The Tri-City Valleycats & Rensselaer County hosted a community movie night tonight at Bruno Stadium, the next-to-last event at the venue this year. There'll be a dog walk coming up soon to end the season.
Anyway, the feature attraction was 1993's "The Sandlot", a coming-of-age comedy-drama populated mostly with a group of unknown young actors. Writer-director David Mickey Evans also serves as narrator as the adult version of Scott Smalls, the newcomer to a neighborhood whose youth play an ongoing game of baseball during the summer.
The gang's somewhere between Our Gang and The Bad News Bears (the 70's version), but without female members. Scott has arrived in town with his mother (Karen Allen, "Raiders of The Lost Ark") & stepfather (Denis Leary, in one of his first movie roles). The core of the story centers on "The Beast", a ginormous English mastiff which captures baseballs, among other things, and when Scott makes a mistake involving his stepfather's prized autographed baseball, one signed by a certain Yankee legend.....!
Here's the trailer:
I could honestly do without the gross-out humor in the middle of the film, but it was a popular trope by the 90's. There were two DTV sequels, in 2005 & 2007, respectively, and Evans returned only for the first of those sequels. The Valleycats devoted a night earlier this summer to the film as it marked its 25th anniversary, and used clips for the rest of the season.
Rating: B+.
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