Movie Nation

Long before a Palestinian activist/agitator has confronted a busload of tourists to an Israeli “Plant a Tree in Israel” forest with “Just think of the refugees they keep out of your news,” viewers of the new film “Alam” have figured that out.

If nothing else, Palestinian filmmaker Firas Khoury’s dramedy about coming of age Palestinian under the Israeli “Alam” (flag) underscores the vast disparity in whose story gets told and whose point of view is almost invisible there, in that fractious sliver of land on the Eastern Mediterranean.

Whatever efforts to balance coverage and explain the endless conflict within Israel and the Occupied Territories by journalists, virtually the only movies anybody sees or has ever seen about that corner of the world and about Israeli history are celebrations of its founding, from “Exodus” and “The Juggler” through “Cast a Giant Shadow” and the recent “Golda.”

That’s even the history that teenaged Tamer (Mahmood Bakri) and his mates are taught in high school in their corner of Israel, named Al Safa here, after a “depopulated” village erased from history. With Israeli Independence Day coming up, their history teacher is taking a deep dive into the specific events that led up to what Palestinians mark as Nakba, a day of mourning recalling a “catastrophe.”

But it is a history written or at least approved by the winners. A tattered Israeli flag flies over the Palestinian school. The students are labeled “Arab Israelis,” not Palestinians. Israeli soldiers occasionally drop by. And the kids have heard from their parents and grandparents of the land they lost, the villages “erased” via “ethnic cleansing,” and the sugar-coated version of all that served up to the world, always wrapped in Israeli spin, often tagged with “Plant a Tree in Israel” funding or foreign aid appeals.

“Alam,” set in an a Palestinian town within the boundaries of Israel proper, had to be filmed in Tunisia.

Khoury — “Maradona’s Legs” was his best known film — packages this condmened-by-history drama in a coming-of-age dramedy about being smitten by an activist girl, and a comically hapless group of argumentative friends getting caught up in a symbolic attempt to do something about which “Alam” is flying over their school.

Tamer and his buddies Rida (Ahmad Zaghmouri) and the hustler-goof nicknamed Shekel (Mohammad Karaki) debate who if off-limits to date and which relatives must be consulted before dating on their surreptitious smoke breaks between classes, which get them into trouble.

Tamer, trying to ensure his parents allow him to continue to live by himself in his late grandfather’s empty but un-air-conditioned house, is already on thin ice.

And then he spies a new beauty in their midst, a girl “kicked out” of her last school. Maysaá (Shereen Khass) is a mystery to them, but the argumentative Safwat (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) seems to know her. Tamer pumps him for information as they sit outside the principal’s office, each getting another demerit of warning for some bit of malfeasance.

Safwat is always tardy and always determined to debate the teacher who won’t let him join class already in progress.

“The bus is late,” he protests (the film is in Arabic and Hebrew). “It’s an ARAB bus, not a German one!”

That little crack about Palestinian People’s Time gets a laugh in class, and earns another trip to the principal’s office. Safwat is always arguing, often worked-up about something. But Tamer has to befriend Safwat to learn more about about the mysterious Maysaa’.

That’s how he gets caught up in Safwat’s plot to secretly replace the Israeli flag with the Palestinian one flying over their school. Because confident, mature and radicalized Maysaá is already on board.

This May 24 “event” on Disney+ looks to hit a lot of the right notes.

Lots of authorities from music, peers, session musicians, etc., singing their praises and pointing out what made “The Beach Boys” special.

It might be too “official” to have much edge to it, but we’ll hear what a jerk the Wilson brothers’ dad was again, if nothing else.

“Candy” was notorious on its release, and widely acknowledged by everyone who was in it, and the various actors’ biographers as well as generations of film scholars, as “the worst film” virtually anyone involved ever made.

The acting ranges from players who “get it” and pitch their performances to be at least lightly amusing  — despite the comedically incompetent director’s worst efforts — to “clueless.” The writing, done on the fly, is a red mark on the career of screenwriter and sometime actor Buck Henry (“Heaven Can Wait”). The sexuality in it is painfully dated and, well, rapey.

But context matters in pseudo-psychedelic satires like this. And it wasn’t just fear of being perceived as unhip or “square” that had critics like Roger Ebert embrace it on its release. Well it was mostly that, one suspects, but moving on.

Based on an infamously-bawdy 1959 best seller by Terry Southern that American schoolboys shared, hand to hand, well into the ’70s, it was a coming-of-age odyssey that sent-up American mores, sexual hangups and increasingly sexualized “girls” in a world of supposedly uptight but actually lecherous and predatory men.

Whoever thought of casting a Swede in the title role and shooting it in Italy with a not-really-proven French actor-turned-director probably ending up drinking himself to death. Because the movie doesn’t play. At all.

There is pre-digital camera trickery aplenty on display, from filming a sexual come-on (assault) below the glass floor of a Mercedes limo to a surgeon’s gloves being slipped on too gracefully for reality (they were filmed being taken off, and the footage reversed).

The players who knew comedy well enough to atone for director Christian Marquand’s clumsiness in the genre don’t embarass themselves. Leering loon John Astin of TV’s “Adams Family,” playing Candy’s school teacher father, who wants to protect his “naive” child from premarital sex, and also playing her father’s randy “with-it” New York uncle, is almost funny. Walter Matthau vamps up his always-on-duty Brig. Gen. Smight and James Coburn keeps his cool as a surgeon who might save Candy’s injured father if a little sexual quid pro quo can be arranged.

 “You’re trying to out-diagnose a world renowned surgeon who has attended eight institutions of higher education and who has more degrees than a thermometer!”

Whatever is in the novel (I’m a long way from my Southern-reading teens), that “”do this for me” and I’ll do THAT to you “transaction” is a bit of plot gimmickry that’s beaten to death here.

Anita Pallenberg was, model Kate Moss declares, “The original Bohemian rock chick.” And Kate, who dated and married rockers and wannabe-rockers like Johnny Depp, should know.

She was the great rock muse of the ’60s, ex-husband Keith Richards says of the German-Italian Pallenberg. She dated three members of The Rolling Stones, with guitarist-songwriter Keith admitting that their role was chiefly “keeping up with her” as she generated friction and inspired “Gimme Shelter” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” among other songs.

Aptly enough, she even sang backup on “Sympathy for the Devil,” when she wasn’t “making the scene,” popping up in quasi-underground indie films, and co-starring in two of the iconic movies of the era — “Barbarella” and “Performance.”

Filmmakers Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill take a shot at capturing the essence of Pallenberg and why she matters in “Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg.” They profile a great beauty of her sexist, limited-horizons-for-women era and that first model to take up with famous rockers, immerse herself in their world and become an essential part of it.

If we remember her, it is because of her connection to The Rolling Stones during their most tempestuous, creative and drug-soaked era. But she was more than just a “rock chick,” a striver who used her connection to famous people to become famous herself. Or maybe she wasn’t and she was just kidding herself, despite her 40 or so film credits and the self-consciously poetic turns of phrase in her unpubished memoir, “Black Magic,” generously sampled in “Catching Fire.”

It was to be “a traveler’s tale through a landscape of dreams and shadows,” she wrote.

“My motto was forward, forward forward, never look back” Pallenberg says, her words read and performed in the film by Scarlett Johannson. That line captures the life force and “sparkle” of this singular figure of that storied time. But it also hints at the self-absorption that fed her addictive personality, a life lived without repetenence but also without much in the way of self-reflection.

“Many people confuse me with the roles I played in films,” she disengenously wrote in “Black Magic.” Or not, seeing as how few people saw “Performance” and nobody would mistake her broad, theatrical turn as a “Tyrant” in “Barbarella” for a real woman.

You can look at the young actors playing four redneck teens accused of throwing rocks at an Amish buggy and killing a baby and tell which one of them might have become a star in “A Stoning in Fulham County.” And not just because Brad Pitt’s the most classically handsome of the lot.

Pitt brings a lovely sensitivity to his few scenes in this 1988 TV movie, first aired on NBC. He generates pity, which considering how loathsome what he and his pals did, is saying something. “Stoning” was his first credited role on screen.

The term “TV movie” was, for much of its history, a pejorative label in Hollywood. Shot speedily and on the cheap, usually in between broadcast seasons of network programs and often featuring network series stars or supporting cast members, they generally feature perfunctory direction, adequate acting and just a little more polish than your average indie film.

I used to cover them in the same part of the country that “Fulham County” is set in — central North Carolina — and saw actors like M. Emmet Walsh, William Daniels, David Ogden Steirs, a very young Keri Russell, Jesse Borrego and others bring a little flash and a lot of professionalism to these two-takes-and-done projects.

These days, not many are produced as TV has migrated to the streaming series model, although you can find lots of them on The Hallmark Channel, especially around the holidays, and on Netflix, which has offered players like Lindsay Lohan a new lease on life in these B-movies for the boob tube.

But Steven Spielberg launched his career with “Duel,” Elizabeth Montgomery discovered life after “Bewitched” with her fierce turn in “The Legend of Lizzie Borden,” Cicely Tyson immortalized herself in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and Andy Griffith left his “Aw, shucks” sheriff behind with TV films like “Savages” and “Murder in Coweta County.”

“Fulham County” is better than your average TV movie, if not one of the exemplars of the genre. It was scripted by writers with “Quincy, M.E.,””Murder She Wrote” and “Columbo” credits and directed by a make-your-“day” and make-the-trains-run-on time filmmaker who worked on “Remington Steele,” and did “Mendez: A Killing in Beverly Hills” and the excellent  “Tecumseh: The Last Warrior,” which I watched him film near Winston Salem.

It’s a courtroom drama based on a real case of local harassment of the Amish that led to a death in 1979 Indiana. The film came out three years after the classic murderers-among-the-Amish romantic thriller “Witness,” and squares off “thirtysomething” star Ken Olin against “Beauty and the Beast” (the series) star Ron Perlman, and features Jill Eichenberry (“L.A. Law”) as prosecutor Olin’s wife, big city folk who have moved to rural N.C. (Statesville was the primary filming location).

Well-known character players Peter Michael Goetz, Nicholas Pryor and Noble Willingham (as the judge) flesh out the cast. And one of the greatest character actors of his era, Theodore Bikel, is cast as the Amish elder Abe, classing-up the entire enterprise with his fluid mastery of German (he was a villain in “The African Queen”), his soulful singing (he was a folk music star) and gravitas, joining Perlman’s grieving father Jacob in explaining “our ways” to the city slicker, and to the TV viewing audience.

When the punks harass and hurl rocks in their “claping” prank on Jacob and his family (Maureen Mueller plays his with Sarah), they’re engaging in a local rite of passage, to scare and even injure the folks who are “different” from them, whose values and traditions that eschew many of the conveniences and temptations of modern life.

The new “finishing out the year” prosecutor has hopes of just doing his time and opening his private practice there until this horrific injustice lands in his lap.

As the locals start with “They’re just boys” and move into full-on harassment of the prosecutor, as Jacob declines to testify or allow any of his family to because “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” prosecutor Jim has to ask, “What the hell have we gotten into?”

The film resembles many a “Matlock” episode (my elderly mother was an addict, before moving on to the hard stuff — “Blue Bloods”), and has barely a whiff of “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Inherit the Wind” in it, despite the drawls, the desperate appeal for witnesses, a biased local judge and the organized, ingrained ignorance they’re fighting against.

“Turn the other cheek,” the go-along-to-get-along Sheriff (Greg Henry) says of The Amish Way. “Not a bad way to live.”

“Unless you’re the only ones who do,” Jim snarls back.

Olin was an early adapter of the empathetic vocal fry school of near-whispered TV acting of the era, and is less convincing in the fiery appeals for justice that are necessary for this button-pushing melodrama to close the deal.

Mueller doesn’t give us much, as a mother struggling with grief and to not lose her faith at this severest test.

But Perlman and Bikel are outstanding, and they do things the generic, sappy “TV movie” score and pedestrian shot selection and editing don’t. They make us invest in this story, move us and infuriate us, and in no way prep us for the formula-breaking finale that shows up and almost cheats us of what we’ve always comes to expect out of such courtroom tales.

That’s TV movies for you. Future “superstar in the making” or not, we’ve got 94 minutes to tell a story, with commercial breaks. And by God, that train’s got to arrive and leave on time, no matter what.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Ken Olin, Ron Perlman, Jill Eichenberry, Noble Willingham, Maureen Mueller, Greg Henry, Peter Michael Goetz, Nicholas Pryor, Brad Pitt and Theodore Bikel.

Credits: Directed by Larry Elikann, scripted by Jackson Gillis and Jud Kinberg. A Landsburg Co. production first aired on NBC. Now on Netflix.

Running time:

The Swiss drama “A Forgotten Man” is an intriguing if not wholly satisfying dip into a piece of little debated history, Switzerland’s dubious “neutrality” during World War II.

Writer-director Laurent Nègre, inspired by a play by Thomas Hürlimann, seeks to address Swiss “good for business” complicity and collusion with Nazi Germany. We engage in that debate through the story of two “forgotten” (especially outside of Switzerland) men whose fates were intertwined thanks to the opportunistic bankers and industrialists that “run” the country, and either turned a blind eye to crimes against humanity, or secretly goose-stepped along with it when the world wasn’t watching.

One man was Hans Frölicher, the Swiss ambassador to Nazi Germany and a figure who had a hand in facilitating Swiss business ties with the Third Reich. His name was changed to Heinrich Zwygart in the play “The Envoy” and for the movie. The other was theology student and would-be Hitler assassin Maurice Bavaud, whom the Swiss state and its German ambassador declined to help when he was arrested for not-quite-going-through-with-his-attempt to kill Adolf Hitler in 1938.

Bavaud’s Wikipedia biography details his family’s and later the Swiss government’s attempts to rehabilitate and Swiss-wash a disturbed young man’s dubious, Russian monarchist motives for attempting what he lost the nerve to try.

Zwygart, played with a growing resentment and secret torment by Michael Neuenschwander, is depicted as a man who dashes home from Bavaria — where the German government fled after Hitler’s death — covering his tracks and burning papers, but seemingly confident of his reception back in Geneva.

But in Nègre’s film, Zwygart is tormented by visions of the very young and silent Bavaud (Victor Poltier), the would-be assassin he took no steps to save or have transferred to Swiss custody.

As he renews his connection to family and takes visits from a Hitler-fan publisher (Dominik Gysin) who wants him to write his memoirs, Zwygart quickly picks up on the arms’ length that his own government is keeping between itself and its German ambassador.

A relative who got into business with the Nazis and others may be furious that an “unconditional surrender” will let the Germans off the hook for all they owe the Swiss, for raw materials, machine parts and the like.

“But you guaranteed Goering’s trustworthiness (in German with English subtitles)!”

But Zwygart starts to wonder if his own state is setting him up as the “fall guy” for Swiss sins ranging from supplying and feeding Germany to laundering German-looted cash and Jewish assets via their banking system, which isn’t touched on here.

Nègre’s script ably recreates the tightrope the Swiss walked to stay fat, rich and independent after Germany conquered most of the rest of Europe. In the Zwygart house, Heinrich and his aged military father (Peter Wyssbrod) converse in German, where the son rolls his eyes at the old man’s assertion that “Our army kept us free!” One and all treat that as a “myth” the Swiss told still tell themselves.

But Heinrich’s wife (Manuela Biedermann) and college-age daughter (Cléa Eden) speak French, as wife Clara wonders how “Berlin changed you” and aspiring London chiropractor Helene introduces a French-speaking boyfriend (Yann Philipona) who wants to “interview” Ambassador Zwygart, and perhaps even confront him.

Nègre — “Confusion” and “Operation Casablanca” were his — walks his own tightrope, angling towards a Swiss reckoning over its national guilt, but pulling his punches as often as not. He leans just hard enough on the whole Bavaud plotline to play the “But look, one of our guys tried to SHOOT Hitler” card. And he’s more than willing to have an American official reinforce the “you’re excused” attitude that dismissed any swift reckoning for Swiss complicity simply because they were “democratic” and stable on a now-half-communist continent.

But “A Forgotten Man” still makes for a most watchable account of a country that may have “gotten it from both sides” during the war, which acted out of self-preservation and self-interst, but which got an undeserved pass for its selective, opportunistic views of “neutrality.”

Rating: R, nudity

Cast: Michael Neuenschwander, Manuela Biedermann, Cléa Eden, Yann Philipona, Peter Wyssbrod,
Dominik Gysin and Victor Poltier

Credits: Scripted and directed by Laurent Nègre, inspired by a play by Thomas Hürlimann. A Sovereign release.

Running time: 1:25

Every indie film — if it’s “indie” enough — is a teachable moment in the sorts of story you can tell with very little money, a catchy conceit and the best assets you have at hand.

Sometimes those assets include “name” actors you’re able to talk into making your film, giving it visibility and cachet. And somethings it’s the locations.

“Permafrost” benefits from striking, snowy Utah settings and access to horses, ATVs and snowmobiles, which to writer, director and star Lenni Uitto, screamed “Ice Age Dystopia.” So he and co-star Rachelle Hardy dreamed up a new ice age where Russians, Russian gulags and bad Russian accents permeate a North America after — presumbly — the Bering Strait has frozen over and allowed Russianism to expand beyond its MAGA base.

The weather gives the film credibility, which the screenplay strips away, one limp cliche after another.

If you’re going dystopian, your future’s got to have bounty hunters. Because even if governments and techological infrastructure has collapsed, you’ll want to “employ” people to guard the gulags, and “loggers” (As in keeping a “log,” or “laggers?”) and hunters to wander the wasteland fetching or killing (and returning their tracking chips) escapees with electronic trackers.

Meat and apparently crackers will still be available, because anyone with a rifle can hunt and crackers will last long after manufacturing and distribution systems have broken down.

So loner James (Uitto) can get by, haunted by the ghost of a teen girl who gives him advice and urges him “Don’t shoot,” every now and then. Maybe she’ll talk him out of killing himself.

James shoots a lot, here. James stabs a lot, too, even after somebody’s apologized for shooting at him, or conked him on the head to rob him.

There’s a little girl (Riley Hardy) that someone is hellbent on tracking down. She’s on the run with her mom (Rachelle Hardy). James takes this assignment from his Boris & Natasha-accented bounty hunt booker and fights his way through (checks notes) “Somali pirates,” and the usual dystopian thugs, uniformed goons and over-made-up cult-gang members calling themselves “White Ghosts.”

He has to admit to the little girl that he kills people. Not that she can’t see that for herself.

“That’s a bad job! You need to get a new one!”

“Permafrost” has some arresting images, but the script is crap and the middling to mediocre acting, directing and general execution of it become more immaterial the crappier it gets.

“Phantom” gunshots extract our hero and the child from some situations. As in “Who fired that perfectly-timed shot to save them THIS time?” Sometimes, we never find out.

Continuity error?

One favorite moment occurs when two women bounty hunters come for little girl Meg, and one drops to the ground after a LOUD rifle report, only to have the other apparently NOT HEAR that and trudge on for several seconds, grabbing the kid, only for a second round to hit her, totally by “surprise.”

It’s not bad enough to prompt a drinking game over idiotic plot blunders, screwy dystopian “logic” no one thought through or Godawful Russian-accented “acting.” When you film an indie in Utah, at the very least you’d like to avoid drinking game prompts.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lenni Uitto, Riley Hardy, Ariel Dawn, Corey Dangerfield, Kalli Therinae and Rachelle Hardy.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lenni Uitto. A FilmHub release on Tubi.

Running time: 1:19

The stumbling French Netflix remake of “The Wages of Fear,” a 1953 thriller by Henri-Georges Clouzot, whetted my appetite for re-watching that touchstone tale of desperate men taking on a suicidal job, each for his own grim reasons.

But none of my streaming services had it available. Max has it, I think Criterion restored it and has it on their channel. (Tubi got it later). So I went in search of the second famous version of that classic story, William Friedkin’s epic “Sorcerer,” a 1970s updating that is as bathed in lore as any movie of that era.

Friedkin’s budget-buster opened a month after “Star Wars,” and the Internet is filled with hot-take reviews (many of them “performed” on youtube) about “the best movie you never heard of/saw” and the like. “Sorcerer” exists in a few versions, never got that much attention when it came out, and Friedkin lamented its fate every chance he got, right up to his death last August.

Poking around, I found a full-length cut used on European TV online and dove back into this world. Because if nothing else, “Sorcerer” is a half hour shorter than the original “Wages.”

“Sorcerer” is a film greatly-enhanced in memory by its signature scenes, down-and-out men driving huge, beater ten-wheeled trucks loaded with volatile nitroglycerine over an ancient, rickety rope and wooden plank bridge in the middle of the South American jungle. That iconic image made one helluva poster. I used to own one.

“Rest in Peace” is a sturdy Argentian thriller with too many soap operatic touches and twists for its own good.

It’s a tale of escaping a messy life through a horrific but all-too-convenient historical event, the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

Novelist Martin Baintrub took that tragedy and imagined someone who used it to get away from ruinous debts and threats against his family. Director Sebastián Borenztein and co-screenwriter Marcos Osorio Vidal got a watchable if sometimes eyerolling, predictable and generally melodramatic movie out of that narrative.

Sergio (Joaquín Furriel of “Intuition”) is a Buenos Aires businessman who inherited the family factory but is struggling to keep it afloat, a fact that he keeps from his dental hygeinist wife, Estela (Griselda Siciliani, who was in “Bardo”).

He can’t have it burden his daughter Flor’s bat mitzvah, because her whole speech at the gathering is about how “He will make all my wishes come true” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English). He can’t let his worries color his little boy Matias’s opinion on his dad.

But the minute he says “Dad’ll always be there with you” to the boy, we know he won’t. It’s that kind of movie.

The celebration is marred by the presence of a collector from that one money lender Sergio cannot put off. Bruno (Gabriel Gioty) is impatient enough to tell him, when they meet again, that he wants “it all by Monday.”

Sergio has barely had a chance to bring Estela up to speed, beg a friend to buy their “country place” from him and fend-off an irate brother-in-law’s ugly accusations at a family dinner when that fateful day arrives.

And then a bomb goes off.

The narrative shifts back and forth between Estela’s concerned, then upset if-not-quite-frantic realization that her husband might have been in that blast. Authorities find his briefcase and the daughter’s new necklace which doting dad had just had repaired. She weeps.

But Sergio, his head ringing in the hospital, has survived. It’s just that as he gathers his senses, takes in the chaos and the scale of what he just lived through and he can’t complete that call “home.”

He runs away, making his way to Paraguay, South America’s version of “a place that doesn’t check ID that carefully.”

Sergio’s new life, working for an importer/trading firm of some sort, just requires that he make excuses any time he’s ordered to deal “with Argentines” or deliver something to another country.

Luckily, the boss’s wife (Lali Gonzálezi) is a fan. And when she’s suddenly widowed…

The tale is told with every moment of forshadowing underlined to ensure we notice it. The license of the driver on that taxi ride to the bus station to flee town is the perfect identity to steal. That heart-to-heart with his son in the bathroom at a big party is too good not to reprise, ironically, in the third act.

The performances are more adequate than compelling. Truth be told, I checked out of the picture at the moment where “seventeen years pass” and we see Sergio in a Robinson Crusoe beard and mop top, as if he hasn’t shaved in decades.

The time to acquire a permanent disguise might be the days and weeks after you make your escape and authorities might be looking for you.

Melodramatic touches — coindidences, old longings — pile up, so that by the finale, that’s pretty much all there is to “Rest in Peace,” a tale too self-consciously “dramatic” to feel “real,” too dramatically-pat to be all that entertaining.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Joaquín Furriel, Griselda Siciliani, Lali González and Gabriel Goity

Credits: Directed by Sebastián Borenztein, scripted by Marcos Osorio Vidal and Sebastián Borenztein, based on a novel by Martin Baintrub. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

Movies that look as if the cast had too much fun making them are often cursed. But “Repo Man,” a cult sci-fi comedy from 1984, has long been the exception to that rule.

Loopy to the point of gonzo, scruffy in every important way, filmmaker Alex Cox conjured up punk rock sci-fi, a film that was Reagan-backlash political, more energetic than polished, more mouthy and goofy than smart.

And everybody in it, from star-on-the-rise Emilio Estevez to veteran character actor Tracey Walter and Blaxploitation alumna Vonetta McGee, gives every indication that they’re having a blast in a movie that feels “We’re-making-it-up-as-we-go” rash.

That was the year Harry Dean Stanton became a cult “star” in his own right, graduating from small, Southern working class bit parts in decades of TV episodes and films, from “Cool Hand Luke” and “Straight Time” to “Alien,” to leading man in “Paris, Texas” and as the sketchy LA “repo man” Bud, who insists that even he lives by a “code.”

“I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof, nor through inaction let the personal contents thereof come to harm!”

Cox, a Brit not long out of film school, got the richest and “hippest” member of The Monkees (Mike Nesmith) to produce his low-budget script, rounded-up the seediest LA locations he could find (with the obligatory trek to the highway through Joshua Tree) and a low-cost but “cool” cast and he was off.

Because who wouldn’t want to be in an action comedy about a nutty scientist (Fox Harris) on the lam from Roswell in a ’64 Chevy Malibu with something strange and deadly in the trunk, a car that becomes the target of every Repo Man — car repossessors working for loan companies — in greater L.A.?

As competitors snatch and grab that Malibu, the movie becomes an amusingly deadly game of “Who’ll look in the trunk?” and “Who do we HOPE looks in the trunk?”

Estevez plays Otto, an earringed “punk” and stocker at a local supermarket, a rebel without a cause. He quits on a profane whim, and that leaves him vulnerable to a hustle from a guy who needs his “help” getting his car to the hospital because his wife is having a baby.

Bud (Stanton) tells the stupidest lies imaginable to convince gullible Otto to get this car and follow him in while stranger Bud drives “my wife’s car.” Otto’s spent too much time in the mosh pit to think much of anything through.

Otto “ain’t gonna be no repo man,” when he learns what he’s just done. But he’s taken cash and swiped a car on behalf of the Helping Hands Acceptance Corp.

“It’s too late. You already are.”

Walter, a character “type” who’d been in “Goin’ South” and “Raggedy Man,” is the repo lot mechanic and resident conspiracy nut Mitchell.

“You know how everybody’s into weirdness right now?”

McGee is the two-fisted office manager, with repo men Bud (Stanton) and Lite (Sy Richardson) serving as Otto’s mentors. Bud Lite will not lead him astray.

Otto picks up a fleeing young woman (Olivia Barash) who turns out to be a free spirit. Sex in a repossessed Caddy Eldorado? Don’t mind if I DO. But she’s on the run because “they” are after her, men in suits who want to know what she knows. Because the United Fruitcake Outlet (UFO) where she works is deep into UFOlogy and hip to the scientist, the Malibu and what might be in the trunk.

Otto keeps crossing paths with punk pals Archie (Miguel Sandoval), Debbi (Jennifer Balgobin) and Duke (Dick Rude) who are in the midst of a smalltime robbery/car-jacking spree.

“Let’s do some crimes!” “Yeah, let’s go get sushi and not pay!”

Forty years after its release, “Repo Man” plays like a snapshot of its era, from the punk nihilism that rose to the fore with Reaganism to the still-seen-on-punks haircuts and fashions and a fleet of aging-poorly hot-wireable cars from America’s “Malaise Motors” era.

Of course Otto is homophobic and not shy about slinging slurs. Of course the bad guys are “Men and Women) in Black” before “Men in Black” were a thing. Of course it’s more cinematic to not show us what’s actually in that Malibu trunk. Saved money, too.

Like many a cult film, “Repo Man” is meant to be watched with an audience of fellow cultists. Soberly seen outside of that cinema drafthouse environment, many of the jokes and gags still land, and some do not. When you’ve been imitated by many films and performers over the years, the “fresh” in your humor sours.

There are stretches when the only thing propelling this forward and giving it any pace is the Tito Larriva and The Plugz Latino punk/surf rock score, which sounds like Dick Dale went Tex Mex.

But that sense of the fun that the cast must have been having pops up in the odd improvised line or scene, and in moments that have a hint of “giddy” about them as various players pile into or out of this car or that one.

The best running gag isn’t about aliens, it’s about the guys this movie is built around — repo men facing off with the rival Rodriguez Brothers (Del Zamora and Eddie Velez). If Zander Schloss’s nerdy turn as a fellow grocery store stocker looks and sounds like the template for “Napoleon Dynamite,” Zamora and Velez prefigure “The Jesus” in “Big Lebowski.”

Cox was definitely onto something here, making a movie about an unsavory, careless and adrenalin-fueled profession which he’d worked in briefly to make ends meet. He’d go on to try his hand at something almost “mainstream” (“Sid & Nancy”) before settling into a succession of hit-or-mostly-miss cult films, more than one a pale imitation of this one.

Estevez would go on to lead “The Mighty Ducks” and start directing himself.

And Harry Dean Stanton? He’d roll down that dusty road towards “legend,” collecting a devoted worldwide following — including cool filmmakers — who’d ensure he’d always work, he’d get his share of big parts, and that fans would go hunting for him in everything he made before he donned a wrinkled suit, took a deep toot off some banned substance, and got to work.

“I don’t want no commies in my car! No Christians either!”

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity, homophobic slurs

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash, Sy Richardson, Fox Harris, Del Zamora, Eddie Velez, Jennifer Balgobin, Fox Harris and Vonetta McGee

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Cox. A Universal release now on Netflix, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:32