Splash.

SPLASH is an absolutely idiotic film that has garnered considerable critical and vast popular acclaim. Yet it is a mere steal from and vulgarization of Andersen's immortal "The Little Mermaid," a tragic tale of heartbreaking loveliness. If you haven't read that one lately, do so, and forget this stupid movie.

As a small boy, Allen Bauer takes a boat trip off Cape Cod with his parents and callow brother, Freddie, who is only interested in looking up women's skirts. Allen looks down into the water, sees something beautiful there, and jumps in, but is promptly pulled out. Gazing after the receding boat is the frustrated, sad child mermaid who almost clasped him to her bosom. Years later, Allen runs the family wholesale-produce business in New York City while Freddie has turned into a fat, wisecracking, lazy playboy. By a series of desperate plot contrivances, Allen ends up almost drowning off Cape Cod again, where a crazy young scientist, Kornbluth, is now tracking a mermaid. Who should rescue Allen but the mermaid from his childhood, whom, in most unchivalrous fashion, he has completely forgotten. But he is greatly aroused by his rescuer, blonde and nude (though her nakedness is pretty efficiently bowdlerized by long tresses and sometimes even a body stocking--the film, after all, was release by the Disney people), hwo kisses him passionately and then, for no good reason, leaves him there on the beach as she carries off his wallet to her submarine habitat, which looks like an only slightly waterclogged Swiss chalet.

Disconsolate, Allen returns to New York, but the mermaid, with the help of his credit cards and a handy underwater atlas, figures out where he lives and how to follow him thither. Soon she emerges naked at the Battery, is hauled in by the police, and finally handed over to an overjoyed Allen, who has come to claim her. They make near-endless love in his apartment--oh, I forgot to tell you that on land the mermaid's tail conveniently turns into legs. While he goes reluctantly to work the mermaid sneaks off to Bloomingdale's, where she acquires not only a complete wardrobe but also a perfect knowledge of English from watching TV in the store's television department. Now, even if you have believed everything up to now--e.g., that a mermaid who knows no English can read maps and credit cards in that language--you will surely agree that no one can learn anything resembling English from television. When Allen, who has come to collect her, inquires of this foreigner (as he persists in perceiving her) what she is called, she lets out an ungodly whale or dolphin yodel--her name--that smashes every TV screen in the store. Yet Allen does not have to pay for any of it. It's the audience who pays.

It seems that Madison, as she calls herself after the avenue along which she and Allen happen to saunter (good thing, it wasn't Of the Americas), has only seven days to spend on land--a feeble echo from Andersen that makes no sense in this context and is never explained. When, during that week, she wants to exercise her tail, she locks herself into the bathroom and pours Morton's salt into the tub, but Allen, the imbecile, never catches on. When Kornbluth wants to unmask her true being, salt water is not required to do the trick--mere dousing with the spray from a hydrant produces a tail thrashing on the sidewalk. How many grains of Morton's are we to take this with? And can we believe that the Museum of Natural History harbors a laboratory full of evil scientists who, protected by the U.S. Army, are all set to cut up the poor mermaid for the benefit of science and the advancement of the inane plot?

Sad to say, the moment Allen saw that tail, he backed away from Madison in horror. Is this a romantic lower? Does he deserve such pure piscine passion if he becomes finicky at a little finny business? Especially since the tail is ingeniously so designed as to look exactly like two feminine legs temporarily encased in a piece of easily removable goldfish-colored rubber. And can we accept the sudden conversion to selflessness of both the irresponsible Freddie and the maniacal Kornbluth, not to mention the renewed love of the apostate Allen, whom those two now help toward a happy ending? Is a fairy tale possible at all in the film's realistic settings? Can we accept an ending according to which Allen can live underwater as long as he cleaves to Madison? Even Baron de la Motte-Fouque, the Romantic author of Undine (1811), did not dare envision a human being's following a water sprite to her element. Even E.T. could not take his human friends home with him. (There is quite a lot of E.T. in the last part of Splash.) A little bit of credibility is mandatory even for a fairy tale, but this film is not so much a fairy tale as a large, sophomoric wet dream.

Yes, we do get a few funny lines and some mildly amusing situations, mostly thanks to John Candy, the corpulent comic who makes Freddie an amiable hot-air balloon, and Eugene Lev, who turns Kornbluth into a wire-haired Groucho Marx. Tom Hanks, a consummate yokel, is too gawky and goony for a hero. As for Daryl Hannah, should a mermaid have minimal acting ability; be raw-boned, lantern-jawed, and knock-kneed when she sheds her tangerine tail (phallic or merely garish?); and look, in fact, like Matt Dillon in drag? Even her hair (wig?) looks rather coase and stringy, but that's what you get for shampooing it with brine instead of Breck. Ron Howard, the former child actor, has directed in true TV fashion, abetted by flashy photography in and out of water. But the main problem is the writing.

Based on a story of the film's producer, Brian Grazer, and a treatment by Bruce Jay Friedman, the screenplay is by Friedman and Lowell Ganz and Babaloo (!) Mandel, the latter two appearing in doltish cameo roles. The greatest ingenuity went, it would seem, into ways of shielding the more interesting parts of the ostensibly nude Miss Hannah from our eyes, and the film from an R rating. Ah well, as Eliot might have written: this is the way the whirl ends/Not with a splash but a splatter.