`Dice Rules': Concert Film Finally Released, But Don't Hurry

X "Dice Rules: The Andrew Dice Clay Concert Movie," with Andrew Dice Clay, Eddie Griffin, Sylvia Harman, Lee Lawrence. Directed by Jay Dubin, from a script by Clay and Lenny Shulman. United Artists Cinema 70. "NC-17" - No one under 17 admitted. ------------------------------------------------------------ Wasn't Andrew Dice Clay last year's 15-minute celebrity?

Didn't he fail to live down to Sinead O'Connor's negative hype on "Saturday Night Live"? Didn't he bomb out as a movie star in "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane"? Didn't 20th Century Fox put his concert movie on the shelf last summer?

Yet here he is again, his concert movie finally released to theaters, even if Fox still refuses to deal with it (it's being handled by another distributor) and even if Loew's theater chain refuses to show it. Late next month, Vestron will release a new Clay videotape, "One Night With Dice," and reissue "The Diceman Cometh."

As the press kit for the movie maintains, "millions will now have a chance to see what the Diceman is all about." Crammed with venomous jokes about women, non-whites and the handicapped, it's one of the few non-porn movies to carry an NC-17 rating.

Filmed at two supposedly sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden last year (dozens of empty seats are visible), the concert lasts about an hour. The movie begins with a half-hour short, "A Day in the Life," written by Lenny Shulman, in which Dice does a Jerry Lewis impersonation.

He's got the whiny baby voice and the childish movements down, but he's not a gifted physical comedian, and the script is deadly. The concert footage comes almost as a relief, because Clay is much more assured as a stand-up comic, even if his material is limited to non-stop insults.

"Hey, honey, who erased your face?" and "Be the pig that you are" are among the more printable ones. The reaction shots of the crowd, even the women, suggest that they're loving it. It's shock comedy, in which certain four-letter words are repeated like a mantra, and it seems to work as a kind of group therapy for his fans. But it doesn't take a lot of talent.

A spokesman for Loew's found the movie to be "odious, repulsive and repugnant to women." He didn't mention that it's also boring, unfunny and a chore to sit through even for 80 minutes.

"I was put on this earth to entertain," claims Clay. He badly needs career counseling.