Movie Nation

Dylan Sprouse? He’s so sweet, “The Suite Life” blond and tanned and beautiful and all.

How could he be the Evil Student, psychotically-intense, given “bullying” his teacher to get better grades in “Dismissed?”

As Lucas Ward, he kid’s on the money, I have to say, creepy, coiled-too-tight, utterly amoral, the sort who’d write a paper defending the “perfection” of “The Final Solution” and believe it, who considers the treacherous Iago the “hero” of Shakespeare’s “Othello.”

Something’s a little off from the start, showing up mid-term, doing ALL the class assignments he’d missed at his previous school, flattering Mr. Butler, his teacher (Kent Osborne), strolling in and dominating the chess club at “small-minded” Morristown High.

Lucas is the sort of smart-kid/smooth talker who’d be any teacher’s dream, especially one whose students seem bored with his lectures on “Crime and Punishment.

Lucas speaks up in class, sharing brilliant insights like an automaton who memorized the forward to this book or that one. The sports jackets he wears to class, the precise way he uses language. He doesn’t write papers, he prepares dissertations.

But Lucas doesn’t react to class disruptions well, even from a jock twice his size. Something about the way he suggests he’ll “jab a pen in your windpipe” convinces the offender to shut up.

He doesn’t handle being “second seed” of the chess team well, and being second to the fellow who happens to be his lab partner in Chemistry class is just a little too convenient. Accidents happen, after all.

“You know, Beethoven composed some of his best work after he went deaf.”

And he isn’t keen on a B+ on his “Othello” paper.

“Iago is the most honest character in the entire play!”

As charming as he’s been, when the newly-enthused-to-be-teaching-thanks-to-this engaged kid Mr. Butler crosses him, the knives come out — just figuratively at first.

“Mr. Butler, where did you get your degree?”

“Dismissed” doesn’t play up the cat-and-mouse game of Lucas’s tactics against his offending teacher, to its detriment. We don’t wonder what Lucas is capable of. It’s as plain as the Hitlerian flop to his forelock.

Brian McCauley’s script shows this nightmare from the victim’s point of view, Mr. Butler’s application to work at a local college sabotaged, we see his growing irritation and then fear at what Lucas will pull next.

The screenplay shortchanges the characters outside the central conflict, narrowing the focus and turning in on itself with a laughably melodramatic third act.

What, tying the teacher’s wife to the railroad tracks never occurred to these guys?

And Osborne, a writer/producer and voice actor on cartoons like “Adventure Time” and “Phineas and Herb,” is more adequate as the baffled, over-matched foil, than compelling.

But Sprouse? He shows us something, here. It’s not a flawless performance, but it is creepily believable. Has Blumhouse called him in? Because they should.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast:Dylan Sprouse, Rae Gray, Kent Osborne, Mitchell Edwards, Chris Bauer, Randall Park, Alycia Delmore

Credits:Directed by Benjamin Arfmann, script by Brian McCauley. A Making Horror release.

Running time: 1:27

The Angelina Jolie not-quite-Oscar-contender was not the “end” of the “Unbroken” POW story.

Sure, it’s been recast, new director, lower budget and narrower focus, but “Path to Redemption” follows Olympian Louis Zamperini (Samuel Hunt of “Chicago P.D.”) upon his return home, learning to forgive the barbaric Japanese soldiers who imprisoned and tortured him. It opens Sept. 14. 

Return we now to the world of Bianca del Rio, dispenser of drag queen justice, the “Hurricane Bianca” of Texas fame, out to “out” Mother Russia in “Hurricane Bianca: From Russia with Hate.”

It’s a rude, crude, cameo-happy sequel to “Hurricane Bianca,” with the same crazy eye makeup and the same stars as the first daft dirty dog of a gay rights goof.

Because SOMEbody not-named-Tina-Fey has got to keep Rachel Dratch employed.

The SNL alumna plays the Texas high school principal who tried to oust science teacher Mr. Martinez (Roy Haylock) thanks to his homosexuality and drag alter ego — Bianca del Rio. Hate-mongering Debby Ward did time in jail for her wars against Bianca, and dreamed of nothing but revenge.

Her post-prison plan? Once she’s turned off the prison matron (Wanda Sykes) who wanted to “initiate” her to prison sex? Trap Bianca del Rio some place where gays are imprisoned. Not Saudi Arabia, “where they throw them off the roof,” but Russia, which has its own Minister of Homosexual Propaganda (Dot Marie Jones).

“Russia, where vodka is born and elections are stolen!”

Of course, it’s not about the “plot,” it’s about taking drag comedies places John Waters never dreamed. It’s about “clown makeup” and big wigs and dirty, dirty jokes and one-liners, where “bitch” is used as punctuation, rejoinder and greeting.

“Girl, you KNOW I’ve got your back…cuz nobody wants your front!”

Mr. Martinez/Bianca moved to Texas because “Somebody has to teach these inbred twats that the world is older than…those pants.”

His conscience, Fire Island Stephen (D.J. ‘Shangela’ Pierce) thinks he’s wasting his life and Bianca’s stardom (“Famous, well GAY famous.”) amid the Lone Star Republicans.

“You make money, but you never make enough to leave. That’s called ‘Texas Hold’em.'”

Stephen dumps addicted and addled toy boy Rex (Doug Plaut) on Bianca/Martinez because he’s headed to Long Beach, which is “like Hollywood, but for lesbians and fat people.”

When Mr. Martinez gets a “You’ve won a trip to a Russian Science Fair” letter (from Ex-Principal Ward), Rex comes along for the fun, or whatever you’d call it when you visit a country where your sexuality and flamboyance can get you locked up.

Underground drag clubs, Russian paddy wagons, a drag show in a Russian prison that gives Rex “the ‘Folsom Prison Blues'”– all kind of comic non-starters, save for the odd R-rated zinger.

“Now FOCUS, or I will FIST you like a muppet!

“I did not pray to President Trump every morning to turn this country into a great big transgender toilet!

“I told you you’d be a good Mom, and not just because of your hips!”

“SAVE it, Martin Luther Queen!”

The most cinematic thing about “From Russia” is the YMC-Gay opening credits sequence, the zaniest cameo might be Janeane Garofalo, vamping a mad Russian scientist.

And the best performance? Well, Dratch is a natch when it comes to disguising herself in drag.  But Haylock, wearing Urkel glasses in his science teacher guise and the zaniest eye makeup this side of Bozo as Bianca, is as divine as Divine, a Rupaul for our times and a character deserving of a funnier film than this comedy set in a “Godforsaken country (not really, unless Russia has old Super 8 Motels for locations) that smells like burnt cat!”

“I didn’t know it’d be like this.”

“You’re from Texas. There’s a LOT you don’t know. ”

MPAA Rating: Unrated, drug humor, sexuality, crude sexual homor

Cast:Roy Haylock, Alyssa Edwards, Rachel Dratch, Molly Ryman, D.J. ‘Shangela’ Pierce, Katya Zamolodchikova (Brian McCook), Michael Musto, Sally Jessie Raphael

Credits:Directed by Matt Kugelman, script by Derek Hartley and Matt Kugelman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25,

Girl meets boy, boy meets girl.

I mean, sure, they’re strangers connected, arbitrarily, by a caper. They don’t know the nature of it, don’t know each other’s real names.

There’s just this briefcase. They pick it up, she drops him off, he passes the unknown package on to somebody else.

She’s a turnstile jumper who never pays to travel. He cooks for his Polish mother’s off-the-books, computer streaming in her apartment harness racing “club.”

How can young love between these two “Tramps” flower with so little to go on?

Writer/director Adam Leon has created a lightweight romantic comedy with a pall hanging over it. There are other forces involved, the threat of legal complications or violence and betrayal is in the air.

Because the path to a one-day love affair was never smooth, especially in the movies.

Callum Turner of “Assassin’s Creed” and “Green Room” is Danny, the devoted son who does what his Mama (Mariola Mlekicki) tells him. And one day, when his brother Darren (Michal Vondel) calls from jail, locked up just long enough to keep him from taking care of this deal he’s set up, Mama is the one who insists Danny cover for him.

Danny’s young, lovelorn, and a would-be cook. What does he know from “making a drop?”

You go this place, meet a guy with a car.

“Are you the guy?”

“Yeah. Are you the guy?”

“I’m the girl.”

She drives the car, he rides along. They make a stop. Alarms go off, and a briefcase is dropped in the back seat. Danny’s supposed to leave it with a woman with a green bag at a commuter train stop. Which woman? Which green bag?

He makes a mistake, and the movie is about these two — Grace Van Patten of “The Meyerowitz Stories” plays Ellie the driver — thrown together, trying to track down this lost briefcase for these guys who never come right out and make threats, but who you can just tell mean business.

Danny asks a lot of questions. Ellie doesn’t feel like answering them…at first. But the way she ditches a car and her phone’s sim card lets us know she’s done this kind of thing before.

She takes charge. Her job now includes baby-sitting this amateur. “It’s gonna COST you,” she yells into the phone. Danny? He’s smitten and curious.

“Where you from?”

“Pittsburgh.”

“So, you live with anyone in Pittsburgh?”

“I live with a Ricky.”

“What’s a Ricky? I had a lizard named Ricky.”

“Sounds about right.”

As she figures out where the package has gone, he tags along in her sleuthing, stumbling into suburbia, confronted by irate rich folk who can see they don’t belong here, hiding over overnight in a boathouse, where “cuddling for weather purposes” makes for strange bedfellows.

Leon gives Van Patten and Turner fun banter to play and amusingly mismatched characters to tackle.

He’s all attempted mustache and “I’m not even supposed to BE  here,” and all disheveled, scheming and pissed off — all business.

But in the movies, guileless wins over guile every damned time.

“Tramps” tends towards cutesy, with its “Bonnie & Clyde” bluegrass banjo chase music and Ellie’s biting “Who’re you to judge ME?” baiting, every time moon-eyed Danny steps into it, over-sharing sexual experiences, implying she has a lot more.

It’s a short but not necessarily brisk movie, and it’d be a shorter one if either one of them had a smart phone with Google Maps on it (a lot of schlepping around, lost).

But these “Tramps” invite us to tag along on their two day misadventure, and you can’t help but be glad you did.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Callum Turner, Grace Van Patten, Michal Vondel

Credits:Written and directed by Adam Leon. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22

Pretty damned ambitious the streaming network Netflix to take on a period piece with a Big Name Star, an acclaimed director and a Scottish icon as its subject.

Chris Pine, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Stephen Dillane and Florence Pugh star in David Mackenzie’s “Outlaw King, coming in November to Netflix.

Coming of age tales are such a summer thing. Why’s Freestyle releasing this one AFTER summer? Beats me.

More 1980s nostalgia, the big “name” in this is the “legend” of the beach, played by the great character comic Peter Stormare.

Percy Hynes White is “Minnesota” in “Age of Summer,” which also features Jake Ryan and opens Sept. 7.

Stu Sanders Wade Barrett is a British wrestler and bare-knuckle boxer turned big screen action hero, where he goes by the name “Stu Bennett.” 

He’s of that Schwarzenegger/Dave Bautista/John Cena class of Action Jacksons, a man mountain any lesser mortal would be a fool to tangle with. Six foot five, 17.5 stone (246 pounds), he doesn’t need a gun.

Which is why he has so many in “I Am Vengeance,” a British B-movie about another “ex-Special Forces” commando out to avenge himself on the blokes what murdered ‘is mate.

I don’t know how many times I have to reiterate this point, but once you’ve established the “special skills” an “extraordinary specimen” has, there’s nothing remotely interesting about watching them pummel and puncture legions of villains in their quest to whatever inane goal the script has set up for them. Piling pistols on top of that is just lazy.

“Ordinary woman” or “man on the street” fending off killers is worth a movie. Man Mountain trained to snap necks? Meh.

Bennett is a Mark Strong without the acting chops, baritone, scowling. He’s Dave Bautista or Cena without the light touch. The odd double-take lands. Two bad guys figuring they’ll have his measure and hit the pub?

“First round’s on me, lads,” is almost funny coming out of that lantern jaw.

“Vengeance” is about “a rogue Special Forces” team that has taken over the remote (Hah!) British village of Devotion. We’ve seen them torture this fellow Mason in the opening scene, watched Mason’s reaction to the news that they’ve already murdered his father and mother.

It was Dad’s call, interrupted by gunfire, that John Gold (Bennett) heard on his answering machine. He shows up in Devotion ready to go “all Charles Bronson” on the locals until he’s found the killers.

He shows up in The Old Fox pub, where, like any Old West saloon, “We don’t want no trouble, Mister.” And he announces himself.

“I’m here to find whoever murdered Sgt. Daniel Mason!”

There’s going to be a fight! Or, not yet. Not for the first 40 minutes of this slow-starting, stumbling B-movie.

A cute, flirtatious junkie (Ann Shaffer) might be of some help. Or the local cafe owner Rose (Saffire Elia). Otherwise, Gold is on his on and on the case, storming into drug labs, bowling over “rogue” soldiers who run it, profit from it and defend it — to the death.

Not necessarily by choice.

Gold sets traps for his foes, after fondling his collection of firearms, crossbow and ax in his chosen lair. He lives up to his “one man war machine” rep, even as the hapless Hatcher (Gary Daniels) and all manner of tough guys and just-as-tough (not really) women in league with him are hurled at Gold and bite the dust.

Writer-director Ross Boyask’s idea of dialogue is a lot of “Look at me,” “Let’s dance!” and “I’m gonna decorate this place in a delicate shade of your skull and brains!”

Guys pause to take off their flak jackets before brawling. In one memorable fight, Gold is pinned between two steroidal stumps and all three stop to watch the junkie freak out on another villain, who doesn’t know what hit him.

Funny.

Sebastian Knapp, who played St. John in “Son of God” a few years ago, stands out in the cast, a sweaty, bug-eyed turn as junkie/dealer Keith, one of the keys to the puzzle.

The mysterious Frost (Mark Griffin) watches all this go down, and has seen the future in an early scene. “Your orders, sir?”

“Orders? Body bags. Lots of them!”

Boyask does manage to stage and shoot some seriously bloody brawls, even if he insists that bad guys point guns at the “one man war machine” and yell “Stay where you are!” Might as well shout “TIME OUT” in the middle of a shoot-out. Silly.

A lifetime of watching this genre has given me an appreciation for the rare films that work and a patience for even the crappy ones, like “I Am Vengeance.” But as much as I love me some fisticuffs and Limey trash talk — “Where do you and the other traitorous wankers hang out?” — there’s just nothing to this one.

Maybe the Hollywood B-action touch could make a star out of Bennett, but if you take away the quasi-Cockney — “Get you fitted for a coffin,” “‘Ave you got a DEAF wish or sumfin?” — and this wouldn’t have merited a drive-in movie booking, back when there were drive-ins.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Stu Bennett, Anna Shaffer, Gary Daniels, Sapphire Elia, Keith Allen

Credits: Written and directed by Ross Boyask . A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:33

Screen comedy has given us a few seriously, unintentionally inappropriate parent/child relationships, mostly in the films of Cameron Crowe — Mother/Son in “Almost Famous,” Father/Daughter in “Say Anything.”

But those have nothing on the sometimes amusing, always creepy Mother-Son weirdness of “Adventures in Public School,” which pairs up Judy Greer with Netflix’s go-to-“teen”-boy, Daniel Doheny in a tale that goes “Ewwwww” for laughs.

Claire has home-schooled Liam, prepping him for physics at Cambridge, “where I can study under Stephen Hawking and become the second-most-famous physicist in the world.”

OK, maybe not.

Claire isn’t a religious fanatic. She had dreams, went to the local high school, got pregnant on a field trip and has no intention of letting her “special” brilliant kid get derailed by “a school for stupid people.”

She’s tried to give him everything he would have gotten out of public school, intense study, even a “prom” where only his grandmother and uncle show up — with “I’d like to cut in” mom. She’s drilled Liam in every subject but socializing. He has no friends.

And on the day of the test, this smart kid figures out, with a glance, exactly what he’s missed. He spies the mysterious and beautiful one-legged blonde, Anastasia (Siobhan Williams). There’s nothing for it but to blow the test, insist he attend high school (taking the place of a girl who “got sick,” taking her classes — modern dance, etc.) and give Mom her first-ever dose of Liam rebellion.

Being the ultimate helicopter mom, she hurls herself further into his business — teaching him about condoms. “Trojans, Troy, Sodom” where sodomy was invented — marijuana, “hot boxing” in her late model LTD (with Granny) — tub-side lectures on female anatomy, a sampler night of what underage boys should drink (“wimpy” beers vs. manly ones).

Inappropriate Mom picking Liam up from school is the worst. “Hey kid want some candy! What are you, a pussy?”

A funny moment, setting up the home school classroom (the garage) so she can teach him the teen rebellion mainstay, swearing — Mom egging Liam into dropping the f-bomb.

Netflix teen comedies lean into sexuality, substance abuse and profanity, and “Adventures in Public School” leans hard. Rarely has a teen comedy put so much effort into checking off minor tests of the motion picture ratings board. They’re shooting for “dirtiest teen comedy on Netflix,” as if that’s a goal worth pursuing.

Still, Judy Greer is just the sort of movie mom who could introduce herself with “I’m freezing my tits off out here.”

The whole Pursuit of Anastasia thing is generic and a non-starter. A boy’s first girlfriend is his mother is the heart of this, and your reaction to that determines how you’ll respond to this comedy. Yeah, the other kids can vouch for her “MILF” status. One can only hope if he gets that notion, it’s with another home schooling mom.

Get past the “Ick” stuff, the fears of “How much further are they going to take this?” and “Adventures in Public School” hits the occasional sweet spot. Liam pretending to be “Maria Sanchez” for the school year is one of them.

Russell Peters is the clueless guidance counselor who directs every kid, even Liam who is into astronomy –counselor cannot even SPELL it — into “massage therapy.”

Andrew McNee is the ditzy principal who lusts after Claire, even as he insults home schooling as “sitting around the house, making up pirate stories.”

Doheny (“The Package”) is a charmingly hapless leading man, and Greer is a comic force of nature. When she and another home-schooling mom (Grace Park) bond over their contempt for public schools and protecting their kids all the way into adulthood — “Nobody’s having sex with them but us…with us…with us AROUND” — you realize nobody else could have pulled off this vulgarian as sweetly.

The teacher who responds to a homophobic slur with annoyance, then an admission that yes, there’s another teacher of the same sex that he’s been with, but “just that one,” the teen sexting, the condom-installation-stopwatch test, labels this “teen” film something else.

Is “Adventures in Public School” appropriate for young kids, the 14-and-unders with Netflix as their baby sitter? Certainly not. This is some seriously adult, flirt-with-pervy “TV-14” doesn’t really cover it stuff.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast:  Daniel Doheny, Judy Greer, Siobhan Williams, Alex Barima, Russell Peters

Credits:Directed by Kyle Rideout, script by Josh Epstein, Kyle Rideout. A Gravitas/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” the poet said. People don’t like change, we understand it to mean.

If only Florence Green knew the poets as well as she loved novelists, she could have avoided a world of trouble, setting up a bookshop in her sleepy English coastal village in the late 1950s.

Who would have thought “The Bookshop” would stir so much enmity among the conservatives and those under their thumbs in tiny Hardborough?

Penelope Fitzgerald’s parable about politics and power applied in the most close-minded ways comes to the screen in a lovely, stately and painfully slow film by the director of “Learning to Drive” and “Elegy.” Whatever life Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson try to breathe into it adapter/director Isabel Coixet sucks right out.

Mortimer is Mrs. Green, a widowed book-lover who decides the long empty “Old House” at the end of Hardborough’s main street would be a good location for a bookshop. She could live upstairs and run the shop below, and even the patronizing banker (Hunter Tremayne in a huff) has to admit she’s done her homework.

But the moment she starts to move in the trouble begins. A retiring fish monger suggests his shop would be a better location. Her solicitor (Jorge Suquet) mentions “There are many other properties” she could take on. A rake from the BBC (James Lance) who lives there wonders if she’s thought of “moving out?”

All because the town’s wealthy snob, self-appointed patroness and “nothing gets done here without my approval” empress (Clarkson) has her own ideas for The Old House.

“We’ve all been praying for a good bookshop in our town,” she purrs, even as she’s suggesting Mrs. Green would be the perfect “manager” for her own plans for The Old House — an arts center.

It’s just that Mrs. Green won’t be put off. “She had a great heart and enormous patience” our narrator (Julie Christie) tells us. She’ll need them.

The story is spun through with promising threads. The biggest reader in town, everyone knows, is the reclusive Mr. Brundish, given his usual dapper turn by Bill Nighy. He informs — by letter — Mrs. Green, that he hails the arrival of The Old House Bookshop “in this forsaken corner of the world,” and promises his support. Sort of. Any time she finds a new work “of literary merit” she can send it to him by messenger, with a note about it and its price, and he’ll buy it.

She sends him Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and rocks his world.

There are no secrets in a small town, and the only other truly helpful fellow, a fisherman/ferryman, Mr Raven (Michael Fitzgerald) sends his group of young Sea Scouts to help set up shop. Others assure Florence she’ll need an assistant, and run through the sisters in a populous, needy family until the curly, outspoken tween Christine (plucky Honor Kneafsey) is sent to fill a job Mrs. Green didn’t think she needed.

The era in publishing seems sure to gin up controversy, with Bradbury, Nabokov (“Lolita”) and others stirring up the world with their words.

But the viper in velvet gloves Violet (Clarkson) is marshaling her forces and hellbent on getting her way, so Florence will need all the help — and sales — she can get.

There are potent metaphors about provincialism, the inbred intransigence of the ruling class, the temerity of their “inferiors,” English xenophobia and the like, timely in the Brexit age and the hand-wringing that’s accompanied it.

That and the characters are all Coixet focuses on, rarely letting “charming” or amusing seep into this town where the powers that be have decreed time must stand still until they say otherwise.

Clarkson’s passive-aggressive villainy lets us understand the general malaise, bordering on malevolence,  which the locals have absorbed. This outsider is just stirring things up. Mortimer beautifully embodies a “Keep Calm and Ignore the Harpy” stoicism and Nighy, playing the latest in a long line of kind, remote, thoughtful and dapper eccentrics, adds a warmth the film sorely needs.

Whatever the ethos of the novel, the filmgoer wants to see the light — the hope that the recluse and the shop owner will bond over books, the children’s eyes opened to the wider world, a funny battle of wits and wills over The Old House, a nice comic uproar over Green’s selling copy after copy of the scandalous “Lolita.”

All hinted at, teased and ignited, only to be snuffed out in Coixet’s still-life direction. Message and metaphor are all and “The Bookshop,” with its terrific cast and lovely setting, barely overcomes that burden.

MPAA Rating:PG for some thematic elements, language, and brief smoking |

Cast: Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson, James Lance, Honor Kneafsey

Credits:Directed by Isabel Coixet, script by based on the Penelope Fitzgerald novel. A Greenwich release.

Running time: 1:58

“Dead Envy” is a micro-budget indie thriller that doesn’t give away its credit-card financing.

Slick, musical and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, Harley Di Nardo’s “make work for myself” project limits its settings, situations and run time to pull off a minor miracle of a movie — a Venice, California project at Venice, Florida prices.

When your sets are a couple of “movie” bars (fake), a hair salon, a couple of street scenes to establish location and a house, you too can make a movie on the cheap that doesn’t look cut-rate.

Di Nardo, who directed, stars in and co-wrote “Envy,” is David Tangiers, a too-old-to-rock-n-roll band leader whose latest (The Dead Rebels) are a ’50s throwback. Before that, it was Tatonic Spin, and so on.

“How old ARE you?” his manager (Joey Medina) wants to know.

“Thirty…eight!”

We meet David as he’s losing yet another Battle of the Bands contest in a Venice bar. His ’50s-style greaser ballad gets him heckled, though not by his wife Cecily (Samantha Smart) or this one creeper of a fan.

Javy, played by veteran character actor Adam Reeser (“San Andreas,” “Steve Jobs”), is like a big fan. A very big fan. The fact that he wears a Hitler haircut and keeps his shirts and Army jacket buttoned to the very top, like some Master Race Adam Scott? David doesn’t let that scare him.

David invites Javy to his Art Rock hair salon and pretty much into his life, creeping out the staff, the other customers (Carla Wynn plays an amusing not-so-silent investor). Javy, it turns out, has a secret — he rocks out, too, writes songs. Javy has other secrets which the movie gets around to — eventually.

“Dead Envy” teases us along through David’s frustrating life, not-making-ends-meet while taking “one last shot” at his dream of music fame. Javy could be his secret weapon, or his downfall.

The acting is, as you might expect from even the cheapest picture shot in film acting’s Mecca, pretty good across the board, with Smart standing out, Reeser managing the odd skin-crawling moment and Di Nardo milking his Mark Ruffalo who can Sing vibe. Not bad for a guy who is an actual hair-dresser with rock star (And movie star?) dreams.

Di Nardo knows how to shoot bands and live music on the cheap, and the script (co-written with Stacey Hullah) has a flippant wit that gets it through the early acts.

But their payoff, the “thrills” in the “thriller,” is nothing. Whatever dread we feared leading up to it, the climax deflates in a heartbeat despite Reeser’s bust-a-bottle-over-my-head efforts.

Workshop this script and maybe you figure out you’ve got a dark comedy on your hands, and joke up the third act accordingly. As it is, “Dead Envy” won’t make anybody else trying to film a thriller in Venice Beach for $50,000 jealous — much.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, alcohol, drugs

Cast:Harley DiNardo, Samatha Smart, Adam Reeser, Carla Wynn

Credits:Directed by Harley Di Nardo, script by Harley Di Nardo, Stacy Hullah. A Random Media release.

Running time: 1:12