Movie Nation

When it comes to cult films, ours is not to reason why they gain that status. Ours is but to shrug and marvel that this rare phenomenon has occurred, again, and perhaps laugh or cringe along with the cultists, which may give us all the clues we need.

“Straight to VHS” is about Uruguay’s first direct-to-video thriller. “Act of Violence in a Young Journalist” suddenly appeared on video store shelves there in 1988, and copies of it entered legend — at parties, family and friends’ New Year’s tradition, clung to by film school students much the way Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” inspired a generation of American indie filmmakers.

“Hey, I can do that,” would-be Coppolas and Kubricks said, sometimes going to far as to brag, “Hey, I can do BETTER than that.”

With “Act of Violence,” a bizarre, often inept thriller involving a radio reporter and her work, conversations and relationships, they had to be right. It has hints of “The Room” in its inane storytelling, incompetent editing and weird characters. All anyone knows about the filmmaker, Manuel Lamas, is that he’s obviously “self taught.”

“Straight to VHS” director Emilio Silva Torres sees the movie as “a punk rock call to grab a camera and film your world.”

Torres, whose own filmmaking bonafides are skimpy in the extreme, set out to find Lamas and the people who made this film. Talking with fellow filmmakers, critics and fans from all over South America, using too-few snippets of “Act of Violence” to truly give us the flavor of it, “Straight to VHS” becomes a mystery and a manhunt, as well as a search for Lamas’ other titles.

We hear from people who sold or rented him video gear, learn about the primitive high-end camcorder and video-deck-to-deck editing conditions Lamas worked under. Torres learns, through newspaper and magazine archives, of other films.

But getting people to tell him about Lamas and give away where he is proves nearly impossible. Long hunts for the stars prove almost fruitless as the survivors prove to be reluctant to be interviewed on camera. It is people on the technical side who have more to add. And with a few news clips here, some “personal VHS tapes” of Lamas there, and a couple of interviews, a portrait emerges.

Lamas was an arrogant know-it-all who knew little and wouldn’t listen to advice or accept simple gear upgrades that would have polished his productions. As to why his stars won’t talk about the experience, clues emerge from his personal tapes, which an old colleague held onto. We see him experimenting with shots and framing and scenes, and then rehearsing a sex scene.

“Selfish,” one colleague recalls, in Spanish with English subtitles. “A misogynist,” a former actor allegedly says.

“He was a sadist,” Torres, who worked in the camera and electrical department of a single documentary, diagnoses. “I get why everyone wants to forget him.”

Torres’ film has moments when it’s a fun man-hunt movie, and the footage he uncovers can be chilling, in a rambling confessional (actual footage of Lamas) or control freak “directing” a rehearsal sense.

But as each and every on-camera interview rambles on — too long — and the film itself winds and wends its way towards its quarry, a nagging feeling overwhelms the non-Lamas-cultist that Torres has never answered question one.

“Why is this guy worth hunting down, again?” There’s so little of “Act of Violence” included here, with its fuzzy video transfers and static-blur effects used to show its age, for us to form an opinion on it.

It’s not as obviously-demented and wrong-headed as “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” not kitschy/revolting like “Pink Flamingoes,” not as amusingly, instantly incompetent as “The Room.”

Torres has plenty of fellow aficionados on camera telling us that they “get it,” but not really why. And he samples so little of the actual film that we’re kind of left in the dark.

He’s made a documentary that investigates a cult filmmaker who had a big influence without unraveling that influence, a period piece that visits many a former (now empty) video store, that catches up with that VHS generation and a few hardcore fans who fling to VHS, who prowl social media pages hunting for those long lost actors. But in not showing enough telling samples of Lamas’ films, he never really lets us in on the joke.

Rating: unrated, nudity, sexual situations

Cast: Manuel Lamas, narrated by Emilio Silva Torres.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emilio Silva Torres. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:17

Who doesn’t love a little gibberish from the cockpit?

July 1, Steve Carell gets upstaged…again.

The acting is underwhelming, the sound is tinny and off-mike and the script isn’t the least bit subtle about shoving exploitive nudity and lesbian sex into the lurid Lovecraft thriller, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Witch House.”

So, amateurish? Hell yes.

But the ambition is here, and director and co-scripter Bobby Easley’s efforts to weave gloomy collages and montages of superimposed horror imagery — extreme close-ups of underlit rituals and nightmares and Satan showing off his horns as nude cultists cavort by the bonfire — almost atone for some of the worst sins of this non-quite-laughable trip to Lovecraft Country.

Lovecraft aficionados will know the story (“The Dreams of the Witch-House”), the ancient witch-villain Keziah Mason, the bizarre occult riff on academia, Miskatonic University, and the themes of the “Cthulhu Mythos” — the symbolic ancient geometry of inter-dimensional travel, “the witch’s curve” and Stonehenge and Nazi “magic castles” and what not.

It’s the execution of it all that really lets the picture down.

Portia Chellelynn plays Alice, a student-older-than-average who flees a friend’s apartment, her refuge after escaping an abusive relationship that ended in a beating that caused a miscarriage. Her new hide out, Hannah House, is a remote old mansion recommended by her Miskatonic professor and mentor (John Johnson).

In a huge, rambling brick house with many rooms, the frightening owner (Andrea Collins) tucks Alice in the unfinished attic.

“I need to be here. I can feel it!”

There’s just that owner, her creeper alcoholic old Jesus freak brother (Joe Padgett) and her too-welcoming walking-tattoo niece Tommi (Julie Anne Prescott) sharing the place.

What’s spooky about that?

Well, the rats, for starters. The loose floorboard hiding a long-rolled-up black magic altar cloth, creepy paintings of this former servant named Keziah and weird stuff happening in the woods out back are kind of red flags, too.

Alice doesn’t have dreams, she has nightmares. And the fact that infants and children are being abducted all around town should give her another clue.

Gratuitous nudity and supernatural perils encountered while the star’s in her underwear aside, this is a seriously silly movie. Its a high school dropout’s idea of what college is like, right down to the professor and his unmistakable Harley mechanic beard and grasp of Lovecraftian academics.

There’s a whiff of the whole “people who take Lovecraft WAY too seriously” about it, especially in the QAnon U. scenes.

Still, Easley manages some striking if murky and so dimly-lit you can’t follow the action ritual sequences. I could see that footage recycled in nightmare sequences of better films, with better acting and better sound, etc.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Portia Chellelynn, Julie Anne Prescott, John Johnson, Erin Trimble and Andrea Collins

Credits: Directed by Bobby Easley, scripted by Bobby Easley and Ken Wallace, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dreams of the Witch-House.” A Horror Wasteland release.

Running time: 1:20

You glance at the poster or the DVD cover for “ScarfFace” and you figure “Ah, a new edition to the DePalma/Pacino Cuban gangster epic” is out.

“Say ‘allo to my leetle friend” and all that.

And then you see the extra “f” in the title and figure out it’s a documentary about “competitive eating,” and chuckle. “Clever…cute.”

But the deeper you get into this film about this distinctly American “sport,” built around the annual, over-hyped and oft-televised World Championship hot-dog eating contest staged every July 4 at Nathan’s on Coney Island, the more the film resembles the making-of-a-mobster tale from the ’80s.

PETA protests and deaths among the competitors, allegations of xenophobia and corruption and racketeering and “fixed” results sour what little wry amusement there is for what its most cynical competitor aptly describes as “”wasting food in onstage display of gluttony” that is both gross and quintessentially American.

Joseph Ruze and Sean Slater’s documentary starts out like many a puff-piece TV feature on the comical metaphor for Wasteful America, Gorging America and Why America is So Fat. A little Coney Island stunt, first staged in 1916, grows into something the content-starved “All ‘Sports’ network, ESPN, turns into a big footnote in the annual “news” that spins around the July 4 holiday.

“Joey Chestnut beats Takeru Kobayashi in Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest! USA! USA!”

George Shea is a PR guy who got involved with promoting the event, took on MC duties and is laugh-out-loud GREAT at it. He had to be the one to give nicknames to some of the eaters — Joey “Jaws” Chestnut, Matthew “The Megatoad” Stonie, Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas.

“The Four Horsemen of the Esophagus are here today,” he intones, working up the crowd, competing for “The Most Important Trophy in the HISTORY OF THE WORLD!”

That there’s some hype, and the straw-boater topped Shea’s breathless patter, reciting-from-memory the titles in eating pierogis, chicken wings, brats and tacos each contestant can claim, is an amusing marvel.

And then “the hot-dog eating contest” film evolves into an expose of “Major League Eating” and hints of greed and megalomania, showing Shea as a would-be Vince McMahon/France family NASCAR cover-ups and NFL colluding hype-master who has taken it over.

It’s enough to make you lose your appetite…for hot dogs and for good-natured carny barker ballyhoo.

The portraits of the competitors are superficial in the extreme. Even the obnoxious self-promoter Juan “More Bite” (Get it?) who is always “available” to talk to doesn’t give us much idea of what motivates these folks — who might pick up an extra $75,000 a year at the very top level — or what their lives are like.

But taking the film far and wide, to Vegas and eating contests staged in restaurants and fairs, gives us an idea of the small-time nature of it, and just how low the stakes actually are that these people and the controlling (no media access except, by contract, through Shea) tyrant who runs it are fighting over.

What feels, at the outset, like a good-natured “King of Kong” (competitive arcade game players) riff on an arcane corner of Americana starts to smell like every dirty thing you’ve ever heard or suspected of the WWE, NASCAR and the NFL.

When we learn, early on, that the skinny Japanese fellow, Takeru Kobayashi, who helped make this event national news in the early 2000s, was banned from competing for refusing to sign on with the greedy control-freak publicist and hype man who took over “competitive eating,” the entire enterprise starts to smell.

And just when you marvel that of all the time we spend watching people shove hot dogs with buns down their throats “nobody chokes to death,” the deaths start to turn up.

They’re not choking, but this practice is as lethal as you’d expect, shortening and ending lives.

As an expose, “ScarfFace” makes a great surface gloss on this “sport,” just deep enough to suggest how unsavory it all is, perhaps not deep enough to lead to legal action against the filmmakers. The “scandals” surrounding it are usually limited to the deaths.

And every “King of Kong” or WWE needs its villain. Shea may even relish (ahem) that label.

The staged footage of Mexican “fans” of the sport watching it on TV and the cynical, droll commentary of semi “above it all” eater and self-described lab trial test subject Phil “The Abyss” Fuden may put this vulgar display of Ugly Americanism in perspective. Or it could be the filmmakers taking their own shot at hyping their product into something it never quite is — an authoritative take-down of a July 4 “tradition.”

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Joey Chestnut, George Shea, Miki Sudo, Molly Schuyler, Takeru Kobayashi, Juan “More Bite” Rodriguez, Phil “The Abyss” Fuden, Matt Stonie

Credits: Directed by Joseph Ruze and Sean Slater, scripted by Sean Slater. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:17

Mandy Patinkin also stars in this “Let me tell you my story” sequel that takes “Wonder” and lessons about doing the right thing and kindness back to The Holocaust.

October 14th.

“Sniper” movies are a combat genre all their own thanks to the fatal attraction of the loners — usually two-person teams — who do the work, hit-men or women in uniform, a one-or-two-shooter “surgical strike.”

Many a first-person shooter video game has sniper characters. Check the Internet Movie Database out — scores of titles built around snipers, many of them spin-offs of a seminal Tom Berenger B-movie from the early ’90s — “Sniper.”

The Ukrainian thriller “Sniper: The White Raven,” hews to that Berenger/Billy Zane film’s formula, with its own Ukrainian twists. It’s built on vengeance, a lone shooter mowing down Russians and their in-country lackeys during the 2014 Russian invasion, and a present-day 2022 epilogue.

It’s based on the experiences of a real-life Ukrainian soldier, and unlike most any sniper movie you can think of, this time, we see how such super-shooters are selected and trained.

“Nobody likes snipers,” the hard-as-nails “Cap” (Andriy Mostrenko) growls to his recruits, in Ukrainian with English subtitles. “They are insidious and elegant.” They can kill with stealth and any number of weapons, none of them all that high-tech. Because “It’s not the rifle that makes a sniper. It’s intelligence and endurance.”

Aldoshyn Pavlo stars as Mykola, a hippie pacifist when we meet him, married to an artist (Maryna Koshkina) who is expecting their first child, living lightly on the land in a dugout house they built, using electricity from a windmill they installed. They’re cute and odd enough to make local TV in their corner of Donetsk.

Mykola bikes to work and teaches his disinterested students physics. But he gets their interest when he turns a punk’s spitballs into a lesson on the mathematics of velocity.

Clever.

When tensions boil over after Ukraine removes its corrupt Russian puppet president, the stealth invasion begins. Mykola and wife Nastya are in the middle of nowhere, is a somewhat camouflaged house. They must be “spies,” the newly-unmasked Russians declare. One seriously rough-handling of the civilians later and she’s dead and he’s left for dead.

Ukrainian militia help with the burial, but they don’t trust the guy the locals nicknamed “Digger,” because of his dugout house, either. Mykola must convince them he’s no longer a pacifist, that he craves revenge. He will go by the code-name, “Raven,” he says, getting WAY ahead of himself.

The militia bootcamp training montage shows how little regard the officers and fellow recruits have for the long-haired teacher. But his math skills get him noticed when he raises his hand for the sniper recruiters.

Yeah kids, you’ve got to be able to do a lot of calculating when you’re choosing your shot.

“The White Raven” follows our grieving widower, toting his wife’s carved raven totem, into combat to carve fear on the black hearts of the enemy, one dead goon at a time.

Labeling sniper films “genre” pictures works because almost to a one — “Sniper” to “American Sniper,” Saving Private Ryan” to “Enemy at the Gates” — they all boil down to The Ultimate Test. There’s always “a shooter with talent,” as Barry Pepper’s character declares in “Private Ryan.” A sniper-vs-sniper duel is inevitable.

That said, Marian Bushan’s film does a splendid job with the preliminaries, doesn’t leave out the morality of having to shoot a familiar face, and doesn’t omit the consequences of mistakes.

The action climax is solid, tense and exciting. And if you’re wondering why Russian generals are as rare as white ravens, stick around for the coda.

Rating: Rated R for violence, bloody images, language and some sexuality/nudity.

Cast: Pavlo Aldoshyn, Maryna Koshkina and Andriy Mostrenko

Credits: Directed by Marian Bushan, scripted by Marian Bushan and Mykola Voronin. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:51

The most perilous minefield in the movies might be daring to explore teen sexuality on screen.

Raunchy farces use the cover of comedy, because everybody knows taking this subject seriously risks crossing the line into straight-up exploitation. And whatever notoriety you want for your film, few are going to embrace the scandal of turning up on a “hot teen sex” web search.

And yet every generation has a version of Larry Clark’s salacious “Kids,” with that film’s screenwriter, Harmony Korine, unleashing “Spring Breakers” a generation later.

Those are the stakes for filmmakers’ Iliana Estañol and Johanna Lietha’s “Lovecut,” a never-sordid but somewhat sterile survey of sexuality in the social media age set amongst the young, beautiful and under-parented in Vienna. They take care to avoid the whole “hot teen sex” trap by limiting nudity and keeping their focus on the young couples, their challenges and the life-altering dead-ends they can drift into trying to figure out love and sex on their own.

Everybody in the movie has secrets. Each of them is homeless, recklessly rebellious or otherwise damaged going in. And all of them end up in relationships limited or doomed by the digital nature of dating for this generation.

Anna and Jakob (Sara Toth and Kerem Abdelhamed) are in the white-hot heat stage of their affair, always in search of the next place they can “do it,” and capture what they do on video. Instagram keeps taking down Anna’s exhibitionist displays of their ardor. But if they want to move in together, the older (maybe 19) Jakob has an idea — uploading their videos to paying porn sites.

“But what if our friends see them?” Anna frets, as if their friends aren’t seeing them in bed, on rooftops or wherever the next sexual selfie is set.

Besties Luka and Momo (Luca von Schrader and Melissa Irowa) are bar and club-hopping teens on the loose, each providing the other with cover and a sense of security as Luka drags Momo — who likes playing with the assumed name and guise of “Olga, from Russia” — along on a Tinder date with Ben (Max Kuess).

Luka is all about messing around. “I don’t want a relationship,” she insists (in German with English subtitles). “Me either.” And “No FEELINGS,” she insists.

Momo isn’t content being the third wheel for Luka’s “no feelings” hook-ups. But her relationship with Alex (Valentin Gruber) is strictly online, video calls for mutual, semi-clothed masturbation. She’s anxious to meet in person, but Alex isn’t.

The “secrets” here range from the obvious to the genuinely surprising, and all point to what we “know” about someone based on their social media profile and the superficial nature of the love connections.

Everybody’s young and sexy in their streak-dyed hair, top knots, torn fishnets, short skirts or belly-baring shirts. Getting beyond that is where everything turns messy — “too old for her,” probation, greed, “using” people, exhibitionism and the like doom every affair captured here, a generation digitally trapped in a learning curve that earlier ones never had to contend with, although each era has its own challenges.

For all their film’s surface intimacy, Estañol and Lietha have the hardest time connecting the viewer with these kids. We may see their flaws and emphasize with their challenges, but there’s a clinical distance to the portrayals, a Teutonic iciness that robs them of emotions.

Nobody cries at what they’re going through, no one loses her or his temper at the way whoever they’ve hooked-up with uses them.

The drama is limited to a few mild parental outbursts, a lot of measured, under-challenged acting-out, plenty of episodes where things come to a head and yet don’t. Not really.

This milieu, kids flopping from apartment to house-breaking to checked-out hotel room that the maids haven’t cleaned yet, has an earthy promise that rarely delivers. Younger viewers may find a character to identify with, but the movie presents us only with superficialities — the hot guy on probation, the “virgin” who wants not just experience, but a real boyfriend.

And the message of “Lovecut,” that there is no “learning” through all this, unless it’s learning to manipulate each other and get away with murder with your parents, is just dispiriting.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, alcohol abuse, all involving teens

Cast: Sara Toth, Max Kuess, Kerem Abdelhamed, Luca von Schrader, Melissa Irowa and Valentin Gruber.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Iliana Estañol and Johanna Lietha. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:34

The rest of the “team” he assembles to take down the great evil menacing the universe makes its bow.

Looks fun, and by July 8 we’ll all need a laugh and a reason to duck into a cold cineplex.

“Good Madam” is a tight, lightly-chilling horror tale from South Africa, a parable of a housekeeper and what “life in service” can mean, in a supernatural sense, in the former Apartheid state.

And how this relatively simple story has twelve listed screenwriters may be the ultimate example of sharing the credit in what is always described as the ultimate “collaborative” art form.

Tsidi (Chumisa Casa) and her little girl Winnie (Kamvalethu Jonas Raziya) have just shown up at the door of the elderly, wealthy woman her mother works for. Tsidi, who was raised by her grandmother, was forced out of the house by greedy, manipulative family members when she died. As her baby daddy (Khanyiso Kenqa) is an undependable lump, mother Mavis, “Sisi” (Nosipho Mtebe) is who she turns to.

She and her mother aren’t close, and the reason is as obvious as the first ting-a-ling of the bell that elderly Diane summons Mavis with. Mavis couldn’t get away to attend her own mother’s funeral.

As we see her 60ish mother on her knees, scrubbing floors, teetering on step stools to dust light fixtures and hear her mother sternly remind her daughter of “the house rules,” we get a bad feeling about what’s going on here. This is something beyond the whitewashed version of such relationships — “devotion.” Tsidi says the obvious out loud.

“She has you living under Apartheid!”

But mother-daughter quarrels and flashbacks to the testy family meeting that cost Tsidi her home are just sideshows. As she pokes around the house, things start to happen. That husky who stuck his head in the door and gave her a look?

“Oh, he died years ago.”

When Winnie notices her mother turning paranoid and obsessed, Mom’s words of comfort are no comfort at all.

“It seems this house doesn’t like Mama.”

Director and co-writer (with many others) Jenna Cato Bass saves most of the jolts here for the third act. The patient pacing means we’re allowed plenty of time to wonder who or what and in what form the “Good Madam” is behind that locked bedroom door, which neither Tsidi nor Winnie should ever attempt to open.

“Rules of the house,” remember.

The dialogue, in English or Xhosa (play it with closed captioning on), is spare and often argumentative. Piecing together relationships and the final twists requires your undivided attention.

But the story has hints of Edgar Allan Poe and other masters of horror about it, and is clever enough to be well worth a look, no matter how many credited screenwriters it took to come up with it and polish into the production screenplay.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Chumisa Casa, Nosipho Mtebe, Kamvalethu Jonas Raziya, Sanda Shandu and Khanyiso Kenqa

Credits: Directed by Jenna Cato Bass, scripted by Babalwa Baartman, Jenna Cato Bass, Chumisa Cosa, Chris Gxalaba, Khanyiso Kenqa, Steve Larter, Sizwe Ginger Lubengu, Nosipho Mtebe, Kamvalethu Jonas Raziya, Sanda Shandu, Siya Sikawuti, Peggy Tunyiswa. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:32

Labor Day, all you people will see why ol’Rodg always stays in hotels.