LADYBUGS, PG-13, 1992, 91 minutes, Paramount Home Video, closed-captioned, $91.95.
Now think about it. If you had an all-girl soccer team, would you let Rodney Dangerfield come within the same ZIP code? I mean, isn't there some federal regulation against this? If there is, the producers of ``Ladybugs' have somehow gotten around it in order to have the fidgety comedian play the coach of a floundering bunch of adorable footballers.But then incongruity is fundamental to comedy, and at least ``Ladybugs' has that, if nothing else, going for it.
In this case, Dangerfield is the ultimate schmuck out of water. The gig wasn't his idea. The team is sponsored by the company Dangerfield works for, and as a condition for getting a promotion, his boss demands that our hero deliver a winning season.
The problem is, Dangerfield doesn't know a soccer ball from a beer mug, and the team isn't exactly up to championship snuff. This paints Dangerfield into a tough corner; if he doesn't get the promotion, he can't get married to his longtime sweetheart, Bess (Ilene Graff), and so he persuades her son Matthew (Jonathan Brandis), who's a soccer whiz, to wear a wig and join the team as one of the girls.
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Naturally, with Matthew (who's now Martha) directing the action, the team comes together and, eventually, works its way to the championship game. But once Bess finds out what's been going on, Dangerfield is forced to choose between her and the promotion.
The only real wrinkle here is that Dangerfield isn't really the Dangerfield we've come to know. He's nice, this guy, decent, caring and virtually germ-free. Yes, we do get to see him in a dress and heels, which is enough to set cross-dressing back a millennium. But who wants a reconstructed, child-proof Rodney Dangerfield?
FINAL ANALYSIS, R, 1992, 125 minutes, Warner Home Video, closed-captioned, $94.99.
Richard Gere gets a case of ``Vertigo' in this tired psycho thriller directed as a homage to Hitchcock by Phil Joanou from a screenplay by ``Cape Fear's' Wesley Strick. Executive producer Gere is implausible as the hero, a jaded psychiatrist who succumbs to the mind games of twisted sisters Kim Basinger and Uma Thurman.
The doctor is flimflammed by Thurman, a seductive patient who borrowed her neuroses from a Freudian textbook. Basinger plays her seemingly vulnerable sister, with whom the unethical therapist becomes sexually involved, and Eric Roberts plays Basinger's psychotic husband.
The plot concludes in a dizzying finale at an abandoned lighthouse that stands in for the chapel tower where another Kim similarly flirted with a fall.
