Stiff Upper Lips

Why didn't the Airplane team, or Mel Brooks, or even Keenan Ivory Wayans, for that matter, think of this: a parody of all those impeccably-mounted, buttoned-up Merchant-Ivory films? All the icons of the genre are skewered: the stern matron (the wonderful Prunella Scales of Fawlty Towers); the veddy proper and duty-bound butler (who nevertheless urinates in the family's soup); the face-in-a-book prig; and the repressed maiden ("I want my sexual awakening and I want it now," she announces at one point). Not as relentlessly paced or as inspired as the drive-by style of the Airplane and Naked Gun films, but there is a nice bit about the corrective measures taken to enhance the cleavage of the bosom-impaired maiden, and predictably, the room with a view looks out onto a brick wall. A few years too late (this 1998 film is only now being released direct-to-video), "Lips" has its moments, but with the heyday of the genre its skewering long since passed, it's pretty much a stiff. An optional purchase. (K. Lee Benson)