SHEAR MISERY

By Kenneth Wright

From The Herald (Glasgow), 02.08.1992

Look, Couch--readers say to us every week in the queue at the three brass balls--do you really watch all that stuff? Come on, shame the devil, it all comes off the press release, right? You just toss a coin to decide whether you like it or not, right? Nice work if you can get it. . . bloody journalists . . .day's work . . . etc.

"Then why," we say politely, "do you think I'm here to get the video out of hock?"

Sometimes we find that one hard to answer, but never mind. For once the sceptics are right: this week's top billing, Edward Scissorhands (rental, cert. PG), is the first blot on the scutcheon of our professional integrity. It's been lying in the house for two weeks and hasn't even been out of its box. (If only we could say the same for ourself . . .)

Why? Because we saw it at the pictures last year and we just can't watch it again. It's too beautiful, too heartbreaking, too expensive in terms of drying all those salt tears out of the carpet.

There are essentially two kinds of monster movies: the tragic and the comic, Frankenstein and ET. Director Tim Burton's strategy in Edward Scissorhands is to combine both forms and throw in elements of the Grimm fairy tales and Struwwelpeter, the end result being, despite its interludes of light comedy, one of the bleakest parables about mass society and the outsider since Tod Browning's Freaks.

High on a hill outside an American Anytown stands a derelict Gothic mansion, formerly the residence of amiably mad scientist Vincent Price. Before he died he made a boy, but didn't live long enough to give him hands: hence the prosthetics of rattling ironmongery with which our hero (Johnny Depp, unrecognisable under a scarred make-up betokening sensitive fragility) beguiles his time in extravagant topiary around the grounds until Avon Lady Dianne Wiest comes a-calling and takes him home to stay with her and her family.

At first all is well: Edward wins friends and influences people with his natural aptitude for hairdressing and garden design. In a sardonic reversal of the monster-tragedy formula, everybody loves him as long as he remains a freak; it's only when he wants to be like everyone else, as symbolised by his falling in love with Wiest's daughter Winona Ryder, that the townsfolk get the old torches blazing--so to speak--and advance, rhubarbing furiously, on Schloss Frankenstein. Edward Scissorhands is a future classic: see it now, even if only once.