AMBULANCE

By Monica Moran

Electronic Hollywood, $17 postpaid

Also distributed by Eastgate systems, $15

Produced by Jaime Levy, the publisher of the offbeat West Coast electronic magazines Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood, "Ambulance" is definitely a Hollywood product, a kind of animated, sound-tracked sadistic comic strip, heavy on melodrama and flat brutal text. It follows a one-way beginning-to-end tack, with occasional "moving comics" footnoting: the reader may click on some of the cartoon illustrations and cause them to move or make noises or give way briefly to an alternative screen. A drug addict, fresh out of rehab, but still on the habit, is picked up at his flat by four old friends. They crash on a lonely road and the driver is killed. A psychotic killer comes to the "rescue" by waylaying an ambulance he has called, killing the driver and paramedic, and then overwhelming the four wreck survivors and abducting them in the ambulance to a lonely cabin. Massive slaughter follows, detailed in crude prose but with chop-licking delight. It is pretty sick stuff, unworthy of the Eastgate list, and not even good hypertext.