moonspinner55

Don Knotts as klutzy but good-hearted Hollis Figg, a bookkeeper at City Hall who unwittingly comes across discrepancies in the town's road improvement budget. Turns out the mayor and his cronies are ripping off the taxpayers; to dissuade Figg from investigating any further, they give him an innocuous new job with a subversive secretary. One of the star's lesser (and less-known) vehicles has some funny writing and physical comedy early on, but is otherwise benign. Vic Mizzy contributes another of his lively, cartoony scores but Alan Rafkin directs at a snail's pace. * from ****

Cheap outdoor saga from Columbia Pictures (filmed in ColumbiaColor!) is nothing more than a padded co-feature meant to take up space on the bottom half of a marquee. Robert Knapp shows not a smidgen of screen charisma as a vengeful husband who rides into Laredo to confront his wife's killer, winding up in prison for murder. He escapes and later frees a mercurial Mescalero girl (played by busty Jana Davi), setting off a personal feud with the Apaches. There's a fistfight and a brawl with hatchets that temporarily rouses this woebegone, wooden-Indian western filmed in L. A.'s Bronson Canyon. NO STARS from ****

Three small town kids, two boys and a girl, all born in the same hospital at the same time (during a solar eclipse!), have turned into vicious 10-year-old killers. This B-grade thriller can't decide if it wants to be a twisted tale with a streak of black comedy mixed in or a straight horror movie. Likewise, the three devilish brats never quite emerge as characters; one minute they're peeping at a neighborhood girl dancing topless, the next they're killing the girl's father and their school teacher. Showing kids firing guns or using bats as weapons isn't bold--at least not without filmmaking craft behind it. This underachiever has been made without a semblance of thought, wit, suspense or, indeed, talent. * from ****