Movie Nation

This Feb. 17 release produced a trailer that gave me a chuckle or three. Prom King “evolves” into a leader of witches, plainly under false pretenses.

Check out the DIY energy in this fly-on-the-wall take on misspent youth, high school recklessness and aimlessness.

“Fight Club” “Sk8rboi” garage band suburbanites misbehaving as only they can (and get away with it).

“Therapy Dogs” has its premiere at Slamdance, because it’s way too cool looking for Sundance.

I avoid checking out early sound films as a rule. The bulky cameras and sound gear make for static productions. The acting is of a more theatrical “classical” pre-“Method” era and seems as stagebound as the blocking and camera work.

The film of Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Street Scene” might be a case in point. But King Vidor’s film of this single (almost) set movie leans into those handicaps and makes a fascinating time capsule for Depression Era America, the state of American drama, pre-Production Code cinema and the motion picture just as it was evolving into the talking motion picture.

It’s a chatty character study parked firmly on the stoop of a New York Hell’s Kitchen brownstone, a “Hot enough for you?” summer tale of infidelity, gossip and a melting pot that more or less melted together so long as nobody got their backs up about xenophobia, Italian flattery of Mussolini and the one Jewish family could turn a deaf ear to anti-Semitic slurs and a bullying goon.

The acting varies from subtle to ham on the hoof. Legendary stage and screen character actress Beulah Bondi stands up for acting’s old school, milking her tone-deaf, judgmental and hypocritical busybody Mrs. Jones for all that she’s worth.

“What them foreigners don’t know about bringin’ up a baby would fill a book.”

Characters can seem like caricatures — such as Mrs. Jones’ mob goon son (T.H. Manning) and bottle blonde floozie of a daughter (Greta Granstedt).

But what stands out is the subtle turn by Sylvia Sidney as Rose, a sexually-harassed office worker fending off her boss’s advances, enjoying the company of the sensitive Jewish neighbor Sam (William Collier Jr.), but struggling to keep the peace between her lonely and possibly-straying mother (Estelle Taylor) and her bluff and abusive stage hand husband (David Landau).

Rice’s snapshot of tenement life is straight-up melodrama, with the various “types” behaving mostly according to type, and an ending preordained based on the what we learn about the characters in the opening act. His single-set show has characters calling out of windows, climbing through windows, harassing and sticking up for each other, passing around ice cream cones one moment, judging the next.

Vidor, with director of photography George Barnes (and uncredited assistant from future “Citizen Kane” wizard Gregg Toland), only manages a few visual flourishes in an opening sequence (crane shots) that might have been filmed silently and looped later, insofar as that process was developed at the time.

“Street Scene” is famously “pre-Code” although the only surviving print of it is apparently “approved,” as in tidied up according to Production Code standards. It’s still jarring to hear long-abandoned slurs dropped with the casual ease of regular use.

As dated as it obviously is, there’s a timeless quality to the work that makes it a cultural touchstone, the movie anyone making a New York City period piece today consults and references when recreating the “street scenes” of a “Godfather,” “Do the Right Thing” or what have you. What everybody observes about neighborhood life, Rice observed and recorded first almost 100 years ago.

The fact that the play was later made into an opera by Kurt Weill seems almost redundant. Rice’s dialogue, performed in solos or duets, is the music of the ’20s (the play premiered in 1929), so imitated its like every New York Depression movie since has been a sing-along.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Estelle Taylor, Beulah Bondi, David Landau, William Collier Jr., Russell Hopton, George Humbert, Greta Granstedt, Max Montor and John Qualen

Credits: Directed by King Vidor, scripted by Elmer Rice, adapted from his play. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:28

If you’re not watching Netflix’s series adaptation of Luke Pearson’s “Hilda” books, about a little Scandinavian girl interacting and learning about the magical creatures all around her, the feature-length film “Hilda and the Mountain King” may not be the most comprehensible introduction to this world.

A follow-up to the most recent “Hilda” series, it plunges us straight into her reality, mid-dilemma, and forces the viewer to adjust to the simple, TV-budget animation, the vast clutter of characters and what that does to a story that breaks down “prejudice” into its root words — “pre judging.”

Aimed at the very youngest viewers, Hilda (voiced by Bella Ramsey) is a curious child raised by her doting single-mom (Daisy Haggard), with a couple of human friends at school, and assorted magical beings and critters who help her through various predicaments.

“Mountain King” hurls her into her biggest challenge yet. A resident of Trolberg, where the cynical, fearmongering chief of the guards Erik Ahlberg (John Hopkins) keeps the locals terrified of the trolls outside the wall that protects them, Hilda finds herself swapping places with a troll.

Her Mom is dealing with an unruly replacement baby troll named Baba, while Hilda is now a troll, trapped under the mountain with creatures who can angry and pitiless, or merely misunderstood and confused at why the humans hate them.

Hilda rages and tries to flee, and only calms down when she’s walked-through this world by sympathetic Trylla (Rachel August) and forlorn Trundle (Dino Kelly).

Increasingly frantic Mom enlists the family’s magical friends in her search, struggling to find a way “into” the mountains, chased by evil trolls, saved (literally) by the “bells” which locals use to ward off troll attacks.

Hilda’s pals Frida and David (Ameerah Falzon-Ojo, Oliver Nelson) struggle to push back the rising tide of fear and lashing-out in Trolberg, driven by troll attacks, and by prejudice and the fearmongering of Ahlberg, Mr. “Your safety is safe with me.”

Hilda is sent on mini-quests as she learns that there are both good trolls and bad ones, “just like people,” and that trolls like to hoard things either cast off from human life, or purloined from it.

On the positive side, the film has semi-buried lessons about processing one’s feelings, stepping back from any rush to judgment and mistrusting authority when it tells you things you can see with your own eyes aren’t true. Most of the protagonists are female — even the troll mother Trylla — and they’re the ones who push dilemmas towards resolutions.

The animation, as with the Annie (Animation) Award winning series, is an acquired taste. And the story, by this stage, has a clutter to it — burdened with loads of characters who do little more than add visual complexity to scenes that are, by the standards of the best animated children’s entertainment of today, crude, almost stick-figure ugly.

Comparisons to the worlds created by Hayao Miyazaki seem breathlessly generous. This never feels that thought-out or polished. “Adventure Time” seems the benchmark comparison here — an almost humorless “Adventure Time.” The whole “world” is disconnected from ours, abstracted beyond far beyond “Dragon Tales” or similarly simplistic American made children’s TV.

The French film and series “Arthur and the Minomoys” was what came to mind for me, something odd and alien and dense with characters and its own myth — European — and not particularly engaging or relatable.

Of course it’s not intended for me. But having spent a few years puzzling over what children under my roof were consuming and what they were getting out of it, I can’t say “Hilda” is anything more than a well-intentioned mixed bag of children’s entertainment.

The movie may wrap things up, but you can’t come into it without having a little taste of Hilda first. And I’m not sure even that enriches what “Hilda and the Mountain King” has to offer enough to endorse it, good intentions and Annie Awards or not.

Rating: TV-Y7

Cast: The voices of Bella Ramsey, Daisy Haggard, John Hopkins,
Ameerah Falzon-Ojo, Rachel August and Dino Kelly.

Credits: Directed by Andy Coyle, scripted by Stephanie Simpson, based on the books by Luke Pearson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25

Here we go, here it is, so on.

“The Laureate” is a biography of the “trinity” that the British poet, novelist and translator Robert Graves shared with his painter/illustrator wife, Nancy Nicholson and American poet, critic and essayist Laura Riding.

Writer-director William Nunez narrows the focus of the film to the few years this trio were together, and briefly joined by the fourth who made their “circle,” Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs. Nunez’s thesis is that the longest-surviving Great War poet — who went on to write the best-selling “I, Claudius,” the first “Lawrence of Arabia” biography, a classic WWI memoir “Goodbye to All That” and well-regarded Latin and Greek translations of ancient texts — might not have lived to tell those tales had it not been for this restorative menage a trois during the Roaring ’20s.

As highly-strung as the whole affair was — the story is framed inside a double suicide attempt — Graves, a bisexual before that word was in common use and a sufferer of what would later be labeled post traumatic stress disorder in the trenches of France, might not have lived to write his famous later works had not the sexually-assertive and literarily-provocative Riding fan-lettered her way into their lives.

It’s a sturdy film, well-acted, but without much in the way of flash. And the TV chat show producer Nunez (“The Beat with Ari Melber”) proves a somewhat pedestrian big-screen biographer, as “The Laureate” is not as meditative and self-consciously arty as one might have liked, a sort of less salacious and utterly humorless “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” or “Henry & June.”

We meet Graves (Tom Hughes of TV’s “Victoria”) as he broods and shakes or screams off the waking nightmares of his service in the Great War. Graves, forelock of hair permanently over one eye, recites his poems in voice-over and frets to his friend and more famous contemporary Siegfried Sassoon (Timothy Renouf) that “war is not the end, but the beginning of violence.” And more’s the pity, because in the mid-20s “no one needs a ‘war poet’ any more.”

Graves is shell-shocked, broke, unemployed, married and a father. His wife and illustrator Nancy (Laura Haddock of “White Lines” and the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies) struggles to buck Mister “Yesterday’s News” up, but his issues are many and include sexual problems.

Then he hears from this America poet and critic, and they promptly invite her to move in with them.

“If you invite a serpent into your home,” Nancy narrates, “you perhaps shouldn’t be surprised if it bites you.”

Riding, played by “Glee” alumna Dianna Agron, is vivacious, assertive and all bedroom eyes when it comes to Robert, but charming and blunt with the feminist activist Nancy as well.

“Jewish girls like me are always at the bottom of the pile,” Riding complains. But she eavesdrops on their sexual struggles and even tempts their little girl — whom she’s meant to tutor — into taking dangerous risks. Riding plays the angles, surfs their social scene and hopes to be published by Robert’s friend, T.S. Eliot (Christien Anholt). Or perhaps Robert’s other publisher friend Jonathan Cape (Edward Bennett) will show an interest.

This much is certain. Riding yanked Graves out of his funk and back into writing and getting published, even as she tempted and bedded him, possibly his wife as well and certainly this Anglo-Irish poet Phibbs (Fra Fee) whom she meets and abruptly invites into their highly unorthodox jazz age “new world” living arrangement.

“If you’re not going to live with passion and instinct, you don’t belong in this new world!”

The film hews just close enough to the accepted parameters of the biographies of all involved to not merit ridicule, even if Nunez seems to take liberties here and there to sex things up a bit. Most involved lived long enough to contest and muddy the waters of their respective stories so that even the apparent double suicide attempt isn’t the only accepted explanation for two people ending up going out of the same fourth floor window.

Agron brings the sex appeal necessary for Riding to come off, Haddock is fine as the “mannish” long-suffering, lonely wife. Hughes makes just enough of impression to be convincing as a suffering but savable poet whose greatest glory would come from explaining, exploring and critiquing the poetic mind and creative process, writing he mostly did in collaboration with Riding.

But while “The Laureate” impresses here and there, there’s nothing that truly dazzles and little that sizzles, either. It’s dry and academic when a fleshier, more overtly-troubled and damaged approach to the story and the “experimenting” characters within it would have made it more memorable.

All up and down the line, from the performances to the period settings, the words that leap to mind time and again are “adequate” and “educational.” Nunez’s efforts leave the viewer with a big question to go with the many answers he provides. Was this really literary history’s most sexually lukewarm threesome?

Rating: R for sexual content, nudity and language

Cast: Dianna Agron, Tom Hughes, Fra Fee, Julian Glover,
Timothy Renouf, Christien Anholt and Laura Haddock

Credits: Scripted and directed by William Nunez. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:47

One of the traps of this profession is leaning too hard into sweeping generalities. You can’t say “The Holcroft Covenant” is the “worst” film of John Frankenheimer’s career, a new low in a particularly low period for Michael Caine, or anything of the sort.

Because Frankenheimer went on to make “The Island of Doctor Moreau” and even took his name off a TV movie, opting for the mark of shame, “Alan Smithee,” as his credit instead.

And we all know about Caine missing his Big Moment at the Oscars because he was off filming “Jaws: The Revenge.”

“Holcroft” comes from that “Revenge” era in Caine’s “make sure the check clears” career. It’s like a parody of the espionage thrillers it never quite joins the ranks of. Nonsensical when it isn’t simply ridiculous, it makes poor use of Caine’s natural cool and menace, instead inviting him to joke and mock his way through a harebrained frequent flyer workout jetting hither and yon dodging unrepentant Nazis.

That was spy novelist Robert Ludlum’s thing before he settled into the deeper, more sinister and more cinematic conspiracy of the Jason Bourne books.

“Holfcroft” is about a big chunk of money a trio of suicide-pact Nazis set up in a Swiss bank at the end of WWII, money to be dispersed by their heirs at a date inexplicably set 40 years in the future.

Caine plays New York builder Noel Holfcroft, informed under sketchy circumstances that he’s to administer this trust, intended to “make amends” for the evils of the Nazi regime. His mother (Lilli Palmer) remarried and moved him abroad, far from the country of his birth and his German general’s birthname — Clausen. So Holfcroft isn’t easily convinced to get mixed up in this.

A Swiss banker, played by the estimable anchor of many a thriller’s supporting cast, Michael Lonsdale (“Ronin,” “Day of the Jackal”) breaks the news to a testy Holcroft, summoned to Geneva to be reminded his dad was a notorious Nazi.

But a barely-foiled murder attempt convinces him of the seriousness of this situation and the need to disperse this cash before it is put to evil purposes. He will meet with a mysterious German veteran (Richard Munch), and the siblings (Victoria Tennant of “L.A. Story” and Anthony Andrews of the TV version of “Brideshead Revisited”) who were the children of another member of the “covenant,” and the quite-sinister British agent (Bernard Hepton) watching and manipulating all this chicanery, perhaps for the purpose of setting a trap.

One hopes so, anyway, “But please, do not attempt anything too vividly cinematic.”

Caine, who dropped into this film after James Caan abruptly dropped out, seems wrong-footed from the start — pink and flustered and bleary-eyed (appropriate, as his character jets back and forth across the Atlantic and all over Europe).

His Noel Holcroft is the audience’s surrogate in many ways, commenting on this or that absurd situation, most of them bizarre choices for face-to-face meetings. A late night trot at an exclusive indoor riding academy for starters.

 “May I suggest, that it is extremely difficult for a man, in a gray flannel suit, to behave naturally while riding on a horse in the middle of the night, waiting for someone to shoot at you!”

Tennant’s character is ludicrously written, cartoonishly-played.

Only the legendary Palmer and the inscrutable Lonsdale acquit themselves with much honor in this.

Caine completists (like me) may want to check it out. But really, the ’80s and ’90s were so miss-and-hit-and-miss-again for him, you could almost skip from “Hannah and Her Sisters” to “Cider House Rules” and only lament the loss of “A Muppet Christmas Carol” among the lot.

Frankenheimer’s direction of “Holcroft” — BIG faces in the foreground of character-packed compositions were his “thing” — is so haphazard and plainly-frustrated that it’s no wonder we were all so thrown and dazzled over a decade later with his “comeback,” “Ronin,” one of the greatest espionage thrillers ever.

And Ludlum is luckiest of them all, a boilerplate genre novelist rescued from the remainders bin by a Matt Damon film series that, while it left him still far short of Graham Greene and John Le Carre’s standards, at least separated him from the legion of hacks who never got over Nazi conspiracy thrillers and are all but forgotten now. As indeed is “The Holfcroft Covenant,” one we’ll be sure to leave out of our Michael Caine tributes the day the man takes his final bow.

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: Michael Caine, Victoria Tennant, Anthony Andrews, Lilli Palmer, Bernard Hepton and Michael Lonsdale.

Credits: Directed by John Frankenheimer, scripted by George Axelrod and Edward Analt, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum. A Universal release on Tubi, Amazon and other streamers

Running time: 1:52

It begins with that socially awkward moment, a “Do you remember me?” that quickly transitions from embarrassment to “triggered” for the 30ish writer Alina. A Londoner whose latest collection of short stories, “Italian Studies,” has gained her a measure of fame, she’s wrong-footed and rattled by that simple question.

Hanging around a recording studio, listening to a very young woman put down backing tracks in that baby dollish imitation Ariana style, Alina ducks outside to bum a smoke. And the barely-out-of-her-teens young woman who provides it opens the door on a blank spot in her life.

It was in New York, remember? You came with Simon. “You don’t remember Simon? How’s that possible?”

Alina struggles, admits confusion and wonders, “Wait, was that when I lost my dog?”

“Italian Studies” is an ambling, almost aimlessly wandering flashback of a movie, an immersive yet arm’s-length recollection of the time the writer’s mind went blank after ducking into a Manhattan hardware store and forgetting her the tiny poodle she left tied up outside.

Writer-director Adam Leon (“Tramps”) drops Vanessa Kirby (“Pieces of a Woman”) into an alien milieu, a woman of looks and means and fame who has so lost her bearings she can’t feed herself, can’t get back into the place she where she seems to remember she’s staying.

Young Orthodox men on the make harass her on the street. “Are you Jewish?”

“I…I don’t know.”

Every encounter, including the come-on of 20ish weed dealer and Sea Papaya hot-dog hustler Simon (Simon Brickner) begins oddly and continues awkwardly because Alina can’t disconnect, can’t remember entirely who she’s supposed to be and cannot find her footing in the conversation, the city or her reality.

She stops in a library to read a bit from her book, chuckling at lines she forgot she wrote, and distractedly autographs it. That gets her into an argument with a patron who wants to stop her from defacing public property. She steps into a bodega and tries to beg-without-begging for some ramen noodles. There’s privilege and desperation in this simple “I forgot my purse” (and most everything else) encounter. She can’t sweet-talk-from-a-beautiful-woman her way into her hotel room either, and sleeps in the stairwell.

Not that she looks like it on her perfectly-put-together walk through the next day.

The way I read her ramble is that all Alina has to fall back on is her process, one thing she remembers she did and that might retrieve some of her reality. She’s a writer. She talks to people, young people apparently. So that’s what she does, asking questions like “Have you ever been in love?” She engages in conversation after conversation, cadges drinks in a club and hears out the passions and anxieties of a generous sampling of 20ish New Yorkers.

Leon’s filming strategy is to overhear some of this — capturing a conversation from across the street at times. He mostly focuses on his movie’s reason for existence — he talked “It” girl Vanessa Kirby into doing this — and she lets us see a woman struggling to recover who she is, what her own passions are, what she remembers that pisses her off. Being called “unoriginal,” for starters.

None of it adds up to much of a movie. “Italian Studies” is more an experimental collection of filmed conversations, filmed docu-drama style, interspersed with clips of a gorgeous blonde wandering New York. But because it stars Vanessa Kirby…

Rating: unrated, smoking, drug use, profanity

Cast: Vanessa Kirby, David Ajala, Simon Brickner, Maya Hawke

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adam Leon. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:21

Doggone it, this comedy should have worked better, ticked-over like a fine Swiss watch.

“The Little Switzerland,” an Around the World with Netflix farce from Spain, is about a mountainous Basque town long frustrated in its efforts to be recognized and governed by Basques. A solution to their identity and self-determination crisis falls in their lap when they discover they’re the burial place of legendary Swiss hero William Tell.

“The apple fellow?” Si. The apple fellow.

It’s no longer “We are NOT Spain,” it’s “We are NOT Basque,” and “Damned if we aren’t SWISS.” We’re set up for a culture clash comedy among the national identity obssed/proud — sometimes violently so — Basques swallowing that pride to take up yodeling. Tell me that’s not hilarious, at least on its surface.

But five credited screenwriters throw one monkey wrench after another into a lean and comically promising narrative — subplots about a love triangle, a spy, competing “identity” agendas, dogmatic efforts at sabotage, ETA (the Basque version of the IRA) bombs and a gun smuggling priest. The picture grinds its gears, time and again, losing what’s “funny” in favor of all sorts of distractions, all of them humdrum when compared to the Big Idea that this is supposed to be built around.

The TV reporters have shown up in tiny Telleria for what they expect will be a real celebration. The town will finally be recognized as Basque and “NOT Castilian.” The mayor (Ramón Barea) is swelling with pride. Representatives from Madrid and the autonomous Basque capital of Vitoria-Gasteiz have negotiated, the Basque president is due to speak.

Only he doesn’t. The two government entities made a backroom “deal.” The always-ignored village, in dire need of a new high school, a snow plow and repairs to its ancient cathedral, got screwed-over again.

But at that same moment two grad students in archeology, Yolanda and Gorka (Maggie Civantos, Jon Plazaola) show up. They’re here to do a little work in that academically picked-over church, which dates from Romanesque times. Clumsy Yolanda crashes through the floor into an ancient crypt. Clumsier Gorka and the priest (Secun de la Rosa) join her and there it is, inscribed in Latin on the burial chamber.

This “city of Tell” that they live in? It was named for “the apple fellow.” It must have been Swiss, a canton of the Helvetica Confederation . They should be calling themselves Swiss and their town “Tellstadt.”

A legation goes to Switzerland, shedding their traditional Basque txapela cap for Tyrolean. “You don’t speak our languages, you don’t share our customs, you are not Swiss,” they are told. Not that they hear this.

“I speak a little Swiss — Nestle, Rolex…RIiiiicola!”

Next thing we know, Telleria is thrown into a tizzy of a makeover — from flags and outfits to wines and changing the size of their beer steins. They even do an online promotional music video. Spaniards aren’t natural yodelers, and apparently, neither are the Basques.

All of this stuff leads to in-town in-fighting, lots of swearing and “We won’t stand for this” (in Spanish and Basque, or dubbed English) by the pro-Spain and pro-Basque factions.

The foul-mouthed priest figures he needs to unload the cache of machine guns hidden in his church before the ever-neutral/hide-your-money-from-the-taxman Swiss take over.

All of that stuff is funny, or on the cusp of it. The love triangle involving Gorka, who is the mayor’s son BTW, and his old love Nathalie (Ingrid García Jonsson) and new “work partner” Yolanda, isn’t.

The faintly-menacing priest and aged locals who have a lot of experience building bombs and setting guard shacks on fire — the guards are now in ornamental, Papal “Swiss Guard” uniforms — give the picture an edge. They’re making Irish comedies poking fun at the IRA. Why not mock ETA and the whole Basque identity thing?

But every time we get a hint of just what the very particular Spanish Basque must do to “adapt our cuisine” and “adjust our schedules” (no siestas, for starters) and how irked they are about it, the picture wanders off subject into a romance that is so clumsily set up and under-motivated that we never invest in it.

It’s no fault of the cast, who are — younger and older — game and able to wring at least a grin out of a few scenes that might have otherwise fallen flat without their efforts.

Show us more outrage over the loss of tapas, jamon and rioja wines! Fight about the headwear, the rich culture that gave the world Picasso and Cervantes forced to embrace the simple chocolatier cuckoo-clock making-bankers!

“The Little Switzerland” could have been a new “Mouse that Roared,” “Coca Cola Kid” or “Local Hero.” What this culture clash comedy isn’t is a lot more promising than what it is.

Rating: TV-MA, lots and lots of profanity, implied violence

Cast: Maggie Civantos, Jon Plazaola, Ingrid García Jonsson, Secun de la Rosa, Kandido Uranga, Enrique Villén and Ramón Barea

Credits: Directed by Kepa Sojo, scripted by Kepa Sojo, Sonia Pacios, Jelen Morales, Daniel Monedero and Alberto López. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

“The Contrast” is a slight, slim comedy of manners that is widely considered the “first American comedy,” as it was written and produced on the stage in 1787, and George Washington was among its first fans.

It’s an arid, dry romance about almost-marrying a cad, a plot Jane Austen would recognize, writing as she did on the other side of the Atlantic. That timeworn scenario is updated for a new film that is easily the most amateurish, excruciating dud I’ve sat through since my days helping judge student film competitions.

“Contrast” reminds one that a movie can indeed be “instantly awful,” with the proof here coming from the incompetently-selected, almost-unreadable font for the opening credits. The fact that those credits plug the play that is the film’s source material as dating from “1778” and not “1787” tells you all you need to know.

Nobody even bothered to proofread the GD opening credits.

The setting — the blandest piece of flat California farm country (I’m guessing)– is revealed behind those credits. The players are almost to a one, dull and unskilled. And the writing? It’s a daft blend of contemporary concerns saddled to a 235 year-old “arranged” marriage story, complete with an 18th century style love-letter that gives away the caddish groom’s taste for one of the bridesmaids.

“For lady you deserve this state, nor would I love at a lower rate,” why it’s enough to make a lady take the vapors! “But at my back I will always hear times’ winged-chariot hurrying near.”

Well, that’s sure to infuriate the bride (Joy Villa), about to marry the rich cad (Lee Donahue) to please her marry-for-money Dad (Lance E. Nichols). Will it be enough to make her follow her heart? This guy promises security and a lifetime of cheating. What Maria (Villa) wants is “butterflies.”

Jermain Hollman plays an Army Colonel, sibling to a bridesmaid (Deanna Rashell), who rolls up and is instantly smitten with the bride-to-be.

And director Sean Dube pops up as a Brit-accented debt collector who buddies up to our would-be groom for all-too-obvious reasons.

The Royall Tyler Inn, taking its name from the judge and playwright who wrote “The Contrast” way back in 1787, is where the wedding is to take place. Curiously, for all this trouble, nobody seems to have checked it out in advance, raised an eyebrow that its driving range (golf) and shooting range (skeet) are one in the same, that its staff consists of one surly, lazy nephew of the owner and that the bride and groom have been booked into a cramped attic room.

I could go on, but nobody’s going to read this, much less rent the movie it’s about. Suffice it to say, every clumsy bit of mugging, every tin-eared line, every new scene is its own reason to groan.

If the 235 year-old play this is based on is as bad as this production, I think I’ve discovered the origins of the phrase “George Washington slept here.”

Rating: unrated, PGish

Cast: Joy Villa, Jermain Hollman, Lee Donahue, Lance E. Nichols, Deanna Rashell, Thahn Ta and Sean Dube.

Credits: Directed by Sean Dube and Presley Paras, scripted by Chris Johnson, based on a play by Royall Tyler. A Mill Creek release.

Running time: 1:22