ANIMAL RITES

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Fierce Creatures is not a sequel in the usual sense of the word. But it does reassemble the key zanies of A Fish Called Wanda: Kevin Kline, all ego and libido and stupid schemes; John Cleese, all British pomp, phlegm and cluelessness; Jamie Lee Curtis, still innocent of the effect her form encased in a tight dress can have on impressionable males; Michael Palin, just plain innocent, but with his former stammer replaced now by another verbal disability--logorrhea.

This time they are the mismanagers of a commercial zoo that has been acquired by a Murdochian media buccaneer (Kline plays him too, complete with Down Under accent). They are charged with getting its profit margin up to his brutal rate (20%). Their plan is to dispense with all the zoo's sweet little fuzzballs and stock the place exclusively with man-eaters. If violence sells on TV and in the movies, why shouldn't it do the same for them?

As comic premises go, this is not exactly a world-beater. But soon enough, the keepers--gentle souls all--are funnily up in arms defending their pets. A wandering tarantula motivates a genteel striptease, and the mean mogul gets his comeuppance. The script, by Cleese and Iain Johnstone, lacks Wanda's mean and giddy inventiveness, and the directors, Robert Young and Fred Schepisi, don't wind their material very tightly. Still, this good-natured movie is very much in the spirit of those ancient comedies from Ealing Film Studios in which nice, silly people defend some enclave of old-fashioned sanity against the forces of brute modernism. And that's a tradition worth reviving.

--By Richard Schickel