12/31/97
MOVIE REVIEW: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control
Light documentary profiles 4 unusual careers

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

**** (out of five)
Featuring Rodney Brooks, Dave Hoover, George Mendonca, Ray Mendez. A Sony Pictures Classics release directed by Errol Morris. Rated PG, contains nothing offensive. Running time: 82 minutes.

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control sounds like the title of one of those teasing sex romps of the 1970s.

Quite the contrary, it's a documentary by respected director Errol Morris about four men who have unusual jobs -- robot scientist Rodney Brooks, wild-animal trainer Dave Hoover, mole-rat specialist Ray Mendez and topiary gardener George Mendonca, who works his magic at Green Animals in Portsmouth.

The four have nothing in common. There's no indication that they've ever met. But they share a driving dedication to their work in offbeat professions.

Because of that, Morris's film doesn't always glide so easily from one subject to the next. One minute we're talking mole rats, the next robots.

Yet each man is fascinating in his own right, and the film is light and funny, especially with the zippy musical score that ties things together. Morris also makes amusing use of clips from the old-time Clyde Beatty movie serial King of the Jungleland to introduce Hoover, who works with lions and tigers at the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus. Clips from Zombies of the Stratosphere, with its clunky robots and men wearing wings, introduce robot scientist Brooks.

Each man is excited about what he does and takes us into his little universe. Mendonca talks about his arrival at the estate that later became Green Animals following the 1938 hurricane, when the place was in a shambles. He tells how he came to shape the bushes, by hand like a sculptor, into giraffes and bears.

Mendez eagerly gives us a history of the naked mole rat, a burrowing African creature that is hairless, and his difficulties in creating a mole-rat exhibit for the Philadelphia Zoo because their sharp teeth can cut through just about everything, even concrete.

Hoover gives us glimpses into the psychology of working with the big cats. He tells us why he no longer wears a watch into the cage -- those big paws like to grab things -- and why he and other wild animal trainers use chairs as props: "To distract them from their original thought, which is, `Eat the man in the white pants.' "

The film's provocative title was borrowed from Brooks, who says he once used it to describe a hypothetical robot invasion of the solar system. Some of his gangly creations are pretty funny in their own right.

Morris, who first came to national attention nearly 10 years ago with The Thin Blue Line, a spellbinding docudrama about a man wrongly convicted of shooting a policeman, is a long way from serious with Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. But this is lots more fun.