British literary light Giles De'Ath -- "Dr. Death" to the chipper delivery boy at his front door, "Erstwhile fogey, now cult" to the BBC program guide in its write-up of his guest appearance on a radio chat show -- takes an unaccustomed plunge into the cultural mainstream when he ventures to the multiplex to have a look at the latest cinematic adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel. A wrong turn finds him in the adjacent auditorium having a look instead at Hotpants College 2. "Puerile romp without a single redeeming feature," he will afterwards read in the highbrow film journal, Sight and Sound. That's not quite how Giles De'Ath saw it. Puerile romp, no doubt, but with the single and very sizable redeeming feature of a Hollywood B-movie Adonis by the name of Ronnie Bostock -- a living symbol of the unpredictable, unformulatable, unfathomable charms of the cinema, and a mute witness to the limits of rational criticism. The details of this ivory-tower resident's descent into the garbage heap of popular culture -- the furtive purchase of teen fanzines at the newsstand, the even more furtive disposal of them in a public trash bin, the schoolgirlish devotional scrapbook labelled "Bostockiana," the investigative forays to the video store to fill in the complete filmography with items like Skidmarks and Tex-Mex (he buys a VCR without understanding that he first needs a television), the discovery of such useful tools of study as the slow-motion and freeze-frame buttons -- are believable as well as funny. Both of those qualities take a sharp dip during the voyage to the New World to track down the dreamboat in the flesh -- especially sharply the quality of funniness -- although the figurative death on Long Island, the literal De'Ath on Long Island, is still a long way short of Death in Venice. (The ultimate in May-December homoerotic frustration.) John Hurt is properly, drily, Englishly understated as the Mr. Priss; and a self-parodying Jason Priestley, sensitive to the verge of tears, never tips you off that he's in on the joke. All in all, a promising first film from British director Richard Kwietniowski. Promising but not altogether assuring. His inability or unwillingness to cheapen his style for the excerpts from the oeuvre of Ronnie Bostock could be a sign either of excess principle or of insufficient skill. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd