KENNETH WRIGHT is numbed by the incessant dialogue in Beatty's

gangster flick.

EVERY so often a clinker of a film comes along that compensates the

reviewer for the sheer hell of having to watch it by writing its own

review in a line or two of script, thereby saving Couch Potato the

trouble of having to make up his own wisecracks. We remember with quite

disproportionate affection lines like ''Murdered -- and someone's

responsible!'' (Plan 9 From Outer Space) and ''An intellectual carrot --

the mind boggles!'' (The Thing), and one day we will perhaps think

kindly even of Bugsy (rental, cert. 18) for providing the fatal line

''Dialogue's cheap in Hollywood''.

Cheap? Director Barry Levinson must have got it wholesale. Nobody

(which usually means Warren Beatty) in this pole-axeingly dull floral

tribute on the cortege of the gangster thriller ever stops talking:

talking slow, talking fast, talking smart, talking dumb, but most of all

talking long (131 minutes long) while not much happens.

The pity is that the story of forties mobster Bugsy Siegel, mainstay

of Murder Inc., Hollywood groupie, and creator of Las Vegas, has so much

potential to make a good film. Bugsy sticks fairly closely to the facts

-- the obsessive affair with B-movie starlet Virginia Hill (Annette

Bening), the prissily psychopathic personality, the skewed commercial

genius that picked the middle of the Nevada Desert as the right place to

build the world's biggest gambling hell -- but its snail's-pace

narrative and editing, stopping the film every five minutes for Warren

Beatty to do some fancy acting, destroys the sense of menace and

unpredictabil-

ity so essential to a good gangster flick. All in all, it's an offer

Couch Potato found terribly easy to refuse.

Scotland may be short of heroes these days, but as long as Sean

Connery has strength to swing a broadsword this reviewer's heart will

always give a wee skirl at the sight of his name on a delicious slice of

escapist tosh like Highlander II: The Quickening (retail, Entertainment

in Video, cert. 15, #10.99). Although his entrance is too long delayed

and his exit comes too soon, he dominates this charming action fairytale

as the perfect tongue-in-cheek foil to Christopher Lambert's rent-a-hunk

heroic lead.

The storyline, set in 2024 and beefed up with a fashionable en-

vironmentalist subplot about the ozone layer, concerns the efforts of

the witty and eminently hissable baddie Katana (Michael Ironside),

dictator of the planet Zeist, to make sure that the freedom-fighters'

leader Connor McLeod (Lambert) never returns from his exile on earth to

rally the slaves again. McLeod is quite an old and disillusioned gent by

now, but he has two things on his side: a) when attacked by baddies from

Zeist, he becomes young and immortal again; and b) his pawky old

sidekick Ramirez (Connery), although dead, is able and willing to

unsheath his fine old Spanish steel in McLeod's aid at a moment's

notice. Ah, if only more films espoused that kind of gritty realism . .

.

Zestfully (or Zeistfully) directed action sequences -- lots of them --

zip along with gratifying speed and surprise in futurist-Gothic urban

wasteland settings, neatly balanced with delightful comedy sequences,

like the bit where Connery gets kitted out at a Highland tailor's and

comes out looking like a cross between a Christmas tree and Nicholas

Fairbairn on St Andrew's Night.

''Do you think we'll ever meet again?'' asks Lambert as Connery

prepares to take his leave. ''Who knows? Who knows?'' Connery twinkles

back. What do you think, readers?

Most idiosyncratic video of the year so far, and just possibly one of

the best, is Wim Wenders's frequently bewildering and consistently

fascinating genre gallimaufry Until The End Of The World (rental, cert.

15). It begins as a loosely-plotted highbrow detective yarn, with four

characters (mystery man William Hurt, wild child Solveig Dommartin,

boyfriend Sam Neill, and private eye Rudiger Vogler) chasing each other

around the world in connection with a McGuffin that may be either

bank-robbery loot or stolen jewels; then in fast order it develops into

an amour fou romance, a road movie, a Mad Scientist B-feature, and a

nuclear-accident nightmare before concluding as a benignly mystical and

optimistic reflection on life, the universe, and everything.

Easier to enjoy than to describe, its subjects include love, dreams,

death, blindness, and saving the planet; it also boasts the best rock

soundtrack we've ever heard, featuring inter alia Talking Heads, Neneh

Cherry, Lou Reed, REM, Nick Cave, and Peter Gabriel. Take it home and

leave your preconceptions in the video store.

Courtesy of the decent souls at Entertainment in Video, three copies

each of Until The End of the World and Highlander II feature in this

week's . . . Competition Corner! To win Wim Wenders's dreamy little rock

'n' roll apocalypse, answer this question: what was the name of his

1980s film in which angels took a hand in the lives of some unhappy

citizens of Berlin? For Highlander II: in which Indiana Jones film did

Sean Connery play the intrepid explorer's dad?

Answers, as ever, to: Couch Potato (Armageddon Out Of Here Prize/

Hoots Mon Prize), The Herald, 195 Albion Street, Glasgow G1 1QP.

* This week's column was compiled with the assistance of the Azad

chain of video libraries and of Ibis Books And Music, Gibson Street,

Hillhead, Glasgow.