Grave Indiscretion

What? A film starring Sting, Alan Bates and Theresa Russell, which rings no dinner bells? With good reason, my friends. Released theatrically as Gentlemen Don't Eat Poets (it raked in mere boxoffice crumbs), this tedious piece of cinematic tripe, based on Patrick McGrath's gothic psychological novel The Grotesque, sets up thus: Alan Bates is a slightly mad scientist (which in Bates' hands, of course, becomes a bug-eyed caricature) who dreams of diddling his butler's (Sting) wife while fighting latent homosexual urges. Meanwhile, the butler is regularly sampling the physical charms of the severely acting-impaired Theresa Russell (Bates' wife), not to mention the foppish (yes, Sting swings both ways) intended fiancé of Bates' daughter. In other words, we have enough narrative food here to feed an entire season of Days of Our Lives. When the fiancé goes missing, any one of these sad characters could reasonably be set up as a possible murderer-the fact that they're all capable of cold-blooded murder simply out-soaps the worst that daytime television could offer. Not recommended, unless you have an extraordinarily high aptitude for bottom-drawer