Movie Nation

If you love Foo Fighters and have a soft spot for the “splattertoons” corner of horror, you won’t want to miss “Studio 666.”

No, it’s not very good. None of these guys are actors and the chap they hired to direct it made “Hatchet III” for Pete’s sake. But there are scruffy, shambolic laughs, giggles amped-up by the band — especially founder/lead-singer Dave Grohl — playing exaggerated versions of themselves.

And where else are you going to see canceled creeper Jeff Garlin (“The Goldbergs”) play a Satanic record producer?

Studio 666″ is a Foo Fighters horror comedy about the band setting up shop in a haunted mansion in Encino to cut their tenth LP. Grohl is “musically constipated,” blocked, not realizing he’s composing songs he’s already written, searching youtube tutorials on creating power chords, grasping for inspiration.

He sits at the keyboard and starts a ballad, and just when we see his eyes take on a flash of “EUREKA,” just when we recognize the tune, a spectral Lionel Ritchie materializes, expresses a few words of sympathy about how hard it is to “find inspiration,” and then goes OFF with “but that’s MY f—–g SONG. Get your own…NERD.”

Yeah, “Hello.” It’s kind of like that.

Grohl plays a “raging a—-le” version of himself, a diva who orders the other five Fighters — Taylor Hawkins, Pat Smear, Rami Jaffee, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiftlett — around, demands that they move into this house that they’re recording in and drives the road crew nuts as he positions and repositions the drums (he was Nirvana’s drummer, remember) to get that “perfect” sound.

“Did you just say ‘NO’ to DAVE GROHL? I’m a f—–g ROCK STAR. I get the best parking wherever I go…for all ETERNITY! That’s the RULE!”

“There goes my hero” indeed.

But stuff starts to go wrong when their crew chief gets fried setting up their gear. Nobody — not the band, not the too-too-friendly neighbor (Whitney Cummings) who figures she could be a backup singer, and auditions unprompted for the part (hilarious), not the fanboy GrubHub delivery dude (Will Forte) who has “a demo” — is safe.

The many murders committed by whatever haunts this place involve things like a charcoal grill and a chainsaw as Grohl makes the journey from “raging” yo- know-what to “possessed” raging you-know-what.

Grohl’s funny in interviews and TV ads, and that’s kind of enough for him to carry this off. His acting tends towards mugging — eyebrow raising, overly obvious “indicators” showing us he’s seen/noticed/been-surprised-by something. He’s still the most polished member of the musician-actor cast, and he’s also the one having the most fun.

Fake-vomiting, you say?

“No more oat meal beer bongs for Dave!”

Cummings and Forte deliver, and keen-eyed horror fans may notice one of the recording engineers, who wrote the title tune for this movie but long ago made Jamie Leigh Curtis a star.

The whole package is more foul-mouthed fun than your typical dark and grim and more self-serious Rob Zombie rocker-to-slasher filmmaker outing.

Keep your expectations low — a 30 minute+  unending instrumental is meant to be their epic, “like ‘2112’ times 2112!” — and your tolerance high for a bunch of rich 50something rock stars messing around making a movie and “Studio 666” might be the monster track you’ve been waiting for.

Rating:  R for strong bloody violence and gore, pervasive language, and sexual content

Cast: Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Pat Smear, Rami Jaffee, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiftlett, Whitney Cummings, Jeff Garlin and Will Forte.

Credits: Directed by BJ McDonnell, scripted by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:46

Maybe an hour or an hour and a half into “Big Gold Brick,” the thought struck me that somebody must really love actor-turned-first-time-feature-director Brian Petsos. But who exactly loved him enough to let him make this pointless, aimless, endless indulgence of a “comedy?”

It’s the sort of empty experience where mind-wandering speculation kicks in. Was it relatives who helped finance it? Parents? Certainly Oscar Isaac must love the guy.

Isaac has a couple of scenes late in the third act. As he’s somebody who has apparently supported the Chicagoan Petsos’ movie-making ambitions by appearing in some of the shorts he made between acting gigs — Petsos was a “Dude” in “MacGruber,” “Pete” in “Bridesmaids,” and Kristen Wiig is listed as a producer here — Isaac may be the reason “Big Gold Brick” got made.

But as Petros attracted Andy Garcia, Megan Fox and Lucy Hale to be in his 132 minute “comic fantasy,” the man must be charming.

The “fantasy” comes from the film’s anti-hero, a disillusioned young writer who, from the comfort of interviews, book readings and signings, tells the story of this “Floyd” fellow who changed his life and is the subject of his book. As for the comedy? It’s nowhere to be found in “Big Gold Brick.”

The film is a laughless, drifting riff on unearned celebrity, the lies people tell about themselves to themselves and anybody gullible to believe them. In film buff terms, it’s a little “Flim Flam Man,” a bit of “The End of the Tour” and a dollop of “The Magic Christian” in its surreal, stream of nothingness episodes about the distracted, ice-cream-loving character (Garcia) who runs over Samuel the would-be writer with his Caddy, and commissions him to write his biography when the hapless Samuel wakes up.

“I challenge you…this was meant to be,” our omnipresent narrator recalls him saying in a voice-over ostensibly from the finished book.

That narrator and the star of the film is Emory Cohen, a bit player bedecked in assorted ill-fitting Ozzy Osborne wigs and so uninteresting as a character, an actor and a screen presence that I wouldn’t mention him at all if it wasn’t required.

Samuel is taken from the hospital to Floyd’s house where he meets Floyd’s dysfunctional family — the much-younger-and-plainly-cheating second wife (Fox), his flirtatious (and nothing else) daughter from his first marriage (Hale) and a disaffected, perhaps sociopathic younger son (Leonidas Castrounis).

The endless narration fills in silent montages of family members’ stories — daughter Lily’s alcoholic and cocaine-fueled breakdown which ended her budding career as a violinist, the wife’s cheating, the son’s bunny killing and Floyd’s yarns about the life that got him this mansion, trophy wife and Cadillac.

“I’m an open book,” he brags. But this will be “a secret book.” Only Floyd talks about it constantly as he drags the befuddled Samuel through his days, introducing him to colleagues and thugs he apparently owes money to as “my biographer.”

Isaac plays the lender — the thug in chief — in a showy, florid performance that dominates the film’s third act because really, Garcia’s charm playing an under-scripted toothpick-obsessed con-man can only take one so far.

There’s telekinesis, a manipulated high school (plainly 30ish) basketball star (Tevin Wolfe), and one person (Shiloh Fernandez) who appears to “really” know Floyd, because they work together and not in anything that would explain Floyd’s large way of living.

As if his toothpicks and fondness for hotel buffets didn’t give him away.

No social, psychological or satiric point is made. No laughs are scored. And nobody involved will be slapping this on their “sizzle reel” or resume…save for the writer-director, who may be beloved but who may never ever get to make another movie after this “all-star” debacle.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Emory Cohen, Andy Garcia, Megan Fox, Lucy Hale and Oscar Isaac

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brian Petsos: A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 2:12

Veterans of the Honk Kong martial arts movie scene star in “Time,” a tale of martial arts assassins in retirement, a comedy that has ties to “Kung Fu Hustle” and “Shaolin Soccer” and enough promising ideas passing in front of the lens that you keep waiting for a big finale that never comes.

Here’s what I mean by “promising.” How would low-rent contract “muscle” make ends meet in its dotage? Maybe hired killers could take on freelance work from online ads — aged contemporaries who know “There’s nothing worse than being bedridden (in Cantonese with English subtitles, or dubbed).”

The killers would become “assisted suicide” contractors. That’s the best idea “Time” loses track of over its 98 minutes.

A kick-ass hit-man/woman trio, “The Invincible Trio,” used to rule Hong Kong’s underworld back in the day. We catch them in their prime in an old-fashioned slo-mo, freeze-frame to animated still brawl in the opening scene, which has the groovy music and cartoonish facial expressions that characterized the Bruce Lee-and-earlier era in kung fu cinema.

These three — Chau, Chung and Fung — were unbeatable, with the cold-blooded Chau usually delivering a throat slitting coup de grace via a “the Lethal Slash” of his curved blade.

But that was decades ago. Chau (Patrick Tse) is now a wizened noodle cook, too slow with his handmade pasta to keep up with his nephew’s new automatic noodle maker.

Fung (Bo-Bo Fung) still sings, which she has to do to support her deadbeat son, daughter-in-law and grandson. Her moves are pretty rusty and she’s looking at assisted living options.

And roly-poly Chung (Suet Lam), their driver and sometime rescuer, has gotten even rounder and is diabetic, short of breath and enamored of a sex worker one third his age.

A DJ’s message on the radio gets the band back together. But these assignments are sad and the infirm, aged and sickly or just lonely clients who hire them are even sadder.

Fung lives by the same aphorism she tells audiences (older) for her cabaret act. “Life is short, death is sure.” Live while you can. But these new clients helping them pay the bills? They’re a bummer.

“Don’t make my wife wait,” one wealthy, aged widower pleads.

That whole story thread is abandoned when Chau takes one job too many, one hit that’s way out of the ordinary. Tze Ying (newcomer Suet-Ying Chung) takes off her Beats, snaps a selfie with the old, ponytailed hit-man, all dressed in black at her door. He yanks the phone out of her hands, ignores her “I want to DIE” pleas, and flees.

But she’s got the drop on him, snatching his phone as he took hers. She’s determined to make him help her with her problem. And she’s maybe 16, 17 years old.

First-time feature director Tsz Pun Ko and his screenwriter find a few funny things to do with this situation, confronting the boy who dumped this lovesick teen, for starters.

Hey, the kid protests, “I took her to a BTS concert already.” He’s paid his dues. He’s entitled to break up.

Most of the attempted humor here is about clueless old folks still able to get a dirty job done and the enervating shrug of deciding whether or not to just “give up” themselves

The fights are fun, but far between.

If you’ve watched Hong Kong gangster movies or martial arts comedies, you’ve seen these folks in their prime. There’s not inherently sad in seeing them now, as Tse still has the air of menace, Lam still a waddling punch-line and Fung still “the girl.”

But the generically-titled “Time” never finds many laughs and never finds its way through these twilight years, when the “invincible” are more vulnerable, but still need the work.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, blood, sexual situations

Cast: Patrick Tse, Bo-Bo Fung, Suet Lam and Suet-Ying Chung.

Credits: Directed by Tsz Pun Ko scripted by Ka-tung Lam. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

No self-respecting werewolf movie would be caught undead without its silver bullets, a torchlit search for “the monster” through the gloom, with survivors gathered in a church that doesn’t offer nearly enough protection.

Writer-director Sean Ellis, whose real-history WWII thriller “Anthropoid” I loved, serves up a gorgeous but conventional tale of the beast with “The Cursed.” It’s a ponderous entry in the genre that adds a few new wrinkles, but not nearly enough, to put this one over.

An awkward framing device shows a gas attack, charge and mass machine gunning in the trenches of France during World War I. A victim, treated in the gory field hospital, puzzles the surgeon.

“That’s not a German bullet!”

Thirty-five years earlier, in the part of France where the characters have Irish Christian names and sing Irish ditties and are played by Irish actors and yet are French, something awful happened. It started as a land dispute and ended with a massacre. As the landowner (Alastair Petrie) was murdering Gypsies with a claim to some of his land, he’s the last to realize that the slaughter is only beginning, even though he hears the curse invoked.

Because he had no idea the Romany woman (Pascale Becouze) had this “Gypsy silver” on her person. A silver set of false teeth with fangs and runes inscribed on them was buried with her in a mass grave beneath the human scarecrow the gentry cruelly set up.

As the children of the village and of the gentleman’s great house start having nightmares about what happened at that Gypsy encampment, their weird visions come to life.

And that’s when a traveling pathologist (Boyd Holbrook of “Logan” and TV’s “The Fugitive”) happens by. A child disappears, another is mauled, the kids aren’t telling what they know. But this Dr. McBride has some notion of what’s causing this. He might even have an idea of how this all started, and how it all will play out.

The World War I framing is cumbersome, but at least that animates and provides visual varoiety to the bookends of “The Cursed,” which lumbers through the grey/black (with splashes of orange torchlight) color scale of the production design — shadows and fog, with nary a clear sky nor a flash of green in the late-winter forest to change up the look.

As the wealthy family is attacked, as the locals still go out in small groups to be turned into victims, Dr. McBride has to convince them, pretty much one at a time, that whatever this is, he’s seen it before and it’s just the sort of thing that can curse a family into extinction.

“Is what you just saw absurd?” isn’t a punchline or unintentional commentary. Everybody, especially Holbrook, takes this all quite seriously. Kelly Reilly and Roxane Duran stand out as the lady of the house and her maid, women numbed by the shock of the unknown.

That shock is, as happens too often in movies about the extraordinary, muted. What, werewolves are old hat in this corner of France?

The effects are standard-issue CG beasts, with one passing muster even on the dissection table (Ewww).

What works against “The Cursed” is its conventionality and its pacing. When we know the genre story beats — yes, somebody has to MAKE the silver bullets — the way to make them play is to dash through them, saving your pauses for big confrontations, big revelations and a big fire. The beats are here. They just pass like sands through the hourglass — ever-so-slowly.

You could Oscar short-list the production design (Pascal Le Guellec, Thierry Zemmou) and art direction (Patrick Schmidt, Paulo Gonçalves), even pay special homage to Ellis’s cinematography. That doesn’t change the fact that the writer/director/DP has made a werewolf movie as pretty as a painting, and almost as animated. It looks better than it plays.

Rating: R for strong violence, grisly images and brief nudity.

Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly, Alastair Petrie, Roxane Duran and Nigel Betts

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sean Ellis, an LD release.

Running time: 1:51

“Fresh” is a nasty, satiric swipe at the predatory nature of dating and how ill-advised any “Just go for it” ethos is for a single woman in the America of today.

Screenwriter Lauryn Kahn and director Mimi Cave take a broad swipe at “Just give me a smile,” sexism and the objectification of women.

Their aim is dark comedy — darker than dark, darker even than “Promising Young Woman.” But the chuckles are mostly in the finale.

Using “patient” to describe this grim horror tale is just being polite for “Could you go any slower?” Any film that starts with a 30 minute+ prologue and ends with a series of “Jesus, isn’t this over?” anti-climaxes is almost bound to frustrate.

The characters are wafer thin “types,” the predicament introduced early and dragged out in ways meant to be excruciating, but the plot turns are more predictable than one might like.

And considering that “predicament,” which has hints of “Misery,” “Hannibal,” “Split” and pretty much any thriller built on a kidnap victim and the awful things an awful person might do to her or him, there’s just a hint of miscasting.

As everybody reviewing this is being coy about that awful hook at the heart of the picture, I’ll join in and limit my complaints about the picture’s fat missing where it’s needed and turning up where it isn’t — starting with excessive length.

Runway-thin Daisey Edgar-Jones of “Normal People” and TV’s “War of the Worlds,” plays Noa, a city 20something who laments her relationship status more than she should, at least according to her gay BFF Mollie (Jojo T. Jones of TV’s “Twenties”).

“You do NOT need a man” falls on deaf ears, which is why Noa swipes right and winds up with one boor after another. But this guy at the supermarket, while tossing old pick-up lines around, at least delivers them cute and smooth.

“You live around here? Because I live over…on aisle six.”

Steve, given an oily, older-man polish by Sebastian Stan of “Pam & Tommy” and the Marvel Universe, gets her number, gets a date and gets to wake up with Noa, who snaps a picture to let Mollie know that she’s finally met a charmer. Steve is courtly, genteel, considerate, a doctor doing “my second residency,” which he looks almost young enough to pull off.

Mollie’s getting a “stranger danger” vibe, but naive Noa leaps right into the “let’s go away for the weekend” pitch. A little cell phone silence and cyber-stalking raises Mollie’s antennae higher. But by then, it’s too late. Noa’s in somebody’s remote, luxurious lair, one with a basement that could be AnyDungeon. What might Steve have in store?

“I’m gonna tell you, but you’re gonna freak out.”

That’s just the set-up, the first act. “Fresh” is about Noa’s dilemma, how she works that problem and Mollie’s efforts to find a friend who has lost control of her phone.

Stan brings a real relish to his captor character, dancing about to early MTV (“Obsession” and “Restless Heart”) hits, calmly taunting Noa, lightly scolding her when she doesn’t “relax” and just go along with his heinous plans like “the others.”

Cave’s stylish but sluggish debut manages a surprise or two, but botches thriller basics. She lingers over the clues Noa and/or Mollie pick up, but skips giving any hint of Noa’s mettle or cunning. The “ticking clock” hanging over her is gruesome and urgent, but she seems numbed to it and the picture’s pacing underscores that. Lots of cute camera angles and shock-shots of what’s in that house and what Noa is fated to become take the place of urgency.

The “dating is deadly” metaphor is introduced, and lip service is paid to not letting “victim blaming” enter into anybody’s thinking. But that feels shoehorned in.

The casting is problematic in a couple of ways, the least of which is the 15 year age difference/sophistication gap that our lonely waif never picks up on.

Although the genre isn’t really my thing and this particular entry in it is more “Human Centipede” than I care for, most of these quibbles wouldn’t matter if the picture clipped along, which it doesn’t. All that screen time, and we know virtually nothing about anybody in this — victim, villain, best friend or otherwise.

That dulls whatever edge this satire has, and in a movie like “Fresh,” “cutting” is the whole point.

Rating: R for strong and disturbing violent content, some bloody images, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sebastian Stan, Charlotte LeBon, Dayo Okeniyi and Jojo T. Gibbs

Credits: Directed by Mimi Cave, scripted by Lauryn Kahn. A Searchlight Pictures release.

Running time: 1:54

A snow storm, a closed interstate, five people holed up in an interstate rest area and somebody there has a little girl duct taped in a van.

This 20th Century release is coming to Hulu Friday and stars Havana Rose Liu, Dennis Haysbert, Dale Dickey, Danny Ramirez and David Rysdahl.

Samuel Goldwyn has this “You’ve no idea who yer dealin’ wit” thriller, which opens March 18.

Michael Smiley, Annes Elwy and Iwan Rheon are the stars.

Every generation has its own tolerance level for grossout, antic comedy, and the farce “Mother Schmuckers (Fils de plouc)” takes a stab at pushing that boundary on behalf of Gen Z.

The Belgian siblings Lenny Guit and Harpo Guit start with “Pink Flamingos,” and take a “Kentucky Fried Movie” curtain call. And in between is a scattering of frantic, nonsensical and barely-translatable Tim & Eric “you had to be there to be in on it” comedy.

They slapped together a movie that moves, but doesn’t exactly “progress” from point A to any point at all through a string of random scenes, situations, tussles and the like. They start with baking feces, an act their sex worker mother (Claire Bodson) interrupts, drift into bestiality, dismemberment and necrophilia and wrap with a post-closing-credits film within a film that’s no funnier than the short and nonsensical hooey we’ve just endured.

What the hell award-winner and one-time Bond villain Mathieu Amalric is doing in this atrocity is anybody’s guess.

Their mother is depressed and avoiding her (State licensed?) pimp (Chaida Chady Suku Suku) and more than willing to tell these two, siblings Issachar (Maxi Delmelle) and Zabulon (Harpo Guit), that she loves her terrier more than them.

Making Mommy vomit makes Mommy cross, after all.

The 20ish lads proceed to stumble through working-poor Brussels, shoplifting at a local market, insulting and fending off Mom’s lovesick and morbidly obese client (Toni d’Antonio) and getting mixed up with a friend (Valentin Wilbaux) who is hellbent on making his own movie. He says he’s lined up a car. And he’s quick to show off a pistol he’s procured.

The brothers take it target shooting — hunting for pigeons, an accident waiting to happen. The dog? They Journey Jack, as he’s called, early on. But not before they’ve encouraged a stranger to buy him off them, or help pay for his “testicular cancer” (in French with English subtitles), with the dog biting the lady’s kid — hard.

“He’s bitten me a LOT, and you don’t hear me whining about it!”

There’s an antic energy to these opening scenes as the boys tussle over the gun and find themselves chased through the streetlife of their hood, where the sight of them sprinting with a pistol draws cries of “JiHAD!” They’re bounced by a cop (another client of their busy busy mother), threatened,

They cost a guy his job, and that’s the very guy who decides all his friends should take a swing at Zabulon.

“Everybody slap him! He’s like a Playmobile!”

None of this adds up to anything, save for the gritty, down-and-out backdrop that is the setting of “Mother Schmuckers.”

The trailer to this was frenetic enough that I came in expecting something zippier and wittier. I laughed maybe twice.

That could be a “wrong generation to ‘get it'” thing. But I’m putting my money on “This ugly, gross, spittle-spattered and incoherent junk movie just isn’t funny.”

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual content, profanity, gross gags

Cast: Harpo Guit, Maxi Delmelle, Claire Bodson, Chaida Chady Suku Suku and Mathieu Amalric

Credits: Scripted and directed by Harpo Guit and Lenny Guit A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:11

Sure, you can hire an Italian Robert Pattinson look-alike as your “recruiter/groomer” for “undead” fresh blood in your “Romeo & Juliet rise from the grave” romantic thriller. Doesn’t mean you have to lay on the fairy dust glitter and what not.

It took only one of the six screenwriters lined up for “Don’t Kill Me” to come up with a new hybrid vampire/zombie brand for those who can’t be killed without a lot of extra effort. Six writers and one of them said, “Let’s call them the ‘Overdead'” and thus earn his or her stipend.

This Italian thriller, more gory than thrilling, is about a virginal teen Mirta (Alice Pagani) who hooks up with the brooding, R-Pattsy “bad boy” (Rocco Fasano). She almost instantly has buyer’s remorse when he talks into ingesting something of a black-tar nature through eyedrops, and rocks her world with the only sex she’s ever had.

Because that puts both of them in coffins, Montague and Capulet style. Only she’s the one who wakes up, sees her eyes turn into huge black pupiled orbs, her fingers into witchy gnarls and her tastes turn toward human flesh.

“I imagine you’re familiar with the tastier parts of the body,” her first interpreter of “overdead” life (Silvia Calderoni) tells young Mirta, who has been stumbling about, avenging herself on married club-stalking predators and her father’s lusty choice for a housekeeper.

What works are the introductory chapters to this slow-walking thriller from a hack grandson of Vittorio De Sica. We see reckless teens GTIing the twisty roads of the Dolomites of Northern Italy, him speeding like a demon, her desperately trying to shout out directions so that he doesn’t run them off a cliff or into an oncoming truck. We hear the dare, her efforts to get her “junky” beau off whatever it is that he’s cooking in a spoon and dribbling into his eyes.

And we see the corpses after she joins him in the grave after taking that dare. Stay off drugs, kids! And vampires who describe themselves as zombies!

What’s most fascinating are Mirta’s struggling first few days of taking stock of her ability to kick open a tomb and rejoin “life” on Earth. She’s seeing horrific changes to her eyes, her gnarled, Nosferatu fingers, and to her appetites.

Where is her companion in death? Without him she has no reason for all she’s sacrificed, no guide. For now.

Like a lot of horror movies about the undead, “Don’t Kill Me” bogs down in all the exposition/history of the overdead and those who hunt them, the Benandanti. Yeah, they’re some sort of silencer-pistol-armed Catholic cult. Kind of explains Scalia’s death at a shooting club, doesn’t it? You can’t waste too much time on stuff like this in an 95 minute movie.

There’s little logic to trying to make the impossible logical, and De Sica’s six screenwriters don’t put much effort into that. We see Mirta protected and even over-protected from the first approach of the “bad boys,” only to have that big-sisterly protector abruptly bail on her the minute they walk into a club that’s a bit young and unruly for her tastes.

Nothing that follows makes much more sense than that.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Alice Pagani, Rocco Fasano, Silvia
Calderoni, Fabrizio Ferracane, Sergia Albelli and Giacomo Ferrara.

Credits Directed by Andrea De Sica, scripted by Chiara Palazzolo, Gianni Romoli, Antonio Le Fosse, Giacomo Mazzariol, Marco Raspanti, Eleonora Trucchi. A Warner Brothers release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:35

“Potato Dreams of America” is a giddy gay fantasia on Russians leaving for the Promised Land, a romp bubbling with wit, wry commentary and visual DIY visual invention.

That’s how it begins, anyway. Writer-director Wes Hurley (born Vasili Naumenko) turns this version of his “true story” into social satire about escaping the former and “still the same” U.S.S.R., fleeing homophobia, anti-Semitism and backwardness there, and coping with versions of the same thing in the U.S.

The Russian stuff is fresh and funny, a child’s memory play of a movie about what stands out about his first home. But a lot of that freshness and spark evaporates as the film shifts locales and covers well-worn “coming out” tropes after Coming to America.

Little “Potato” (Hersh Powers), as his mother (Sera Barbieri) calls him, remembers the abusive marriage his parents shared and coming of age in the last gasps of Soviet era Vladivostok. Mom was a doctor in the prison system, and after her divorce they lived in a cramped apartment with her racist, judgmental mother (Lea DeLaria, hilarious).

Amid the blackouts, shortages and propagandistic totalitarian TV, little Vasili and his pals revel in telling each other the plots to Americans movies like “Total Recall,” lying when they run out of material.

“I saw ‘Star Wars: Episode 35” at uh, my cousin’s friend’s house. Here’s how it goes!

When they’re not lying about cinema, his classmates are all about the anti-Semitism (Potato feels for his Jewish classmate) and homophobia. His future looks bleak, as it’s either join the police (who are murdering inmates in Mom’s jail) or “the Russian Army,” which his grandma assures him “You vill never survive!”

Potato remembers himself barking, “The communists are NO BETTER than the Nazis” to a teacher, refusing to wear a red scarf on school picture day. And even if that isn’t true, his fate is sealed when the U.S.S.R. collapses, a new “renegade” TV station comes on the air and he gets his first tweenage glimpses at the homoerotic pleasures of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

Thank heavens his mother applies to one of those “be a bride for a lonely American” services, and they wind up with the nice, well-off John (Dan Laria of “The Wonder Years)”). He’s into toy trains, Russian Orthodox Christianity and “control.” Maybe not so nice after all.

Have Potato (now played by Tyler Bocock) and his Mom (Marya Sea Kaminski) leapt from the frying panski and into the fire?

“Potato” takes a sharp turn towards “conventional” once we get past our hero’s early efforts to fit into an American high school, mismanaged by an overly-helpful teacher, thrown in with “his own kind” (a Russian emigre, just as bigoted as the people Potato moved away from) and finding a girl so he can be her gay BFF.

It’s never a bad film, although one plot twist is eye-rollingly convenient, and the third act wraps up with a clumsy abruptness. But there’s no getting around how the air goes out of the balloon shortly after we leave the invention (mimed dance, shadow play scenes, all managed on the cheap) and deprivation of Russia.

The laughs are both easy and biting “over there.” Grandmas gripes that “See? I told you capitalism wasn’t going to be all that” when the Soviet empire collapses. “Same old Russia,” same blackouts, cruelty, petty prejudices. One minor improvement? “Toilet paper.”

The performances are sprightly and fun, and the worst things you can say about the American half of the movie is that we’ve seen the gay and out and cutting a wide swath through the clubs thing many times, often used, as it is here, to illustrate losing shackles and experiencing “freedom” (see the earliest Almodovar films).

The novelty of the Russian scenes is in recalling how limited the culture was, where books and classical music and dance were celebrated and shoved down the public’s throats, and all the kids revolted by talking up “Hollywood movies” and their “happy endings” and memorizing Ninja Turtle “CowaBUNGAs.”

Given the Russian influence on the most gullible third of the American electorate, any film that reminds us why no one moves there and why people there, even today, dream of fleeing, is a good thing.

Hurley’s efforts to wrestle with the role of religion in the culture are more haphazard and under-developed. Christian proselytizing in Russia lets Jesus (Jonathan Bennett) move in with Potato and his family. In America, Christianity is trotted out just long enough to show it as the “opiate” of control freak men.

Still, even if Hurley has only one movie in him and this hit-and-miss proposition is it, Hurley’s personal story is fresh and engaging enough to stand out, a coming-of-age saga with modest ambitions that get to the heart of some still “self evident” truths — the freedom to be who you are, life your life and pursue your own dream of America.

Rating: unrated, sex

Cast: Sera Barbieri, Hersh Powers, Marya Sea Kaminski, Tyler Bocock, Jonathan Bennett, Dan Laria and Lea DeLaria

Credits: Scripted and directed by Wes Hurley. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:35