (Jones) and town drunk Howler (Elliott) listen in disbelief as spurned wife Talbot (Tilly) goes head-to-head with Thais (Dunaway) over Talbot's wayward husband. Although the writing is uneven, and the talky nature of the film sometimes nearly drowns it, Scorchers is, for the most part, primo dirt. How many of us would want to miss Faye Dunaway delivering a line like: "The day you save this man, I will bend over and kiss your butt in front of the post office." Audience: Those who like their dirt to be literate. But forewarn people: the language in Scorchers would make a sewer rat blush. By the way, teen heartthrob Luke Perry (Beverly Hills 90210) has a very brief cameo as a heckler.