`Tom And Huck' Visits The Dark Side Of Twain's Classic Adventure Story

----------------------------------------------------------------- Movie review

XX "Tom and Huck," with Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Brad Renfro, Eric Schweig, Amy Wright. Directed by Peter Hewitt, from a script by Stephen Sommers and David Loughery. Alderwood, Aurora, Broadway Market, Enumclaw, Everett Mall 1-3, Gateway, Issaquah 9, Kirkland Parkplace, Lewis & Clark, Metro, Puyallup, and Snohomish. "PG" - Parental guidance advised because of graphic knife murders. -----------------------------------------------------------------

The limits of the PG rating are tested by this Disney version of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."

Much of it plays like a horror film about a serial killer named Injun Joe (Eric Schweig) who impales people with his knife, hunts down pre-adolescent kids in a cave of carnival terrors, and stirs up an entire Southern town with his unpredictable brutality.

Like an episode of "Tales From the Crypt," the movie opens with an undertaker trying to force a smile on a corpse. The filmmakers drain every bit of ghoulishness out of the episodes in which Tom attends his own funeral and terrorizes his half-brother Sid with a tarantula.

It's possible that Twain would be amused by this approach to his much-filmed book, which was most memorably handled in 1938's David O. Selznick version, featuring Victor Jory as Injun Joe, and a 1973 musical in which 11-year-old Jodie Foster played Tom's girlfriend, Becky Thatcher. Certainly the horror elements were always there; emphasizing them is not exactly a betrayal of the text.

Yet in this context, the funny bits barely register. Tom's clever conning of the neighborhood kids to whitewash his fence doesn't get the comic accent it needs. Neither does his use of reverse psychology on a schoolteacher who means to punish him by putting him in the girls' section of the classroom.

These episodes come off as too mild compared with the grisly events that surround them, and British director Peter Hewitt ("Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey") doesn't seem interested. The script lacks Twain's wry perspective, which might have lightened such groaner dialogue as "there's a little bit of Tom Sawyer in all of us."

There's no hint of the author's viewpoint, which might have helped in establishing the relationships between Tom and Becky (who seems too mature here), Sid and Aunt Polly. They're too sketchily treated. Cheaply made by studio standards at $10 million, the movie seems rushed and unpolished.

As Tom, "Home Improvement's" Jonathan Taylor Thomas starts off so pleased with himself that he's insufferable. Yet his aggressive approach to the role does pay off when Tom is forced to take responsibility for his actions in the movie's big courtroom scene.

Brad Renfro, who already took a ride on the Mississippi earlier this year in "The Cure," is a solid choice for Huckleberry Finn.

"I ain't got no time for friends," Huck tells Tom at one point, "but if I did have one I'd want him to be like you." Renfro has the ability to make lines like these play as if he made them up on the spot.

Now if only Disney had let him play Huck in their 1993 treatment of "Huck Finn," which mysteriously removed Tom Sawyer from the story altogether. Both scripts are the work of Stephen Sommers, whose bland reductions of Twain aren't likely to cause a rush on libraries or bookstores carrying the originals.

Also on the program with "Tom and Huck" is an animated short, "Stand by Me," featuring Timon and Pumbaa from "The Lion King."