Movie Nation

My hat always comes off in the presence of filmmakers daring enough to take on a period piece with their indie film.

They’re invariably passion projects with a capital “P.” Because you’re not cranking out some attention-grabbing/career-starting horror-zombie or romantic comedy quickie. If you’re making a movie on a tiny budget, and have to add-in Civil War uniforms and battle reenactments (“Field of Lost Shoes”) or vintage clothes, cars, settings and gear for a movie like “The Iron Orchard,” you’re committed. 

“Iron Orchard” is an unconventional, fictionalized tale of Texas oil’s peak “wildcatting” years — the 1920s through the 1950s. Enterprising gamblers with a thin stake, some gear and chancy leases on (mostly) West Texas land where no known oil reserves existed, risked all for a chance to strike it rich in “Black Gold,” “Texas Tea.”

It’s the subtext many a Texas/Oklahoma story (“Giant,” “Oklahoma Crude”) and there’s no reason to not tell another one.

But you’ve got to do a better job than this. It’s a duller “Dallas,” a diminutive “Giant,” an “Oklahoma Crude” that isn’t crude enough.

All these oil wells, all those cars and trucks dating from the 1930s to late ’50s, period costumes, etc. And in service of what? A murky, anachronistic “Dallas” soap opera that struggles to find someone — anyone — for the audience to identify with as it perfunctorily skips through time following the sorry saga of one Jim McNeely (Lane Garrison of “Camp X-Ray” and TV’s “Prison Break”). 

We meet him as he shows up in the Permian Basin in the late 1930s, a young man chased away by the parents of the well-to-do Mazie Wales (Hassie Harrison, who makes a fine blonde hussie) because he just didn’t have good enough prospects. At least they hooked him up with a job.

He begins work as a roughneck for Bison Oil in 1939. He is bullied, hazed and ridiculed from Day One.

Not that he isn’t warned. The guy bringing him in, Dent Paxton (Austin Nichols), has nothing but blunt warnings for him.

“My advice to you is run…go back to where you came from.” He is just “one of them college boys” whom the other roughnecks will “run off in the week..”

“All hopes are illusions are blasted to pieces out here”

But McNeely won’t be dissauded. The greater part of the film is him being beaten, forced to do backbreaking labor (ditch digging, laying pipe, wrestling with heavy oil pumping valves) and finally fighting back enough to retrieve a little dignity.

The locals curse him (several sound like profane versions of characters from TV’s “King of the Hill”) and call him “Boll Weevil” (as in “useless insect” and a blight on their lives) at every chance they get. There’s a nephew (Temple Baker) of the company owner who shirks work, and a brute of a crew leader (Gregory Kelly) who must be faced down with fists. 

This is smelly, dirty authentic-feeling male bonding and is the best thing in the movie. 

Flashbacks to days with the comely blonde Mazie remind him of his goals — save money, get “into” the business, win back Mazie.

Then he lays eyes on an engineer’s unhappy wife, played by Ali Cobrin of “Neighbors” and “American Reunion” and “Lap Dance.” She’s miserable to the point of self-destructive, and given to offering rides to McNeely.

“You’d better get out here. You know how people talk.”

He thinks nothing of making his move on the married woman, and the film perfunctorily leaps into their happy lives together, Jim spending his stake money on wildcat leases, taking the risks and seeing them pay off, thanks to inside tips from a geologist-friend (Allan McLeod) and his own folksy charm. 

But the “hero’s journey” wouldn’t be complete without him ruining his own success, over-reaching, drinking, inviting Mazie back into his life.

Director and co-screenwriter Ty Roberts has ties to Midland oil folk, and got financing from others in West Texas oil for the film. The 1966 novel this is based on is a roman a clef Texas Van Zandt family history, according to the son of the novelist, character actor Ned Van Zandt (who plays a Van Zandt in the movie).

 Which is all well and good.

But “The Iron Orchard” — a vividly poetic titular image of a field of derricks, I have to say — lacks such fundmentals as a dynamic of conflict. McNeely drifts from hero to villain, with no other character save for the wife he lured away from her first husband, developed to an extent that she could be his foil.

Which she isn’t, even though the film desperately needs that balance — that conscience (Dent?) or outside person or force that pushes back against Dent’s ambition. 

Think of “Giant,” where Rock Hudson’s easy wealth is clashes with James Dean’s hunger and class resentment. 

Garrison is game enough at giving us the drive that young men of intelligence and limited means brought to such 1930s oil patch stories, but out of his depth at showing Jim’s rising arrogance, foolish indiscretions and financial desperation over the following decades. 

Indie period pieces are always too “clean” — the classic cars and trucks, that in reality would be dirty, dented and beaten up from working lives in the wasteland of West Texas, are always spotless, down to their whitewalls. Only the language is soiled and worn, here. 

Songs turn up in the wrong decades (Willie Nelson’s “Hello Walls,” recorded by Faron Young in 1960, shows up in 1948 or so) as the story advances by uninteresting spasmodic leaps.

The fact that author Tom Pendleton (Van Zandt) saw this tale “really happen” to his family doesn’t mean the story doesn’t need dramatic license to work. Because that’s why you’ve never heard of Tom Pendleton as a novelist.

I tipped my hat at the outset of this review at the effort all involved made here, and it stays off in respect for what Roberts et al were going for in this project that perked to life in 2011 and took until now to reach the screen.

But all those years, and you didn’t workshop the daylights out of this script, with others pointing out the holes? It plays like a TV mini series chopped to fit into a theatrical film, with a lot of “good stuff” and connections lost in the editing. 

All that money for music rights and Willie’s reps didn’t tell you “You shouldn’t have ‘Hello Walls’ playing during the (earlier) heyday of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, sexual situations, fist fights, deaths

Cast: Lane Garrison, Ali Cobrin, Austin Nichols, Hassie Harrison, Lew Temple

Credits: Directed by Ty Roberts, script by Gerry DeLeon and Ty Roberts, based on the  Tom Pendleton novel. A Santa Rita Films release.

Running time: 1:58

The weekend after Oscar nominations are announced is typically limited in terms of new releases, with Oscar nominees taking charge of that “Oscar bounce” owning many spots in the box office top ten.

This year, Universal rolled “Green Book” back into theaters, and it is paying off to the tune of $5 million+. It’s still not the Oscar favorite, but “Roma” isn’t geting any theatrical help, as AMC and Regal Cinemas, the nation’s biggest chains, have refused to roll the Netflix film into theaters pre-Academy Awards. Post-Academy Awards too, I’ll wager.

It’s a TV streaming movie and while Hollywood in general has seen to its own interests in terms of release dates, movies it rolls out on DVD and POD earlier and earlier (“Green Book” will be on video in a week or so.), and day-and-date Direct TV and other VOD releases that also open in theaters, the theater chains do what they can to protest the content providers’ efforts to cut their throats.

I’ve said it many times, when Hollywood gives its top honor to a minor work that belongs on streaming TV, where it began, the game is up for the Oscars and their tie to theatrical release motion pictures.

This weekend will be owned by “Glass,” which should clear the $100 million mark today (Saturday) and win its second weekend in a row with a $16.5 million take.

Fox has high hopes for “The Kid Who Would be King,” a smart, teachable moment kids’ fantasy picture built around a British lad who pulls a sword from a stone (rebar-reinforced foundation piling, actually) who becomes a New Arthur for a troubled age.

Decent reviews buttress this self-aware action film that lightly mocks itself and its connection to such popular fantasy sagas as Harry Potter and “The Lord of the Rings.” It may hit $10 million, which considering it didn’t cost much, is a win. Bit of a letdown, I am sure, for Fox, which screened it often and early and hopes for a bigger payout.

I joked to a friend after we watched “Serenity,” the odd-twist/bad-twist neo-noir potboiler Aviron released wide this weekend, that Hollywood saw the studio and the film’s Chinese financiers coming. Thin plot, an exotic location (Mauritius) to attract two Oscar winners and an Oscar nominee to star in it, and a very silly script which has been critically pounded lead to a movie that won’t out-perform “Green Book.” $5-6 million is the expected take for “Serenity.” The movie’s backers and releasing studio were suckered.

The last of Oscar nomination help knocks “On Account of Sex” out of the top ten, and “Stan & Ollie’s wide release similarly didn’t benefit from Academy endorsement. Both worthy films, but no buzz — no cash.

“Spider-Man” and “Dragon Ball: Broly” are dueling for the adult animated audience, but “A Dog’s Way  Home” and “Kid Who Would be King,” actual kid movies, will draw more this weekend.

There’s a lot of salesmanship that sits, obvious to the naked eye, in “Serenity.”

Here’s how “Serenity” was sold to overseas investors, and then to nascent studio Aviron, and how they in turn are selling it to us.

Matthew McConaughey skinny dipping, Anne Hathaway as a femme fatale, Oscar winners and “Interstellar” co-stars sharing sex scenes in a Virgin Islands (actually, Maritius in the Indian Ocean) setting.

Sell the all-star cast on a paid Mauritius working vacation. and voila, you’ve got yourself a movie.

It’s not much of a movie, an overboiled, rum-and-sex-soaked neo-noir about deep sea fishing, predestination and murder. And just as its not amounting to much, writer-director Steven Knight’s script (he wrote “Dirty Pretty Things” and “Locke”) takes a deep dive into flipping genres and reframing the narrative.

With plot contrivances piling up alongside McConaughey nude scenes, interrupted by moments where he tosses back his head and howls, Hathaway vamping up the ex lover who tries every argument in the book to talk this charter fishing boat captain into killing her brutish husband (Jason Clarke, perfectly vile), one is tempted to say that the only thing that worked here were the sales pitches.

McConaughey is Baker Dill, a hard-drinking hard-luck charter captain on tiny Plymouth Island, which has but one bar — The Rope and Anchor — and one cougar (Diane Lane) to keep him afloat. She loans him money after sex.

“You’re a hooker,” she cracks.

“A hooker who can’t afford his hooks,” he agrees.

His righteous, works-with-nuns first mate (“Amistad” co-star Djimon Hounsou) cannot cure Dill of his obsession, his Great White Whale. It’s a giant tuna he keeps hooking and never landing. “Justice” he calls it. He pulls a knife on two customers who try to take the rod and fight the fish onto the boat on THEIR charter in an opening scene.

“I fish tuna,” Dill growls.

“You fish for ONE tuna,” one and all agree. Everybody knows Dill’s story, knows who he sleeps with and the state of his finances because “Down here, everybody knows everything.”

They see the new blonde (Hathaway) who shows up, even if they don’t know Dill and Karen’s shared past. She’s got a proposition. Think “Palmetto” or “Body Heat.”

She uses their history. She shows a little leg and comes on to him. She plays the pity story, claims she’s being beaten. She wants her husband to go fishing, and not come back.

Dill is also being pursued by this mysterious nerd in a business suit (Jeremy Strong of “The Big Short” and “Detroit”). The guy keeps running down the dock, just seconds late in catching Dill, or taking off his expensive shoes to wade into the surf after him.

Weird.

The setting, the sexy tone, the cast and snippets of sharp dialogue tamped down my eye rolling through the film’s first half. McConaughey, who has mad more than his share of seaside tales, gives fair value in delivering salty lines.

“Who owns your boat?”

“Me’n the bank take TURNS.”

But it’s at that midpoint that Knight, an accomplished writer who let his director of photography talk him into a few too many pointlessly showy circle-the-character pans, takes a turn towards the desperate and turns his plot and his movie inside out.

Playing it as a straight noir wasn’t impressing anybody. Screenwriters and directors over 60 are have to try tricks to keep themselves relevant in a film industry driven by childishness.

But this twist popped whatever bubble of believability that makes “Serenity” watchable.

Still, you’ve got to hand it to any salesman who sold this cast, these producers and this studio on this project. Must have been a pitch for the ages, with “Mauritius” to seal the deal.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, sexual content, and some bloody images

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Diane Lane, Djimon Hounsou, Jason Clarke

Credits: Written and directed by Steven Knight An Aviron release.

Running time: 1:46

There’s romance in the sight of a sailboat, never moreso than when you see one is the last place you’d expect — the desert Southwest.

That arresting, poetic image has turned up in a few movies over the years — 2003’s “Off the Map” comes to mind. And it sets the tone for “A Boy Called Sailboat,” a charming romantic fable which opens with the sight of a cowboy hat-wearing used car salesman (J.K. Simmons) towing a fully rigged, old and worn-out sloop across the parched flatness of New Mexico.

He deals in classic cars, but is always on the hunt for “acquisitions” that add a touch of novelty, whimsy and fantasy to his mid-desert “Oasis” lot.

“Boy Called Sailboat” is about a nearby child who has been obsessed with the image of a sloop under sail since birth. He’s never actually seen one, but little Sailboat (screen novice Julian Ataconi Sanchez) has always drawn them, something only his sickly abuela (grandmother, played by Rusalia Benavidez) understands.

In Sailboat’s self-narrated folktale, our story doesn’t really begin until Sailboat himself finds “an acquisition.”

“My abuela says, ‘You find the most important things when you’re not looking.”

It’s “a little guitar” that suits his diminutive stature (a ukulele, actually). And it becomes Sailboat’s new obsession.

His indulgent mother (Elizabeth De Razzo) smiles and encourages him. Her obsession is spicy Mexican meatballs. Sailboat’s doting dad (veteran character actor Noel Gugliemi, wonderfully stone-faced) may have the bald head, face tattoos and scowl of a brute. But he gets it, too. His obsession is horses, and he’s covered the walls of their tumbledown (literally) shack with paint-by-numbers portraits of stallions. He paints them when he isn’t seeing to “the stick,” a colorfully decorated pole that props their leaning ruin of a house up.

Best pal Peeti (Keanu Wilson) may wish Sailboat would share his soccer obsession. Peeti cannot blink and is constantly putting drops in his eyes, and therefor needs a friend to pass the ball to while he’s administering the drops.

Even Sailboat’s loopy teacher (Jake Busey, perfectly cast) buys into the kid’s new “little guitar.” Teach is obsessed with rattlesnakes, and is forever showing them off to his class.

The story really takes off when abuela, sick in the hospital, gives Sailboat a task.

“Write me a song on that little guitar.”

Which Sailboat, who seems to be about 8, attempts to do. He charms a cute girl classmate, who helps him. He draws the attention of school bullies, which is when Papa “gets that difficult look on his face” (scary) and has to intervene.

And the song the kid concocts makes grown men weep, leaves women, children and everybody slack-jawed with awe.

Which leaves Australian writer-director Cameron Nugent with a dilemma. How do you present a song you’ve built up with that much hype? The biggest letdown of “Mr. Holland’s Opus” is when we hear that “Opus,” in the film’s finale. The bust in Spike Lee’s “Mo Better Blues” is the song the lead composes of that title, which is no “blues,” jazz or otherwise.

So Nugent makes the screen go silent — with a thousand hertz tone playing when Sailboat sings his song. It’s a novel solution to a problem, but a rather irritating and unsatisfying one, I have to confess.

So many other ingredients to the picture dazzle and delight that this unfortunate miscalculation grows larger in contrast. Guitarists Leonard and Slava Grigoryan fill the guitar-duo score with snatches of folk songs and children’s tunes — fanciful Spanish guitar runs through “Row Row, Row Your Boat,” to “La Bamba,” “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” to “House of the Rising Sun.”

And the film cheats us of a “big moment.”

Simmons gets to trot out his sexualized used car-salesman’s patter, Busey gives Bing the teacher a compassionately clueless touch — showing off snakes to little kids, nicknaming Sailboat “South of the Border,” dragging the class to the local tobacco factory for a field trip.

The pest control guy who uses desert lizards to eat problem insects, the creepy-seeming vintage Chevy driver (all the cars are old) who picks up Sailboat hitchhiking, the feisty abuela (“I am from Tijuana. Sick does not concern me.”)  — “A Boy Called Sailboat” bubbles over with delightful, light touches and decorations.

I’d buy the soundtrack if they put it on disc.

It’s just a shame Nugent couldn’t find a less grating solution to “We don’t want you to ever hear the song.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, mild threats of violence

Cast: Julian Atocani Sanchez, J.K. Simmons, Elizabeth De Razzo, Jake Busey, Noel Gugliemi

Credits: Written and directed by Cameron Nugent. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:32

No release date on this epic, which features a few authentic Good Ol’boys (Barry Corbin) mixed in with the likes of John Travolta, a suprisingly down home Kevin Dunn, Shania Twain (Southern Canada? Maybe.) and Michael Madsen.

Madsen is past-his-prime driver Travolta’s nemesis, the VERY guy the old man’s up and coming kid (Toby Sebastian from Blighty) would want to flee dad and go drive for.

Surely there’s a Shania title song about “Trading Paint” in there somewhere.

Yes, he was a real figure, the great composer, working in the shadows of Hollywood as others got the credit and students went on to become JOHN WILLIAMS and JERRY GOLDSMITH and HENRY MANCINI.

Yeah. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco really lived. He was a great concert guitarist, composing scores of classical pieces for the guitar. Then he fled Europe, settled in at MGM and scored 200 or so films. Almost never getting credit for them.

Xander Berkely plays him in “The Maestro,” a tale of a budding musician (Mackenzie Astin) who comes to study with him in the Beatnik ’50s.

“The Maestro” was slated to open in December, but is now opening Feb. 15.

Kind of a dizzy and dark riff on Matthew M’s “Awright awright awright, where’s my BONGOES?” past image, with a hint of “Spring Breakers” about it.

Korine landed Isla Fisher and Snoop Dogg and Jonah Hill and Zac Efron and…Martin Lawrence?

“The Beach Bum” opens March 22.

The impression that sticks with you is of carnage — animals slaughered on a wholesale scale.

“We shoot until we run outta shells,” one camo-clad local drawls from the cockpit of his flat bottomed swamp boat.

But they’re shooting at “Rodents of Unusual Size,” the destructive “swamp rat” named nutria. So any cringing at all this shooting, trapping, skinning and lopping off the tails of untold hundreds of thousands is minimized, or at least dulled by repetition.

Here’s a nature documentary set in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” country, the coastal wetlands of Louisiana, fast disappearing due to oil and gas exploration, drilling, pumping and canal digging, by Missisippi River mismanagement on a vast scale, and due to the incursions of a 20 pound beaver-toothed rodent imported from South America, the bane of coastal marshlands across the planet.

A whimsical animated opening (narrated by Wendell Pierce) recounts “a tale crazier’n Hell,” about nutria — how a few folks, encouraged by the state, imported the Argentinian rodents in the 1930s to broaden Louisiana’s fur industry.

The most famous importer, and the one who gets most of the blame (not all of it deserved), is E.A. McIllhenny, scion of the Tabasco Sauce empire. Nobody messing with nutria knew what they were dealing with, and keeping them penned up while they bred like their fellow rodents — rats and rabbits — was a challenge.

Which the nutria entrepreneurs abandoned, loosing their stock into the state’s marshes “to aid the state’s fur industry.”

As the fur is quite soft and pretty, that worked out — sort of. A LOT of people trapped and sold nutria for their fur. Until “Fur is Murder”  sea change of the 1980s. The market collapsed, and battered wetlands, broken by river-dredging, river traffic and the canals dug by the state’s rampant oil and gas exploration, were beseiged from below. Nutria love marsh greenery. And they dig burrows that flood and collapse the landscape they’ve denuded.

Generations of water folk who had used nutria trapping as a winter source of income were broke, and losing the land literally under their feet. So the state went after nutria with a vengeance — a $5 bounty on every nutria tail.

As much as this fifth generation Cajun or umpteenth generation Native American waterman (and the occasional woman) declare that they were taught “never to kill something unless you make something with it,” that’s just what they’re doing.

Tails cut off, fur-covered corpses with big orange teeth and a meat not unlike rodents we eat (rabbit) tossed back into the swamp.

If the carnage of “nutria skinning contests” doesn’t turn you off, the sheer waste just might.

But filmmakers Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer (they did “Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea”) and editor/co-director Quinn Costello turn this documentary about a necessary evil — Louisiana IS washing away, after all, and they’re NOT going after the oil and gas industries, so — into a serio-comic essay on the duality of man — redneck man, anyway.

But as wildlife officials lecture about the utter necessity of scaling back the nutria population (still in the millions), as a state employee who tries to trap nutria out of the canals of New Orleans itself (levees and bridge foundations are being undermined), as hunters efficiently take their .22s to their shoulders and pick off another quarry and old-timers tally their day’s count with the state tail-tally assessor, we sense their grudging admiration for the critters.

You’re not getting anybody in North America to eat the meat (again “rabbit”) without major rebranding (the filmmakers named their production company “Tilapia,” after a re-branded trash fish). But the fur has the “sustainable” cachet.

There’s a Fur Queen Beauty Pagent, the nutria is a newly-hip sports mascot down on the bayou and one hunter’s even taken a nutria as a cuddly “high maintenance” pet.

So whatever outsiders might think of the carnage, or the acceptable hatred of an “invasive species,” the locals seem to have reached their peace with the invader, even if they’re not keeping them as pets or adding them to their gumbo.

MPAA Rating: unrated, animal slaughter, mild profanity

Cast: Briefly narrated by Wendell Pierce.

Credits: Directed by Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer, Quinn Costello. A Tilapia Film?PBS release.

Running time: 1:11

“Crossed the Line” is a soapy, sloppily-plotted thriller that might have played better on the TV network that originally produced it. But thanks to its violence and language, this 2014 Ice-T versus four vengeful sisters tales earns its release on assorted video platforms.

Caryn Ward of TV’s “Grown Folks” and “Fame” is the LA sibling keeping her family and the family business running after their mother’s death.

Mom ran a flower shop, and that’s what Kyra does, with little help from her partying, short-tempered sister Lynn (La’Myia Good).  Kyra’s responsible enough to be legal guardian for pretty tennis player with college dreams Sherrie (Lauren Pennington) and mousy aspiring nurse Denita (Shanell Rene).

That flower shop gives them all a middle class life and the younger sisters the chance to dream bigger. But the shop is on the edge of South Central, and it’s a convenient “respectable” and above-board business, the perfect place for drug drops.’

Which is why Miguel (Ice-T) wants it. And when Kyra won’t sell for the right offer, Miguel’s boys stage a robbery and club Kyra as they do.

Whatever the streetwise Denita gets from this, Sherrie’s too-soft-to-be-a-thug secret beau, Twist (Sam Sarpong) sees enough to know who did it, and plot his revenge on their behalf.

That’s what “Crossed the Line” is about, a little lecture Miguel gives in the opening moments — “Revenge,” he says, “is how the world makes stuff right.”

Twist robs an underage aspiring gang-banger of a bag of drugs, hides them with Sherrie, and soon Miguel’s gang AND the cops are all over the sisters, landing Kyra in jail, with Lynn bellowing “We’ve gotta pack heat ourselves,” and “We want justice? We’re gon’ have to GET it ourselves!”

A cycle of vengeance ensues that swallows everybody we see here, pretty much.

Movies that don’t work share one thing in common, that first moment that takes you out of the story. Here, it’s the police raid on the sisters’ house. It’s a 65 second affair that gets them through the door, finding drugs in Sherrie’s room, Kyra accepting the blame, the cops cuffing her and all but sprinting out.

No search for more drugs. No questioning of the siblings. Nobody by Kyra summarily taken “downtown” and jailed.

Twist’s inept, under-motivated stalk and robbery were weak, but this scene needs a walker or a wheelchair.

Even as Kyra makes a prison buddy, Juicy (Vanessa Williams, top photo) and two sisters’ culpability in all this misery that’s visited on them all becomes clear, the movie’s little grace notes — Juicy’s sassy prison pose, Miguel’s “Thou shalt not steal” lecture to a little kid who needs to learn “revenge,” not petty theft — are overwhelmed by the mendacious mediocrity of the dialogue and plotting.

The cast is game enough, and the simple parable plotting of the story plays. The players deserved sharper characters, a more surprising narrative and better lines.

Because scene by contrived scene, loaded with lapses in logic and freighted with teppid dialogue, “Crossed the Line” stumbles forward towards an all-too-obvious conclusion which cannot get here soon enough.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with gun violence, drugs, profanity

Cast:  Caryn Ward, Shanell Rene, La’Myia Good, Ice-T, Lauren Pennington, Vanessa Williams, Sam Sarpong, Jack Guzman

Credits: Directed by Dennis Conrad, script by Dennis Conrad and Laura Scheiner.  A Gravitas Ventures/BET release.

Running time: 1:32

“Dead Ant” is a real “Give the Devil his due” B-movie.

And by “Devil” I mean that Trump-tanned comic neer-do-well Tom Arnold, who delivers laughs where few exist in this “drive-in” genre riff set where U2 took inspiration for “Joshua Tree.”

Arnold plays Danny, the ’80s relic manager of hair metal band Sonic Wave, formerly Time Warp, whom he wants to take inspiration from the most potent peyote available to “find your moment” and write a song that goes viral and wins the desert campout music fest, “Noachella.”

“I’m not creepy. Even PROVEN it in court,” Danny oozes to a couple of bikini-topped groupies.

Danny’s the guy who, when giant ants start chasing him and his band, bellows, “If this wasn’t so SCARY, it’d be AWESOME.”

It is Danny who, after a band member is devoured by said giant ants, notes “Not the FIRST band member we’ve had to replace…This s— happens every DAY in rock’n roll!”

This “Coachella/Them” inspired horror spoof by Ron Carlson is a sort of instant cult-film, or aspires to be.

A has-been band with one hit “power ballad” behind them — led by guitarist Pager (Rhys Coiro), featuring shrieking singer Merrick (Jake Busey), shag-topped drummer Stevie (Leisha Hailey) and bassist Art (Sean Astin, in wig, shades and “Sucks to Suck” hat) heads to the desert, pre-festival, for “inspiration.”

A medicine man named Bigfoot (Michael Horse, funny) and his diminutive sidekick Firecracker (Danny Woodburn of “Seinfeld” fame) warn and warn all who buy their “Blue Moon” or “Sunshine” peyote of “grave consequences if they don’t respect it and the “sacred site” where they’re to injest it at sundown.

They do disrepect it.

And Merrick has barely noted his irritation at the post-Cobain/Kanye changes in “rock” with “I MISS the makeup, man!” When they’re running for their lives.

Carlson finds scattered laughs in the cheesy effects — ant traps, towering blood geysers, a Hobbit mauled by fire ants — and the ironic zingers blurted out by the stoners seen here.

“There’s like 22000 species of ants, right?” doltish Merrick offers. “But none on Ant-
ARCTICA!”

The opening scene, a hippe chick who is the first to ignore the peyote warnings, has the full allotment of B-movie nudity (she disrobes as she’s chased).

And the picture never abandons its B-movie pretentions, kind of noble, generally a plus in movies like this.

It isn’t much, amusing junk at best. But “Dead Ant” lets Busey be a stoner-philosopher, Hailey be a rock-chick heroine (’80s style) and Coiro (“Entourage”) demonstrate the power of a “power chord” in a “power ballad,” especially where there are murderous insects concerned.

See it not-entirely-sober with a friend. And give the Devil his laughs. Arnold, this time out, earns them.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody (comic) violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Tom Arnold, Leisha Hailey, Jake Busey, Michael Horse, Cameron Richardson, Sean Astin, Rhys Coiro, Danny Woodburn

Credits: Written and directed by Ron Carlson. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:27