Movie Nation

Does the “moron comedy” have a future? After Adam Sandler ages out of them, I mean?

Sandler’s latest for Netflix, “Hubie Halloween” has him freezing his face in perma-stupor, and doing the dopey dunce voice — just like the old days. It’s a PG-13 childish (kid-friendly-ish, too) spook spoof, and thus is more on-brand than most of his Netflix fare.

A few pranks, some slapstick, some pratfalls, with a modern “Stooge” as the hero. Not many laughs, but hey — he’s keeping the “moron comedy” genre alive.

Everybody in Salem, Mass., “America’s unofficial Halloween Capital,” picks on Hubie Dubois (Sandler). He’s become an expert at ducking everything tossed at him when he bikes to work at the supermarket’s deli counter, and at letting most of the insults that come his way from the likes of Ray Liotta, Kevin James (in a wig, shades and beard as Officer Steve). “Pubie” is one that stings, and sticks, though.

“That nickname spread like warm peanut butter,” he mutters.

Halloween, though, is Hubie’s time to shine. He’s “Salem’s Unofficial Volunteer Halloween Helper,” lecturing school kids, policing trick-or-treating, urging candy-giving generosity, booze-free teen parties and generally being a kill-job/

One big problem with that, aside from the relentless “Watch it, G.I. Jackass” abuse, is he’s easy frightened. Pranking and scaring him is no challenge at all.

And on this particular Halloween, the frights just might be…REAL.

A murderous nut has escaped the nearby asylum, thanks to the new orderly (Ben Stiller). Hubie and his mom (June Squibb) have a new neighbor who warns them to pay no mind “if you ever hear some commotion from over at my house.”

He’s played by Steve Buscemi. Beware. BEWARE.

Is it any surprise that folks start to go missing in Salem? Can Hubie calm his fears and crack the case?

There’s the standard collection of pee-pee and dog poop jokes.

The “out of his league” love interest is a high school classmate (Julie Bowen) Hubie pines for and calls “girl,” even though she — like he — graduated in 1984 (They’re both 54).

“Hubie” is the usual “make-work” project for Sandler’s Crap Pack — Colin Quinn, Tim Meadows, Rob Schneider, Dan Patrick et al. And four lesser Sandlers and assorted little Quinn, Liotta and James offspring have bit parts.

The best gag has a hint of “American Graffiti” at the radio station to it. And I liked the way the script tries to upend expectations with a goofy turned “and the moral of the story, kids” finale.

It’s less hateful than usual, but not funny at all — pretty much par for the “Happy Madison” course, in other words.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude and suggestive content, language and brief teen partying.

Cast: Adam Sandler, June Squibb, Julie Bowen, Kevin James, Steve Buscemi, Kenan Thompson, Tim Meadows, Ray Liotta, Maya Rudolph, Michael Chiklis, Ben Stiller and of course, Colin Quinn, Rob Schneider and Dan Patrick.

Credits: Directed by Steven Brill, script by Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

Last year’s release by the Department of Defense of unidentified flying object footage and the seeming admission that there’s “something” to all these decades of sightings, photographs, filmings and conspiracy-mongering about UFOs, gave birth to “The Phenomenon.”

This is the perfect time, veteran UFOlogist/filmmaker James Fox (“I Know What I Saw” and “UFOs, 50 Years of Denial”) suggests, to revisit all the “events” that have become benchmarks in UFO believer circles, and consider them again after what The New York Times reported in the spring of 2019.

So here’s Roswell, McMinnville, Socorro, Australia to Zimbabwe, with Fox trotting us through a decade-by-decade, Project Blue Book to the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

It’s the “Greatest Hits” of UFO fandom, revisited because now we’ve all seen that footage shot by Navy pilots. Something tangible is “out there,” believe it or not, covered-up or not.

This is Fox’s slickest, highest production-value film outing. It’s narrated by Peter Coyote, veteran of many a PBS documentary. There are fresh interviews and excerpts from archival conversations with politicians, military officials, eyewitnesses and experts, some more credibly-credentialed than others.

The extant footage, ranging from grainy and ancient to the newer Navy footage — still not detailed enough for us to make out the actual shape of what we’re looking at — is folded in.

And there are recreations of incidents in New Mexico, Britain and elsewhere, most memorably the 1994 Zimbabwe sightings, which included an alleged alien visit to Ariel School, to buttress the belief that visitors from other worlds are stopping by, scanning our nuclear reactors and missile installations, (in the US and Russia) and/or trying to warn us of ecological catastrophe.

But I have to say, the recycling of old evidence without having fresh “proof” doesn’t make it any more conclusive, no matter how compelling the witnesses. Fox is right that what we know now means that we can’t utterly shrug off the testimony of Patrolman Zamora in New Mexico, way back when, of those apparently still-traumatized school kids from Zimbabwe.

Still, hearing former Senator Harry Reid recall his efforts to dig into government secrets to find evidence of a Roswell coverup, of Australian kids visited and told to shut up about something they saw, and the like, doesn’t constitute “new” evidence and a spike-the-ball “Told you so” moment.

Following around the French computer scientist and UFOlogist Jacques Vallee, real-life model for the Francois Truffaut French UFO expert in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” doesn’t seal the deal either. Yes, he’s fascinating, and he’s got reasons for believing what he does. Fox doesn’t let him get into that (“Paranormal” everything is his hobby.), which might undercut his authority or at least water down his message.

And the film’s alien “debris” analysis scenes with Vallee are laughable and intentionally vague.

That’s also why the phrase “Area 51” doesn’t turn up here. No sense reminding folks of the wild stories and pop culture myths that the credulous have sworn up and down was “proof” but which have been thoroughly debunked in scientific and journalistic circles in recent years. And no, “abductions” don’t come up, either.

Books and documentaries like “The Phenomenon” serve the purpose of keeping the subject alive, even as “momentum” towards a resolution of this fascinating scientific and societal question never seems to develop. “For seventy years,” as Coyote narrates, we’ve been hearing about this, looking at possible explanations, and pondering the oddly America-centric nature of the vast majority of sightings.

Even in an age where some 5 billion of us have cellphones, with cameras, in our possession at all time, filmmakers like Fox are still forced to recycle “Greatest Hits” which have either no footage, or something as inconclusive as Dude-in-a-Bigfoot-suit in quality. At least we’re not looking at cave paintings of flying saucers in this one. But someday, we might have to revisit those as well. Heaven knows the History* Channel will.

Movies like this don’t settle the UFO question, don’t automatically make cherry-picked incidents from this or that “saucer craze” from the past undeniable true stories and there’s no sense pretending the Department of Defense settled it for you when they didn’t.

Fox & Friends may very well get their end zone dance on this subject. But he has to know, as anybody with a lick of common sense does, that when “proof” comes out, true believers like him won’t be the ones to present it to the world.

And repeating past claims ad nauseam doesn’t get anybody any closer to the “UFOs are Flown by Aliens” end zone. That’s as tedious as it is credulous, and that’s “The Phenomenon” in a nutshell.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Christopher Mellon, retired Senator Harry Reid, Gordon Cooper, Dr. Jacques Vallee, John Podesta, narrated by Peter Coyote.

Credits: Directed by James Fox. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:40

“Feel good movies” are a balm for tough times, and “Yellow Rose” comes along in one of the darkest falls in living American memory.

It’s an immigrant story with a country music hook, and it taps into our need to see that there are decent people out there, even in the South, even in the most conservative corner of music fandom.

Rose, given a vulnerable, soulful turn by screen newcomer Eva Noblezada, is a Filipina 17 year-old living in rural Texas in the motel where her mom (Prince Punzalan) is a housekeeper.

They’ve lived in this country seven years, but Rose’s dad — an American citizen — died sometime before. And her strict Catholic mom has been keeping a secret. ICE is onto them, and Dad’s status won’t protect them.

Not knowing that lets Rose hold on to her dream. She loves country music, has a lovely voice and a cheap guitar and child’s cowgirl hat — the works. Let her classmates nickname her “Yellow Rose.” If there’s one thing country music’s taught her, it’s that pluck and determination can get you through hard times.

The college-bound kid at the music store is kind of sweet on Rose. And persistent. Elliott’s (Liam Booth) the guy who takes her to Austin for the first time, serves her that first Lone Star, and arm-twists her into singing for him.

One night at the legendary Broken Spoke listening to the twangy honky-tonk crooning of Dale Watson (playing himself) change’s Rose’s life. Just not in the ways we expect.

They get back home in time to see Mom hustled away by ICE. Rose’s tears and confusion aren’t allayed by her emergency Plan B– “Go stay with your tita (aunt).”

Aunt Gail (Lea Salonga) has married well enough to have a nice house, and a new baby. But the reason she’s estranged from her family might be her husband, who doesn’t want the drama.

The Broken Spoke becomes Rose’s refuge, thanks to owner Jolene (Libby Vallari) and the white-haired, side-burned icon leading the house band, Mr. Watson.

“Honey, I don’t know anythin’ about law, other’n RUNNING from it!”

Co-writer and director Diane Paragas goes heavy on the sentiment with this homespun tale, getting drama out of Rose’s quick temper and her talent, and the ways other folks — old and young — are eager to help out.

“Let me know if you’re needin’ a safe place. That’s what they’re callin’ it now, right?”

The story is both familiar and unpredictable, tracking two points of view — Rose’s, trying to write songs to express her hurt and longing, and her mother’s journey through immigration enforcement.

Every good thing that happens we see from a long ways off, every setback is abrupt. But the whole affair ambles easily down a well-trod path and makes for a very pleasant and emotionally satisfying experience.

The songs are sweet and authentic-feeling, and authentically tentative in that “just starting out” way.

Casting Salonga, a singing actress best known for Disney’s animated “Mulan,” and not letting her sing is a cheat. But Watson is a laid-back delight and makes Rose’s odyssey make sense musically and emotionally.

Take a tip from a classic song and make sure this “Yellow Rose” of Texas is a movie you are going to see.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, and teen drinking

Cast: Eva Noblezada, Liam Booth, Princess Punzalan, Libby Vallari, Lea Salonga, and Dale Watson.

Credits: Directed by Diane Paragas, written by Diane Paragas, Annie J. Howell, Celena Cipriaso. A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 1:36

Fernando Botero stood out as “a figurative artist in an abstract era.”

Everybody wanted paint spatters, stylized geometric forms or soaked paper or cracked porcelain on their canvases. Here was a Colombian inspired by Renaissance masters painting people, animals and still-lives with a vivid color palette and in forms that didn’t require the viewer to do all the “interpreting.”

Then again, there was his “style,” which anyone recognizing his name instantly attaches to his name. “Volumetric” he calls it. He likes the fruit he paints in the bowl, the mandolin on a table, the cats, cardinals and canaries he paints and sculpts to have “volume.”

They’re fat. Round, rotund, comically exaggerated and often carrying the sting of satire, Botero’s style is a brand, as recognizable “Big Eyes” painter Margaret Keane’s. And yet, few treat his work as kitsch.

There’s a lone critic carping at the “cartoon” style of the “world’s most famous living painter” in the documentary “Botero,” an otherwise adoring biographical portrait of Latin America’s greatest artist. Dealers and curators and family members dominate this affectionate homage to a prolific artist who has dominated his era the way Picasso dominated his.

The film is built around an entertaining lunch with his three surviving children, laughing over wine, talking about his childhood and the many moves of his life, often accompanied by the sale of this or that work that financed his moves, from Medellin to Madrid, Madrid (by Vespa) to Florence, where he discovered deadpan Renaissance minimalist Pierro della Francesca, whose 15th century works he idolized and imitated.

Adding “volume.” Always more “volume.”

He went to Mexico City where the vibrant colors of Kahlo and Diego Rivera worked their way into his psyche, to New York where Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Canning Miller championed him — “THIS is ‘modern art!'”

And then, as he was on the rise, he left New York and took up sculpture, moving from Paris to Tuscany, just down the street from the marble quarries and bronze foundries that Michelangelo and his contemporaries made famous.

“A good artist looks for solutions,” one son remembers Fernando saying. “A great artist looks for problems.”

Director Don Millar’s film uses archival footage or Botero working, cut in with fresh interviews and chats with others in his circle, documenting his travels, his rise and his ways of repaying his home city — the formerly drug war zone Medellin — and Colombia’s capital, Bogota. Each is home to one of the two most important art museums in Latin America, both built by Botero, featuring centuries of great art (much of it he bought) as well as his own works.

A more critical eye might have noted how these monuments have a hint of vanity project about them. But as an artist, he sees himself “in conversation” with the great artists represented there, with Picasso and cubists, Rubens and El Greco.

But there’s no getting around how this workaholic’s audience-accessible oeuvre will endure after he’s gone (he’s pushing 90), and how these museums have permanently altered the cultural life in the cities that host them.

If you’ve ever been in the presence of a street display of his massive bronzes, and they graced Fifth Ave. and Madrid, Paris and pretty much anywhere you traveled to in the ’90s and early 2000s, you get it.

It’s all about “volume,” and Botero cranked that up like no artist of his time.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Fernando Botero, Lina Botero, Juan Carlos Botero, Dorothy Canning Miller, Rosalind Kraus, Fernando Botero Zea

Credits: Directed by Don Millar, script by Don Millar and Hart Snider. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:22

You like your horror in mashup form? 

“Vampires vs. the Bronx” is “Attack the Block” meets “Do the Right Thing” in a lyrically (and amusingly) Latinized setting.

An activist teen (Jaden Michael) named Miguel, but who goes by “Lil Mayor” is the first one in his corner of The Bronx to figure out that the predatory (white) developers, Murnau Properties, that’s buying up every business in the ‘hood is actually a nest of vampires.

His pals, the hustler and the nerd (Gerald Jones III, Gregory Diaz IV), are slow to catch on. His priest (Method Man, LOL!) won’t hear it. His mentor, the bodega owner (The Kid Mero) has to see for himself…and rewatch “Blade” to be convinced.

All the while, Frank (Shea Whigham) is closing deals and assorted follow-up visits by whiter-than-whiter neck-biters finish off the sellers. 

“Man, nobody’s gonna care…He’s (or she’s) from THE BRONX.”

Director Osmany Rodriguez and screenwriter Blaise Hemingway narrow the plot to the basics, dress up the proceedings with a generous helping of “flava” — street argot, slang, flippant under-reactions to extraordinary events — and let this genre goof of a comedy sprint by.

A major “Do the Right Thing” borrowing? Having the neighborhood “news” related by live-streaming blogger girl Gloria (Imani Lewis, sassy and hilarious) of “GloTV.”

“Sleep with one eye open and don’t get got,” she counsels, at one point.

Nerdy pal Luis (Diaz) is the “expert” on vampires of Lil Mayor’s crew, and as “Puerto Rican Harry Potter” gets no respect at all. 

Bobby (Jones) has been kicked out of school, is trying his hand at rap and is flirting with the idea of joining Henny’s gang.

Henny (Jeremie Harris)? He’s not impressed by all these pale, long-haired white dudes in their 18th century overcoats.

“Yo, Hamilton! You LOST or something? Stop RIGHT there, Mozart!”

The kids have to figure out what’s behind the string of disappearances (Zoe Saldana, Latina nail salon spitfire, is the first victim) and take advice from Luis, who brings them up to date on vampire lore and vampire fighting, “stuff he read in a comic book.”

“It’s a GRAPHIC novel!”

There are no surprises left in the genre, so don’t expect any here.

Nobody should be making serious vampire or zombie movies at this stage of the horror cycle, so this riff on the genre absolutely fills the bill. And making it a commentary on gentrification? Inspired. 

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, language and some suggestive references.

Cast: Jaden Michael, Gerald Jones III, Gregory Diaz IV, Sarah Gadon, Shea Whigham, Method Man, Coco Jones, The Kid Mero and Zoe Saldana

Credits: Directed by Osmany Rodriguez, script by Blaise Hemingway. A Universal/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

Tom Wolfe began his book about the early days of the U.S. manned space program “The Right Stuff” with an observation and an explanation.

At the time he was reporting it, you could get on a jetliner from most any American airline and the comforting, laid-back drawl from the cockpit — “This’s your captain speakin’.” — always seemed to have a touch of West Virginia about it.

Every pilot making a living flying was emulating, in Wolfe’s ears, Chuck Yeager, the American test pilot who broke the sound barrier. Yeager, played by Sam Shepard in the 1983 film adaptation of the book, was the embodiment of its title — laconic, never-panicking, a working class professional and nobody’s idea of a showboat or publicity hound. He was an American archetype, and the fact that he wasn’t one of those chosen to be America’s first astronauts was both an injustice and of less consequence than you’d think.

Because he was the role model for every member of the Mercury Seven, test pilots chosen to be “Spam in a can” for America’s impulsively conceived, desperately undertaken space program. These were macho types disinclined to lose their cool, “Maintaining an even strain” under the most terrifying work conditions of their day, just like their idol, Yeager.

Chuck Yeager is nowhere to be found in the new take on “The Right Stuff” launching on Disney+ Oct. 8. Remaking the greatest American screen epic of the ’80s meant that the producers would have to shift the focus, concentrate on the hell-raising astronauts and their families. Fair enough.

The jaunty swagger of Philip Kaufman’s film masterpiece, the droll gee whizzery of Tom Wolfe’s book? Gone.

Creator Mark Lafferty (“Halt and Catch Fire”) and his production team went so far out of their way to avoid Kaufman’s brilliant take on Wolfe’s brilliant book, that they didn’t make “The Right Stuff” at all. This runs closer to “The Astronaut Wive’s Club,” a 2015 series focused on the women behind the men — putting up with the dangers, the reckless risks, the womanizing and having to give up their own ambitions to make those men and those flights a success. Only it’s not that, either.

This is a blandly-cast, boringly-acted, dully-written, flatly-directed and instantly-forgotten bore.

The focus here, at least in the earliest episodes provided by Disney, is on the Alan Shepard (Jake McDorman of TV’s “Murphy Brown” revival) and John Glenn (Patrick J. Adams of “Suits” and “Sneaky Pete”) rivalry to be “The First American in Space.”

McDorman gives Shepard a competitive intensity and wandering eye smirk, and the screenwriters put a lot of their energy into showing the First Man to Golf on the Moon’s constant womanizing, putting an under-funded program in jeopardy every time he chose to step out.

This Shepard’s passion for “privacy” has a dark undercurrent, one the NASA shrink ID’s early on. “You aren’t honest with yourself. And that will catch up with you eventually.”

Adams’ Glenn is much more familiar to the national memory — always smiling, always politic, a Marine who matched Shepard’s competitive edge and topped it with a press and TV friendly ear for the quote — “Quite a moment for our country, and for the whole human race.” His desire, backed by his wife Annie (Nora Zehetner), a shy but steel-willed stutterer, is to seize “my chance to be the first at something memorable.”

We get quick sketches of the oddball form of training and conditioning used to winnow the potential candidates into a seven-man rotation, the one thing this “Right Stuff” allows itself to repeat from the classic film.

The film made movie stars out of Dennis Quaid, Scott Glen, Ed Harris and Fred Ward. I don’t see that happening here.

The leads don’t have much color to them, and truthfully only Michael Trotter and Micah Stock, as Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton, look anything like their real astronaut characters. Eloise Mumford, as airplane-racer turned “astronaut wife” and mom Trudy Cooper, married to Gordo Cooper (Colin O’Donoghue) is the only spouse to register.

The comic relief — for those to remember the book and the film — is limited to Patrick Fischler as the long suffering administrator Bob Gilruth. There’s precious little of it, in any event.

If you’re the type to give a series a few episodes to see if it’s worth your trouble — don’t hold your breath waiting for anything spectacular, gripping or fun. When Gilruth mutters “Another one of our rockets exploded,” instead of the filmmakers SHOWING us that, you’ve got your answer.

This “Right Stuff” is pretty much all wrong.

Cast: Jake McDorman, Shannon Lucio, Patrick J. Adams, Eloise Mumford, Patrick Fischler, Colin O’Donoghue, Nora Zehetner, James Lafferty, Michael Trotter, Aaron Staton, Micah Stock and Mamie Gummer.

Credits: Created by Mark Lafferty, based on the book by Tom Wolfe and the 1983 film by Philip Kaufman. A Disney+ release, a National Geographic production.

Running time: Eight episodes @45-50 minutes each.

In an alternate Joe Pantoliano timeline, there would be no more “Bad Boys” reboots. He’s played enough cops. No more “Joey Pants” sleazeballs, either.

He’d spend his years nursing little indie comedies like “Feast of the Seven Fishes” (Christmas is coming, RENT IT) and “From the Vine” to life.

“Vine” is the sort of cute comedy that you go into with an idea that you’re going to like it. There’s not a lot to it. But a game cast, sweetly-undemanding story and gorgeous Italian scenery make that hope come true.

It’s about quitting the real world and going back to the Mother Country to make wine that your grandfather made long ago. That’s what Mark Gentile (Pantoliano), an Italian-Canadian car company CEO finds himself doing.

He was a corporate lawyer who took over when his friend and boss, the founder, died. Unable to get the founder’s dying wish — that the company go green and sustainable — past the board of directors, Mark impulsively goes back to the place where they called him “Marco” as a boy.

That would be the hometown of Acerenza, Basilicata, Italy, and the lost-to-unpaid-taxes home of his late Nonno. That’s what they call “grandfather” there.

The movie’s “Meet Cute” comes when Mark reaches town, and an inquisitive cop (Marco Leonardi) decides to rough him up a little. Forget your childhood pal Luca, will you? “Shut up, Americano!”

Mark reverts to “Marco,” drinks and dances with the locals, breaks into the old house and has dreams and reveries about the place, the land, his grandfather and wine.

The fact that he didn’t really clear any of this with his careerist wife (Wendy Crewson of “The Frankie Drake Mysteries”) or aimless and well-over-20 daughter (Paula Brancati) doesn’t figure in his daydreams. He’ll tend the vines, get help picking the grapes and bring wine-making back to Acerenza!

But but…all the young people left long ago. It’s a half-empty town of old people, even if it is picturesque as all get-out, nestling on the top of a hill. Any vintner has to pass “certification” to grow Aglianico grapes and make wine. How will this ever work out?

“Basta andare con esso,” as the Italians say. “Just go with it.”

Confessing to the priest about his guilt, his worries about getting the town’s hopes up, is little comfort.

“By trade, I am a lawyer.”

“Perhaps you are beyond redemption, my son.”

Yes, everybody calls him “Avvocato” there, because “lawyer” is as big an insult in Italy as it is here.

Marco’s hallucinations include animated grape leaves mocking his naivete and chats with his dead grandfather and dead automotive boss.

The obligatory harvest and hand (or foot) crushing the grapes scenes are included.

And obstacles — not enough of them, really — threaten to upend the whole enterprise.

Tony Nardi and Tony Nappo play grumpy locals who pitch in, rounding out an Italian cast that is charming, quaint and funny. A young would-be suitor vamps through “Life is a Highway” when daughter Laura and Mom show up.

Tom Cochrane, who recorded that, is Canadian. Get it?

As I say, there isn’t much to this — just an Italian-American movie star who’s into wine playing an Italian-Canadian getting his feet wet in a place that should be on any list of the Most Photogenic towns in all of Italia.

But if you’re in the right mood for vicarious travel, wine and lawyer-jokes in Italian, this hits the spot.

MPAA Rating: unrated, a tiny bit of profanity, innuendo

Cast: Joe Pantoliano, Paula Brancati, Marco Leonardi, Wendy Crewson and Tony Nardi, Tony Nappo.

Credits: Directed by Sean Cisterna, script by Willem Wennekers, based on the novel “Finding Marco” by Kenneth Canio Cancellara. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:34

“The Binding (Il Legame)” is an Italian horror tale that doesn’t play by the rules, that defies every expectation it sets us up for.

Does that heighten the frights or amp up the suspense? Not really. But it’s a puzzling bit of cinematic horror bait and switch that could hold your interest.

A couple (Argentine actress Mia Maestro and Italian star Riccardo Scamarcio) travel to the South of Italy to visit his mother. Emma and Francesco are about to marry, and her pre-teen daughter from an earlier marriage, Sofia (Giulia Patrignani) is along for the ride to a remote villa where weird things are afoot.

Francesco’s mother Teresa (Mariella Lo Sardo) is no Mother Teresa. She’s all about incantations, herbal remedies and weird ceremonies. We can see that because we saw the prologue where a young woman was held down and cut in some blood ritual.

Emma starts picking up on it from the strange whispers in the house, the oddly nosy folks who visit for a group meal welcoming Francesco back, all ready for her “to become part of this world, and this family.”

Sofia sees ancient, overturned trees, hears Teresa’s claims of a magical ability to heal those trees, and screams in the night at what’s under her bed. A spider, for starters.

One bite later and Sofia’s in peril, her mother picks up on it even as Francesco and everybody else tell her “You’re over-reacting” (in Italian, with English subtitles). She isn’t.

But what we’ve been set up for, some ritualistic Southern Italian cult taking possession of the child, isn’t what’s going on. The villains aren’t necessarily the ones we finger. And the story stumbles toward a resolution that doesn’t seem to fit the facts we’ve been immersed in.

Everything, including the doctor in town who treats the bite (after Teresa’s application of herbs), seems to be “in on it,” this “binding” (evil eye curse) thing.

Emma’s rising paranoia and determination to get her kid out of there are reasonable responses, we think. But do we have all the information we need to know what’s coming?

No. We don’t.

Putting a child in jeopardy and subjecting her to horrors (with their accompanying shrieks of terror) is usually a foolproof set-up. This take on that left me cold, with a few mild frights and only a vague idea of who we should be rooting for or rooting against.

Not playing by the horror rules means “The Binding” avoids becoming “Rosemary’s Baby.” The trouble is, it doesn’t become anything else, either.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sex

Cast: Mia Maestro, Riccardo Scamarcio, Mariella Lo Sardo, Giulia Patrignani, Raffaella D’Avella

Credits: Directed by Domenico Emanuele De Feudis, script by Daniele Cosci, Davide Orsini and Domenico Emanuele De Feudis. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

Strange, dark and dystopian. Very Alan Moore. He’s in it, too. Coming sometime this fall.

There’s pretty good evidence that famous outlaw Butch Cassidy spent a little time on Brokeback Mountain. Contemporaries spoke of his sharing-the-blanket days on the trail, in prison and what-not.

And heaven knows he spent an inordinate amount of space in his letters that survive — talking up his whore-housing good times — “overcompensating,” one might say. This has been “out there” in outlaw lore for decades. So make what you will of Paul Newman’s casting in the iconic role in the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

Sundance and Butch did overdo the dynamite thing when they blew up safes on railcars, and yes, they ran into the same UP rail clerk, E.C. Woodcock, guarding the darned things on more than one robbery. Just as you see in the movie.

They didn’t head straight to “Bolivia” after their “last job” (one of many “one last score” robberies). No, they spent years ranching and failing at it in Argentina first.

The movie, like much of the “legend” around the duo? Let’s just say that the great “Nobody knows anything” screenwriter William Goldman wasn’t big on “research” and “historical accuracy.”

Actually, let’s let Charles Leerhsen say it, which he does in an amusingly flip and snarky new Butch bio out this year. A onetime Sports Illustrated and then People mag editor who wrote a pretty good book on Ty Cobb and books on the Indy 500 and famous horses and ghost-wrote one for a famous jackass (“Trump: Surviving at the Top”) turns his attention to reexamining the historic “Butch Cassidy” for his latest, “The True Story of an American Outlaw.”

Leehrsen paints vivid portraits of Butch, born Robert Leroy Parker, to a Mormon family in rural Utah, and New Yorker Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, who earned his “Sundance Kid” moniker in a one-horse town of that name that came along long before Robert Redford slapped that label on a film festival, a TV channel and the like.

Butch had a colorful career that included rustling and horse thievery, but was every bit the well-read “gentleman bandit” of lore and the George Roy Hill (script by Goldman) movie. His “Wild Bunch” or “Hole in the Wall Gang” didn’t kill victims (leaving witnesses), didn’t rob ordinary folk — just railroads, banks and once or twice, a general store.

Sundance was the “sullen” tougher one. Butch was “the charmer,” albeit one who kept the company of rougher types, bad influences who drew the law to him, all his relatively short life.

In the parlance of our times, not his, Butch wasn’t particularly “binary” in his sexuality. The whole “love triangle” with the mysterious Ethel or Etta “Place” has maybe a hint that Etta wasn’t who he wanted on his handlebars. Place is a Longabaugh forebear’s surname, because she married The Kid, by the way.

Leerhsen punctures a few of the storied names in the Outlaw Scholarship industry, visits a LOT of the places named in the newspaper accounts and later eyewitness histories (the reliable ones) and paints a richer portrait than the 1969 movie, which stands the test of time, despite inaccuracies and filmmaking blunders (see “Thomas, B.J.”).

“To feel just how soft and find the atmosphere is above your head, feel it with both hands at once” isn’t as pithy as “REACH for the SKY!” But apparently, our colorful caperers were given to waxing a tad poetic on the “stick’em up” basics.

Leerhsen paints a picture of a scene that seems worth a movie all on its own, an Outlaw Thanksgiving in which the duo served as waiters and cooks for a feast for their fellow highwaymen, surely a raucous affair if anybody’s account is to be believed.

It’s been over 50 years since the movie that defined them, and while nobody much makes Westerns these days and few would dare tackle remaking a classic, there’s plenty of stuff in this brief and breezy biography that suggests an altogether different spin on the story than the Newman/Redford one many of us know and love could be filmed.

Anybody option “Butch Cassidy” yet?

“Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw,” by Charles Leerhsen, Simon & Schuster, 253 pages. $7.99 and up (eBay, Amazon) hardcover