MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN

   Film (1992). Warner Bros. Dir John CARPENTER, starring Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill, Michael McKean, Stephen Tobolowsky. Screenplay Robert Collector, Dana Olson, William Goldman, based on Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1987) by H.F. SAINT. 99 mins. Colour.

   Nick Halloway (Chase), a feckless businessman, is turned invisible by an industrial accident. The Government, represented by a CIA psycho (Neill), tries to capture Hallowayto use him for its own nefarious purposes, and he falls for a glamorously unbelievable anthropologist (Hannah) between escapes, disguises, stunts and tricks. After a good opening the film slips into a standard romantic comedy/thriller vein, with Carpenter reprising the facelessly efficient approach he used on STARMAN (1984). Several of its best images are lifted directly from James Whale's The INVISIBLE MAN (1932), but the film hardly uses its ambitious source novel, raising but then abandoning a central point - that Halloway was such an average loser as to be invisible even before he became literally so. The well achieved effects (Chase smoking a cigarette whose smoke outlines his lungs, and many others) keep the film interesting.

   KN