'Exit to Eden' inflicts pain on its audience

Just as straight, sober sex is the ultimate paen to narcissism, hypocrisy and smarminess are still the rule when Hollywood attempts to make a film about eroticism.

The latest, and one of the very dullest, examples of this phenomenon is former TV-director Gary Marshall's "Exit to Eden," a preposterously bad film in which a fetish for bondage and discipline is treated as one more threatening and deviated intrusion upon terrified, intolerant, middle class sexuality.

"Exit to Eden" is based (at least in name) upon Anne Rice's bestselling novel, in which an unlikely love affair develops between a submissive man and the head mistress of a sexual Fantasy Island catering to exotic B&D fantasies.

Screenwriters Deborah Amelon and Bob Brunner invent a less-than-half assed story that features Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O'Donnell as a wise-cracking pair of LAPD cops chasing two diamond smugglers. Amelon and Brunner have apparently never met a stupid or just plain ignorant S&M cliche they didn't like; the pair try to compensate for the machinations of their lame TV plot with a cornucopia of cheese (and occasionally beef) cake.

Dana Delaney plays Mistress Lisa, Eden's reigning dominatrix - and someone should be severely desciplined for that casting decision.

The film has one painfully timid spanking scene that feigns at capturing the real intensity of sadomasochism. Marshall's eden is the kind of place where seldom is hear a "Yes, Mistress," or a scream of pain, and were the recreational activity of choise is - of course - rollerblading.

Rosie O'Donnell is the only salvation in the whole unsightly mess. Her coming timing compares to the best work of Bill Murray, Robin Williams and certainly Dan Aykroyd - whose paycheck for this role was apparently determined by the number of assine expressions he could squeeze off by manipulating his dense eyebrows.

But no one else involved in the production appears as capable of mustering the balls necessary to indulge an S&M fantasy anymore than they're capable of making a watchable movie.