SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER

SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER (Directed by Thomas Schlamme. Stars Mike Myers, Nancy Travis, Anthony LaPaglia, Amanda Plummer, Brenda Fricker)

Wayne's World star and creator Mike Myers' foray into romantic comedy is one of the most intelligent and amusing American movies of recent years. NOT. It's actually another bizarre hodge podge of comic styles, with the dough faced Myers cast as a handsome lead and required to be both straight man and comedian, carrying the plot and goofing around on the side. He also turns up in a completely off the wall supporting part, as his own belligerently Scots father, instructing himself as his son to "give yer mother a kiss or I'll kick yer teeth in."

The plot is a sort of Hitchcockian Basic Instinct pastiche, with Myers falling for an attractive butcher (Nancy Travis) who he begins to suspect may have murdered three former husbands. Around this are hung a low key, occasionally witty, sometimes silly collection of gags. There are some of the verbal jinx of Wayne ("I am smitten," he announces, "I am in deep smit!"), some broad slapstick (a bathing towel slips off at an inopportune moment) and some entirely surreal alternative poetry (don't ask). All this is peppered with bright cameos such as Steve Wright as a deadhead pilot and Alan Arkin as an over-polite police captain, and kept buzzing with a soundtrack that features The Boo Radleys, The La's, B.A.D., The Spin Doctors, Soul Asylum and a bagpipe version of Rod Stewart's 'Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?'

Amiable but uneven, the title is more than likely to encourage the response 'so what?'