8/23/96
MOVIE REVIEW: A Very Brady Sequel
It's a very funny sequel

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

*** 1/2 (out of five)
Starring Shelley Long, Gary Cole, Tim Matheson, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Christine Taylor, Jennifer Elise Cox, Paul Sutera, Olivia Hack and Jesse Lee. A Paramount picture written by Harry Elfon and Deborah Kaplan, directed by Arlene Sanford. Rated PG-13, contains violence, adult themes, drug use. Running time: 90 minutes.

Sexy double entendres, incestuous desires, a kidnapping, gay gags, magic mushrooms, hostage taking at gunpoint. It's the new Brady Bunch movie!

The filmmakers may have called the followup to last summers' surprisingly successful The Brady Bunch Movie, A Very Brady Sequel, but there's a lot here that's not very Bradylike at all. It's as though they decided that the totally retro Bradys had gone about as far as they could in doling out their saccharine life lessons and so instead have them going for broke in a film that's very often laugh-out-loud funny.

Thus Carol Brady (Shelley Long) makes sexy meowings toward husband Mike (Gary Cole) while fondling a carrot, eldest daughter Marcia (Christine Taylor) and eldest son Greg (Christopher Daniel Barnes) discover their budding sexuality when they share a bedroom, and clueless daughter Jan (Jennifer Elise Cox) dials a phone sex service so her pretend boyfriend will seem real to the rest of the family.

Clueless is the operative term here. The family is so stuck in its '70s time warp that when Carol starts talking about how she wants to be gay again and how she misses Marcia and Jan and Cindy, she doesn't realize that other people take her remarks very differently from the way she innocently intended. And so we laugh at her and A Very Brady Sequel becomes a funny ride into the world of bell-bottom pants and flower power.

Writers Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan (who didn't write the first Brady film but are writing a big-screen version of Gilligan's Island, which like The Brady Bunch was created by Sherwood Schwartz) have borrowed enough ideas from the old series so fans won't feel stranded. At one point the Bradys take off for Hawaii, just like in a popular string of shows from the series, although this time it's to rescue Carol, who has been kidnapped by a man who claims to be her first husband . . . although she can't quite place him.

Sincerely funny

Tim Matheson plays the returned "husband" in the film's stab at a plot. He's really a crook who is after the priceless sculpture of a horse that has been part of the Brady entrance hall for years.

Matheson is amused and amazed by the completely dense Bradys and their perky '70s spin on life, and becomes an unwitting foil for their well-meaning but usually miscalculated attempts at helpfulness. When he's accidentally fed a plate of pasta laced with magic mushorooms, his fantasy takes the form of a zany cartoon and he moans, "I'm tripping with the Bradys."

The feeble plot is merely a line from which to hang amusing vignettes of Brady-ness. Cole only has to stand there in a brown jacket of huge windowpane checks that shouts bad taste for a laugh.

Despite the bad clothes and the doltish actions, he makes Mike believe in the sometimes idiotic things he does. In fact, the sincerity of the cast is what makes A Very Brady Sequel work so well.

Long is wonderfully blank-headed in the role of the perpetually cheerful Carol, who at one point decides to change her image and get a new hairdo that requires silver-paper rollers and a chain saw to accomplish. Wait 'til you see the results!

I don't think Long, who left TV's Cheers to become a movie star, ever envisioned that she would become one as Carol Brady. But that's kind of the neat-o frosting on her career cake.

There are good turns, too, by Henriette Mantel as Alice the maid, who uses a pot of lard to stuff her meatloaf; Taylor as the preening Marcia ("I'm the prettiest, so I go first"); and Cox as Jan, the underappreciated daughter who has her orthodontist and optometrist autograph her yearbook.

Arlene Sanford's direction catches the high spots and doesn't dwell too long on the sticky situations, such as Jan's pathetically desperate attempts to be liked and find a boyfriend. In two truly hilarious musical numbers the Bradys overwhelm customers at a shopping center and passengers aboard a jumbo jet with their insistently drippy songs and relentlessly sunny smiles.

Add some startling cameos by RuPaul, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Rosie O'Donnell, John Hillerman and Henry Winkler and the merry spirit really does become infectious.