Fred Buch Movies

Cocoon 2: The Return, like most sequels, relies a bit too heavily on one's familiarity with the first film. Without dwelling too long on Cocoon #1, we can observe that it ended with a group of senior citizens heading for the distant planet of Antarea, hoping to find a new, rewarding and elongated life. Cocoon 2 picks up the action five years later: The Antareans return to earth to check on the damage caused to their life-regenerating cocoons by earthquakes. Coming along for the ride are the elderly couples whom we met in the first film. Also carried over from the first Cocoon are young ferryboat captain Steve Guttenberg and gorgeous Antarean Tahnee Welch, who resume their interplanetary romance. Oldster Jack Gilford, whose beloved wife died in Cocoon, likewise finds romance in the form of Elaine Stritch. A secondary plot involves an insidious secret government plan to exploit the Antareans, which is foiled by sympathetic researcher Courteney Cox. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Canadian actor/director Philip Borsos made a couple of interesting films before an untimely death in his early forties, including The Grey Fox (1982) and this crime thriller starring Kurt Russell as police beat reporter Malcolm Anderson. Happily abandoning the Miami Daily for which he's labored for years, he takes a job on a small town paper hoping to take life in the slow lane for a time. Of course, he's soon caught up in a career-making story, after a serial killer (Richard Jordan) likes his account of a murder he's committed and decides to use the journalist as his mouthpiece. As the killings continue, Anderson begins to receive national attention, and the Numbers Killer, motivated primarily by a desire for the limelight, becomes jealous, and decides to kidnap Anderson's girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway) to teach him a lesson. As he has with Anderson, the killer soon develops a relationship of sorts with the woman, and slowly reveals the workings of his bizarre personality while the police search desperately for the pair. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide

Abby (Lori Loughlin) and her brother, Loren (Shannon Presby), seem to have it all: good looks, lots of friends, and a great relationship with their loving mom and their heroic, discipline-minded military dad. When their folks are killed in a car crash, however, the siblings must move to small-town Florida to live with their sweet but cash-impaired Uncle Charlie (Ed Jones) and Aunt Fay (Lucy Martin), who own a gas station and a struggling, bargain-bin amusement park. For Abby and Loren, life in the Sunshine State proves to be a mixture of hard work, new faces, and harassment at the hands of drug-dealing, skirt-chasing local scion Dutra (James Spader) and his gang of trailer-park psychopaths. Dutra places a bet with the wiry, reptilian Gideon (John Philbin) about which of the young villains will be able to bed Abby first, leading to a series of increasingly vile sexual come-ons. Abby, however, has other romantic ideas involving a kindly boy named Mark (Eric Stoltz). Between bouts of defending his sister's honor, Loren finds a similarly wholesome romance with pretty, blond Karen (Paige Lyn Price). With the help of these new friends, Loren and Abby make some headway in the local social hierarchy, but their skirmishes with Dutra and his minions escalate, climaxing with attempted rape, kidnapping, and bumper-car violence on the night of a high-school dance. Director Sean S. Cunningham also directed the original Friday the 13th. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Sand, surf, sun, and sex alternate in this bikini-clad movie about student lemmings heading to the sea at Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, the moment the last test is taken (and sometimes before). This time, Nelson (David Knell) and his three friends get into various types of innocent trouble while Nelson tries to evade his overbearing stepfather. Wet T-shirt contests vie for attention with bikini and He-shirt contests and a Playboy centerfold, but other than a fairly standard venting of pent-up energy, there is not much else to remember about this Spring Break. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The smash success Caddyshack became a prototype for countless other wacky T&A-tinged teen comedies of the early 1980s. At an exclusive country club for WASPish snobs, an ambitious young caddy (Michael O'Keefe) from an overpopulated home eagerly pursues a caddy scholarship in hopes of attending college and, in turn, avoiding a job at the lumber yard. In order to succeed, he must first win the favor of the elitist Judge Smails (Ted Knight), then the caddy golf tournament which the good judge sponsors. Of course, there are love interests as well -- one good, one naughty -- not to mention several foes he must vanquish along the way. The story itself serves to string along a series of slapstick scenes involving an obnoxious nouveau riche land developer (Rodney Dangerfield) who wants to turn the site into a condominium community; an oddball, Zen-quoting, millionaire slacker/golf ace (Chevy Chase); and a psychotic groundskeeper (Bill Murray) with a gopher-fixation. Caddyshack was a bona fide hit; throughout the '80s and '90s, director Harold Ramis would continue to create such hits as Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, and Analyze This. ~ Jeremy Beday, All Movie Guide

Scandalizing historians with its blithe disregard for the historical record, this American Civil War docudrama poses the theory that President Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edward Stanton, was behind a plot to kill him at Ford's Theater. His motive was his opposition to Lincoln's adamant refusal to allow the North to punish the South for its actions. The "official" assassination goes awry when another would-be assassin, the second-rate actor John Wilkes Booth, learns of the plot and decides to beat the government to the punch, for reasons of his own. In the movie, it is Stanton's assassin who is mistakenly captured and killed, rather than Booth. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide