TV Reviews : Showtime Premieres ‘Boris and Natasha’

This is quite the week for long-shelved, live-action cartoon features. Just as “Brenda Starr” is belatedly hitting the big screen, tonight Showtime goes undercover to unearth the formerly buried “Boris and Natasha” for a cable premiere (at 8 p.m.). At this rate, somebody may actually put out that missing “Captain America” feature that theaters were showing trailers for a few years ago.

Then again, “Boris and Natasha” won’t likely create a rush on what few remaining comics haven’t already been mined by the movies. It’s not as bad as a lot of projects that do make it into multiplexes, but is still almost as misbegotten a crazy-quilt mess as advance rumor indicated, dahlink .

The inspiration in this piece of comic Cold War spy-vs.-spy nostalgia pretty much stopped after the sharp casting choices, with Sally Kellerman a good choice to play Natasha as a half-slinky, half-wide-eyed Commie ingenue adrift in the hedonist West, and Dave Thomas a natural for her shorter, shiftier, mustachioed compatriot in undercover intrigue--teaming here to steal a microchip from American scientists for their tiny Eastern Bloc country.

Director Charles Martin Smith and the four credited writers go for all-out zaniness, naturally, but it comes off like lowest-level Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-Proft --less Jay Ward than failed Mad magazine. The pop culture non sequitur jokes (like putting a still of Telly Savalas on screen just for a laugh) and the relentless movie-movie parodying (takeoffs of Sergio Leone’s twitching close-ups, et al.) are predictably tired, but no more so than the less referential attempts at classic farce (like the time-tested but trying shtick of trying to pass off a corpse as a drunk).

Still, if it’s bound to disappoint boomers who recall the more sophisticated, animated source of these shenanigans, the kids might have a good time with its benign silliness, and be less likely than Mom and Dad to mind the ongoing waste of a lot of “SCTV” talent (with cameos by John Candy and Andrea Martin as well as Thomas).