Movie Nation

It wasn’t “Stop the PRESSES” news last year when racing driver Hurley Haywood came out to the world that not only was he a five-time 24 Hours at Daytona, three-time 24 Hours of Le Mans and two-time 12 Hours of Sebring race winner, but that he did all that as a gay man.

Sports car racing is still regarded as a rich gentleman’s sport in this country, so big “news” there doesn’t reach far beyond the asphalt. In the sporting world, it’s lower-profile, save for the occasional movie star (Paul Newman, Patrick Dempsey) who dips his toe in it.

The wealthy-preppy “movie star handsome” Haywood fit right in with that crowd. And his sexuality rarely came up in his 1970s to early 90s heyday. He wouldn’t let it.

“Pretty quiet” is how he thinks others saw him, when asked about his reputation among others in his sport in the new documentary, “Hurley.”

“I was super shy…almost throwing up if I had to get in front of a microphone.” He admits that in his early days, he even gave thought to driving off the course and losing “so we wouldn’t win” and he wouldn’t have to face the press.

That’s how he comes off to this day, a legend in his sport but a retiring man who shows up at the big races, shakes hands and poses for photos with fans, but keeps his private life to himself.

“It’s not easy to talk about,” he tells filmmaker Derek Dodge, and his mannerisms and demeanor back that up. He makes little eye contact in on-camera interviews, back then (archival footage) and even in the present day.

But behind the wheel, he was something else. Haywood might modestly say he just “keep my foot down longer than the guy next to me” was the secret to his success. But contemporaries, peers and admirers all insist it was more than that.

Patrick Dempsey says “He won in any type of car he could drive…a legend.”

One and all express admiration for Haywood’s “discipline,” which the film never quite links to Haywood’s self-control in keeping his sexuality and lifestyle secret, though Dempsey hints at that.

“He’s the quintessential race car driver,” but “there’s a vulnerability there,” Dempsey says. “He IS different. He’s been different since the moment he was born.”

“Hurley” tracks Haywood’s life, with his former debutante sister Hope filling in the blanks about the early years — behind the wheel at 12 — on through his move to Jacksonville for college, where he won a Corvette autocross race, edging local star driver Peter Gregg. Gregg promptly recruited the young Haywood for his Brumos Porsche racing team and years of glory followed.

Haywood was winning races on the track, meeting his future husband Steve Hill at a Jacksonville gay bar, and keeping it all on the era’s stigmatizing “down low.”

But there were whispers, even back then, winking headlines in stories about Gregg and Haywood, the “Batman and Robin” of sports car racing.

Haywood says “my core people knew,” but he was “indiscreetly” warned by a colleague “You don’t mix business and pleasure.” Hill, his partner and now husband, confesses to feeling hurt by being unable to share in Hurley’s decades of big moments, watching him with friends in the winner’s circle “through a chain-link fence.”

Sister Hope notes the many ways Haywood had to “keep his racing life and his personal life separate.”

Even today, longtime friends and colleagues become evasive when asked if they think Haywood “lost sponsors” or suffered other discrimination back when homosexuality was kept out of the spotlight and “macho” was in on the tracks.

Not every off-camera question screenwriter turned documentary filmmaker Dodge asks — “How did Peter (Gregg) find out?” — earns a straight answer.

“People could just think what they wanted to think.”

The film gets at the sometimes thorny relationship with the abrasive “Peter Perfect” Gregg, which led to the winning team’s breakup. Even that didn’t slow Hurley Haywood’s ascent to the pantheon of his sport — winning big races from the ’70s into the ’90s.

Le Mans, France. 11-12 June 1977. Jacky Ickx/Jurgen Barth/Hurley Haywood (Porsche 936), 1st position, action. World Copyright: LAT Photographic. Ref: 77LM02

In the film and in life, Haywood got and is still getting his wish, that he be judged for how he performed on the track, “winning with any kind of car they put him in” as Dempsey puts it.

To that end, “Hurley,” like its subject, is most as home at the track. Much of the film was shot at Daytona International Speedway and we see Hurley, consulting with Dempsey and his team, overseeing timed driver-changeover practice, taking us on a tour of Victory Lane, showing us the placard at the track listing his achievements.

Dempsey is here not just as a cheerleader (“a legend of the sport”) who regards Haywood as a mentor, but to explain endurance racing (teams of three drivers sharing behind-the-wheel duties) and deliver context — about how vastly different attitudes towards sexuality have changed.

That may have been the hook that got “Hurley” made. But Haywood’s as in control in the movie as he has been in his life — not giving much away, even his “intimate” life treated with discretion and an arm’s length detachment. He lets Dodge and us in, but not that far in.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Hurley Haywood, Patrick Dempsey

Credits: Directed by Derek Dodge. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:22

Yes, the BIG Keanu news this week was the announcement that barring anything UNFORESEEN — he and Alex Winter, now an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, will reprise their roles as “Bill & Ted” in “Bill & Ted Face the Music.”

But Reeves’ bread and butter action franchise with Lionsgate isn’t letting the cobwebs settle over John Wick.

Oscar winners Halle Berry and Anjelica Huston join Laurence Fishburne and Ian McShane, all of whom do the light lifting while Keanu handles the epic knife fight this May 17 release, “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum” promises.

My favorite character has to be Charon, the concierge at the Hotel for Hitmen. Silky smooth Lance Reddick brings those scenes to life.

A $6 million Thursday night in “previews” points towards a $40 million+ opening weekend for Jordan Peele’s highly-anticipated horror tale, “Us.”

As a follow-up to “Get Out,” it’s outperforming that film as of this writing, and “A Quiet Place.” The comparison to those two is useful as both of those fright-fests had word of mouth build and cause their opening weekend take to swell, and kept them in theaters for months.

Will “Us” manage that? Box Office Mojo is speculating that the film, built around Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, will clear $50 million this weekend — an epic haul for a non-franchise horror film to manage on its opening weekend. An epic haul for pretty much anybody without “Pixar” or “Marvel” in their opening credits.

Reviews have been uniformly positive, if not exactly rapturous (It lacks the bite and frights of “Get Out”).

I don’t know if this is going to have the “Dude, you’ve GOTTA see this” word of mouth of “A Quiet Place” or “Get Out.” It doesn’t have the cultural resonance, the satiric edge, of “Get Out” or the sheer nerve-rattling terror of “Quiet Place.” But we’ll see. $40 million or $50 million, you’ve got to figure Lupita N’s quote is going up and Peele will have Blumhouse sized blank checks from whatever studio gets hold of him, long term.

HOWEVER…If “Us” tails off at all, and $40 becomes an iffy proposition, “Captain Marvel” could very well win another weekend. It’s on track to do another $35-38 million, and any under-performance by “Us” could leave it on top.

“Gloria Bell” is the BEST movie to go wide this weekend, after a short time in limited release. It hangs on a tour de force turn by Julianne Moore and is well worth your time, but it won’t crack the top ten on just 640 or so screens.

Nothing else is opening wide, so all the teens flocking to “Five Feet Apart” will keep it in the top five and “No Manches Frida 2” will hang around the top ten in a mere fraction of the theaters that “Us” and the rest are playing in.

A city of beauty, history, culture and affluence — a city that has, as the film’s title implies — almost emptied of the people who helped make it what it is.

This poetic and reflective A24 release, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” offers a nice curtain call role for Danny Glover, and starring roles for Jimmy Fails and Jonathan Majors. It goes into limited release June 14.

If you want to film a Western, you could do worse than Bonanza Creek (Movie) Ranch in Sante Fe, New Mexico. It’s got a vivid sense of a place and time, unspoiled vistas and striking topography.

And there are nicely aged leftover Western buildings — saloon, hotel, the works — settings used when TV’s “Comanche Moon” “Lonesome Dove” prequel filmed there over a decade ago.

But nobody there will be bragging about “Big Kill” using it as a location. This foot-dragging C-Western has a few “names” to dress it up and make it sellable to financiers — Jason Patric, Lou Diamond Phillips, Michael Paré and Danny Trejo show up in supporting roles.

From it’s dopey and inept opening — explicit sex interrupted by a noisy if clumsy shoot-out — to its laughably drawn-out climax, this is one poor excuse for a horse opera.

There are no cattle or wild stallions involved. So the roundup here is of worn out Western cliches — the Eastern tenderfoot forced to take up arms, the good-bad men, the “preacher” who is too handy with a pistol, the gunfighter dressed like a 1970s TV pimp.

Give-aways that what you’re about to watch is going to be indulgent, tin-eared and just…off? The unknown writer-director (Scott Martin) has written himself a co-starring role. Another? Running time.

Editing is the heart of filmmaking, and that doesn’t just mean cutting the footage in a coherent and professional way. Clint Eastwood always took scripts and stripped two thirds of the dialogue out before the camera rolled for a reason.

Having Paré, ending his glorified opening act cameo as a Cavalry officer say, “Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me. I have things to take care of” is the very definition of unnecessary, leaden lines sucking the life right out of the script.

The other kind of editing rears its head in ugliness, too. The film’s opening shootout — two thieving, womanizing cowpokes (Clint Hummel and Scott Martin) have to shoot their way past General Danny Trejo’s Mexican troops (Couldn’t get Danny to cut his hair into something more soldierly?).

Cut to a medium  shot of a soldier felled as he stands on top of a wall, cut AGAIN as he hits the ground — an obviously short “bend over” tumble that this “dead” man braces for — just as obviously.

Martin gives his “names” star entrances — filming them from below or above and behind. Gives them lines he should have cut. And then makes the movie about Travis and Jake (Hummel and Martin) teaming up with Philly accountant Jim (Christoph Sanders) as they mosey across Texas and New Mexico, making their way to Big Kill, Arizona.

That’s where Jim’s brother runs the saloon. It’s a silver strike boom town, so Jim says. He doesn’t know. The boom has gone bust.

There, the guys run afoul of unfriendly locals, from The Preacher (Patric) to the shovel-wielding undertaker, Digger (Paul Blott), Bartender Fred (Toby Bronson) to the gunman Johnny Kane (Phillips).

Did I mention there’s a hooker named Felicity Stiletto (Stephanie Beran)?

Situations, characters and lines feel recycled from a hundred earlier Westerns, the Mexican Army posse that dares to cross the U.S. border pursuing Jake and Travis, for instance.

“They can’t DO that!”

The Preacher recruits his flock at the saloon.

“You boys’ve been a little REMISS with your devotions…See you Sunday.”

Random killings, murders in the street, the “You don’t belong here” shopkeeper’s daughter (Elizabeth McLaughlin), the Big Black Man (Jermaine Washington) that some fool calls “boy,” the tenderfoot who eschews firearms.

” I notice you ain’t heeled…why don’t you pick up a Colt before we leave?”

Among the cast, the younger leads aren’t bad, if a little starved of screen charisma. Patric just makes you wonder, “What HAPPENED to you, man?”

Phillips and Trejo acquit themselves well, even when delivering cliches.

“I heard you were fast!”

The troops are here, and the tropes. It’s just that none of this pewter-plated “Silverado” knock-off amounts to much — outdoor scenes all shot in the early morning sun, sunlit interiors looking authentic, but with only the most banal dialogue and action (save for a pretty unexpected stabbing) animating them.

I love the genre and appreciate any effort in this cinematic field. But you’ve got to do something with the cliches, realize what you can cut out (83 minutes of movie in a two-hour+ picture?), figure out what you can show visually instead of having characters explain and for the Love of God don’t cut to an extra falling three feet when we’ve just seen him tumble off a ten foot wall.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, some sexuality and brief language

Cast: Scott Martin, Clint Hummel, Christoph Sanders, Jason Patric, Lou Diamond Phillips, Danny Trejo, Stephanie Beran, K.C. Clyde, Audrey Walters and Michael Paré

Credits: Written and directed by Scott Martin. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 2:02

Creepy. Writer-director Roxanne Benjamin finds terror in a woman alone in the wilderness. “Body at Brighton Rock” arrives in theaters and VOD at the end of April — April 26 to be exact.

For years, Steubenville, Ohio was thought of as, well, the hometown of crooner, actor and “Rat Pack” hipster Dean Martin — when it was thought of at all.

In the summer of 2012,  you could find its other source of pride and fame on a placard at the entrance to the local high school football stadium. Steubenville’s Big Red were 15-time Ohio state champions already, with titles dating back to 1925 and with their latest title as recent as the previous season.

But that opening image of the documentary “Roll Red Roll” is a warning sign of misplaced priorities and an avoidable tragedy to come, one that stains the city to this day. Because when we hear the word “Steubenville” now, we think of rape and jock privilege, of The Game that Ate America and how it took over the small town values that places like Steubenville are supposed to embody.

Director Nancy Schwartzman takes us into a crime, the investigation of it, the impact of reporting on that crime and the changing tides of local and national public opinion about what we used to call “date rape” in this gripping, disturbing and brilliant “anatomy of a rape” film.

She jars us not with that opening image of the stadium and the state titles, or with the dimly lit street scene she cuts to. It’s the “evidence” audio of chuckling young men that chills you to the marrow.

“That girl…what did they DO with that girl?” “She is SO raped right now!” These kids use the term “Dead Body” with contempt, its meaning almost instantly obvious even before the word “trained” pops up.

No, the victim didn’t die here. Her innocence did, and her reputation. These jocks were using their slang for a girl so drunk she has passed out, which the predators among them see as an opportunity.

“If that gets around, then you might go to jail.”

We see the frantic, angry and despairing text messages from the victim “Jane Doe,” the next AM — “Who did that to me?”

Schwartzman settles in to answer that question, tracking first the maligned (perhaps unfairly) police investigation, the football team and school system’s response (inept, culpable), the reporting on a story that ended with an Anonymous hack that turned “The Steubenville Rape” into a cause and a scandal that spread around the world.

We see Detective J.P.  Rigaud grill teen after teen, participants in the August 2012 evening’s parties that point us toward what happened.

“I need to know everything from you, from Saturday night through early Sunday,” he tells every girl and boy that sits down in front of him.

“We kept tryin’ to tell her, ‘You don’t want to go with them.,” one girl recalls. “‘You wanna go with back with your friends.’ We knew she’d be safer with us.”

But the victim was an outsider, “not a close friend” one witness admits, apologizing for not taking the extra step of arm-twisting Jane Doe into staying with the crowd.

What we’re watching is the police doing the right thing, taking the accusation seriously, methodical justice being served.

Then the story’s digital component moves to the fore, totally out of police control. One of the accused, quarterback Trent Mays, texts and complains and pleads with the victim.

Local sports talk radio gives the first hint it’s heard something is up, but won’t go any further.

But one person who does is blogger, activist and Steubenville native Alexandria Goddard. Whatever the police are piecing together, seizing phone after phone of the accused, bystanders and the victim, Goddard is skilled enough to find online — names of players, their social media clues about where the parties were, Twitter accounts and deleted tweets, Instagram and other online revelations from a generation that is living its life on line in a tone-deaf teen bubble of no privacy, amorality and gossip.

And what Goddard pieces together at Prinniefied.com becomes the megaphone that turns this tragedy into a story and that story into a cause.

Schwartzman interviewed Goddard and lots of townsfolk in painting her picture not just of a crime, how it was investigated and how it was revealed to the world. She captures the climate where this sort of thing was tolerated or at least swept under the rug — not just in Steubenville, but in America at large.

The kids had no clue what they were perpetuating with their “When are these hoes gonna learn?” comments, damning photos, their drunkenly amoral commentary on what they heard had happened or was happening as they taped their evening of beer pong and bad decisions.

Goddard tears up at how this girl — named on Fox and other less rape-sensitive cable news channels — was not just assaulted, but “humiliated” by her peers. Schwartzman lets us marvel at how Goddard’s digging through Twitter archives shows “It was ALL out there”  — comments, attitudes, excuses, accusations and photographs  — of a drunken teenage girl, a “dead body,” being dragged to and fro.

Screen captures don’t lie. One teen creep jokes “Song of the night is definitely ‘Rape Me’ by Nirvana.” A sentient adult is left aghast. Who RAISED them?

For her trouble, Goddard was sued even though “all I did” was post their handiwork, “their own words.”

We hear the victim being poor-mouthed, for her clothes, for her own behavior. And we hear talk radio “covering” it, letting callers vent and criticize her for what the host wants to call a “He said, she said” situation.

One name I didn’t catch was that of an utter idiot talk show host declaring “It’s easier to tell your parents you were raped than ‘Mom, Dad, I got drunk and decided to let three guys have their way with me.'”

He might have daughters, but he hasn’t got a clue.

Goddard may have thought she knew the town she grew up in and figured that others would be as shocked as she was by this “rotten onion” she was peeling. But she took the brunt of the heat as other news organizations (the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper) only later took up the story.

“Is this football town putting its daughters at risk by protecting its sons?” was the question Plain Dealer reporter Rachel Dissell asked.

And Goddard couldn’t have foreseen that this “entrenched football culture” town was about to be laid bare for the world to see how screwed up its priorities were. We catch  defensive, buck-passing school superintendent Mike McVey on local TV, and are treated to the police interview with Reno Saccoccia, the defend-his-players-no-matter-what football coach. Det. Giraud has to open the man’s eyes by explaining legal rape and consent to someone whose bigger concern seemed to be that his players were out drinking.

And then The Hive — the Internet’s collective mind and some say “Outrage Machine” takes up the story as Anonymous unearths the videos that left the world shocked. Protesters started turning up in Steubenville, demanding justice that apparently was being served, if just too slowly to calm the outraged.

There’s a lot to digest in Schwartzman’s film, from the role football plays in remote, dead-end towns like this all over America — a way out for some kids, a “fraternity for life” for those who stay behind — to the shocking speed of change in attitudes about consent and rape that this case hastened by bringing them into the light.

I was most impressed by its recounting of a lonely unpaid citizen journalist’s quest to get the facts out there (“tried and convicted online” or not) and tell a story the town didn’t want to hear. If we sense that Steubenville was changed by this, even reluctantly, that mostly comes down to Alexandria Goddard.

Schwartzman has made an utterly riveting “true crime” film and an eye-opening updating of the “How I Got that Story” tale, simply letting events unfold on camera in pretty much the order they did in town. “Roll Red Roll” is a terrific use of the documentary form.

If you miss it in cinemas, “Roll Red Roll” is coming to PBS on June 17, kicking off another season of the documentary series “POV.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, profanity

Credits:Directed by Nancy Schwartzman, script by . A Together Films/PBS POV release.

Running time: 1:19

First of all, nobody managed the “macho jerk guy who becomes a woman” movie thing better than Ellen Barkin in “Switch.”

Blake “Pink Panther” Edwards writing and directing, and the sexy Barkin — all gross and profane and genuinely puzzled about how women manage “these things” (breasts) and “all this HAIR” — was “on fleek,” as nobody said back in 1991.

The only problem with that comedy from the Golden Age of Body Switch Comedies? It sucked. Most did, and most still do — save for the recent French Netflix take on this “Man learns how hard women have it” version of the tale, “I Am Not an Easy Man.”

So that’s what “The Sex Trip” has working against it. A low-budget riff on the piggish man condemned to try being a woman for a while, it rallies for a few fun scenes, spends too much time in the toilet (literally) and suffers from a cast in which nobody makes you forget how good Barkin was in a bad film that covered the same ground almost 30 years ago.

Eddie Greenleaf (actor and British TV presenter Marc Crumpton) is a successful “How To” author. It’s just that his books — “52 Pick-Up” is one title — are about how to con women into sleeping with you.

He has “three “rules of engagement” he tells an appalled female TV interviewer — “‘Trigger her interest,’ ‘Play indifferent’ and then ‘Go for the kill.'”

He’s got the AMG Mercedes and Architectural Digest home to show for his success. But he’s a heartless jerk. And one night a homeless crone (Eve Sigall) confronts him on the way to a fashion show.

Women are just “notches on your bedpost…that’s a METAPHOR Eddie!” He needs to kiss her to “See the beauty in ALL women!”

He refuses, and that’s how Eddie wakes up equally-accented with the body of an Edna, “Eddie’s sister!” Jade Ramsey (“The Myth of the American Sleepover” and TV’s “The House of Anubis”) plays this version of Eddie, shocked and furious at this turn of events, but seemingly not so concerned that she spends day and night searching for the witch who put him/her under this spell.

Seriously, once Eddie/Edna has broken the news to piggish agent Steve (Louis Mandylor, funny in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” funny here), and they’ve made one trip to a homeless shelter in search of that witch, here’s what “The Sex Trip” script treats us to.

Edna goes in search of “some chick clothes.” See Edna test-drive her first bra, her first thong.

“Steve? What do you think?”

“Marry me!”

There’s her first gay hairdresser (Eric Carrigan) — “I’m gonna give you more waves than a Hawaiian surf competition!”

And her first waxing…wait, really? Followed by Edna’s first trip to the women’s locker room — gawk city, with all the naked, parading tattooed women looking like bartenders and/or strippers.

“Do you think you could rub some lotion on my back, please? Rub me REALLY good!”

A couple of things stand out and work here, starting with Mandylor’s playing of Steve as a bit on the fence on the whole sexuality thing. Homoerotic jabs at a sexist pig are easy laughs, and Steve’s a little of both.

“Hey Dreamboat,” he purrs to a potential bar pickup. “Not YOU, Shipwreck!”

And Edna’s first trip to a Sex shop run by sisters (Dahlia Tequali and Dia Tequali) is one long giggle.

“Welcome to Adult Warehouse, the paradise for sexually active adults” run by sisters they chirp in perfect sync. Need some help help getting “your Amelia Earhart on?” As in flying “solo” sexually? They’re experts. Check out their names — Dill and Doh.

The rest of “The Sex Trip” is a tedious ride indeed, from Edna’s makeover of a pert wallflower who runs a homeless shelter, Jess (Charlotte Ellen Price) to Ramsey’s scenes playing newly-outraged at the sexism the world shows him/her as a man-in-the-body-of-a-woman. Yes, Eddie will “grow” into a better man. Sure.

The script has few funny scenes or even lines. And as an aside to writer Marc Prey and co-writer and director Anthony G. Cohen, “first menstrual cycle” can be funny or gross, but generally not both. And vomiting on the camera lens (Edna can hold her liquor, but not Jess)? Almost never funny.

“Sex Trip” demonstrates that sometimes a tired idea is just that, tired.

MPAA Rating: unrated. sexually explicit

Cast: Jade Ramsey, Louis Mandylor, Marc Crumpton, Charlotte Ellen Price, Rachel Breitag, Natasha Blasick

Credits:Directed by Anthony G. Cohen, script by Marc Prey and Anthony G. Cohen. An Ammo release.

Running time: 1:20

Here you go.

Sensational re-creation of Hollywood — the film biz (on the B-movie backlots) circa 1969.

Great role for Brad Pitt, jaded/funny stunt man. Leo D. gets to send up his Oscar winning ladies man “movie star” image.

No hint of the Manson Family, and a whole lot of co-stars are left out of this trailer for the July 26 release of Sony’s (NOT Harvey Weinstein’s) “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

This is an era that Quentin T. knows well, and a general subject — 1969-75 Hollywood history — he’s at home in. This should be great.

MARCH 12, 2019, BOSTON – Sophia Lillis and Zoe Renee in “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” (2019). Photo Warner Bros. press materials

Here’s one to catch at Red Box, on Netflix or your favorite “family” movie channel.

Everything about “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” says, firmly and with conviction, “TV movie.”

Sophia Lillis, who played a young Amy Adams (character) on TV’s “Sharp Objects” is a properly plucky (if pale) and intrepid sleuth in this nicely updated but thin and half-speed re-boot of a teen heroine who dates — fictionally — from The Great Depression.

She’s mouthy, moody, headstrong and independent — a skateboarder inclined to compliment a deputy sheriff with how happy she is that he’s not “as much of a tool” as she thought he was.

Her “superpowers,” her Aunt (Andrea Anders) reminds her, upon her moving to tiny River Heights, are “perseverance and righteousness.” But in this backward berg in which Chicagoan Nancy and her father (Sam Trammell) have re-settled in, it’s her powers of observation, unflappable ability to reason, rationalize and decode clues on her feet that will serve her well.

The town’s slated to get a commuter train, and as that will entail destroying some of the character of the place and taking down some landmark old homes, Nancy’s lawyer-dad is fighting it.

We figure out who the villains of the picture are the moment we see them.

One of them might be Mean Derek (Evan Castilloe, ALSO of “Sharp Objects”) and his Mean Girl Girlfriend Helen (Laura Wiggins). But Helen’s aged Aunt Flora (Linda Lavin, TV’s “Alice”) isn’t — a villain, I mean.

Her historic house is haunted, she says. And getting the blow-off from the sheriff’s department isn’t reassuring.

“I have stared down communism,” the octogenarian growls. No, she ain’t afraid of no ghost.

Neither is Nancy, who ignores her suspicions about the Mean Girl and Mean Girl Boyfriend (“Rich people are PSYCHOS!”) and spends the night to do a little sleuthing and debunking.

This “Nancy Drew” gives up the ghost in a lot of regards — its villains, for starters, the “mystery,” the story and the failed attempts over the years to revive this character (Emma Roberts made a memorable throwback Nancy back in 2007 — and the first version of the “Hidden Staircase” story was filmed back in 1939) for the age group she was once intended for — teens. This “Drew” picture skews younger, and the director only figures that out with a bit of slapstick in the opening prank, and the finale.

What does the critics’ put-down “TV movie” mean in this day and age? It has to do with cut-rate casting. Ms. Lillis makes a fine Nancy — all redheaded pluck — but surrounding her with no-names is classic “cut-rate Georgia-filmed TV movie” casting.

Lavin can still handle a punch line — Aunt Flora wondering if “my cheese was finally sliding off the cracker,” comparing her bare-belly-button (in EVERY outfit) niece’s generation to hers — “We had better HAIR back then.”

The rest? Not even the “You’re REALLY grounded this time” is something these folks can make funny.

The classic TV movie approach to filmmaking includes slack pacing and a picture that tells its story in a series of endless BIG close-ups of the leads. Teevee was historically a close-up medium, you see — faces lost in wide shots in the pre-HD “small screen” dark ages.

The result — then and now — is typically dull, a picture best enjoyed under the freedom of DVR, or better yet walking out of the room during, or before and after commercial breaks. You can rest assured you aren’t missing much.

MPAA Rating: PG for peril, suggestive material, thematic elements and language

Cast: Sophia Lillis, Sam Trammell, Zoe Renee, Andrea Anders, Mackenzie Graham, Laura Wiggins and Linda Lavin

Credits:Directed by Katt Shea, script by Nina Fiore and John Herrera. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:29