David Newhouse Movies

Director Jackie Kong, who later made the cult favorite Blood Diner (1987), directed this terrible monster movie for exploitation pioneer Bill Osco, who stars under the pseudonym "Rexx Coltrane." The plot concerns a mutant child who has become a monster after being exposed to toxic waste in a small Idaho town. Mortimer (Osco) wants to investigate a series of disappearances, only to have his efforts stymied by the town's mayor (José Ferrer), who is worried about the potential economic impact on the local potato industry. This abysmal horror film was made in 1980 and shelved for three years despite a cast which includes Oscar winners Ferrer and Dorothy Malone, Martin Landau, and Kinky Friedman. Other featured performers are Ruth Buzzi, Murray Langston ("The Unknown Comic"), and Kenny Rogers' wife (at the time), Marianne Gordon. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

Made for television, a former professional baseball player (John Ritter) coaches a team of misfits to the little-league crown. ~ John Bush, Rovi

Jonah (Jeffrey Bravin) is a lonely deaf child who has been misdiagnosed as retarded. Jonah's mother (Sally Struthers) and father (James Woods) struggle to establish communication from their withdrawn son. As the specialists shake their heads and cluck their tongues, Jonah's parents finally manage to teach the child sign language, thereby opening up his world both intellectually and emotionally. Despite competition from the network premiere of Taxi Driver, And Your Name is Jonah managed to post excellent ratings upon its original telecast. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Based on the 1976 autobiography My Luke and I by Eleanor Gehrig and Joseph Durso, Love Affair: The Eleanor & Lou Gehrig Story provides a slightly different slant on the events previously dramatized on film as Pride of the Yankees (1942). The story is told in flashback from the point of view of the wife of baseball's "Iron Man". Sitting in a deserted Yankee stadium, Eleanor (Blythe Danner) relates her tale to her biographer Joseph Durso (Robert Burr). She recalls how she met the painfully shy ballplayer Lou Gehrig (Edward Herrmann) on a blind date in 1933. She remembers her battle of wills with Lou's domineering and possessive mother (played with a nearly impenetrable foreign accent by Patricia Neal), and her 1934 elopement with her "Luke." Other memories include the New York Yankees' goodwill trip to Japan, where relationships became strained between teammates Gehrig and Babe Ruth (Ramon Bieri). Also recalled is the fact that Lou played 2130 consecutive games (a record was only recently broken by Cal Ripken Jr.). Eleanor's story ends inevitably with Lou's slow death from amyotropic lateral sclerosis. In summing up, Eleanor insists that despite the tragic final years, she wouldn't have traded her short time as Mrs. Lou Gehrig for anything. Edward Herrmann took pride in the fact that his portrayal of Lou Gehrig won the unqualified praise of the real Eleanor (though Herrmann learned to bat southpaw for the role, he is seen actually playing baseball only once) Originally scheduled for broadcast on October 9, 1977, the made-for-TV Love Affair was bumped by a World Series playoff game; it was rescheduled for January 15, 1978--smack dab opposite the Super Bowl. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Terraces is a television series pilot about a group of high-rise apartment dwellers who share adjoining balconies. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi

An Americanized version of Truffaut's The Wild Child, this drama centers on the attempts of a behavioral psychologist to educate a boy, raised in the wilds by dogs, and teach him how to function in society. This film spawned a brief television series, Lucan. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Originally made to be a television pilot, this sci-fi thriller is set in the future and chronicles the exploits of a trio of space travellers who thaw out after having spent nearly two centuries in suspended animation, return to earth and find it inhabited by clones. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Dick Van Dyke put his image and his career on the line with this searing TV movie about a "social drinker" who becomes a full-fledged alcoholic. Van Dyke plays a loving husband and father with a solid job and an excellent reputation, who blows it all with his excessive drinking. His wife (Lynn Carlin) tries to be supportive, but even she throws in the towel as Van Dyke's illness worsens. The film refuses to cop out with a happy ending, leaving Van Dyke as low as he can get short of sleeping in the gutter. Morning After was something of a public "A.A." testimonial for Dick Van Dyke, who had recently come to grips with his own real-life alcoholism. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, John Boorman's gangster film hauntingly merges a generic revenge story with a European art cinema sensibility. In Alcatraz to divvy up the spoils from a robbery, thief Walker (Lee Marvin) is instead shot point blank by his double-crossing friend Mal Reese (John Vernon) and left to die while Reese takes off with Walker's wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) and his $93,000. Resurrected, the stone-faced Walker returns to Los Angeles a couple of years later to seek revenge on Mal with the help of the enigmatic Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). Wanting little but his cash, Walker implacably penetrates Mal's lair and the hierarchy of the shady "Organization," registering no emotion about the string of murders left in his wake, as his thoughts repeatedly return to the past that brought him there. In his first American feature, Boorman transforms a stripped-down revenge plot into a surreal meditation on the gangster's spiritual demise, using flashbacks and startling shifts in setting to interweave Walker's fractured memories with his extraordinarily photographed odyssey through L.A. Marvin's chillingly stoic presence further hints at the ambiguities in Chris's observation that Walker "died at Alcatraz, all right." Brutal in the violence that it shows and suggests, Point Blank opened in the U.S. in the same period as Bonnie and Clyde, becoming one more testament to the genre-bending and ground-breaking possibilities of the nascent Hollywood New Wave. Although Point Blank was mostly overlooked in 1967, Boorman's visual adventurousness, and Marvin's amoral and apathetic antihero, have since made Point Blank seem one of the key films of the mid-late '60s, a precursor to revisionist experimentations from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino. It was remade as the 1999 Mel Gibson vehicle Payback. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

In postwar London, Chicago-raised fashion reporter Linda Medbury, working for a British newspaper, runs across a crime story that's too good to pass up -- all about Sugiani (Joseph Calleia), a racketeer who has quietly amassed a fortune, and near-total control of vice in London, through counterfeiting, black marketeering, and smuggling, all backed by strongarm men who've got everyone he does business with scared. Linda insists on running the story, even though one woman and two writers who previously gotten in Sugiani's way have either disappeared, been killed, or blinded. Her fiance, sportswriter Jumbo Hyde (Derek Farr), an ex-commando captain just back from the service, wants to protect her and enlists the aid of the boxers at a gymnasium where he's well known. But Linda is moving too fast for his efforts, and Sugiani is already tying up loose ends, including eliminating one talkative witness (Ruth Nixon). And when Sugiani and his right-hand man Bar Gorman (igel Patrick) discover that they can't buy or charm Linda off her crusade, they prepare to take more drastic action -- Sugiani sends out his personal enforcer, "the barber" (Hay Petrie). ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi