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Idling on her stretch yacht, sporting a taut hairdo like Attila the Bun, Joanna Stayton (Hawn) dispenses insults with the ease of a born screwball ^ heiress. Joanna is way less mature than 3 Men's six-month-old star; her fatuous husband (Edward Herrmann) calls her "Diddums," and her ditsy mom (Katherine Helmond) advises her, "If you have a baby, you won't be the baby anymore." Joanna's big worry is that Dean Proffitt (Kurt Russell), the uncouth guy she has hired to do some carpentry, will carp right back. Which he does. Well, throw him overboard!
Movie tradition and Leslie Dixon's clever script ordain that Joanna follow Dean into the sea, lose her memory, wind up humiliated in his hovel with his four grungy sons and, presto!, fall in love with her vengeful bohunk. The plot structure is a sophisticated torture device for social adaptability, and Garry Marshall's direction carries the sadism too far, but the picture is funny when it strips Joanna of everything but her rich-bitch wit: "I don't know who I am, but I'm sure I have a lawyer." Because the two stars give good humor, Overboard is a small ornament to the season. Sometimes it shines.
Throw Momma from the Train: But will they? Will Owen (DeVito) and his captive pal Larry (Billy Crystal) really bump off Owen's towering troglodyte mom? Naaah! Though Screenwriter Stu Silver filched the plot from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, Throw Momma is a bonding-buddy romance, a sweet bedtime story disguised as macabre farce. The only surprise the movie offers is DeVito's inventive direction; his busy camera is almost always in the right place. As Momma, Anne Ramsey has the face of an abused duffel bag and the rottenest spirit west of Caligula. Turns out, of course, she's nice too; lawn gnomes come in all sizes this movie season. Throw Momma from the train a little holiday kiss.
Then sic big bad Momma on Bill Cosby. TV's favorite obstetrician deserves the worst for piddling away America's goodwill on a $20 million bomb called Leonard Part 6. Cosby plays a retired secret agent, fabulously rich and anomic, who must defeat a conspiracy to unleash the animal kingdom in a kamikaze raid on humankind. Director Paul Weiland exerts much effort in achieving such comic effects as a car-wrecking ring of frogs, a rainbow trout with the soul of a pit bull, a belching ostrich, and a lobster that goes for Leonard's crotch. There are also loving, intrusive displays of a Coke bottle, a commercial that would make Cosby's patrons happy if anyone were going to see it. Cosby produced and co-wrote Leonard, and now he has disowned it. That is his first smart move in this whole sorry caper.