Word: beelzebubs
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Dennis Feldman's script labors almost as hard to get Murphy to Tibet (where he must seek the abducted "Prince of Light") as it does to place him in conflict with Beelzebub's legions. But it makes little of the comic possibilities in the star's new screen situation. And Director Michael Ritchie, who can be a wonderfully cockeyed social commentator (Smile, The Survivors, Fletch), seems almost as lost as Murphy when he is back of the beyond. They are both men who need to plant their feet firmly in contemporary American reality if they are to deliver their punches...
...might be called Pop surrealism that uses classic design elements the way Walt Disney cartoons used the physiognomy of a rodent to create Mickey Mouse. For all its playfulness, however, the Portland Building is dangerous. Modern architecture is ripe for a radical change, but Graves would replace Satan with Beelzebub...
Hell as well as Heaven. Absent is a brooding Satan or a slick Beelzebub to direct the traffic of the damned. Elkin's Hell is an anarchic ghetto, "the ultimate inner city" in perpetual and agonizing meltdown. "Its stinking sulfurous streets were unsafe," he writes. "Pointless, profitless muggings were commonplace; joyless rape that punished its victims and offered no relief to the perpetrator. Everything was contagious, cancer as common as a cold, plague the quotidian. There was stomachache, headache, toothache, earache. There was angina and indigestion and painful third-degree burning itch. Nerves like a hideous body hair grew...
...cousin, who seems to represent heaven-inspired goodness, are played by Jonathan Scott-Taylor and Lucas Donat. In the end, Damien survives, for no good reason except the producers' hopes to squeeze one more sequel out of him. It is, of course, possible that they are Beelzebub's agents in a new strategy of boring us so profoundly that we will turn to evil to cheer ourselves...
...employed by people who never read a phrase he wrote. It is an odd fate for the haunted functionary of the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague: his magnificent hallucinations have collapsed in the public mind to the scale of a worn-out adjective-one that turns the Beelzebub he implied (totalitarian bureaucracy, the Holocaust, the Gulag) into something only slightly more menacing than the Cookie Monster. "Oh, wow," protests the 17-year-old asked to prove she is old enough to drink. "That's really Kafkaesque...