Mark Holton Movies

Co-written by Paul Reubens and Phil Hartman, Pee Wee's Big Adventure marks the debut of director Tim Burton, who stamps the entire film with his quirky trademark style. The premise: Pee Wee (Reubens), an overgrown pre-pubescent boy sporting a molded Princeton cut, blush, lipstick, and a shrunken gray flannel suit, lives an idyllic life in his bizarre home (some have compared the remarkable set design to the expressionistic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) until someone nabs his most prized possession: a fire engine-red customized bicycle. He then embarks on an epic cross-country search to find his lost love, not to mention more than a little adventure. Along the way, he makes friends with various oddball characters, visits the Alamo, endures various hallucinatory nightmares, and has a supernatural run-in with a spectral trucker. In this reprisal of his popular standup routine, Reubens is wonderful as the nerdy man child; he plays it silly, yet he manages to imbue the role with some sensitivity without ever seeming maudlin. The score by Danny Elfman is terrific -- as is the case in nearly every film Burton has directed -- and the script is fresh and inventive. Some of the most memorable moments: the opening sequence involving Pee Wee's morning activities is a stroke of genius (note the bunny slippers and talking breakfast), as are the scenes at the truck stop, and the "Hollywood" version of Pee Wee's story at the end (starring James Brolin and Morgan Fairchild in surprise cameos). In all, Pee Wee's Big Adventure is a delightful film, enjoyable for children as well as adults. ~ Jeremy Beday, All Movie Guide

This comedy fuses Three Stooges clips with a storyline about a "Stooge Maniac" who is so obsessed with the comedians his sanity comes into question. Josh Mostel plays Stooge devotee Howard F. Howard, and Melanie Chartoff is Beverly, the woman of his dreams. Howard's condition is analyzed by Dr. Fixyer Minder (Sid Caesar) and for awhile the Stooge fanatic spends some time in a mental institution. Will this damage his love affair with Beverly? And will he know it if it does? ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This is teen drama concerns three friends, Margo (Daphne Zuniga), Kelly (Virginia Madsen), and Cece (Cynthia Gibb) whose only pursuit in life is men. The three young women go out to night spots to see what action they can pick up, and one evening Kelly's discarded date Clifford (Clayton Rohner) is conned into driving Margo and Cece to their favorite clubs. Meanwhile, Kelly is close to getting herself into serious trouble. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

When a police officer is killed while investigating the drug trade at a South Carolina high school, his partner, Sheffield (David Neidorf), decides to get even. With the help of officers La Rue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Sgt. Irwin Lee (Barry Corbin), Sheffield goes undercover to discover the source of the deadly drugs. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

Advertised as a parody of cheapo-sleazo biker flicks, Easy Wheels looks so much like the real thing that one wonders whether or not we were originally supposed to take the whole megillah seriously. Biker Bruce (Paul Le Mat) and She Wolf (Eileen Davidson) forget their mutual animosity long enough to plan a mass abduction of female babies. The idea is to create a race of super biker chicks, who will enslave mankind and set up a leather-jacketed matriarchy. Bruce isn't completely sold on this idea and bides his time until he gets a chance to undermine She Wolf. Filmed in glamorous Des Moines and Dubuque, Easy Wheels makes all those American-International flicks of the 1960s look like the collected works of Antonioni. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In My Life, Michael Keaton stars as Bob Jones, who has just been informed that his wife Gail (Nicole Kidman) is pregnant with their first child. However, he has also been told he has kidney cancer that has spread to his lungs; the longest Bob is expected to live is four months, which will deny him the joy of witnessing the birth of his child. Raging within, he visits a Chinese healer, Mr. Ho (Haing S. Ngor), who encourages him to let go of all the anger and fear he has kept trapped inside himself. Bob proceeds to videotape himself, on the advice of Mr. Ho, where Bob will talk to his unborn child and discuss what he has learned in life. In the process of the videotape sessions, Bob discovers that his anger resides in his past with his family, and Bob reveals secrets that he has kept hidden from himself and his wife through the years. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

A successful retired jock and his geeky younger brother play out their sibling rivalry by coaching rival little league football teams in this family comedy. Ed O'Neill plays the older brother, Kevin O'Shea, a former Heisman Trophy winner whose gridiron exploits have made him a local hero in his small Illinois hometown. Kevin is the almost unanimous choice to head up the town's Pop Warner football team, and he happily builds an imposing team from the best local players. One of the few objectors is Kevin's young brother Danny (Rick Moranis), an awkward, bespectacled gas station owner who empathizes with the kids rejected from the team, including his own athletic daughter Becky (Shawna Waldron). As revenge, Danny starts his own competing team of misfits, taking on the coaching duties himself. Naturally, despite the total ineptitude of Danny and his players, they eventually find themselves major underdogs in a climactic battle against Kevin's well-trained juggernaut. Director Duwayne Dunham and a team of four screenwriters hit all the expected sports film conventions, throwing in a few innocent romantic subplots and cameos by real football players for good measure. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide

For those who don't know the name and legacy of John Wayne Gacy, the movie is based on the true story of one of the nation's most prolific serial killers (33 murder convictions). Gacy depicts the methods upstanding citizen and neighborhood party clown Gacy (Mark Holton) used to seduce young men, slaughter them and then hide their bodies in the crawl space under the house he shared with his wife (Joleen Lutz) and children. ~ Buzz McClain, All Movie Guide

A man scarred by the horrors of war encounters a new low in human brutality in this extreme horror story. Trevor Lloyd (Jason Connery) is a veteran of the Iraq war who has had a falling out with his wife and has decided to head west to start his life over again. While hitch-hiking through Texas, Trevor gets a ride from Parker Hilton (Randy Spelling), who makes him an offer -- if Trevor wants to make some traveling money, he's welcome to work a few days at Hilton's ranch. Trevor eagerly accepts, but when he and a handful of other hitchers arrive at the Hoboken Hollow Ranch, they discovers they've made a horrible mistake. Weldon Broderick (Mark Holton) and his family of bloodthirsty psychopaths run the ranch with Hilton, and rather than pay laborers, they simply kidnap men unlikely to be found missing anytime soon, and work them as hard as they can for as long as they can. When the abuse and torture become too much to bear, Broderick and his cohorts kill the drifters and make jerky from their flesh. As Trevor searches for a way to escape from this living hell, eccentric local businessman J.T. Goldman (Michael Madsen) is trying to persuade Broderick to sell him his land, but unwittingly discovers the horrible secret of his success in ranching. Hoboken Hollow also stars Dennis Hopper, Robert Carradine, C. Thomas Howell and Jonathan Fraser. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide