Whether she's struttin' the beach in her body-gripping "Baywatch" swimsuit or being wheeled furtively into the emergency room of a Los Angeles medical center, the legendary Pamela Anderson-Lee has captured the collective fancy of a public ravenous for glamour and voyeurism.

This tape, which topped national sales charts for an astounding twelve straight weeks, certainly deals those two elements out in spades. But nos necessarily from a fresh deck.

It wouldn't take a psychic or a Las Vegas bookie to predict or lay wager on the contents of this Anderson retrospective. As faithful viewers have come to expect with Playboy's patented calendar girl vidtorials, there's the compulsory reggae dance sequence, an album of Pamela pix detailing the clichéd transition from duckling to swan, her thoughts on a variety of deeply engrossing beauty pageant subjects, and third party pronunciamentos worthy of tombstone enshrinement.

With the smile of a lottery winner, the grace of a thoroughbred and the good humor of a creamy popsicle, Anderson rises above the laborious pretentiousness that mar those well-meaning but obvious efforts at premature canonization. That she was Canada's "Centennial Baby" with all the attendant publicity thereof, seems to have made her paparazzi-littered existence a foregone conclusion. Statistically, Pamela's appeared five times on the cover of Playboy and has been the subject of three pictorials —all reprised in this ode, sometimes, with excruciating factoid recollection. Ironically, those layouts are described as "some of the most intimate published" in the magazine, whereas the video equivalent displays the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't whimsy of a night club magician.

Playboy photog Stephen Wayda, quite accurately, describes her as the "Brigitte Bardot of the Nineties," except that Bardot should have looked so good. Pamela's personal manager goes one better to call her a "cross between Bardot and Goldie Hawn." The encomiums should have ceased at a reasonable juncture. Pamela might be a one-woman pajama party, yes, but Comedy Central? Not yet. Give her time.

At a deceptively scant 105, Pamela Anderson cuts quite a stunning figure, and the worst of her certainly beats the best of anything else out there.