Movie Nation

Any history of TV’s landmark children’s series “Sesame Street” is going to have Muppets and songs, a lot of laughs and a few tears, and every letter of the alphabet — over and over again.

Marilyn Agrelo’s warm and sentimental appreciation of the venerable “educational” show,” “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street,” takes us back to how it was created with an agenda, born of the better angels of ’60s activism.

We’re shown its world-changing premiere, led through gags and giggles, into controversy. And like the program itself, “Street Gang” touches on the “family” and deaths of cast members, reminding us how this very grown-up daily entertainment for children became an institution by never “talking down to kids.”

Using archival footage, vintage interviews and fresh chats with some of the minds behind it, we go way back to the origins of The Children’s Television Workshop and the foundation grant money that researched, focus-grouped and expert-consulted its way to a 1960s epiphany.

Let’s make a show about “what television would do if it loved people instead of trying to sell to people.”

Looking at research coming out at the time, a braintrust that included New York TV documentary producer Joan Cooney decided that one way to get kids, who loved TV then as much as they love it now, all on the same page when they started school was to “sell the alphabet to pre-school children.”

A show aimed particularly at inner-city kids would teach and tickle with animation, songs, sympathetic adult characters and most important of all — Muppets.

The film’s major revelations are not how hilarious, anarchic and charismatic the Muppets were and are. That’s been covered elsewhere. What’s fascinating here is remembering the lesser known figures who shaped the show that was to come.

Jaded New York director and producer Jon White, who was “over TV” when pitched the show, sees a catchy PSA for New York’s Urban Coalition and decides the show needs to be on an inner-city street scene set.

Hiring Black Philly talk-show host Matt Robinson as Gordon, the show’s major father figure upon inception, was more key than we realized at the time. He set the tone, gave the show “Street” cred with its main target audience — disadvantaged minority kids — and annoyed the hell out of Mississippi Public TV, which had to be bullied into carrying it, over racist objections, by commercial broadcasters in the state and noisy public demand.

The most adorable bit in this often adorable doc is watching Matt Robinson’s adult children, Holly Robinson Peete and Matt Robinson Jr., remember how cool it was to have a father on the most popular kids’ show on TV, and how troubling their questions about that were at that age.

“Who is this other little girl he’s holding hands with?” Holly frets, while Matt Jr. talks her down, just the way he did way back when.

The show was an instant success, with only tiny bits of pushback from this or that quarter. Orson Welles is seen telling Dick Cavett that “it’s the best thing that ever happened to television,” one of a flood of endorsements in a flurry of TV news pieces on the series as it debuted.

And a segregated America had to sit slack-jawed as a more idealized version of childhood and a vision of an integrated America played out, for 130 hours a year, right in front of their children.

Paul Simon sings an impromptu duet with a Black girl who doesn’t know who he is or “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard.” Jesse Jackson leads a call-and-response of kids from many races in “I AM somebody…We ARE beautiful. Beautiful children WILL grow up and make the whole world beautiful.” Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash, Dizzy Gillespie and James Taylor and Stevie Wonder and Lena Horne lead the way to thousands of guest appearances on “Sesame Street.”

Cast member Sonia Manzano marvels at that very first episode, before she was ever hired — James Earl Jones sonorously reciting the alphabet, Grace Slick (of the Jefferson Airplane) singing ‘One two three four five six seven eight nine ten” and Bert & Ernie starting their quarrelsome bromance.

Did I mention what an unalloyed joy it is to see these people — outtakes from Muppeteers Jim Henson and Frank Oz, crusty Carroll Spinney joking around about Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird — and remember this show as those involved made it up as they went along? It is.

MPA Rating: PG (Language|Some Thematic Elements|Smoking)

Cast: Joan Cooney, Jon White, Holly Robinson Peete, Carroll Spinney, Sonia Manzano, Emilio Delgado, Frank Oz, Jim Henson, Lisa and Brian Henson

Credits: Directed by Marilyn Agrelo, based on the book by Michael Davis. A Screen Media/HBO Max release.

Running time: 1:47

Agoraphobia is about to be the new…Asperger’s?

May 31.

Just so we’re clear, please do NOT pass the ketchup. There’ll be no eating right after “Death Ranch,” and certainly no red meats or anything that comes with French fries.

Here’s an old-fashioned grindhouse “splatter” film, with blood and entrails, racism and riot guns and guys in white sheets threatening to “hang you up on a tree branch.”

As if that threat carries any weight after the gory goings-on we see in this piece of Middle Tennessee.

Brandon (Deiondre Teagle) just busted out of jail in Memphis. Sister Angie (Faith Monique) and big brother Clarence (Travis Cutner) pick him up in a ’59 Caddy Eldorado Biarritz and head for grandpa’s old place, somewhere west of Knoxville.

As the vintage Blaxploitation graphics in the opening credits and the jazz-funk score tell us, it’s 1971, and there’s nothing for it but to hide out with the kid until they can hightail it to Florida.

“They’ve got this new place, Disney World,” where Brandon can start over.

But hell’s bells, who knew Grandpa’s half-abandoned farm was a favorite haunt of the local Klu Klux Klan, a handy place for a cross burning and ritual torture of Black kidnapping victims?

Brandon interrupts their midnight mischief and doesn’t take the fleeing victim’s warning seriously. Well, seriously enough.

“They’ll kill you and they’ll EAT you!”

They will. Because while this branch of the KKK may not be as well-armed as later post-NRA AR-15 marketing incarnations, they leave little trace of their victims. These are KKK cannibals.

Heads explode, pistols open up chest wounds big enough to yank intestines through — “Chew it up, Whitey!” — and axes, machetes and shotguns are wielded to murderous effect as the silly slaughter begins.

And right at dinner time, too!

A stake through the eyeball here, a dismemberment there and next thing you know, we get down to the real violence.

It’s a stupid movie by genre definition. But writer-director Craig Steeds (“An English Haunting”) embraces the stupid, if not nearly enough to lift this to the level of “camp.”

All concerned are more worked-up about the next blast of butchery, the next redneck racist rant, the next “cue the banjoes” moment.

The performances never rise above adequate, so there’s little of the gusto C-movie veterans bring to such enterprises. It never achieved “grossout fun” for me.

Still, it kept a whole lot of bit players in and out of white robes out of trouble for a couple of weeks, so that’s something.

As splatter films go, I’ve seen worse.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic, gory violence, racial slurs

Cast: Deiondre Teagle, Faith Monique, Travis Cutner, Scott Scurlock, Brad Belemjian

Credits: Scripted and directed by Charlie Steeds. A Shinehouse release.

Running time: 1:17

If it wasn’t for Youtube, you’d have a helluva time convincing anybody under the age of 30 that Tiny Tim existed, or even could have existed.

Androgynous ahead of his time, with a trilling falsetto that could crack glass, style anti-icon, a singular talent with a pop repertoire that covered half a century and certainly the greatest novelty act of the Swinging Sixties, if not all time, he was one of a kind.

Herbert Butros Khaury got his start in a literal “freak show” on Times Square, blew up the pop charts in the Summer of Love and when he got married on TV’s “Tonight Show,” “they had brown-outs,” power outages, as over 50 million people stayed up late to tune in.

Johan Von Sydow’s “Tiny Tim: King for a Day” celebrates the man who made his own myth in a film that ranges from gloriously giddy to Pagliacci sad, capturing his star turns and his very last performance, collapsing on stage one time too many in Minneapolis in late 1996.

Using old TV and film clips, interviews and performances, with his only modern analog, “Weird Al” Yankovic reading entries from his diary, “King for a Day” (which takes its title from one of the ancient pop standards that were a part of his repertoire) paints a portrait of a talented but fragile soul who endured punative parents and audience abuse and pelting in his earliest performances, and some of his last ones as well. But he still carved out his unique place in American pop culture.

He was sought out by Dylan, filmed by Andy Warhol and lionized in New York’s folk music scene of the late ’50s and early ’60s, appreciated for “the unique beauty” of his “singing the sissy way” style.

Peter Yarrow, Tommy James and Wavy Gravy sing his praises, with hippy icon Gravy remembering how hearing Tim “cooked my brain.”

TV producer George Schlatter recalls the meeting he was dragged from to hear this long-haired “weirdo” (his long locks predated The Beatles by years), an audition that would make his series, “Laugh In,” the smash it became. With NBC telling him “You can’t put this on, he’s a freak!” Schlatter threw Tim on stage with unsuspecting co-host Dick Martin, and history was made.

The corny Tin Pan Alley novelty “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” became Tim’s signature, and with Sinatra’s Reprise label (which signed him pre-TV — because like Dylan and Wavy Gravy, they KNEW) behind him, Tiny Tim conquered the pop music world.

If Tiny Tim ever gets a “Bohemian Rhapsody” movie biopic, the peak moment has to be not his many TV appearances on “Ed Sullivan” or his “Tonight Show” wedding to Miss Vicki, but his triumph at the Isle of Wight music festival, serenading 500,000 paying customers with “There’ll Always Be an England” through a megaphone to give it that Rudy Vallee/old time radio sound, to awed and delighted applause.

Von Sydow, who has documentary biographies of opera singer Jussi Bjoerling, writer Marie Kandre and mysterious artist Nils Olof Bonnier to his credit, takes Tim’s artistry seriously, first scene to last.

As hilarious as it is hearing Tiny Tim, playing the ukulele and covering “People are Strange” by The Doors, as amusing as his other covers — from Jeanette MacDonald Great Depression ditties to Bill Haley and the Comets and disco standards — can be, the guy was a walking, high-notes-hitting encyclopedia of 20th century pop.

The “Greatest Generation” types who interviewed him back then recognized his homages to Russ Colombo and Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee and even Jeanette MacDonald as daft and yet adoring.

The long slide toward the end seems particularly poignant here, reduced to touring with circuses and playing fairs and school gyms, married three times, hints of being too open to the attentions of underage groupies (not THAT open).

His diary entries, where he frets over “sin” real and perhaps exaggerated, chart a “never-fits-in” outsider from rejection to “biggest star in the world” glory with a pathos you don’t expect, just as his TV interviews often saw him soberly drop “the act” to reveal he was pretty much exactly as he came off — nostalgic, courtly and not at home in this world.

But Von Sydow paints a compelling and very entertaining portrait of a showbiz original who found a niche, made his mark with an act famed for its shock value, and yet dabbled in most every musical style to come along after he broke big because he could and would try anything, and do it justice, no matter how high his voice got or how much he rolled his eyes.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Tiny Tim, Susan Khaury Wellman, Peter Yarrow, Wavy Gravy, Tommy James, George Schlatter and Miss Vicki.

Credits: Directed by Johan Von Sydow, script by Martin Daniel. A Juno release.

Running time: 1:15

His charitable acts and blasts of largesse are well documented, using his wealth to help, aid and make statements for civil and human rights and simple civility.

His efforts particularly stand out during the pandemic, especially in his native Georgia where he is making a difference far beyond the jobs he creates around his production banner.

Nicely done.

A sixteen year old comes of age by hanging with and falling for a 35 year old theater director.

Woody Allen sees this trailer and goes, “See? SEE? The French ‘understand’ me!”

A May 21 release.

This punch, pistols and parkour thriller starts streaming early in May and hots DVD/Bluray shortly thereafter.

“Goodbye Honey” has the makings of a lean, nervy first-rate B-movie, a thriller whose suspense delivers the goods. That it doesn’t throws that one missing ingredient into the spotlight — urgency.

It’s an abduction tale in a remote setting, an escaped abductee (Juliette Alice Gobin), a lone lady trucker (Pamela Jayne Morgan) just trying to catch a few winks in a dark, empty county park and the threat of imminent recapture and a fate worse than death.

Co-writer and director Max Strand turns this into the pokiest 95 minutes in “ticking clock” thriller history. And most tragically, a decent finale and a lone bravura sequence here suggest he “gets it,” but just didn’t get around to tightening this thing into a nail-biter.

Morgan is Dawn, the 50ish trucker, 32 hours into an all-nighter hauling somebody’s worldly goods in a tractor trailer for Nate’s Haul & Go movers. She just needs a little shut-eye.

The young blonde (Gobin) who bangs on her door in a panic is Phoebe, she says. She’s just gotten away from her abductor, she says. She was locked in a guy’s basement for months, and has the long black roots to prove it. She’s manic about “getting OUT of here.”

And Dawn isn’t in any hurry, can’t figure out if she believes Phoebe and can’t find her damned keys in any event.

“Goodbye Honey” starts to go wrong the moment Phoebe stops tossing out bags and emptying the glove compartment. The “panic” isn’t gone. It’s something Phoebe talks about but doesn’t act out. Dawn isn’t listening when Phoebe pleads “We’ve gotta stay out of sight until I figure this out,” and doesn’t look scared of the baseball bat Phoebe retrieves from the truck cab. But she slowly backs down.

Emphasis on “slowly.”

The almost real-time evening adds some punks who bust into the truck, and long flashbacks — Phoebe, telling her “whole story” (seven years in the making) and Dawn explaining how she came to be behind the wheel of a big rig.

As every one of those “added complications” unfold, the movie staggers to a halt. Only a blur of a montage showing the terrifying tedium of Phoebe’s ordeal — locks clicking, a light coming on and scores of meals dropped in front of her — gets us back to “manic.” That’s where thrillers come to life.

Morgan has a hint of Ann Dowd (“Compliance”) about her, but it takes so long for Dawn to grasp what’s happening and how they can get out of this you could bruise yourself, slapping your head in dismay. It’s a lumbering turn.

The punks (Rafe Soule, Jake Laurence) sequence is loaded with illogical twists and cringing gullibility. How is this woman making a go of it in the rough and redneck world of trucking if she can’t outsmart these two, or at least figure out she’s being outsmarted?

Gobin makes Phoebe’s arrival — breathless and on the verge of tears — the jolt the film needs to get going. Only she can’t sustain that and the two leads let the multi-night nature of the film shoot show in their fading energy levels, scene after leaden scene.

The “Is she lying?” mystery to Phoebe’s tale is abandoned, and even the finale feels slow-walked and perfunctory.

“Goodbye Honey” would play better at an 80 minute runtime. But cutting can only take the pacing so far if your players aren’t as frazzled as you want the viewer to become on their panicked behalf.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Pamela Jayne Morgan, Juliette Alice Gobin, Rafe Soule, Jake Laurence and Paul C. Kelly.

Credits: Directed by Max Strand, script by Todd Rawiszer and Max Strand. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:35

If you’ve ever made a movie titled “Exorcism at 60,000 Feet” you get to label yourself “a cult director.” It’s the law.

Sure, it’s a way of finessing the fact that virtually nobody saw that, or “Parasite” or “The Chair.” But a niche is a niche, and let’s not get hung up on how Chad Ferrin describes himself. Because Ferrin has taken his shot at…bomm bomm BOMM…H.P. Lovecraft!

The writer whose name is incantatory to horror filmmaker fans such as Jordan Peele (“Lovecraft Country”) and Roger Corman (“The Haunted Palace”) and legions of lesser lights, Lovecraft’s tentacled, reptilian monsters of the sea who love mating with humans and infiltrating humanity provide the foundation for “The Deep Ones.”

If that isn’t the definition of “instant cult film,” the definition needs to be re-written. Forget that it’s barely creepy enough to merit the adjective, that it’s as odd and goofy as most Lovecraft adaptations that aren’t titled “Color Out of Space,” and embrace it for what it is and maybe you won’t cringe.

Making a drinking game out of “Deep Ones” might help.

It’s a modest-budget California-set thriller that may give veteran Hollywood watchers a start. Why, here’s “Cindy” (Kelli Maroney) from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” and there’s this or that star from a long running soap opera, back when they were a thing.

Hell, here’s 80something Nicolas Coster, who’s done so many soaps, TV series and movies, from “All the President’s Men” to “The Facts of Life” to “Santa Barbara” and “The Bay” that he’s one of the most recognizable character actors in big or small screen history.

Our “unsuspecting couple” (Gina La Piana, Jonathan Urb) have rented an AirBnB on the beach at the Solar Beach Colony. Their hosts are somewhat weirder and only slightly more underfoot than your average rent-my-house-to-strangers types.

Russell (Robert Miano, a mugger in the original “Death Wish”) and Ingrid (Silvia Spross of “The Two Pamelas”) are pregnant and rapturous as they sing the praises of “the colony,” which makes its own wine and has other self-sufficient touches.

But the wine is drugged, and it allows them to get the Finnish Petri (Urb) away from Alex so that he can “look into the light” and see what Russell wants him to see, under hypnosis. It’s the light of the Cthulhu Mythos, and next thing we know, tentacles are crawling out from Ingrid’s uterus and down Petri’s throat.

Alex suspects something is up, what with the local law enforcer not knowing her “Andy Griffith Show” reference and the crazy lady (Maroney) who urges her to “run away.”

A visit by pal Deb (Jackie Debatin) seems to confirm Alex’s fears from the “house call” she gets from the transgender doc (Timothy Muskatell) and vibe Russell gives off, with his “an old world is dying and a new one is about to be born” prophesies.

Deb checks out “the weirdos,” notes “I’ve been to Burning Man twice” and she’s never seen the likes of this colony’s freak-show.

And we get glimpses of monsters, the nightmares of our “unsuspecting couple,” and struggle to lose ourselves in the loopy, druggy and dopey “universe” this claptrap is anchored in.

The opening credits float over a dark, silent-movie homage introduction to this world of cowled capes, cults and blood rituals. Ferrin shoots a lot of this in dreamy, diffuse extreme closeups — but not nearly enough. Just eyeballing the variations of “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” costumes is enough to break the “spell” and send one into giggling fits.

But that’s a cult film for you. If only the unintentional laughs, and the intentional ones, added up to something more than a vaguely canonical Lovecraft spoof.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sex, lots of nudity

Cast:  Gina La Piana, Robert Miano, Johann Urb, Silvia Spross, Jackie Debatin, Timothy Muskatell and Nicolas Coster

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chad Ferrin, based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. A 123 Go release.

Running time: 1:22

This one has a “Human Centipede” alum as star and a May 11 release date