Texas Tornado

By Richard Zoglin

TITLE: THE POSITIVELY TRUE ADVENTURES OF THE ALLEGED TEXAS CHEERLEADER- MURDERIN G MOM

TIME: DEBUTING APRIL 10, HBO

THE BOTTOM LINE: A spoof of true-crime movies is more believable than the real thing.

AS WANDA HOLLOWAY, THE TEXas housewife accused of trying to hire a hit man to murder the mother of her daughter's cheerleading rival, Holly Hunter is like a clenched tornado. She talks so fast the words barely make it out of her mouth; expressions flash on and off her face in milliseconds. Plotting the crime with her former brother-in-law (who turned her in to the police before it could be carried out), she keeps bursting into giggling shrieks, a schoolgirl titillated by the brazenness of her own amorality. A control freak to the end, she demands instructions from the detectives arresting her on what to wear to jail. "God," one of them sighs, taking a long puff on a cigarette, "I miss drug busts."

The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom -- a new, rather too strenuously titled HBO film -- is intended to be a spoof of TV's ubiquitous true-crime movies. The joke is that it's more believable than most of the ripped-from-the-headlines docudramas it pokes fun at. Director Michael Ritchie (Smile, The Candidate) and screenwriter Jane Anderson (The Baby Dance) don't lampoon the genre; they merely strip it of the solemn sensationalism that TV usually lavishes on these seedy tales. What's left is acid black comedy.

The film re-creates not only the bizarre case (already the subject for one TV movie this season) but also the media frenzy that surrounded it. TV reporters try to sweet-talk their way into the principals' homes. Friends and relatives battle over selling their stories to Hollywood. "Mom, when they make the movie, can I play myself?" asks Wanda's daughter as if she were seeking a lift to the mall. Layers pile on layers: we watch as Wanda watches herself on Donahue and A Current Affair; the film's producer and writer appear as themselves; and the entire story is framed by a videotaped "interview" with Wanda wearing a new blond hairstyle but the same bone-chilling self- assurance.

Yet the film is more than just a clever satire of media overkill. Ritchie assembles a vivid, sharply drawn gallery of small-town characters: Beau Bridges as Wanda's unwilling co-conspirator, a hardhat burdened with a messy past and a loony wife (Swoosie Kurtz); Elizabeth Ruscio as the rival mom, no less competitive but not as imaginative; and Matt Frewer as Wanda's drudge of a lawyer. All that and a bouncy country score by Lucy Simon too. True or not, it's positively terrific.