Movie Nation

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

No sense uh, tiptoeing around it. “Grace Fury,” an autobiographical dance documentary by dancer-choreographer Laura Carruthers, is the worst dance doc I’ve ever seen.

Not that the dancers aren’t terrific and the choreography — a hybrid of ballet, modern and Scottish dance — at least a little interesting.

It’s a life story cryptically, quasi-“poetically” related in dance and endless, eye-rollingly pretentious voice-over narration.

“I have outgrown my simple faith,” Carruthers intones, “given up fantasy for truth.”

In between dances, which are sampled not-quite-randomly with no set-up, she hints at conflicts in companies, competing agendas, being dismissed and fleeing Arizona for Scotland.

“‘I mean, look at her. That’s what she’s here for!'”

This is illustrated by her walking an Arizona desert highway, narrating about how “hot” it is (she’s wearing a leather jacket) only to be picked up by a 1975 MGB Midget. The ’70s vibe spreads to the score, twinkly primitive synthesizer Muzak with digital whistles and bagpipes.

“Here we go again,” she introduces in a dance number featuring sword and scabbard, venturing “somewhere between fire and grace.”

Somewhere between modern dance and “Riverdance,” between pliés and highland flings, Carruthers finds her dancing “voice.” If only she’d kept that pretentious narrator’s voice to herself.

Too harsh? Consider this — “With each ending, you slip under in a way, pulling me further and further out to sea…now adrift, alone with thoughts that sway between giving up and treading more uncertainty, more of these amplified ups and downs. And I think I’m a little seasick.”

Perhaps you can’t be a dancer to hear how howlingly agrammatical, self-absorbed and “slept through English class” that sounds. Apparently nobody in her circle told her.

Those same people neglected to suggest maybe knowing nothing about how to film dance and a direct a movie about dance should give one pause. Gene Kelly, Kenny Ortega, Twyla and Fosse were rare birds.

The dance here has a local PBS affiliate taping a visiting dance company feel — pedestrian, static.

And “we’ll meet again to share this thirst” sounds like a threat.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Laura Carruthers, Seth Belliston, Matthew Powell, John J. Todd, Deanna Doyle

Credits: Scripted and directed by Laura Carruthers. A Carruthers & Co release.

Running time: 1:16

She is curious, looking at this new city through new eyes. She is also evasive, changing the name she gives when asked, and the city and even the country where she is from.

It’s obvious to the much younger man who comes on to her in the checkout line that she’s not from around here. “Tourist?” Not that she’s immune to his charms.

Not carrying luggage, not providing ID to the hotel she wants to check into, Petra or Susanne or whoever (Johanna Wokalek) seems aimless, drifting through Vienna, hitching a ride to Bratislava because that’s where the driver is bound.

Like the song that underscores “Freedom,” that famous Richie Havens tune from Woodstock, she’s improvising, reveling in something without analyzing or having the luxury of thinking it through.

Back in Germany, rumpled, harassed lawyer Philip (Hans-Jochen Wagner) dancing as fast as he can. He’s riding herd over a just-turning-rebellious teen daughter and a high-maintenance boy of about eight. He’s struggling to get a handle on how to try his most difficult case, a racist teen who put an African immigrant into a coma.

And he’s appearing on TV, defending himself and pleading for answers. His wife has disappeared. The police wonder if he had something to do with it. And he’s not sure if “Nora” is dead or alive.

“Freedom” (“Freiheit” in German) is German filmmaker Jan Speckanbach’s second feature film and second movie (“Die Vermissten” was the first) about a disappearance. Here, he dives into a breakup, letting us pass judgment on who might be at fault, upending that judgment and then flipping it again.

We are totally immersed in Nora’s get-away, her eagerness to cover her tracks, go off the grid and “start over,” making new Czech friends. That first friend she has sex with as she is just starting to enjoy her “freedom” with right up to the moment when she catches him going through her wallet for ID. The second person she befriends is a sexy blonde (Inga Birkenfeld) who makes a living as an onstage sex performer at a few-holds-barred Bratislava club.

But Nora left behind two kids. Is the increasingly short-tempered bear Philip really all that bad? When he threatens and manhandles his punk client and then physically tosses his daughter’s new boyfriend out of their apartment, we wonder.

Wokalek (“The Baader Meinhof Complex”) makes Nora mysterious, resourceful and fragile. We never know what’s going to trigger her, where her paranoia will take her and who it will yank her away from. Later flashbacks explain some of her motivation, but there’s still a lot that’s unknowable about her.

Wagner (“Lore” was the film he’s in that got the widest release in the US) makes Philip equally unknowable. Was he cheating on Nora, or just too dull and stuck in a rut to be interesting? His temper and his quick turn towards another pair of empty arms make us wonder.

Speckenbach makes this broken couples’ shared mysteries painful and fascinating, deftly dropping in Germany’s “baggage” to older Czechs and reputation for racism in, pointedly leaving any lightness out. Their sexual dalliances have “Freedom” about them, and release. But joy? Not that we can tell.

As Richie Havens sings in the opening scene, only getting into the verse in the film’s coda, “sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.”

MPA Rating: unrated, explicit sex, nudity

Cast:  Johanna Wokalek, Hans-Jochen Wagner, Inga Birkenfeld, Andrea Szabová, Ondrej Koval

Credits: Directed by Jan Speckenbach , script by  Andreas Deinert, Jan Speckenbach. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:40

Of all the ways the folks north of the border could have approached the story of a 1970s marijuana-use-and-its-consequences study, why’d they take the “Lifetime Original Movie” tack?

“The Marijuana Conspiracy” could have been an over-the-top “outrage” tale, with a hint of camp, like “Reefer Madness.” The funniest nation (per capita) on Earth could have gone “stoner romp.” Get Samantha Bee or Seth Rogen, Catherine O’Hara or Caroline Rhea on board.

But writer-director Craig Pryce (“The Dark”) went for something safe and squishy and sensitive instead. Maybe he got close to the real women this story is based on and felt too respectful. Whatever the case, what he turned out is too bland to make an impression.

The “true” story — in 1972, with marijuana use peaking and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (the new guy’s Dad) supposedly thinking of legalizing it, a “foundation” put government money into a study of its use and abuse.

The movie’s thesis, based on the fact that this study’s findings were never made public, is that the government covered-up the shocking news that pot isn’t The Demon Weed of Myth, the “gateway drug” to heroin, that it might not even “kill ambition,” as the montage of Canadian news coverage of the day seen here claims.

In the film, veteran character actor Derek McGrath is the cigar-chomping, whisky drinking diabetic in charge of the foundation underwriting the research, an old guy with “an agenda.”

Gregory Ambrose Calderone plays the vegetarian, long-haired hippy sociologist who argues for letting “the data speak for itself.” He gets the assignment because he’s young enough to “speak their lingo.”

And as they’re most concerned about pot’s effects on young women (ahem), this is what Project Venus would do. Two groups, a “control” group having no access to pot and a study group who’d have a nightly “eight o’clock toke” would be isolated for 98 days, put to work making Macrame, watched,questioned and weighed by staff.

Their behavior would be noted, their productivity measured, a psychotherapist (Paulino Nunes) would counsel them should pot paranoia kick in, and any “munchies” weight gain they experienced would be documented.

The young women, under 25, were hand-picked from applications and screening interviews. They’d be well-payed, and they’d have access to legal weed every night before bedtime.

Far out.

Those women are a cross-section of Toronto life — the college-bound Black woman (Tymika Tafari), the pale, underweight homeless girl (Julia Sarah Stone), the indulged, globe-trotting experimenter/”enthusiast” (Kyla Avril Young) and so on.

“This is gonna be the BEST job ever!”

The staff would include the nurse (Marie Ward) the ladies nickname “Nurse Ratched” and the hunky research assistant (Luke Bilyk) with inappropriate eyes for one of the subjects.

We see the women settle in, the data start piling up and the THC dosage raised to measure how much is too much when it comes to lethargy impacting productivity, and how much pot contributes to the shaky mental health of women kept from direct contact or even phone calls with their families. (This seems pointless, scientifically).

The players make light surface impressions through the film’s pranks and giggling fits and uncomfortable chats with the hidebound, pipe-smoking shrink who is about 50 years away from ever being “woke.”

This cross-section of Toronto in the ’70s has racism, sexism, homelessness and homophobia to wrestle with, even as those enduring that are getting their “mellow yellow” on every night at eight.

Thus, “Conspiracy” overreaches, tries to comment on too many other issues bubbling to the surface at the end of the ’60s. That’s why the film is entirely to long, and that’s why it doesn’t really play. Pryce loses the thread and wallows in the melodrama rather than in focusing on stoned flirtations, stoner hijinks and hard data that starts to suggest that maybe pot isn’t a bad way to take the edge off, and that it has other benefits as well.

The implications of all this are clear and damning, as holding up legalization (it’s now legal all over Canada) filled prisons, invented new organized crime players and generally accomplished nothing good.

That serious subtext and the social justice stuff jammed-in explains why the picture never finds a pleasant tone and the story, rather than zipping by, feels bogged down, “Day One” to “Day 98.”

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, alcohol use, pot use, profanity, smoking

Cast: Tymika Tafari, Julia Sarah Stone, Kyla Avril Young, Morgan Kohan, Luke Bilyk, Gregory Ambrose Calderone, Derek McGrath and Paulino Nunes.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Craig Pryce. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 2:02