RECORDED DELIVERY

A critical guide to the week's videos

Liese Spencer
Friday 25 July 1997 23:02 BST
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That Thing You Do! (PG) Fox Guild, rental, 28 Jul.

Tom Hanks (above) turns director to present one of the most sanitised visions of teendom to hit the screen since Happy Days. An anodyne account of the rise and fall of green, young, Sixties popsters The Wonders (one hit and they're history), the film substitutes plot and characterisation for a twinkly tribute to 1960s kitsch. From the opening montage of dated appliances to the carefully pastiched soundtrack, That Thing You Do! gleams with ersatz period detail. Such is the movie's well-scrubbed innocence that you keep hoping it's all an elaborate prelude to some Lynchian nightmare about the dark desires that lurk behind the white-picket smiles, but, sadly, Hank's fantasy goes unpunctured by reality. It's a measure of the movie's mildness that the perennially pleasant Mr Hanks provides the villain of the piece in a supporting role as The Wonders' business-minded manager. But even he fails to do anything more cruel than insist the boys don matching suits - a case of the bland leading the bland.

Remember Me? (PG) Film Four, rental, 28 Jul. Michael Frayn's frenetic suburban farce about a woman haunted by an old (and not entirely solvent) flame resembles a starrily cast sitcom, with toe-curling over-playing from the likes of Brenda Blethyn, Robert Lindsay, Imelda Staunton and Rik Mayall.

Extreme Measures (15) Columbia TriStar, rental, 30 Jul. In Paper Mask, Paul McGann donned a surgical mask to pretend to be a doctor. Watching Hugh Grant's surgeon barking out urgent sounding acronyms in Michael Apted's hospital thriller, it's hard not to feel that he's doing the same. Happily, you're soon distracted from his medical qualifications by his investigation into the murky DIY research practises of senior surgeon Gene Hackman. A well-paced chiller, with a properly brooding atmosphere and enough genuine scares to compensate for the gaping lesions in the plot.

Dead Calm (15) Warner Home Video, retail, pounds 5.99.

Husband and wife Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman sail into stormy psychological waters in this uncanny thriller, one of three welcome re-releases from Warner.

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