"Kika"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                               July 16, 1994

   Especially during the summer you run into these weeks when there is nothing
playing in the theaters that fits even remotely under the heading "Women and
Film" and I am reduced to scouring the video stores or going to see what I
call "boys' films." This week I did the latter, with extremely mixed results.
I actually saw two boys' films this week, one, KIKA, allegedly a comedy, and
the other, SPEED, in the action genre.


   The other boys' film I saw this week, was Spanish director Pedro
Almodovar's new "comedy" Kika, and I truly hated it. Comedy, of course, is a
highly gendered genre. (I recently did a presentation on this subject to a
group of school teachers studying theories of comedy. The responses of the
audience members to the film clips I used from feminist comedies certainly
seemed to bear out this claim. Many, if not all, of the women in the audience
were laughing heartily at the scenes I had selected from such films as
"Shirley Valentine," "The Is My Life," "She-Devil" and "Sleepless in Seattle"
while the men in the audience, to a man, declared that they saw nothing at all
humorous about the scenes I had shown). KIKA must illustrate this same point
in reverse. I found it very difficult, for example, to sit through, much less
laugh at an interminable rape scene ("played for laughs" it says in the press
kit) in which an escaped convict/porno star rapes a sleeping woman and then
tries to break his own record of how many times he can come without
withdrawing and he's still humping away when the police come to drag him away.
I really can't imagine that many women would find this little gem funny,
though there certainly were people--mostly males--at the preview at the Tampa
Theater the other night who were laughing away at it. This "comedy" also
features a serial killer who murders three women during the course of the
film. Ha ha ha. I realize that Almodovar is intentionally bending over
backwards to be outrageous. He succeeded. I was outraged--but not amused.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and
Film.

   Copyright 1994 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not
reprint this review without the permission of the author.