Movie Nation

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is one of those gold standard comedies that keeps on giving, a farce so unerringly-costumed, production designed and covered in muck that it looks like a documentary, with slapstick and sight gags that twist towards surreal and dialogue that takes on economic theory, the aerodynamics of cocoanuts and what constitutes “a mere flesh wound.”

This classic merits revival every few years, and this year, The Florida Film Festival is bringing it back.

And they’re hosting a Q&A with the very silly John Cleese afterwards.

The Pythons aren’t getting any younger, so you’d best grab this chance to come see and hear from Basil Fawlty and his “Fish Called Wanda.”

I’ve interviewed a couple of Pythons — “The Terry’s” — Jones and Gilliam. But never the erudite Oxbridge Master of Silly Walks. I’m moderating the Q & A. Which means “Right, I’ve got some homework to do.”

Just following Our Lord J. C.  on Twitter will never do.

Enzian Theater, Maitland, the evening of April 14.

See you there. 

Here’s a sometimes-fun found-footage riff on that time, on Halloween Night of 1977, that a failing late night talk show “communed with the Devil” as a stunt for ratings.

I’ve said it before and I can’t stop repeating it — the ’70s, man. You had to be there.

In “Late Night with the Devil,” character actor David Dastmalchian plays talk show host Jack Delroy in a darkly-comic skeptics-vs.-believers-vs-Old Scratch himself thriller.

I wasn’t as enamored of this overreaching, choppy narrative about a live TV broadcast gone supernaturally wrong as many others reviewing it. I think it’s because I remember too clearly the very similar but more harrowing and suspenseful “The Cleansing Hour,” which has more pathos, higher stakes and surprises than “Late Night.” But the lighter touches, the reasonably-accurate spoof of the medium it sends up, make this worth a watch.

Dastmalchian plays a ’70s chat-show host, one of the legion of “also-rans” our narrator (the unmistakable voice of horror icon Michael Ironside) reminds us, a flip and (kind of) funny host willing to try most anything to get his ratings up.

Delroy is blandly representative of a type — a little Dick Cavett wit, a chunk of Jack Parr self-pity and self-importance, a Phil Donahue level of credulity and an uneasy smile that hides not just the loss of a recently-deceased wife, but the feeling that this is all just an act, a very hard one for him to keep up.

It’s difficult to decide if former radio talker Jack was ever all that funny, with his strained, lame monologue and Reggie Jackson (the Yankees had just won the World Series) and Jimmy Carter and Billy Carter jokes.

Of course, Carson got rich off material not unlike this, back in the day.

Delroy’s comic sidekick and sometime verbal punching bag (Rhys Auteri) might be somebody who realizes this “all an act” pose.

On this night, the guests begin with a medium (Fayssal Bazzi) named Christou, whose act is so bad and unconving that the studio audience can barely contain their groans. Their giggles? They can’t hide those at all.

But something happens, something that delays at least one commercial break. Christou may have actually “made contact” with somebody or something real. The fact that he projectile vomits black bile almost sells it.

Inviting an Amazing Randi-style professional skeptic (Ian Bliss) on the “Night Owls” show to debunk the “charlatan,” pretty much to his face, may be the most ’70s-savvy bit of pop culture spoofing that writer-directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes (“100 Bloody Acres” was theirs) conjure up.

This “Carmichael” debunker knows his stuff, and he’s insufferable. But Christou? He’s having a mental health crisis, or something. “This isn’t right,” he protests, slipping into shock. But is it supernatural?

Paranormal researcher Dr. June (Laura Gordon) and her star patient Lily (Ingrid Torelli) endure the skeptic’s skepticism when they show up. But when Lily jolts into a demonic alter-ego trance, we at least start to wonder if this Carmicheal debunker might be wrong.

Delroy has to be chilled when Lily seems to note his “sweeps week” despair of ever improving his ratings. “I think you’re gonna be very famous — soon.”

Dastmalchian, the most recent screen version of “The Boston Strangler” (he was also in “Oppenheimer”) isn’t the most credible chat show host ever. The larger-than-life personality, the ability to switch “on” seem lacking. That hampers “Late Night with the Devil’s” ability to make that sale. This is like an imitation of DeNiro’s dispirited wannabe talk show delusions in “King of Comedy.”

But the haunted side of Delroy fits this veteran character actor’s persona like a glove.

Bazzi is amusingly inept as Christou, a guy who loses his exotic Spanish/Gypsy accent the moment things start to get “real.”

Auteri serves up a venomous, spoil-the-peanut-gallery’s-fun drollery in this part, a smarty pants who relishes bursting bubbles for the boobeoisie.

And Torelli and Gordon are convincing enough before the fireworks start. And once they do, “convincing” stops mattering as much.

The filmmakers’ generally accurate recreation of how such a show might have gone down — “A television first, we attempt to commune with the Devil…but not before a word from our sponsors.” — breaks up the flow of the story so much that the finale is the only place where there’s rising action and heightening suspense.

But they’ve tapped into a fun angle to visit the “Devil, real or unreal” thriller genre, a “master tape” that comes close enough to broadcast standards to pass muster, and goes over-the-top enough to be fun enough to recommend.

Rating: R (Violent Content|A Sexual Reference|Some Gore|profanity)

Cast: David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Fayssal Bazzi, Ian Bliss, Rhys Auteri and Ingrid Torelli, narrated by Michael Ironside.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes. An IFC/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:33

“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” is a creaky, cutesie and cluttered sequel to the dark and pseudo-serious reboot of this goofy, action comedy franchise of the 1980s, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.”

Ungainly, so over-populated with survivors of those Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson pictures, and their far less interesting younger counterparts, the film is analogous of that infamous Stay Puft marshmallow man of the original film, “Ghostbusters. ”  “Frozen Empire” can’t get out of its own bloated way.

It’s so committed to “fan service” that any doubt that was ever a euphemism for “pandering to the people still into this junk” vanishes.

Newcomer Kumail Nanjiani, as a sketchy goof selling off his granny’s antiques who sets off the movie’s icy armageddon, pretty much steals the picture by default. Everybody else, old and new, has to content her or himself with almost triggering a case of the “warm fuzzies.” Almost.

That pretty much goes for the entire film here. “Almost.”

The Stengler family — Mom Callie (Carrie Coon), the daughter of the late Egon (Ramis), her science-smart teen daughter Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and older son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Callie’s new man, former science teacher Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) have been living in the old Ghostbuster firehouse, cleaning spectral nuisances out of New York and making a hash of the city as they careen about in the Ectomobile ghost busting ambulance.

The mayor (William Atherton, amusingly vile as ever) isn’t pleased. “Retired” buster Ray (Aykroyd) is more interested in his other-worldly video channel, produced by protege Podcast (Logan Kim). And rich ex-buster Winston (Ernie Hudson) is financing possible upgrades to the operation and the industry via his in-house Brit wizard (James McAster) and Trevor’s crush, Lucky (Celeste O’Connor).

Then the low-rent hustler Nadeem (Nanjiani of “The Big Sick”) lets this bronze orb fall into the wrong hands — OK, he sells it to Ray. And almost everybody else is involved in unleashing the frigid ancient Beast Within — and ice and newly-found or newly released/already-captured ghosts threaten to tear a rift between “here” and what lies beyond.

“The end of the world as we know it” won’t just be a golden oldie.

Phoebe’s encounter with a cute chess-playing ghost girl (Emily Alyn Lind) who must be from the ’80s, based on her hair, attire and vocabulary (seemingly intended to be MUCH older), has Phoebe questioning her connection to the afterlife, and attraction to women.

So, being bi-curious almost kills the cat. And every body else.

Nanjiani is funny in most every scene, which makes the return of prodigal buster Venkman (Murray) almost painful to sit through. His character’s running the same academic “research” hustle he always did, still reaching for the same pithy punchline he delivered, on or off script, 40 years ago. And it’s not working.

Director and co-writer Gil Kenan, whose breakthrough was directing the animated “Monster House” and who co-wrote “Afterlife,” is at a loss with what to do with Murray and Annie Potts from the earlier franchise. He gives them and Hudson and Akyroyd scenes and closeups which only exist because he and co-writer Jason Reitman figure the fans would have wanted them.

Coon soldiers through this, the one serious player allowed not to land a laugh. But here’s comic Patton Oswalt and the normally-reliable Rudd seeking that same excuse, “allowed not to land a laugh.” Because they pretty much don’t.

The ghost gimmicks, sight-gags and settings — the New York Public Library — as well as the non-supernatural villain (Atherton) are, like Murray’s attempts at his jokey old self, simply recycled from the original films.

Even that orb’s nicknames, “Ball of Hate” and “The Devil’s Testicle,” feel like throw-away jokes because nobody on set came up with a better line.

The plot gets bogged down in old tech and new, exposition and more pages and pages of Akryoyd and his disciples riffing on the “science” of the “world beyond” our own, gobbledygook which no longer falls trippingly off the tongue.

And it’s hard to say relative newcomers Grace, Wolfhard, O’Connor, Kim and McAster come into their own, because their struggle to be noticed over the sentimentalility still ladled on in the second film, if not quite as heavily as in the first, doesn’t let them register. Not much, anyway.

Phoebe’s efforts — at 15 — to be accepted by authorities, the world and her family for who she is — “I’m a ghostbuster. I save the world!” — isn’t so much lost in the tsunami of not-quite-silliness as noted and shrugged off.

So there it is, a “Ghostbusters” that’s a ghost bust. “Impossible,” you say?

“Son, I stopped believing in that word a long time ago.” And never did figure out a funnier comeback for it.

Rating: PG-13 for supernatural action/violence, profanity, innuendo.

Cast: Paul Rudd, McKenna Grace, Kumail Nanjiani, Dan Aykroyd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Ernie Hudson, Bill Murray, Celeste O’Connor, Patton Oswalt, Emily Alyn Lind, Logan Kim, James McAster, Annie Potts and William Atherton

Credits: Directed by Gil Kenan, scripted by Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman, based on the screenplay to “Ghostbusters.” A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:55

Annie Potts returns!

Those giggly, girly, binge-eating, too-dim-to-balance-a-checkbook “Baby Assassins” are back, more childish than ever in “Baby Assassins 2 Babies,” the sequel to a fast, furious and glibly funny film about Japanese teens who have taken up contract killing as their high school extracurricular activity.

But you’re only allowed to take the viewer wholly by surprise once with your John Wick Junior Miss take on murdering for money. And something — several things — hit me wrong about this more sluggish sequel.

The fight choreography is more “choreography,” the ditziness is more grating and the acting even more over the top.

And the Bugs Bunny Physics of it all — pitting two petite flyweights up against rivals with a lot more throw-weight — the point blank shootouts where nobody is any more than slightly injured and the dead spaces between the action beats I found wearing and kind of soul-sucking. The video game body count didn’t help.

Here, two callous, life-is-cheap teen dullards (Joey Iwanaga and Tatsuomi Hamada) become rivals for punching, pistol-packing pixies Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa).

Makoto (Hamada) and Yuuri (Iwanaga) are ready “to move up the ladder” after slaughtering a gang when all they were meant to do was take out its leader. The best way to not remain “errand boys” and to land two spots in the “guild” of assassins, their manager informs them, is to shoot other assassins to create vacancies.

That couldn’t come at a worse time for bleached-blonde Mahiro and chatterbox Chisato. They’re behind on their guild training gym fees, and they’ve blown-off payments on their “Jolly Assassins Insurance Plan.”

They can’t “go on strike.” They can’t give away their work with a “viral video” protest.

They have to rush to make their payments, but as they do, the bank is held up. What can they do but break their hostage zip-ties and kill the robbers? That gets them suspended, forced to take odd jobs and slash expenses. And that leaves them vulnerable.

Their guild rules say they can “Never kill outside of work.”

There are still laughs in this sequel, but for me, they all came after its lumbering, stumbling start. The coed killers take jobs as retail plush-suit mascots, and get into a tussle — with each other — over their costumes, and in costume.

And one quick-cut gag sees Makoto eject a round from his trusty pistol, with Yuuri snatching the floating round mid-air.

It’s the sort of comedy where a short order cook orders her feuding customers to leave with a “Play with your guns outside (in Japanese, with English subtitles).”

At some point, the flippancy of the gun violence here achieves “cringiness” and never gives it up.

A lot of the cleverness of the original film, the world-building and character-introductions, is lost when you add two new “babies” and show half of the nonsensical, bloody-but-not-remotely-as-bloody-as-it-would-be-in-reality action from their point of view.

The original “babies” — OK, the talky annoying one — overreaches with her breathless, bugeyed impression teen girl behavior.

At some point, “cute” no longer figures into it, and you’re just joking around with guns and gunplay tropes that aren’t any funnier simply because they’ve already been beaten to death.

Rating: unrated, very violent, teen smoking, profanity

Cast: Akari Takaishi, Saori Izawa, Joey Iwanaga and Tatsuomi Hamada

Credits: Scripted and directed by Yugo Sakamoto. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:41

Writer-director Ivan Sen’s “Limbo” is a film of few words, little action and an understated resolution.

It’s a murder mystery starring Simon Baker, but co-starring the scenery near Coober Pedy, a dry, under-populated sandscape riddled with holes.

When Baker’s Det. Travis Hurley shows up there, he checks into the Limbo Hotel — like most of the places we see there, a structure dug out of the outcroppings and cliffs. Never was there a more apt and allegorical name for a hostelry in the pockmarked middle of nowhere than that.

Hurley’s in purgatory, tracking a 20 year old cold case stuck in “Limbo.”

Sen sets about introducing this character, filling in just enough of his back story to get by. Hurley’s first act on checking in is to cook and shoot-up his needle drug of choice. Every person he speaks with he tries to keep at some distance. At one point, he tosses his badge to a former murder suspect (Rob Collins) rather than getting any closer before asking questions.

When Hurley gets no answers, which is is the case with the missing woman’s brother Charlie (Collins) and others, as often as not, he just shrugs.

“Fair enough.”

The victim — no body was ever found — had a mistrustful sister, too (Natasha Wanganeen). No one there, especially the Aboriginal friends and relatives of missing Charlotte, wants anything to do with a “white fella copper.”

As we listen and Hurley to the 20 year-old tapes of police interrogations from back then, with their racism and ridiculously obvious efforts at railroading anybody with dark skin, we get it. So does Hurley.

“Fair enough.”

Writer-director Sen — who filmed the similarly-plotted “Goldstone” a few years back — keeps one detail from the viewer long enough for us to ponder “What are they all digging for?” It’s opals, but the gemstone’s only connection to the plot are as a reason for the pits, tunnels, homes and church carved out of the rock there.

This loner with a drug problem (understated) never sees much urgency in this work, even as we see him visit suspects and question the missing young woman’s family. And the family is not just wary. They have spent their lives keeping their expectations when it comes to justice from “white fella coppers.”

Baker plays this Bryan Cranston-weathered, Guy Pearce-introverted detective so close to the vest he’s almost mesmerizing in the role. We read into him what he won’t say about his issues, his past and just what he’s too cautious to say he hopes to accomplish here.

“I guess I don’t like anyone too much. Most people don’t think too much of me, either.”

I was wholly taken in by the forlorn setting — accentuated by the black and white photography — and by the racism subtext in play here. But too little happens in “Limbo” for my taste, and there’s a fine line between “patient” storytelling and a film so slack in its pacing as to lower the stakes and test the viewer’s patience.

Still, that barren landscape, a wasteland before men and women covered it in holes, is unforgettably striking and just symbolic enough to keep us hopeful this “Limbo” provide some answers.

Rating: unrated, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Simon Baker, Natasha Wanganeen, Rob Collins, Joshua Warrior and Nicholas Hope.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ivan Sen. A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:49

It’s a little chilling to realize that hired killer is a job that might be the world’s second “oldest profession.” Judging by the movies, most every culture seems to have them, and the way screenwriters depict them, they have traditions, mores, preferred weapons and a “code.”

That’s the intriguing premise of “Inkabi,” a South African/Zulu thriller about that continent’s most famous warriors taking their skills and tribal traditions into murder-for-hire. If the Japanese Yakuza, American and Italian mafia, the French, Brits and the Chinese of the John Woo universe can be contract killers, why wouldn’t South Africa’s bloody colonial and Apartheid history have produced hitmen?

But that promising set-up earns a lumbering, half-speed treatment in writer-director Norman Maake’s hands. Even the fights feel like rehearsals before “Action!” is shouted — walk-throughs that won’t fool most viewers.

A hit is contracted in a tiny, rural store/cafe out in Zulu country. And that ensnares a big city croupier, a axi driver, the cops and the object of that hit — a white man embroiled in a government scandal that’s made the newspapers.

Michelle Tiren is Lucy, a hard-partying, always-late roulette wheel spinner at the storefront Big Time Casino. Her drinking and snorting and loose-living have cost her custody of her daughter, we learn in the film’s laborious, melodramatic early scenes.

That court case guts her, and makes her say “Yes” to the creepy older customer (Jonathan Taylor) when he makes his second attempt to ask her out. She wakes up in his bed just in time to see him strangled, almost rituatlistically, by the scowling Inkabi nicknamed “Scar” (Dumisami Dlamini).

But that slow, deliberate taxi driver she stiffed on a ride the other day? He might be her salvation. Frank (Tshamano Tsebe) is a retired, gone-into-hiding killer. He and Scar know each other. They know “the code.” But unlike in the Chow Yun-Fat films of John Woo, it’s not “No women, no kids.” It’s thou shalt not harm or interfere with another Inkabi in his work.

Whatever the many melodramatic touches Maake ( “Piet’s Sake” and “Soldiers of the Rock”) serves up — kidnappings, every killer pausing and lecturing his victim before pulling the trigger, all but ensuring somebody else has time to fetch a gun and shoot the shooter in the back, he needed a fresh set of eyes editing this picture.

Maake pointlessly breaks the tale into “chapters,” and uses animation to give a taste of tribal history and the devolution into contract killing work.

But literally every scene drags in this Zulu contract killer thriller, with the camera lingering over many a take well past its payoff.

That underscores the weakness of the performances. Players don’t act Maake’s stentorian lines, they intone them.

“Money doesn’t change lives. It ruins them.” “I lost something today which I used to hold very dear,” follows declarations about “the power to lead people astray” and that deepest of deep thoughts, “Everybody is in a hurry to get something. You just need to wait your turn.”

Tsebe has more presence than charisma, and Tiren is more affecting than the character she is playing or the lines she delivers.

But even with the cachet of being a new world for Zulu John Wicks to inhabit, “Inkabi” just doesn’t play. It’s the “code” of hit-man thrillers that does it in. They’ve got to move faster than this, and the action has to reflect that speed most of all.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity

Cast: Tshamano Tsebe, Michelle Tiren, Dumisami Dlamini and Jonathan Taylor

Credits: Scripted and directed by Norman Maake. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

“Uproar” is a sweetly-uplifting coming-of-age dramedy set against a fraught moment in the history of New Zealand.

It’s about a sensitive teen trying to find his place in a rugby-obsessed culture, and a member of the Māori minority struggling with identity in a mostly-white country that agreed to host Apartheidist South Africa’s famous rugby squad as the world was finally turning against that repressive, racist state.

Julian Dennison, the cute kid from Taika Waititi’s charming “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” plays Josh Waaka, a smart, bespectacled and rotund kid forever bullied at the mostly-white prep school he attends.

His older brother was a star player for the school in his day, but Jamie (James Rolleston) is on crutches, his career at an end and too bitter and grim to stick with the rehab that will at least let him walk without a cane.

Mum (Minnie Driver) is a custodian at St. Gilbert’s, another reason Josh is there.

It’s 1981, Josh narrates, a moment in history when “mild mannered” New Zealand was torn by protests as Māori and some white allies took up the cause of shaming their government for hosting the murderously repressive Boer state‘s Springbok’s squad.

Being smart and sarcastic, Josh has to see the irony in the stern headmaster (Mark Mitchenson) lecturing the student body that “Real New Zealanders combat division with unity.”

“Unity” is sometimes code for a majority imposing its idea of “calm” on minorities.

Josh has a childhood friend, Grace (Jada Fa’atui), more traditionally Māori, who comes into political awareness over the issue. But being half-Māori, Josh never picked up the language or expressed much interest in the culture. He’s not ready as a “brown” person to identify with the South Africa’s oppressed Black majority.

And he has that one teacher who takes an interest. Mr. Madigan, played by Rhys Darby of “Next Goal Wins” and the recent series, “Our Flag Means Death,” calls on Josh in English class and would love for him to join the secret theater group he’s started in the conservative school. The kid’s emotionally available and a quick study at memorizing lines and the teacher would like him to capitalize on that talent.

But as the street protests turn violent and the school rugby team begs Jamie to take over as coach, Josh finds himself pulled in multiple directions at a time in life when your first big decisions present themselves. Which way — or ways — will he go?

There were many hands reworking the script Paul Middleditch and Hamish Bennett directed, so perhaps that’s why the picture has a compromised feel. The dialogue also has a scattering of modern anachronisms transferred to the early ’80s which grab your attention.

It’s still sweet, lightly amusing and very good at setting up the conflicts, identifying villains and such. But a concerted effort to “not be predictable” serves up false leads, red herrings in the plot and a sometimes frustrating feeling to things that aren’t resolved.

The big moments scome from exactly the places and situations you expect — a march that climaxes with a Māori haka chant/dance at billy-clubbing riot police, a bit of pursue-your-bliss and a moment of solidarity among people who got their share of raw deals from the British who colonized their islands in the 1840s and took most of their land.

Even as a child actor, Dennison had screen presence to burn. He’s effective here, with Darby adding sparkle to the teacher trying to sneak a production of “Foreskin’s Lament” by the authorities. Driver was cast for her nurturing but fiesty presence. And Erana James from Amazon’s “The Wilds” series impresses as the most outspoken protester of them all, the fiery Samantha.

“Uproar” is a tad too cute to pass by uncriticized. An overly-precious epiloque rather spoils the climax. But it’s long and never once drags, and the players, the politics and the intrigues tucked into it make a splendid history lesson, one with just enough feel-good moments to carry the day.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Julian Dennison, Rhys Darby, Erana James, James Rolleston, Jada Fa’atui, Mark Mitchenson and Minnie Driver

Credits: Directed by Paul Middleditch and Hamish Bennett, scripted by Hamish Bennett and Sonia Whiteman, based on a script by Keith Aberdein. A Blue Sky release.

Running time: 1:49

Long before he became the German filmmaker whose somber, ironic narrations and bleakly beautiful and humanistic documentaries turned Werner Herzog into a pop culture icon, he was a cult figure among international cinema fans.

In his early years of fame, Herzog’s movies could be dark, naturalistic poetry, or ambitious, cast-and-crew-testing living nightmares. His alter ego in the latter films was the bug-eyed maniac Klaus Kinski (“Aguirre: The Wrath of God,” “Nosferatu the Vampire, “”Woyzeck,” Fitzcarraldo”). Herzog later made a documentary tribute to their difficult working relationship, “My Best Fiend.”

But his co-conspirator/muse for the strange, personal and very human character studies “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” and “Stroszek” was the eccentric, troubled forklift driver and self-taught street musician Bruno Schleinstein, known in Herzog’s films and to the film world as simply “Bruno S.”

“Stroszek” is a tone poem of a shattered life that comes to cling to one last broken dream. It’s a statement on the disconnect between 1977 Europe and America, particularly rural America, as seen through a delusional and alcoholic street musician with no visible means of support who moves from Berlin to BFE, Wisconsin in a country where “everybody gets rich” and The American Dream, at least as Cold War-weary Germans saw it, could come true.

It’s bleak and tragic, and funny in the darkest ways. It’s the sort of film that seemed very much of its time in its time, but that inspired generations of indie filmmakers to seek out the unheralded inhabitants of whatever underbelly of life was close at hand, and the sort of eccentrics who might be living in it.

Bruno is a theatrical goofball of inmate who loudly jokes through his entire paroling out of a Berlin jail. Some of his warders want to know, after all the time he’s served, if he’s been “dropped on the head?” The warden hectors him over his “beer” and goes on and on (in German with English subtitles) about how he should “never touch another drop” and “never set foot in a pub.”

Garrulous Bruno seems to agree, right up to the moment he rolls into his neighborhood watering hole on his way home.

A couple of brutish pimps are berating and knocking around Eva (Eva Mattes), whom Bruno sees as his “girl.” He doesn’t even try to defend her. But he invites her to live with him, with hopes of taking care of her. It’s just that his cluttered flat full of musical instruments which he’s taught himself to play, from the piano and accordion to the mellotron and glockenspiel, seems to defy that expecation.

And Eva’s lot gets worse when her pimps drag her out and back to work, and then bring her back, beating Bruno and humiliating him in front of her as they do. Their only way out may be accompanying their elderly neighbor (Clemens Scheitz) to stay with his nephew in Railroad Flats, Wisconsin.

So that’s what they do, losing Bruno’s mynah bird in U.S. customs, buying a used station wagon and trekking cross country to this place they can barely find on a map.

Clayton (Clayton Szalpinski) is a simple Air Force veteran running a garage in a one-stoplight town on the Northern Plains. He scrapes out a living, adds Bruno to his garage staff (Ely Rodriguez already works there) and shows them around a tiny, dead town where “murders” happen, where farmers feuding over a tiny parcel of land between their adjoining farms ride their tractors with a rifle in their spare hand.

But at least there’s a local truck stop where Eva can wait tables. As Bruno and Eva set up housekeeping, buying a new single-wide and a ruinously-expensive Sylvania TV, Eva is almost certain to have to resume her old career if they’re to make ends meet.

“Stroszek” is a leisurely, contemplative character study with music, as Herzog gives Bruno S. room to let us see into his soul through his musicianship, his fondness for playing and singing to no audience in big, echoey, empty courtyards and such. The Country Muzak of guitarist Chet Atkins’ instrumentals underscores many of the North American scenes.

One evokes memories of the Old World, where the buildings and people seem ancient and set on life’s path by their circumstances. Bruno S., playing a version of himself, is an orphan whose prostitute mother didn’t want him. Life in both worlds has its tests but the nature of the struggles are different, with the promise of America, a land of plenty undercut by the never-ending quest and need for money, which the “proletarian” Bruno starts to see as a “conspiracy.”

In its day, “Stroszek” was celebrated as a soulful bolt out of the blue in an American film landscape just turning itself over to the blockbuster. Lore grew up around the film and the seat-of-the-pants way Herzog filmed it (driving scenes with no camera truck/trailer) and scripted it, working around his screwy leading man’s moods, filming much of it Nekoosa and Plainfield, Wisconsin, with a conjured up tourist-trap-in-winter-finale filmed in Cherokee, N.C.

Viewed today, its whimsical charms stand out more than its tragic overtones. Even back then, critics and culture observers were pondering why American cinema made so little effort to find and celebrate the Brunos in our midst.

But documentary filmmakers Errol Morris and Les Blank, early disciples of Herzog and credited in “Stroszek,” are Americans who achieved their first fame for finding and lauding the quirkiness in the vast United States between the coasts.

And then the indie cinema of the ’80s and ’90s came along and amplified queer lives and rural despair, urban struggle and generational angst. By that time, their acknowledged or unacknowledged icon, the pioneering Herzog, had shifted more to the documentary side (“Grizzly Man,” “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”) and become an actor and personality far more famous than the movies that first made him.

But quaint as it sometimes seems now, “Stroszek” remains one of the touchstone films of an era whose very look on screen — grey and gritty and forboding — is as instantly identifiable as its often more sober-minded and cynical subject matter and the inimatable characters inhabiting it.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex work, profanity, smoking

Cast: Bruno S. (Bruno Schleinstein), Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz, Ely Rodriguez, Clayton Szalpinski

Credits: Scripted and directed by Werner Herzog. A New Yorker Films release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:48

Wes Anderson went a long ways towards “rescuing” the reputation of the dark and twisted fiction writer Roald Dahl from his “children’s author” image with his gloriously cast and production-designed-to-death short film version of “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.”

The author of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Witches” and “James and the Giant Peach” had something to say to adults, too.

Now, celebrating that 40 minute “Henry Sugar” Academy Award win, Netflix releases that film folded into into a new package of FOUR Roald Dahl stories. It’s titled “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More.” And as “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher” and “Poison,” the added stories make clear, Dahl’s sophisticated, sometimes sadistic fiction could pack on suspens, despair at the human condition and touch on themes with the cold, wet slap of cultural criticism layered-in.

“Henry Sugar,” the story of a greedy rich heel (Benedict Cumberbatch) who masters the transcendental Eastern art of seeing with one’s eyes closed and seeing through things to win at blackjack, only to reform after winning bores him, showcased Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Richard Ayoade and Oscar winner Ben Kingsley. It was an acted/all-narrated story within a story within a story, with every actor named speaking in voice over or directly to the camera, often deferring to the author himself (Ralph Fiennes) as he sits and edits and speaks from a soundstage version of his writer’s “shack” behind Gipsy House, Dahl’s home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.

It’s classic Anderson “twee,” a fast-talking, candy-colored animated film sans animation, with actors telling the story, passing the narration back and forth, dryly reacting or under-reacting to the words, the actions and the stage hand who shows up to remove or add props and change stage backdrops and settings.

Every man has his moment — for this is an all-male enterprise, not wholly out of place for the sometimes-sexist Dahl — and many of those moments are underscored by a Max-the-Dog move from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” Each and every one turns and stares, befuddled or annoyed, at the viewer.

The precious effect is repeated throughout “Henry Sugar” and the three newer and darker stories added here. Only now, Rupert Friend joins the ensemble, all of whom play multiple roles in the stories.

In “The Swan,” we’re treated to a grim and horrific tale of a young birdwatcher being kidnapped and tortured by bird-murdering teens — tested by being lashed between the rails of railroad tracks, forced to watch crimes against nature and bird sanctuary laws. It is a sad, almost bleak dip into magical realism, here tinged by Dahl’s trademark sadistic edge.

“The Rat Catcher” features a feral Fiennes as a bloke who’s been summoned to deal with rats in a 1950s British village. By focusing the script on Dahl’s actual words via the constant narration, Anderson immerses us in the lovely, exacting descriptions of a cynic and a master craftsman.

The title character “was lean and leathery, with a sharp face and two long, sulfur-yellow teeth protruding from the upper jaw over the lower lip.”

Cumberbatch, Kingsley and Patel are featured in “Poison,” a tale from just-before-independence India in which a Brit (Cumberbatch) has had a poisonous krait snake crawl onto his chest and doze off. A colleague (Patel) summons a Bengali doctor (Kingsley) to try and protect the seemingly-doomed Englishman and neutralize the snake. But will his efforts dent the Brit’s inbred racism?

The way Anderson uses the actors, deadpan performances (mostly), narrating in a stacatto style, parked in front of clever settings in varying degrees of surreal “realism,” is almost animation, a reminder that “The Fantastic Mister Fox” and “Isle of Dogs” have been the pointilistic Anderson’s most wholly-realized triumphs — created in stop-motion animation.

His style can be grating, especially that self-aware mugging-to-the-camera that he insists on. But here we see its greatest application, deadpan turns played underneath screwball-comedy-speed dialogue, all of it, pretty much every juicy, biting word, written by a mercurial, sometimes mean-spirited wit who was always entirely too brilliant and too adult to be “just for children.”

The real Dahl was a real piece of work. But the work is timeless, and Anderson has rendered it in its most entertaining cinematic form with this short story collection feature film.

Rating: PG, closer to PG-13 thanks to human and animal cruelty, racism

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Rupert Friend, Richard Ayoade and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Wes Anderson, based on four short stories by Roald Dahl. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29