‘ZOO’: KID STUFF

“The Zoo Gang” (citywide) is a jaunty, mindless little comedy best appreciated by unsophisticated junior high schoolers.

Small-town girl Tiffany Helm and some of her pals lease from seedy ex-champion wrestler Ben Vereen a turn-of-the-century saloon and convert it into a teen club they call the Zoo. But they don’t reckon with local bully and all-around spoilsport Jack Earle Haley, who’s determined to ruin their fun. Backing him up are his husky twin brothers, played by Glen and Gary Mauro; failing them, there’s yet another brother, the gigantic Darwyn Swayle, and their nasty father, Ramon Bieri.

This is one of those youth films in which school is nonexistent, and parents and police are nominal presences at best. The struggle between these good kids and the evil Haley and his family escalates to a potentially lethal level virtually in a vacuum. To be sure, writers- directors Pen Densham and John Watson don’t mean for their picture, for all its uplifting stick-together-and-learn-to-fight-back sentiments, to be taken too seriously. Yet it is perhaps more disturbing than they intended when they stage a brutal climactic confrontation between the kids and their oppressors that involves Bieri actually aiming a gun at the youngsters--and in plain sight of do-nothing adult onlookers and a pair of belatedly arriving cops.

This all-too-sobering note aside, “The Zoo Gang” (PG-13 for considerable mayhem and some strong language) has an abundance of verve and high spirits. Vereen is showy in a sentimental turn as an alcoholic redeemed by the kids’ need for his support. Haley is always a deliciously nasty heavy, and Bobby Jacoby is terrific as Helm’s feisty, imaginative little brother. Ty Hardin is Helm and Jacoby’s father, highly peripheral until the final moment. Best of all, however, is the film’s attractive setting, Prescott, Ariz.