Grade: One star out of five

Verdict: Replaces a chilling sci-fi version forwith a humorless satire

By CHRIS GARCIA
Cox News Service

In the gated community of Stepford, Conn., unsmudged perfection reigns. Spotless SUVs checker the drives, trees out of a Thomas Kincaid painting line streets with geometric daintiness and small mansions gleam under pool-water skies. Even the tidy, vibrant lawns look nipped, tucked and Botoxed.

And the women! Like magazine-ad models they are -- fluffy blond coifs, shellacked smiles, tanned limbs. They operate in a glaze of uninflected perk, their breathy speech sheer narcotized bliss. They're rabid about baking and housekeeping and keeping their men happy. You would think they were fastidious robots.

But that wouldn't be funny; it would be scary. And that's why the lame remake of "The Stepford Wives" -- whose premise is that, yes indeed, the women are robots programmed to smarmy perfection -- flops on its pretty little head.

The 1975 film version, starring a winsomely horrified Katharine Ross, was a creepy thriller aquiver with "Twilight Zone" paranoia and cautionary, what-if chills. The new movie, also based on Ira Levin's 1972 novel, believes it is suburban satire in the shape of a dark comedy, though it's neither dark nor comic. Sometimes it so badly misses its laugh marks, it takes your breath away. By the end, you'll demand that breath back with the price of admission.

In Õ75, America was in the throes of the feminist revolution. The notion that husbands might turn their wives into docile machines who did their masters' bidding -- fetching drinks, having sex on demand -- jibed with the times. It worked as a science-fiction nightmare where patriarchal oppression spiraled to grotesque, told-you-so extremes.

Instead of preying on female fears of male dominion, the new film plays off the theoretical upshot of the feminist movement. These wives were formerly "castrating career (women)," CEOs, judges and brain surgeons, who intimidated their husbands' manhood and scotched dreams of the "little lady." So the men essentially lobotomize their wives, reshaping them from Martha Stewarts to Betty Crockers.

Nicole Kidman is Joanna, the former president of a major television network. After a nervous breakdown, Joanna and her family (two fleeting kids and all-purpose signifier of vanilla Matthew Broderick) find suburban refuge in Stepford. The place's ghoulish sterility instantly alarms Joanna, and it's as if only she and two other sharp cookies who haven't yet been robotized (Roger Bart as a sitcom-swishy gay guy and the increasingly unamusing Bette Midler) notice things are out of whack.

Naturally, when Broderick starts hanging with the Stepford men and learning that their gorgeous wives are remote-controlled dolls (one even spews cash from her mouth like an ATM -- funny!), his eyes light up with possibility. He can save his faltering marriage. He can have perfection.

If screenwriter Paul Rudnick ("Jeffrey") and director Frank Oz (the voices of Yoda and Fozzy Bear) had thought out a more stinging satire of the times, rather than toss off feeble jokes about America Online and Viagra, "Stepford Wives" might not feel like the pandering junk it is. Rudnick and Oz attempt to defuse the film's jolly misogyny with canned sentiments about how only a non-robotic wife can provide love and how shiny marital perfection is an impossibility we must accept. There's something insulting about moviemaking this shoddy.

No one is especially good in the film, not even Christopher Walken as the villain, whose dyed blond pompadour stands like a flaxen soufflˇ. Glenn Close as the head airhead is shrill, Midler is plain awful and Kidman displays mere glints of her usual radiance. Part of the problem is that she's miscast. In the original, Ross had a flinty darkness that would make a robot transformation chillingly wrong. Kidman's delicate, fair-skinned beauty suggests that she might already be one.