Sick And Twisted Fest Lives Up To Its Name

------------ MOVIE REVIEW ------------

XX "Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation," a two-hour collection of new and old cartoon shorts assembled by Craig Decker and Mike Gribble. King Performance Center, nightly through Oct. 29. No one under 18 admitted.

Always a versatile form, the animated short can be made to serve more than one programming purpose.

Seen earlier this month in "Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation" at the University of Washington, Bonnie Leick's droll three-minute cartoon about thrill-happy cattle, "Better Than Grass," has now turned up as part of the fifth edition of "Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation."

Also making the transition from that classy program to this crass one is Scott Norlund and Mark Osborne's hilarious four-minute send-up of "Jurassic Park," which uses "Weird Al" Jankovic's parody of Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park" to lampoon Barney (who gets eaten by a larger dinosaur) and Steven Spielberg (who flees from his director's chair while yelling "Cut!").

The opening-night audience at the King, made up mostly of groups of teenagers who appeared to be daring each other to see how much they could take, had several reactions to Barney's decapitation. Some cheered, some were grossed-out while a few, who apparently harbor fond feelings for television's ubiquitous dinosaur, sounded as if their minds had been violated.

The rest of the program turned out to be considerably grosser and much less clever, though not all of the shorts relied on the bathroom humor that drives most of these festivals.

Kevin Kalliher's "Home Honey, I'm High," for instance, is an amusingly skewed spoof of suburban lifestyles, in which hard-working dad gets a joint instead of a martini when he arrives home, and the pot-addled family, blind with the munchies, watches "The Donna Weed Show."

Jimmy Cesario's "My Dog Sex" may be a one-joke routine about the misunderstandings that can result from giving your pet an inappropriate name ("I want a license for Sex," "My whole life revolves around Sex"), but it's deft and short enough not to wear out its welcome.

A British series, "Beastly Behavior," lends a disturbingly human scale to the strange practices of praying mantises and hermaphroditic snails.

Greg Lawson's Dutch entry, "Safe Sex," is raunchy enough to get an NC-17 rating, but it's also fairly imaginative.

The ghoulish spirit of New Yorker cartoonist Gahan Wilson lives on in Gregory Ecklund's "Lloyd Loses His Lunch," which imagines various methods of casual self-mutilation.

"The Birth of Brian," a sequel to last year's "Brian's Brain," gets yet more mileage out of the saga of a kid whose brain matter is unprotected by a skull cap.

Walter Santucci's "The Evil Cat Does Washington" takes on Ronald Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton and the White House cat, Socks.

For all the bright new entries, the program is dominated by a depressing number of mean-spirited cartoons about nose-picking, vomiting, glue-sniffing, flatulence and defecation.

Another drawback is the sloppy presentation. Most of these shorts were not designed to be stretched across a wide screen, but that hasn't stopped the festival organizers from showing them this way.

Billed as "a brand new show," the festival includes more than a few items familiar from past "Spike and Mike" shows that have played the King. The Beavis and Butthead favorites, "Frog Baseball" and "Peace, Love and Understanding," are back again, though they now look almost quaint in this context. Also returning: an ode to necrophilia called "Deep Sympathy" and the aptly titled "Mutilator II."

This edition of "Sick and Twisted" runs through Oct. 29 at the King, with evening shows nightly, midnight screenings Fridays and Saturdays, and one matinee, Sunday at 4:30 p.m. Tickets are $7 at the door, $5.50 for the early Sunday show. They're also available through Ticketmaster: 628-0888.