TOP DOG

title: TOP DOG

year: 1995

cast: Chuck Norris, Timothy Bottoms

rating: **1/2

Chuck Norris teams up with a capable shaggy police dog named Reno to stop a group of racists. The direction puts you right there with the dog's movements and this happens during some of the action scenes as well. Chuck and the dog don't get along at first and then learn how to depend on each other; this happens in EVERY cop-buddy film, so why should this be different just because one of the cops has a flea collar? Good for kids, but pretty violent... for the adults forced to watch it with them.

D.A.R.Y.L.

title: D.A.R.Y.L.

year: 1985

cast: Barrett Oliver, Michael McKean, Mary Beth Hurt, Josef Sommer, Colleen Camp

rating: **

Daryl has some sort of amnesia and very special powers. He can play piano without having played before, and most importantly, he can hit a baseball right out of the park. The scenes involving Daryl (played nicely by Barrett Oliver), his foster parents, and his buddy "Turtle" - who's the comic relief here - are wonderful. Then, something happens. Fifty minutes through - just as the audience is getting into the rhythm of a very laid-back fish-outta-water story... Daryl is picked up by his "real parents", who turn out to be the scientists who "created" him. Daryl's name is actually spelled D.A.R.Y.L., which stands for "Data Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform" (imagine his teacher reading that name off in role-call). At this point it's all downhill and keeps going down, further and further till you just don't care if little D becomes a pile of scrap metal or if he finds a new life as a "real boy". More family fun and less formidable military evil and this would have been a terrific movie.

EXPLORERS

year: 1986

cast: Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix

rating: *1/2

Joe Dante was a good director before this movie, and River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke were good actors after. There in-between lies a science-fiction fantasy about three dull young boys who build a spaceship out of garbage and with some kind of computer creating a forcefield around it, they fly around. There's plenty of tricks but no magic. Joe Dante seems as if he were trying for another "Gremlins", but perhaps without Steven Speilberg producing, doing a Speilbergian film doesn't quite work. It's at least somewhat entertaining until the bottom falls out and the spaceship (named after the Bruce Springsteen song "Thunder Road") graduates past crashing into drive-in theaters and goes to another planet inhabited by big silly looking monsters. Then all goes to hell; that which wasn't heaven to begin with.

FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR

title: FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR

year: 1986

cast: Joey Cramer, Cliff DeYoung

director: Randall Kleiser

rating: **

You'd think a movie about a boy who flies around in a giant silver bean dip bowl would be completely awful, but it's only partially awful. The first fifty minutes is quite good actually. A boy is wandering in the woods, he falls down a ravine, and when he wakes up, it's eight years later. His parents are older, and his little brother is his big brother. He ends up being taken to a NASA outpost where they do tests on his brain. He has the intellect of a brilliant alien. They give him a room and then he gets "called" to, that's right, the giant silver bean dip bowl - actually a space ship - that the government is keeping in a hanger. He escapes from his room riding in a robotic butler, goes to the hanger, and climbs aboard the ship. At this point the good half of the film has run its course. Inside the vessel is a metallic... something-or-rather, kind of a steering wheel with a personality, which begins speaking to him... and get this... it's Pee Wee Herman's voice. Imagine Mel Blanc providing the voice of "Hall 9000" and you'll get the concept.