The premise would stand a chance if the writer shared the suspicion such a fanastic interloper is bound to inspire in the audience, particularly when played by a specialist in furtive behavior like Hopkins. Marsha Mason and John Beck are mired in the miserable roles of Janice and Bill Templeton, a contended, prosperous New York couple suddenly unhinged by a stranger named Hoover, played by dead-eyed Anthony Hopkins, who insists that their bubby 11-year-old, Ivy (Susan Swift), is thereincarnation of his daughter Audrey Rose, who perished 11 years earlier in a fiery car crash. Trying to whip audiences into a hysterical frenzy with the sight of a tormented child and then exorcising that distress with blithe assurances of immortality, De Felitta looks profoundly inept and foolish.

The psychic mysteries and spectacles arranged for 'Audrey Rose' are conspicuously unbeguiling. Perhaps someone should have encouraged De Felitta to write a comic fantasy about a little kid who plays like Fats Waller. The incident that transfixed De Felitta was rather beguiling: his six-year-old son, who couldn't play the piano and can't play it now, supposedly sat down one afternoon and began tickling the ivories in the style of Fats Waller. Most of the miscalculations that transform 'Audrey Rose' into a potential laughing stock seem to have originated with Frank De Felitta, who fashioned the screenplay from his own novel, inspired by an incident that led him to Edgar Cayce, India and an apparently slaphappy belief in the immortality of the soul.

'Audrey Rose,' which opened Friday at three area theaters, makes an equally feckless case for reincarnation by insisting that a character likely to impress audiences as a child molester is a spiritual benefactor. The former, a science-fiction mutation on the devil-child thrillers, tends to confirm the suspicion that Hollywood harbors some animus toward ordinary children and perhaps ordinary life processes, since the picture ends up endorsing crossbreeding between computers and humans. If 'Demos Seed' and 'Adurey Rose' weren't intended as companion features, they should have been.

Audrey Rose by Frank De Felitta