In the last few days, we have seen the director Arthur Penn honored by the air of celebration attending the special two-disc DVD of his greatest film, Bonnie and Clyde. We have also seen the suffering caused by the comedian-magician Penn Jillette's attempt to dance with the stars. Weirdly enough, there actually is a connection between these two, besides the fact that one of them insists on wearing the other's last name as his own first name. The last theatrical feature directed by Arthur Penn turns out to have been Penn & Teller Get Killed, which was the first, and will in all likelihood remain the only, movie vehicle starring Penn and his silent partner, Teller. It is not readily apparent who thought it would be a good idea to have these people work together, but maybe it had something to do with Arthur Penn's reputation for finding new ways to show violence on screen, a propensity that included a willingness to use it for darkly comic effects. As you might have guessed from the title, Penn & Teller Get Killed has a morbid edge to it that links it to the unsettling, neo-carny vibe that the duo sought to achieve in their celebrated stage act in the 1980s. (The movie, which Penn & Teller wrote, was actually made in the mid-80s, when the two were frequent guest attractions on Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman, but ended up sitting on the shelf for a few years before being giving a flyspeck of a theatrical release.) It opens with a talk-show segment in which Penn proffers a jive invitation to any psychos in the audience to stalk and try to kill him, to liven things up. This sets in motion the kind of events you'd expect it to. It also serves as a cue for such menaces to society as the playwright Christopher Durang and the character villain specialist David Patrick Kelly to drop by for a paycheck. (There's also a brief performance as a thug by a hungry-looking, pre-fame Tom Sizemore, as well as a charming turn by the late Caitlin Clarke, who's probably best known to moviegoers as the heroine of the 1981 Dragonslayer.)
The movie's best scene is its opening, which depicts the act that Penn & Teller do on that talk show. They strap on gravity boots and hang upside down from a bar, while the camerawork makes it appear to those watching at home that they're right-side up. Then they proceed to whip out playing cards and other objects, so that when they let gravity do its work, it looks on TV as if the stuff is flying upwards. This actually duplicates a trick that Penn & Teller once did on SNL; when they actually did it on TV, to the accompaniment of a braying studio audience, it just looked weird to the home viewers who had no way of being in on the joke, and they must have relished the opportunity that the movie gave them to try it again, and the extra layer of point of view that the movie adds — showing the movie audience what's going on, while showing TV viewers scratching their heads — makes it work brilliantly. Unfortunately, once the plot-setting apparatus is done and out of the way, the movie flatlines quickly. It doesn't really have a plot so much as a series of pranks that the characters play on each other, and though it's meant to work as a series of pranks on the audience, after you've noticed the pattern you settle in and start to wait to find out what's really going on in whatever scene you're watching. So not only is it not funny or surprising when the reveals come, but you spend most of the movie feeling that you're smarter than the people onscreen. It does have its fascinaton, though: it's a cerebral, overconceptualized misfire, which isn't what you expect from a bad vehicle for a couple of hot comedians — more Cabin Boy than Corky Romano, I guess. (It's also arguably a more interesting and honorable failure than the previous couple of pictures that Arthur Penn had directed, Target and Dead of Winter.) So should you give it a look sometime, if you ever get the chance? Perhaps luckily for you and me both, the odds of your ever getting the chance are distant enough to almost make that a moot point.