BOYS (35)

Directed by: Stacy Cochran

Starring: Winona Ryder, Lukas Haas, Chris Cooper

The Pitch: A mysterious, rather trampy woman-with-a-past is rescued after an accident by a trio of schoolboys from a nearby boarding-school.

Theo Sez: There's a decent joke at the core of this mildly unusual movie - the woman of the world plunked down in a dorm full of underage preppies, who look on her as on a creature from another planet - which would perhaps have worked best with a cartoonishly pneumatic Jayne Mansfield type in the lead, or at the very least someone who can project trashy, like Juliette Lewis ; instead it gets the sweet, demure Ryder - who looks younger than most of her co-stars - and it never recovers. It has some of the quietly offbeat quality of this director's MY NEW GUN but very little of the edge, and there's barely enough story even for its short running-time (under 90 minutes, hinting at some big-time studio tampering). Mostly though the problem is that, when Ryder and Haas get together, it's supposed to resonate with all kinds of complicated innocence-vs.-worldliness emotions, but instead - with this casting - it just feels like the sappiest kind of puppy love.