Checking Out

You suspect from the first fantasy sequence - hero Ray Macklin (Daniels) in his grave - that things are going to be wild, wacky, raucous and asprawl, and by the time you reach the final fantasy of Heaven as a Howard Hughes desert motel with George Harrison pushing broom, you know it. This 'light-hearted', heavy-handed skit on hypochondria in the suburbs is a miscalculation from start to finish. Macklin's life starts to go wrong when his best friend dies of a heart attack in his prime. Heck, this could happen to him, and he becomes increasingly hysterical and dishevelled, pestering doctors and loading up the household with personal oxygen supplies and pulse monitors until his wife (Mayron) can endure no more of it. There's no real structure to the film, and incidents and meetings - the orgy in the car, or the weirdo junk-food millionaire, for example - are the screenwriter's version of builder's rubble. Desperately unfunny.