Exit To Eden

After giving prostitution the full Disney treatment in Pretty Woman, director Garry Marshall recommends mild doses of sadomasochism and bondage-discipline to the middle-class. As both a liberal project and a light tease, this carries a certain charm, though the star dominatrix here, Dana Delany, is so soft and malleable that one winds up feeling that the movie has backed away from its own agenda. The first and best part has its hero, Paul Mercurio, taking off for a therapeutic island named Eden, something halfway between summer camp and kinky theme park, where wisecracking undercover cops Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Aykroydfurnished with arch and awkward dialogue by Deborah Amelon and Bob Brunnerare trying to track down some central-casting villains (one of them played by the model Iman). Then Delany and Mercurio fly away to Louisiana, and the movie flies away with them. The source material, incidentally, is an Anne Rice novel. (JR)

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