Bronx Bull

By RICHARD CORLISS

Summer in New York City, 1977. A record heat wave, a Yankee pennant drive, a blackout and a looting spree. For the tabloids and news shows, and for six unlucky people who died at the business end of his .44, that scalding season belonged to the Son of Sam.

Someone could make a good movie about a tortured fellow who kills lovers in parked cars on the advice of a talking dog. But in Summer of Sam, a kind of Bronx Boogie Nights, Spike Lee has made a very bad movie with David Berkowitz deep in the background. It's mainly about whether a Bronx hairdresser would rat on his best friend if he didn't get fellated by his wife. How do you say "Huh?" in Italian?

In a Spike Lee movie you can barely see the characters behind all the editorial placards. Da boys in this hood hang out under a big sign reading DEAD END. Vinny the hairdresser (John Leguizamo) cheats on his wife (Mira Sorvino), then takes her to Plato's Retreat for a disastrous evening of group sex. His best friend, Ritchie (valiant Adrien Brody), is a newborn punk who moonlights as a dancer-stud in a gay porno house. The local lowlifes think Ritchie is weird; he's not neighborhood. So he must be the Son of Sam.

Movies have had way too much fun with Italian-American stereotyping, but Lee plays it dead serious, unendurably shrill--and for an endless 2 hrs. 20 min. Still, we can't pin all the blame for ethnic defamation on Lee; his screenwriters are Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli. To them, we cry, like a stern Italian grandma, "Vergogna!" That's how you say "Shame on you" in Italian.

--R.C.