12.11.98 06:35:12
Hilarious comedy goes alarmingly off kilter

The Alarmist
**1/2 (out of five)
Starring David Arquette, Stanley Tucci, Mary McCormack, Kate Capshaw, Ryan Reynolds. A Lions Gate Films release written and directed by Evan Dunsky from the play Life During Wartime by Keith Reddin. Not rated, contains violence, sex, profanity. Running time: 91 minutes.

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

The Alarmist is an offbeat independent film that takes a clever idea -- a salesman for a home-alarm system stages fake break-ins to terrify a neighborhood and sell more alarm systems -- and goes over the edge with it.

"Not break-ins . . . incidents,'' is how Heinrich Grigoris (Stanley Tucci), the boss at Grigoris Security Systems, explains to his new salesman why he has just kicked in a door on a house where his company recently installed an alarm system.

It's one of Heinrich's dirty little secrets, but he thinks so much of his new salesman, Tommy Huddler (David Arquette), that he expects him to become part of his shady way of drumming up business. But Tommy, the mildest kind of straight arrow you could expect to find, is appalled.

The Alarmist looks like it's on its way to being a hilarious comedy. But midway, its tone changes nearly 180 degrees. A pair of surprise murders, a visit by a ghost to a delusional young man, and his wildly misplaced motive for revenge on the man he believes responsible for the murders conspire to throw this offbeat comedy a little too off.

Rather than the wild slapstick promised, The Alarmist becomes not only strange, but exceedingly ridiculous. It's a movie in which people shout at each other, but no one seems to hear (or want to hear) the truth. The longer it goes on, the more it looks merely desperate.

Based on a play called Life During Wartime, The Alarmist has lots of good things going for it, however, especially its jaundiced way of looking at the world.

Early in his selling days, Tommy falls madly in love with a pretty, but much older customer named Gale (Kate Capshaw). Writer-director Evan Dunsky sets up a funny meeting-Tommy's-folks scene that's awkwardly hilarious for everyone concerned, as well as an earlier oops! moment when Gale's strapping teenage son Howard (Ryan Reynolds) walks in on an embarrassing sexual moment between Tommy and Gale. The payoff comes when Tommy tries to ease Howard's mind and winds up hearing graphic details of the naive-looking Howard's own romantic flings.

The Alarmist has lots of moments like that, such as the momentary relief a man feels when he goes to the morgue to identify a corpse and discovers that the body is someone else. But it turns out to be a clerical error by a dimwitted morgue attendant (things like this must really happen!) and soon the real corpse emerges from a drawer.

It's a bleakly funny scene, but it also marks a leap from sheer goofy comedy to something that's darker and weirder. The Alarmist gets a little too alarming for its own good.

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