Okay, here's the deal. There are times when I just don't get it. I try, and I try, and it just doesn't shake the cerebral sensors. It absolutely boggles my mind, and, after three ex-wives, I thought my mind couldn't get any more boggled.

So I put the question to you people: Am I the only person in America that thinks Fran Drescher is the most annoying woman on this planet?

Well, somebody somewhere must dig her enough to shove her down our throats over and over until she's a star. She has her own TV show, her own book (a fact that still sets my gag reflex into deep overdrive), her parents are regulars on "Rosie O'Donnell", and now, she's got her own movie, The Beautician and the Beast.

Oy, vey....

Friends and neighbors, if your entertainment goal in life is to see a two-hour episode of The Nanny, right up there in big-screen splendor, well, here you go. This is all yours. It's like the producers took a lesson from Ted Turner. Ol' Ted loves to take two episodes of "CHiPS", cut 'em together, and show them on TNT as a "feature film event." This Beast of a movie is like four episodes of "The Nanny", four dumb episodes, cut together, and wiped onto film stock instead of video. Oh, and for you "Nanny" audiophiles, it's recorded in Dolby Surround Sound. Ooooh. I'm getting chill-bumps on my chicken-skin.

In this so-called film, Fran plays Joy Miller, a "beauty expert" who is mistakenly hired to be a teacher for some foreign leader's children. Let the comedy begin. We get every tired line that writer Todd Graff could think of all poured into one script. The "Jewish vs. Gentiles" jokes that made Joey Bishop a hit in the Catskill Mountains back in '64. Stop. My sides are splitting as I speak. The "I'm smarter than you are" nods and lessons. Color me chuckled. And we get Ms. Drescher's drop-dead perfect impression of Lucille Ball. Bah-hah-hah. I think I pulled a groin muscle.

What I'd like to know is this: Is this the role of a lifetime that Timothy Dalton quit the James Bond Series for? Sweet Fancy Moses, I hope not. If it is, he deserves to get a good sock in the jawbone. His comedy timing is little more than that shown by your average Boston Fern, and his ongoing attempts to offer dialects should be stopped immediately. His mangling of the Southern accent in Scarlett was enough to put me off fried green tomatoes for a year. And this strange garble of Hogan's Heroes-German and Bullwinkle-Russian is mockable, to say the least.

Put Tim and Fran together and you get the audio equivalent of a train wreck, and the visual equivalent of a spilled plate of linguini. If I had to be nice, I would say that there are some funny moments in this movie. Three of them to be exact. They all occur within the first twenty minutes, and then it's a lot like nude skydiving. All is well when you jump out of the plane. The air feels kinda nice on your flowing privates, and you've never felt so free. A smile is on your face, you're content. Then...suddenly, it occurs to you. If you're nude, then you are not sportin' that stylish backpack that goes oh-so-well with that Calvin Klein designer chute. And before too much longer, things are getting a bit scarey, and even unbearable, and now you're starting to panic....and then everyting goes black, and you're watching the end credits of your life.

And now a last request from the newly deceased parachutist: somebody please give Timothy Dalton a tuxedo and a handgun, and let him do the TV revival of "The Saint" until he's as old as Roger "Tummy Tuck" Moore. Somebody show Fran Drescher a good surgeon to renovate her upper nasal cavity, and then gently shove her back to another 26 weeks of mind-numbing jocularity on a number three network. Then, those of us that care can venture back into the movie house without fear of developing an inner ear malady.