This Way to the Children's Crusade

By RICHARD CORLISS

Ah, the rites of summer! Baseball and sunbathing. Picnics by the old swimming hole. Heat prostration and killer mosquitoes. Steven Spielberg movies. For the fifth consecutive summer, this tireless auteur-mogul has placed his name on a fantasy adventure or two designed to turn sentient adults into wonder-lusting children. Spielberg directed neither of the inevitable hits before us: he wrote the story and served as an executive producer of The Goonies; he shepherded Back to the Future toward production, then pretty much left the film's creators on their merry own. But his candy-smirched fingerprints are evident on both projects. Like Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Goonies is all bustle and noise and adolescent ingenuity. Like E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Back to the Future has a gentler pace and a heart as big as all suburbia. Both new pictures trumpet the familiar Spielberg moral: stranded in the wilderness of kiddom, American youth can fight its way out and help its parents survive.

You could say that The Goonies is not so much a movie as the kinetic model for a theme-park attraction: the Pirate Fun House (& Restaurant). Tiptoe past the men's room and peek at a SCARY MONSTER! Crawl through a fireplace into a SPOOKY CHAMBER! Elude the clutches of an EVIL ITALIAN GANG! See the underground WATERFALL, the infernal CANNONBALL, the DEATH ORGAN and the very many SKELETONS! Hurtle down the FLUME to the cavern containing a genuine imitation 17th century PIRATE SHIP! Get out ALIVE! (And have a nice day.) As in any fun house, the pleasures here are as subtle as a rattrap sprung on a boy's foot. Dense, oppressively frenetic, heavy on the slapstick and low on the charm meter, the film asks to be experienced, not cherished. This efficient thrill machine contains gag homages to its makers' earlier work (E.T., Screenwriter Chris Columbus' Gremlins, Director Richard Donner's Superman) and even self-critical lines of dialogue ("I feel like I'm baby- sitting except I'm not getting paid").

Which is only to say that The Goonies is as hip, sassy and innocent as its seven teenage heroes. In the Spielberg tradition, each youngster uses his or her ordinary strengths to forge, and then save, a community of lost souls. Wise-Guy Mouth (Corey Feldman) translates the Spanish on an old map; Data (Ke Huy-Quan) gets out of scrapes with his Rube Goldberg gadgets; pretty Andy (Kerri Green) plays the Death Organ; Stef (Martha Plimpton) socks a crone on the jaw; Chunk (Jeff B. Cohen) finds an unlikely friend who loves junk food as much as he does; athletic Brand (Josh Brolin) muscles his way through calamity; and his little brother Mikey (Sean Astin), a dreamy hypochondriac, goads his fellow Goonies toward their rendezvous with a storybook pirate. The Goonies is like a clubhouse where every Boy's Life adventure comes true. And on the door hangs a sign: ADULTS KEEP OUT.

No such caveats should be applied to Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Zemeckis and Bob Gale. What moviegoer of any age could resist a sprightly romantic comedy on the Oedipal dilemma? As Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a pleasant 1985-style teenager, exclaims to his shock and chagrin, "My mom has the hots for me!" This takes some explaining. Marty's pal, an aged, eccentric scientist (Christopher Lloyd), has fashioned a De Lorean car into a functioning time machine. Suddenly, Marty finds himself in 1955, in the bedroom of the 17-year-old girl (Lea Thompson) who will be his mother, if -- big if -- he can deflect her crush on him toward the nice-guy nerd (Crispin Glover) who will be his father. All clear?

Unlike The Goonies, whose narrative is a rapid succession of hotfoots, Back to the Future has a long fuse that, halfway through, explodes into comic epiphany. Until then, the film is nicely propelled by the ingratiating Fox (from the NBC sitcom Family Ties) and some snappy then-and-now jokes (in 1985 the local theater is showing Orgy American Style, while in 1955 the attraction is a Ronald Reagan western). The choice of year is canny, for 1955 is close to the historical moment when television, rock 'n' roll and kids mounted their takeover of American culture. By now, the revolution is complete. So the child of 1985 must teach his parents (the children of 1955) how to be cool, successful and loved. When they learn it -- when the Earth Angel meets Johnny Do-Gooder -- the picture packs a wonderful wallop.

But Back to the Future goes further: this white '80s teenager must teach black '50s musicians the finer points of rock 'n' roll. Out-rageous! After a thunderous heavy-metal riff, Marty stares at his dumbfounded audience and shrugs, "I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it." You bet, Marty. You and your whole movie. Now and for 30 years to come.