Golden Age Club

By JAY COCKS

HOMEBODIES

Directed by LARRY YUST

Screenplay by LARRY YUST, HOWARD KAMINSKY and BENNETT SIMS

If traveling salesmen sold movies then Homebodies would be called a novelty item. Such gewgaws find their value not in beauty or utility but in their oddness. And, like a Whoopee Cushion or a musical nutcracker. Homebodies is an odd little item indeed.

The bodies in question are a group of senior citizens who turn homicidal when a real estate mogul, with the city's acquiescence, wants to run them out of their home to put up a complex of high-rises. It ain't much, their little apartment, but it's all they got. The developers find the oldsters a new place to live -- "way across town," as one of them complains, "and twice the rent" -- expecting them to shuffle along. These oldsters fight back. They are lame, halt, blind and loony, but scrappy enough for all that.

The moving force behind the ring of death-dealing duffers is a little old lady who watches the results of her murderous plotting at the construction site down the street while fortifying herself from a box of S & W prunes. It is quite a show: a cable breaks, and a worker falls from a great height, meeting mother earth with a steel beam on his chest; an elevator fire breaks out, and three other workers are fried to death. The job is shut down, but only temporarily, and the old folks at home are laying plans to go after the mogul himself.

Homebodies is plotted out and done up with competence, so it does not look like the usual sleazy horror flick. For a yarn like this to work at all, though, the elfin imagination of a John Collier or Roald Dahl is indispensable. The authors and director of Homebodies have no such wit.

The cast boasts no identifiable names, but the faces are familiar, mostly from television commercials. All the actors -- Peter Brocco, Frances Fuller, William Hansen. Ruth McDevitt, Paula Trueman, Ian Wolfe -- muster up a dignity that is touching under the cir cumstances. The key question, really, is not even why or how this movie was made, but for whom.

It is certainly not a youth picture, and it hardly seems the sort of thing that would induce Mom and Dad to spring for a sitter and a night on the town. Maybe the producers were trying to crash the senior-citizens market, give the old folks a thrill and a little grue some encouragement against the insults of aging. A notion like that conjures up entertaining visions of audiences full of.

gray heads, theaters filled with thou sands of members of the Golden Age Club (half price till 5 p.m.), whistling and stomping and carrying on as an other member of the heartless Establish ment gets properly snuffed.

-- Jay Cocks

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