Date with an Angel

Heavenly matters continue to be a curiously prominent subject in the cinema; just when you’d gotten used to the reincarnations of Hello Again and Made in Heaven, along comes Date with an Angel.

This outing features a regular, Earth-bound guy (Michael E. Knight) who’s preparing for marriage to his unheavenly girlfriend (Phoebe Cates). One night he hears a loud splash in his pool – he’s supposed to be a starving musician, and the pool is never explained – and he walks out to find the water glowing like the after­math of a nuclear accident.

What he finds is an angel (Emmanuelle Beart) who’s busted her wing during an awkward re-entry of the Earth’s atmosphere. So Knight takes her under his own wing, as it were, and brings her back to health. His fiancee, needless to say, gets a tad peeved at the presence of this blonde knockout. Of course he comes up with an explanation: Honey, she’s not the other woman, she’s – uh – an angel from heaven. Yeah, that’s it.

And there are other complications: Knight’s best buddies want to use the angel for their own commercial purposes, and plaster her image on T­ shirts everywhere. Plus, Cates’ rich father (David Dukes) wants to put the angel puss into advertisements for his cosmetics line, Ethereal Beauty.

In the subgenre of films about a man who falls in love with an Other, Date with an Angel can’t quite decide whether it’s Splash or Mannequin. Unfortunately, I’d say it’s all too often like the latter.

The writer-director is Tom McLoughlin,who directed Friday the 13th, Part VI, which, as I noted at the time, was the best of that misbegotten series. Faint praise, true. But in Date with an Angel he aims higher, toward a kind of Capraesque enchantment. And he does have a knack for funny little touches, like the frequent sight gags that pop up in this movie.

Still, the film never gets into gear. Perhaps it’s the dullness of Knight as a leading man, or the raggedness of the subplotting (we never find out what happens to the cosmetic king’s idea).

The only performer who delivers the sort of stylized performance that the film requires is Phoebe Cates (Gremlins), who amusingly exaggerates her wronged-woman role. It’s also easy to gaze forlornly at Emmanuelle Beart, a French actress soon to be seen in the title role of Manon of the Springs. She has almost no dialogue in the film, but she’s adept at making high-pitched angelic squeaks and stuffing herself with such unfamiliar earthly fare as French fries.

First published in The Herald, November 1987

Give the movie credit for trying to capture a long-departed style. I had forgotten that Cates gave a stylized performance here, but that makes sense. This was still near the beginning of Beart’s career – I think I must have seen Manon at the Seattle International Film Festival or something – and she was about to go on an amazing run in European film. McLoughlin has not directed in ten years, according to IMDb. I appreciate his Friday the 13th picture here.