In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that my unkind words for Summer School don’t properly acknowledge how weirdly watchable I find that comedy to be. On the other hand, I stand by my praise for Kirstie Alley in this review. I still think the only thing separating her from a dandy film career was the right part.  

For being a very funny man, Carl Reiner is not exactly the most dependable comedy director working in Hollywood. Even though he’s had such terrific efforts as All of Me and The Man with Two Brains, he’s also managed to lend his talents to some films of lesser quality, like Summer School and the film that leads off the show this week, Sibling Rivalry. In this latest effort, he’s once again working with Summer School co-star Kirstie Alley, who plays a woman stuck in a boring, repetitive marriage to a doctor played by Scott Bakula, of TV’s Quantum Leap. Alley decides to seek a bit of adventure by having an affair. The big problem arises when she discovers that the man she has just slept with has died of a heart attack. The rest of the film revolves around the attempts by Alley and a local vertical blinds salesman who gets himself tied up in the whole mess to keep the affair and death from the police and her family.

The script is packed with all sorts of twists, turns, and overly complex relationships. In fact, about the only thing the script doesn’t have are funny jokes. To be fair, there are a few funny scenes, including one that involves Bill Pullman using a pencil to force-feed laxative pills to the corpse in a botched attempt to make it look like suicide and Alley and Pullman’s search for some missing, as she puts it, “protection.” The film also suffers from subpar performances, such as that of Jami Gertz as Alley’s sister. Alley herself manages to exude some charm in this thankless role. If she ever manages to get a part with real substance, one imagines she may actually be able to create some sort of respectable film career. But as long as she keeps working in mindless fluff like this, she’s wasting her time. And wasting ours.

1 and 1/2 stars, out of 4.