St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 83

3,1987 ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 3F Bill McClellan 7 if i 'INNERSPACE' Drinking, Quarreling Lead To Loss Of Life I LfcH 3 DAVID PFEIFFER sat at his kitchen table and talked about the morning he killed his wife. Her name was Karen. "If I wasn't half-tanked, it wouldn't have happened," he said. He had been up all night, playing a card game called Pass the Trash.

It's a simple game, takes almost no thinking whatsoever, and that was important because Pfeiffer and his friends weren't capable of much heavy thought. Pfeiffer had started drinking beer at noon, and the card game had started somewhere around 10 at night and continued until about 5:30 in the morning. Then everybody left, except for one fellow who passed out on the couch. Pfeiffer just sat at the kitchen table for a while. His wife woke up shortly after the game ended, and she went to the bathroom to clean up.

She was a security trader at a brokerage house. Pfeiffer was a guard at the St. Louis County jail, and he had the day off. He and his wife had argued the night before, and while he had not spent the night brooding about the argument, he hadn't forgotten it, either. He headed toward the bedroom, started past the bathroom, thought better of it and decided to resume the argument that had been left unfinished the previous night.

The argument had to do with one of Karen's three children from a previous marriage. As far as Pfeiffer was concerned, the child was becoming too wild. Let's get this thing straightened out right now, he said, and he started toward the basement where the child's bedroom was. "That was dumb, dumb, dumb," Pfeiffer conceded as he sat at his table, remembering the way it all happened. Karen, predictably, wouldn't let him past her into the basement.

OK, everybody out, Pfeiffer proclaimed, and he began wrestling his wife toward the back door. He shoved her out onto the porch and closed the screen door. She tried to fight her way back into the house, and he pushed her again. She fell backward and hit her head on the cement at the bottom of the steps. There are, incidentally, only three steps leading down from the back porch.

Subsequent news stories would make it sound at least in Pfeiffer's mind as if he had pushed his wife down a flight of stairs. That would indicate at least in Pfeiffer's mind an intent to harm her. According to Pfeiffer, that intent did not exist. Karen was knocked unconscious, and she died five days later. The charge against Pfeiffer, which had been first-degree assault, was amended to second-degree murder.

A grand jury subsequently knocked the charge down to involuntary manslaughter. Pfeiffer's attorney and the county prosecutor's office made a deal. (The prosecutor's office has said that Karen's family did not want to put her children through the ordeal of a trial.) At any rate, a deal was made. Five years probation in return for a plea of guilty. Then the Dennis Bulloch case went to trial.

The jury convicted Bulloch of manslaughter in connection with the death of his The public was outraged. Many people believed that Bulloch had got away with murdering his wife. Shortly thereafter, in the same courtroom and in front of the same judge, Pfeiffer appeared. He pleaded guilty, and the judge ordered a pre-sentence investigation. The fact that Pfeiffer probably was going to get probation made the front page of this newspaper the next day.

That concerned Pfeiffer. After all, the official sentencing does not take place until August, and Pfeiffer is worried that the deal might evaporate. In the strange world of criminal justice, the defendant's attorney and the prosecutor make a deal. Then when the defendant pleads guilty, the judge asks him if anybody has promised him anything in return for the guilty plea. The defendant has to say no, when he really wants to say, yes, of course I have been promised something.

Not that Pfeiffer thinks the presentence investigation will turn up anything harmful. He's confident that neither of his other two ex-wives will have anything really bad to say. "It's not like I'm a wife-beater or anything. The violence was only that one morning," he said. Pfeiffer, who is 44, said that his problems can probably be traced back to booze.

"None of this would have happened if I hadn't been drinking," he said. Asked if he had stopped drinking, he shook his head. "I suppose I should just stop completely, but I'm trying to control it." As we sat in the kitchen, I tried to conjure up the image of Karen wife, mother and working woman. This was, after all, once her kitchen, too. But the only image I could come up with was the one in front of me an unemployed, middle-aged man sitting at the table, trying to figure out how everything had gone so wrong, and knowing, of course, that he was the cause of his own problems.

"In a moral sense, I'm a guilty man," he said. By Joe Pollack Of the Post-Dispatch Staff AH, THE JOY of sailing on a sea of swirling stomach acids, the Intricacy of infiltrating the inner ear, the optimum pleasure of oscillating in the optic nerve, the lyrical languor of lolling in the lungs waiting to be sneezed across the room and onto someone's glasses. -Those are some of the high spots of "Innerspace," another exercise in overdone special effects with the name of Steven Spielberg above the title to lure the unsuspecting with memories of the days when be showed imagination and a certain amount of honesty in his relationship with the viewer. I don't know what Spielberg had to do with this sloppy, unfunny collection of chase scenes through the streets of San Francisco and the internal organs of Martin Short Spielberg's title is executive producer, which he shares with Peter Guber and Jon Peters. There are two other co-executive producers and a producer as well, so there is no way of knowing who did what to whom, except that the audience is once again the victim.

"Innerspace" is another of those comedies in which someone had an idea let's take a carousing pilot who is scheduled to be part of a miniaturization experiment that then will see him, space ship and all, injected into a laboratory rabbit. But let's inject him into a nerd. So far, so good, with Dennis Quaid as the pilot and Short as the nerd, plus Meg Ryan as a newspaper reporter in the midst of an on-again, off-again affair with Quaid. They really love each other, of course. But it obviously wasn't long before someone discovered that putting the Quaid character inside the Short character meant that the two men never got a chance to relate to each other except conversationally.

So some industrial terrorists (or maybe international spies) were added, and a few more characters, and some James Bond-style gimmicks, and always more chase scenes. And Short gets the chance to make faces, some of which are funny. He also loses some of his weaknesses under the encouragement of Quaid, and that's an area that could have made the film far more interesting. But quick cuts and MTV effects are what we get, plus one pretty-well-shot sequence involving Short (or more accurately, his stunt double) hanging from the back of a truck and attempting a drop into a speeding car. As the plot is set up, Quaid only has oxygen for 24 hours to spend going through Short's innards, but it soon becomes as obvious as the noonday sun that no one is going to worry about it, so any sign of tension also eases.

For some reason, there also are some shrinking effects involving Kevin McCarthy and Fiona Lewis, who lead the bad guys, but they make less sense than the other goings-on, and aren't funny, either. Joe Dante directed with an attitude that everything could be fixed in the cutting room or with the special effects. He was mistaken. (Running time: 2 hours. Rating: GREAT PRICES Oil I UDS II 90 10-PACK WITH FREE BATTERIES I THAT'S $1.40 EACH! 1 XL II 90 10-PACK WITH FREE 9 IwiSf ABOVE: Baby sitter Elisabeth Shue (center) and her charges, Anthony Rapp, Maia Brewton and Keith Coogan, are awed by the night life of urban Chicago in "Adventures in Babysitting." LEFT: Martin Short (left) helps Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid celebrate their marriage in "Innerspace." director Chris Columbus (a Steven Speilberg protege) capitalizes on the natural spunkiness of this foursome to charm us, which they do, without becoming sickeningly cute.

Shue, who played Ralph Macchio's girlfriend in "Karate Kid II" shines as the baby sitter, rising to all occasions and wowing us with her charisma. The mesh of personalities really works well in -this film, and is rounded out by perhaps the sweetest car thief in all of Chicago, played by Calvin Levels. Once again however, as is the case with most teen-age movies, screenwriter David Simkins asks us to suspend our better senses and accept the premise that four youngsters would rather risk being killed then call the police for help because their parents might find out they were where they shouldn't have been. If you can get past that (and by now you should be used to it, given all the teen-age films to come out in the last five years), "Adventures in Babysitting" is a lot of fun as well as entertaining and has more going for It than the ridiculous title suggests. (Rated PG-13.

Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. At Cinema IV, Clarkson, Halls Ferry, Kenrick, Ronnie's, 66 Park-In and Westport). Senator Soaper Whila we haven't turned our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, we have changed our flatirons into door stops and our clotheslines into ump ropes. The pain that disappears as you're describing it to the doctor is closely related to the engine noise that can't be heard when the mechanic is listening. The greatest hazard of being a good listener is getting caught in the crossfire between two good talkers.

i 0-. high school senior Chris Parker (wonderfully played by Elisabeth Shue) is stood up by her boyfriend and agrees to baby-sit for an adoring freshman Brad (Keith Coogan, grandson of Jackie) and his. plucky little sister Sara (Maia Brewton). While baby-sitting, Chris gets a call from her best friend Brenda (Penelope Ann Miller) who decided to run away from home but changed her mind as soon as she hit the downtown Chicago bus station. She is out of money and begs Chris to come to her rescue.

Chris piles the two kids, and Brad's wise-cracking buddy Daryl (Anthony Rapp) into the family station wagon and heads downtown to pick up Brenda. Ail it takes is one tire blowout on the highway to start the wheels of adventure turning. From there they take to the streets, traipsing through the city's back alleys and blues clubs while hotly pursued by gangsters and killers. They even manage to find love at a fraternity party and scale a glass skyscraper. The high point of the film comes when the kids, in an effort to escape the clutches of some bad guys, sneak into an all-black blues club and must improvise a blues song before they can leave.

First-time AUDIO CASSETTES THAT'S .90 EACH! if RADIO A2LTISTBZ0 CASSETTE PUYER 1885 40 in UHTHl An ad to sel yrx nouse Post dassifd sds gets results? To place an ad cat 6214666 Uonday through Fnday, 8 am to 5 pm St if A 1 hi wu in Ml movie rentals PG. At the Esquire, Northwest Square, Regency Square, South County, Sunset, Woods Mill, Village) 'ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING' By Ellen Futtermart Of the Post-Dispatch Staff ANY TEEN-AGER who has ever been "left in charge" knows that once the adults walk out the door, anything is possible. And so it goes in "Adventures in Baby-sitting," where anything and everything that's possible not only happens to a feisty blond baby sitter and her three precocious charges, but happens within the course of a single evening. Then again, what else would you expect when a bunch of affluent suburban kids are plopped onto the mean streets of big, bad Chicago? If this sounds familiar it is because it is with elements of "Risky Business" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off creeping into the screenplay. Still, "Adventures" Is undeniably cute without being too cutesy and very likable despite its unoriginal and somewhat frenetic nature.

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