Winona Ryder's `Boys' Heads Straight To Video

It had a brief theatrical run in New York last spring, but the rest of the will see Winona Ryder's latest movie, "Boys" (originally called "The Girl You Want"), on cassette when it turns up Tuesday in video stores. She plays an affluent 25-year-old mystery woman who has a riding mishap and falls for a prep-school senior (Lukas Haas).

Written and directed by Stacy Cochran, who made her debut with the delightfully nutty "My New Gun" (1992), the movie died at the box office after being savaged by critics, including Variety's Greg Evans, who called it a "flat, oddly paced mystery/coming-of-age drama," and Box Office magazine's Wade Major, who found it "a dreadful disappointment."

Nevertheless, The New Yorker's Terrence Rafferty tried to resurrect it by attacking Touchstone Pictures' indifferent theatrical release ("If there's one thing studio marketers are good at, it's insuring that a movie they dislike doesn't succeed") and praising the movie as a misunderstood and idiosyncratic screwball comedy.

"The humor of `Boys' grows out of its youthful lovers' restlessness and dissatisfaction," Rafferty wrote. "Haas's geeky ardor is touching and funny, and Ryder gives a strikingly lucid portrayal of a muddled spirit."

"Boys" is one of several high-profile movies that are bypassing theaters this month. Also headed for tape are British director Terence Davies' first American film, "The Neon Bible," starring Gena Rowlands and Denis Leary; Robert Wuhl's "Open Season," a "Network"-style media satire; and Nicolas Roeg's "The Two Deaths," starring Michael Gambon and Sonia Braga. (Roeg will be in Seattle this weekend to introduce "The Two Deaths" at a one-time-only theatrical showing at 9 p.m. Sunday at the Broadway Performance Hall.)

Rowlands, who is being promoted for a best-actress Oscar for another 1996 film, "Unhook the Stars," plays an unsuccessful Southern singer who bonds with her victimized nephew in Davies' coming-of-age drama. Leary is the boy's brutal father and Diana Scarwid his much-abused mother. The New York Times' Stephen Holden praised Rowlands' "delicate understatement" but found the violence of Davies' finale incongruous: "The bloodshed feels jarringly out of step with the film's dreamy mood."

The Village Voice compared "Open Season" to "an Albert Brooks movie with the jokes sucked out of it," while Box Office's Kim Williamson wrote that "by allowing its satire to run amok, it attacks only straw men." Wuhl is the star of HBO's recently renewed comedy series, "Arli$$."

Roeg's "Two Deaths" stars Gambon as a sadistic surgeon who is mysteriously drawn to his housekeeper (Braga) in 1989 Romania. The New York Daily News gave it four stars and called it "rich, intellectual and almost terrifying in its understanding of the dark side of the human heart." The Film Journal International found it "sometimes riveting" but marred by "a chatty script and too much emphasis on vulgar shocks."

Also headed for tape are Angel Muniz's "Nueba Yol," a Spanish-language comedy about a Dominican widower (Lusito Marti) who abandons island life for the Big Apple (it recently became the highest-grossing film in the Dominican Republic's history), and Michael Covert's road movie, "American Strays," starring Jennifer Tilly as the persistent new customer of a vacuum-cleaner salesman (John Savage). Eric Roberts and James Russo are also in the cast.

The Village Voice's Gary Dauphin wrote that "Muniz's eye for immigrant detail and the performance he gets from Lusito Marti make the plotline worth following." Variety's Godfrey Chesire felt that it was "too slight and generic" but praised its "appealing authenticity." The title is slang for "New York."

Time Out magazine's Stephan Tally praised "American Strays" for its "gorgeous" cinematography and capable cast: "The actors go whole hog, but the script doesn't really hold together beneath them." The Village Voice's Justine Elias wrote that "this low-rent black comedy" proves "what happens when the set decorator knows more about storytelling than the director."

Like a number of recent African-American films, Larry Cohen's "Original Gangstas" and Doug Ellin's "Phat Beach" played theaters in a few cities with large black populations, but they'll be making their debuts elsewhere on videocassette.

Last May, "Gangstas" was the subject of a New York Times Magazine piece in which the cast of blaxploitation icons (Richard Roundtree, Ron O'Neal, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Fred Williamson) was rounded up for a group portrait.

They play older members of a depressed community who attempt to take back the streets from drug dealers and youth gangs. Variety's Leonard Klady called "Gangstas" "a satisfying diversion," but The New York Times' Lawrence Van Gelder panned it for descending into "the sort of ill-conceived bloodbaths and settling of accounts that owe more to the conventions of movies than the demands of logic."

"Phat Beach" is a "House Party" wannabe, starring Jermaine (Huggy) Hopkins and Brian Hooks as a comedy team that some reviewers compared to Abbott and Costello.

Van Gelder called the movie a "contrived and simple-minded R-rated comedy," while Variety dismissed it as "lean cuisine." But Box Office's Tom Quinn found it "a fun indulgence" and praised "its unapologetic desire to delight its target audience, namely horny teenage boys with a penchant for hip-hop music."

Other members of November's straight-to-video club: "Yesterday's Target," a time-travel story starring Daniel Baldwin, Malcolm McDowell and LeVar Burton; the martial-arts movie, "Fist of the North Star," with McDowell, Julie Brown and Costas Mandylor; "Forrest Warrior," starring Chuck Norris as an outdoorsman committed to saving his home; Playboy Films' latest erotic thriller, "Glass Cage," starring Eric Roberts and Charlotte Lewis; "Public Enemies," with Theresa Russell as an outlaw leader and the ubiquitous Roberts as a kidnapper at the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list; and "Just Your Luck," a New York comedy with Virginia Madsen and Sean Patrick Flanery as yuppie club crawlers and Vince Vaughn (the rising star of "Swingers" and "The Lost World") as a rookie cop. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Video Watch by John Hartl appears Thursdays in Scene. For more information call the Video Hotline on InfoLine, a telephone information service of The Seattle Times. Call 464-2000 from a touch-tone phone and enter category 7369. It's a free local call.