The title refers to a scooterized wheelchair for a crippled young boy, besides, of course, the standard method of stopping werewolves. In the broader application, it refers to a typical Stephen King tossed salad: hand-me-down horror mythology, corny Americana, redneck local color, dumb jokes, children and their imagination, adults and …
Buddy is a cleaver-wielding backwoods baddie who, along with his father Lester, doesn't take kindly to trespassers
Another Neil Simon odd couple: an aspiring rock-and-roll singer and an Atlanta Braves power-hitter. The latter, with the support and inspiration of the former, is closing in on Roger Maris's single-season home-run record (Babe Ruth doesn't get a mention, much less the National League and right-handed record holder, Hack Wilson). …
This, the first full-length dramatic feature by documentarist Joyce Chopra, is two-thirds of a very fine film. Oddly enough, those two-thirds are hardly more than preludial padding in front of the Joyce Carol Oates short story (Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?) on which the movie is based: …
The opening, with hard-working music by Elmer Bernstein, is a reasonable facsimile of a straight espionage drama. The rest is an unreasonable facsimile of a Bob Hope spoof of one. (An actual cameo appearance by Ski Nose himself, in golfing togs, can't help.) Director John Landis tries to maintain a …
Nell Dunn's very contrived and mediocre stage play about the patrons of a women's bathhouse scheduled for demolition. The sets and photography and staging are expertly done, but one could have wished that Joseph Losey's swan song would have shown off more of his facets than just his technical adeptness. …
Post-graduate soap opera: seven collegiate colleagues in their "freshman year of life." ("Four months after graduation," one of them impatiently fumes, "and you're still acting like every night's a frat party!") It's nice that the movie takes so impartial a view of its characters, and nice that it offers no …
Diminutive of Stickley, but perhaps just as well of Stick-in-the-Mud: a middle-aged ex-convict hopelessly out of step after seven years in the slammer. Burt Reynolds plays the part in a near whisper, to denote weary sensitivity, or, on specific other occasions, concerned fatherliness and assured sexuality. He sometimes slips into …
Martin Bell's documentary on runaway teenagers in Seattle picks up from a Life Magazine article (by Cheryl McCall) and photo essay (by Mary Ellen Mark). It shows us close up (by way of telephoto lens, usually) a lifestyle most people are only distantly aware of, and it contains some good …
A sadsack on vacation in Florida has a last chance to redeem himself (after a couple of days' lessons) in the annual sailboat regatta; and the movie, having failed at being Mr. Hulot's Holiday, has a last chance at being Rocky. The anemic comedy pales (or perhaps one should say …
Only a poster of This Is Spinal Tap on the dormitory walls will remind anyone that this movie and that one were directed by the same man, Rob Reiner. That other movie must indeed have been a very special match-up of people and idea. This, on the other hand, is …
"Lots of up and down" is how Patsy Cline describes her second marriage, with a lascivious smirk to indicate that it's really up all the time. But there is a lot of down, too: food-throwing, slap-exchanging, all the standard expressions of marital strife. Director Karel Reisz, seeing that his fellow …
Hand-me-down horse story about a Texas cow pony named "Sylvester Stallone" at an Olympic equestrian event in Lexington, Ky. There is always, of course, a new generation of horse lovers who didn't see National Velvet or else can't see around its datedness. Even the present generation, however, ought to have …
It starts out, deceptively enough, in a comfily domestic mode, painting a relationship between middle-aged husband and wife that is warm but not without sudden passing chills, and a relationship between father and son that is cool but not openly nippy. The mode changes drastically when the husband and father, …