Movie Nation

“Made in Italy” goes down easily, like an unassuming Chianti that doesn’t drown the taste of the pasta. It stumbles out the door, and staggers a bit at the end of the evening, a wino back off the wagon. But everything in between is sweet, sentimental and guaranteed not to deliver a hangover.

Sorry, films about Tuscany bring the cringing wine analogies. I’ll stop.

Liam Neeson, a grand vintage in his own right (sorry), co-stars as a retired painter who accompanies his son to the family’s long-vacant Tuscan villa for a quick clean-up and a quick sale. The kid (Michael Richardson, of those Redgraves and Richardsons) needs the money.

Because Jack isn’t really a “kid.” He’s going through a divorce. His wife’s family had the money that kept his “Flite” London art gallery open. If he wants to keep it, he’ll need to buy them out. No sense telling Dad that.

Robert is a widower, once a star with a brush, now turning his energy to turning on the charm for any woman who catches his eye. He’s fine with selling the house.

One dull, time-killing road trip in an old VW van (Not THAT old.) later, and they’re there. Robert turns sentimental, Jack is on task. Guess who the British-born estate agent, Kate (Lindsay Duncan, fun) sympathizes with? And it’s not just because Robert flirts with a little blast of the Bard.

“Bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst, but Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom.”

Want to impress a lady? Don’t drop “The Taming of the Shrew” on her. All business “Kate” it is.

“Your plumbing seems to work. And people like that.”

Everything else? A bit of a shambles, with a weasel having the run of the place, to boot.

Jack would get a lot more done if Dad would stop reminiscing and pitch in, if the lovely restaurateur Natalia (Valeria Bilello) wasn’t in town, a ready-made distraction.

The actor James D’Arcy (“Dunkirk,” TV’s “Homeland” and “Broadchurch”) wrote and directed this, and he tends towards the maudlin at times. He sets up a sort of competition for Natalia between father and son, which is mercifully dispensed with.

“Made in Italy” was over twenty minutes longer when it played the festival circuit. Bu with romantic idyll movies, shorter and quicker is always better, even if you lose some lovely Italian vistas in the process.

Neeson brings a nice twinkle to Robert, and D’Arcy gives him one clever-bordering-on-brilliant scene. Jack looks at the place in the daylight for the first time and praises the “view.” Dad’s mini-tirade turns purple as he gripes at the kid not doing “one of the most spectacular convergences of nature” justice. Jack thinks that’s over the top, but “the artist,” his back turned, recites the glories of the aspect the place surveys. He has total recall for a landscape that “takes your breath away.”

“No, that’s the DUST, Dad.”

That lovely British word “tumbledown” describes the house, and while there are few surprises in any movie about a house renovation in Tuscany, “Made in Italy” clings to cute for dear life and thankfully — at this shorter run-time — never lets go.

It matters not that we, like Robert, will remember the view but not much about the story told in it or the Chianti reveries it inspires.

Cast: Liam Neeson,  Valeria Bilello, Micheál Richardson, Lindsay Duncan

Credits: Written and directed by James D’Arcy. An IFC Release.

Running time: 1:34

“Cromwell” came out in 1970, a late entry in a formidable run of stately British period pieces.

It’s inferior to “Anne of a Thousand Days,” “Becket,” “A Man for All Seasons” and even the somewhat stagebound “The Lion in Winter.” But it’s got realistic English Civil War battles, glorious Puritan/Cavalier era costumes, an abridged and bastardized piece of British history and Richard Harris and Alec Guinness, so it’s worth a go if you haven’t seen it.

Harris plays the gentleman-farmer Cromwell, about to emigrate to America where his fellow Puritans have set up shop, when he’s goaded into returning to Parliament to show the imperious, constitution-flouting Charles I (Guinness) that “the people” are in charge of the purse strings, and thus the country.

The high-handed Charles needs money, and only the Parliament — which he dissolved years before — can raise it. And with Cromwell and his fellow puritans like Pym (Geoffrey Keen) leading the way, and earls like Manchester (Robert Morley) and Essex (Charles Gray) bristling at the king’s overreach, Charles won’t get a ha’penny, blast his eyes.

Civil War it is then, and with the King’s continental nephew Prince Rupert (Timothy Dalton) here to “Tally HO” the royals, what can go wrong?

The great Geoffrey Unsworth was cinematographer, and the Spanish exteriors (Pamplona, Navarre and environs) make for splendid battlefields filled with musketeers, pikemen, artillery and cavalry, which Spain under Franco was always willing to provide on the cheap.

The dialogue — director Ken Hughes (“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”) also scripted it — is pungently quotable, and Harris and Guinness make quite the theatrical statement with the best lines.

The newly-devout Cromwell –“O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.”

The tyrannical snob Charles — “A democracy, Mr. Cromwell, was a Greek drollery based on the foolish notion that there are extraordinary possibilities in very ordinary people.”

And of course, there’s the most famous Cromwell battlefield quote of them all — “Put your trust in God, but keep your powder dry.”

The history is something of a mashup, condensing three civil wars into one, shifting Cromwell’s importance in this or that battle, putting him at the execution of King Charles (he wasn’t there), all sorts of things great and small which even someone not a stickler for British history can sense.

Still and all, I think it works — after a fashion. Whatever deserved abuse it received upon its release, it’s brisk enough, the grandeur and scale hold up and the cast has just enough heft to carry it off.

It being British history and filmed in the late 1960s, you can expect to see many a James Bond bit player in supporting roles, just as every member of British Actor’s Equity turned up in the Harry Potter pictures more recently.

Here’s Keen, who took over after Bernard Lee (as “M”) died as Bond’s boss for several 1970s films. Gray was in an early Connery Bond as a bit player, and turned up as Blofeld in “Diamonds are Forever,” although he’s best remembered for singing and dancing the “Time Warp” in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Dalton would play Bond for a couple of films in the ’80s. And Hughes directed some of the “unofficial” unsanctioned 1968 “Casino Royale.”

But the oddest thing I fixated on in this viewing was the makeup scheme chosen for Harris. A famous drinker and brawler who once kept a booking on “The Dick Cavett Show”after getting pounded in a bar fight, I was mystified at what I was seeing in Harris’s closeups.

One day, he’d have what looked like bumps and injuries covered by pancake on his chin and forehead, another a busted lip that could have been a cold sore.

There are plenty of photos that show him for the unmarked matinee idol that he was in that day. What gives? Were they going for a version of “Cromwell had boils and abscesses” authenticity (entirely possible), or did the man have herpes and the occasional knock-about in the local pubs?

In any event, he’s good in the film, which does a pretty good job of walking the fence on Cromwell as a Rights of Man patriot, a gifted organizer and field commander, and a religious fanatic who hated Catholicism and recruited fellow fanatics for his New Model Army.

“Cromwell” isn’t the last word on its subject. But to this day, that complex figure has yet to generate another major motion picture that even tried.

MPAA Rating: G, violence

Cast: Richard Harris, Alec Guinness, Robert Morley, Dorothy Tutin, Charles Gray, Frank Finlay, Patrick Magee and Timothy Dalton

Credits: Written and directed by Ken Hughes. A Columbia Pictures release, on Tubi, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 2:09

Some days, you need a movie that’ll make you smile, maybe feel a little better about the world.

It can be a teen dance comedy, built on a formula that was old when Channing Tatum was young.

Give us another plucky, cute and clumsy white girl who needs to get schooled by the talented kids of color.

Make the villain a diva who’s taken the name “Juilliard” and who no-no-no just isn’t HAVING your all-elbows/head-turned-the-wrong way “audition” for his team.

“Trinity? Could can ‘sage’ the space?”

Give us some sass, some dance trash talk quick to cross that line when Juilliard dons a white tank top and pink sweats as costume.

“This isn’t over. And you look like a tampon.”

Point us toward the “big competition,” hit Netflix “play” and let the TV stream, because we could all use a “Work It” break.

Sabrina Carpenter, alumnus of TV’s “Girl Meets World,” makes a star-statement as Quinn, rising high school senior, born klutz and thus determined to get into Duke University, the self-described “Harvard of the South.”

Carpenter’s gift isn’t that she’s latest in a long line of such white-girl-needs-help characters in dance/cheerleading comedies. It’s that she’s a damned genius at being just-bad-enough at dancing to convince us that the reason we don’t see her ripped midriff for most of the movie is that girl-can’t-dance and hasn’t rehearsed her ass off.

Quinn’s Duke (“Dook,” as we actually call it down South) dreams take a hit when one of her extracurriculars goes wrong — shorting out the lighting board for the Thunderbirds dance squad at her school. “BANISHED.” And damned if the shallow, dance happy admissions officer (Michelle Buteau, a hoot) isn’t underwhelmed by her GPA and resume.

Cellist? “Everybody plays the cello.” Nuts about TED Talks? “Girl, that’s sad.”

But let the lady who holds the keys to your future think you’re on a dance team? “THAT’S breaking out of the box!” She might be Dook-material after all, because they’re short on hyper-focused middle-class white girls, you know.

Too bad Juilliard (Keiynan Lonsdale, hilariously bitchy) has banished her. Nothing for it but to try out, and when that fails, research, recruit and run her own team with the help of BF and dance-career-driven classmate Jasmine (Liza Koshy, dazzling) and this once-promising dancer/hunk-choreographer who tore up his knee and now teaches kiddie classes (Jordan Fisher).

Oh, it’s SO on.

“Ugly Dolls” screenwriter Alison Peck finds her niche with this picture, throwing just enough plot wrinkles and smart-ass banter into the mix to make the formula — if not exactly fresh — at least fresh-adjacent.

Quinn NEEDS this team to do well, so she prays to the Dance Goddess — Queen Bey, Beyoncé, of course.

You KNOW if Quinn’s volunteering at a nursing home, there’s just got to be some aged hoofer wandering the halls, ready to pop it and lock it. You DON’T expect little old lady to bark “Turn that S— UP!” when she hears her jam.

Some of that HAS to come from director Laura Terruso. I mean, “Good Girls Get High” as a credit conveys a certain…edge. Not that this is “out there,” but the teen “types” and salty speech feel real enough.

And the dance numbers themselves are well-shot and edited without going all music-video-overboard.

Forgettable, disposable, one-among-many, all those labels apply to “Work It.” But it’s cute, hormonal and just sweet enough to get by. In this day and age, that’s a blessing and a reason we say, “If it’s a teen comedy that works, it MUST be on Netflix.” Even if STX intended to put this into theaters.

Even if, as everyone knows “Dook sucks.”

MPAA Rating: TV-14, profanity, sexual humor

Cast: Sabrina Carpenter, Liza Koshy, Jordan Fisher, Keiynan Lonsdale, Michelle Buteau

Credits: Directed by Laura Teruso, script by Alison Peck. An STX Film, a Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

We’ve got a captain’s hat, a camera, my dad’s old pontoon boat, and there’s that old light house down on North Point. Let’s make a MOVIE!

The delightfully daft and DIY “Lake Michigan Monster” seems to give up its origin story in every cheesy, off-the-wall frame. A no-budget horror movie that pays homage to George Melies, Ingmar Bergman, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and Monty Python, it’s a classic “Oh, look how those crazy kids did that” film festival farce — the sort of screen comedy you’d only find in off-the-wall, off-the-beaten path gatherings of offbeat cinema and its fans.

Me? It had me at “It’s pronounced ‘pontoooooon.‘”

“Monster” is fizzy fun from the mind of the over-named Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, its writer, director and star. There’s a touch of Terry Gilliam whimsy in his design and effects, and Graham Chapman anarchy in his performance as “Captain” Seafield, a Milwaukee madman who assembles a team to hunt and kill the “monster that slew my father.”

Sean Shaughnessy (Erik West) is his “weapons expert.”

Nedge Pepsi (Beaulah Peters) is the “sonar individual.”

And Dick Flynn (Daniel Long) is from the “Nautical Aptitude adVenture Yunit.” That’s the “Navy.” The “Captain” is fond of self-invented acronyms, and isn’t even a real captain.

“You know how long a fathom is?” No. No he doesn’t.

Tipsy, manic Seafield and his “Team of the Century” set up shop on the beach at Lighthouse Island and search for the beast that he insists killed his father.

“With a gun or a knife we must end this monster’s life!”

It goes, well, silly and sideways right from the start. Every new scheme for accomplishing their mission has a goofier name than the one before — “Operation: Nauty Lady,” “Operation: Master Baiter.”

And every few minutes poke new holes in the “story” and competence of the “captain,” whose piratical brother (Wayne Tews) seems even nuttier than he is.

“There I go again, pretending.”

The black and white cinematography matches video — covered with superimpositions of dirt and celluloid scratches — with inserts of obsolete technology and the switches and buttons it took to operate it edited into “sonar” montages, digitally hand-drawn “diagrams” and graphics.

The inventiveness never ceases, even as the energy and fun flag a bit. Need a “phantom ship” for a scene? Film the local ferry (we can see crew on this “ghost” ship) and play back its deliberate maneuvering in sped-up time lapse.

The whole enterprise hangs on R.B.C. Tews’  ditzy readings of the lines he gives himself as the loon-in-charge. How’d he come UP with this latest scheme?

“I saw some stuff when I was sleeping.”

“Like in a dream?”

“THAT’S the one!”

The effect of this 78 minute lark is to imagine how the 19th century illusionist and film pioneer Melies approached a problem on the set of say, “A Trip to the Moon,” and how he invented the tricks, effects and techniques of cinema with what he had at hand in 1902.

Melies, like Monty Python, made sketch-length short films. They knew how to make a point, get the jokes in and fade to black. “Lake Michigan Monster” plays like a sketch that goes on and on and on. It doesn’t so much run out of ideas as wear out its welcome.

But before it does, Tews and his Team in dazzle and amuse us in ways that put many a well-financed Hollywood production to shame. Tews is now working on a project titled “Hundreds of Beavers” next. One can hardly wait.

MPAA Rating: unrated, comic violence, alcohol

Cast: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Erick West, Beulah Peters, Daniel Long and Wayne Tews

Credits: Written and directed by Ryland Brickson Cole Tews.  An Arrow release.

Running time: 1:18

Toni Collette and David Thewlis play the parents of Jesse Plemons, with Jessie Buckley as the girlfriend who has to witness this little family strife.

Sept. 4 on Netflix

Damn, I’d like to have seen this one with an audience, in a re-opened cinema.

Yes, the only reason to interview filmmaker Jayro Bustamente would be to ask “Why on Earth did you give your movie the exact same title as a dozen other horror films about ‘the weeping woman?'”

Yes, his “La Llorona” takes a long time to deliver a fright, deliver on the dread he puts so much effort into building.

But the Guatemalan Bustamente (“Ixcanul”) has brought us the rare horror film that is actually about something. And it’d be interesting to see how the chill he spends too  much time establishing pays off, if there’s any jolt to the horror of a reckoning, the revenge of the woman who weeps.

This “La Llorona” is heard more than seen, the moans and tears a paranoid old dictator (Julio Diaz) hears in his fortress of a house. He and his family are under siege. A trial for the genocide committed in his name, massacring the Mayan-Ixil people of the provinces during a 1980s civil war, has denied him the justice he deserves.

And here in this bubble, his affluent family is whining at the noisy mob of protestors that surround the place.

“Why won’t they leave us alone?”

His wife, Doña Carmen (Margarita Kenéfic) knows more than she’s telling her doctor/daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz). We’ve seen the imperious Carmen leading a strange seance-like ceremony with the women of the family in the opening scene, a chanted prayer for deliverance by…could it be, Satan?

As to the mass murders and rape brought up in the trial, “even generals are men,” she huffs. She calls the grieving widows testifying in court “prostitutes” and berates Natalia (in Spanish and Kaqchikel, with English subtitles), “Don’t tell me you believe those…communists!”

As the general hears the crying, inside his house at night, as he stumbles into running faucets, he arms himself and takes potshots at “the guerillas” who have broken in.

“Did someone hear a woman cry?”

Nobody did. But the faucets turning on? Even the staff sees that once the exotic Alma (María Mercedes Coroy) shows up to replace those native maids and cooks who flee the “evil” that they assume is coming, but which we know is already here.

This General Montverde is a guilty as sin. The monster is in the house, waiting for Judgement Day.

It is daughter Natalia who is the first to awaken to her father’s guilt. She has a teenage daughter of her own, trapped under this roof, with that mob outside and this “presence” in it. Head housekeeper Valeriana (María Telón) may an ancient solution to their problem.

“Grab all the candles you can, and bring me sugar!”

But it’s not a corpse in a tattered bridal dress that they all have to fear. It is the general’s demented gun-slinging, firing at shadows where he hears crying. It is the noisy vigil or people surrounding the house, bearing witness for “the disappeared.”

This is horror that works on the head, not on the nerves, and as such lacks much in the way of hair-raising moments or frights. And those are sorely missed in the third act, when the nightmares have spread to those who share the guilt, when general’s butcher bill comes due.

The performances are subdued, not really pitched to match the rising horror facing them all.

Still, you have to hand it to Bustamente. He’s made a “La Llorona” movie with pointed politics, real world villains and righteous wrath. Sometimes, the horrors are in the headlines, or what the headlines aren’t telling us.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: María Mercedes Coroy, Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kenéfic and Julio Diaz.

Credits: Directed by Jayro Bustamente, script by Jayro Bustamante, Lisandro Sanchez.   A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:38

Here’s an interesting artifact I stumbled upon while prowling the free streaming channel Tubi (it’s also on Youtube), a 1969 British TV special that’s a piece of “How I see myself” autobiography from Peter Sellers.

Documentarian Tony Palmer (“Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire,” “Margot,” “Testimony”) was just starting out when he filmed “Will the Real Mr. Sellers…?” aka “The World of Peter Sellers,” getting Sellers’ mentor and “Goon Show” pal Spike Milligan to narrate it.

“Peter’s a freak, NOT a a genius. Which makes him even more unique.”

It is, as one would expect, a sympathetic/always-take-the-star’s-side appreciation, with full Sellers participation. The film has artistic pretensions and self-consciously artsy touches, and it makes a fine if less trustworthy take on the actor than Peter Medak’s embittered (with just cause) but sympathetic “The Ghost of Peter Sellers” documentary of earlier this year.

Sellers vamps through “bits” for the camera, about his current life, his travels and the making of the film that was just then coming out, the all-star satire “The Magic Christian.” He horses around on a Cunard ocean liner, the QE 2, on the set of the film, in public appearances and the like. He kvetches about his heart attacks (graphic surgical footage is inserted), drives his Rolls Royce with the top down and revels in the freedom from pressure, the press and the public that having his own private yacht, the Victoria Maria, gave him.

Milligan enthusiastically narrates the project, getting into the “only child” and his relationship with his mother.

“He was always looking for the security he got from his mother…To him, the world seemed like a violent attack by the world on him and this comfortable life his mother created.”

Milligan insists there was an almost therapeutic “freedom” to Sellers’ work in the free-form “Goon Show,” the precursor to Monty Python, freedom lost thanks to the “idiots” Sellers had to deal with once he cast his lot in the cinema.

The narration sees Sellers’ growing paydays and power as “planned revenge” on such “idiot producers…idiot managers…idiot BBC officials,” and every person who ever saw things differently in a script, on a set or in the tabloids.

Given Sellers’ decidedly mixed track record in film, that is both disingenuous and revealing. He sought big paydays, and as Medak’s film suggests, lost his cool and turned diva when they didn’t turn out as critically-acclaimed blockbusters. And he was a very wealthy martyr about it.

“I tend to approach people now very warily, in case they’re going to clobber me. I find I get clobbered a lot.”

There’s all this wonderful footage of him goofing around during the “Magic Christian” shoot, snippets of the finished film (the Lawrence Harvey as “Hamlet” burlesque is still funny). The mercurial talent is obvious, his ability to improvise “bits,” to sling accents and mimic “types” almost unrivaled.

He was a Robin Williams who refused to be “on” all the time, unless “on” meant that posh accent he affected as his public persona for chat shows.

But it is Milligan’s insightful narration — spoken in 1969 as if Sellers was already dead — which gets at the man, protecting him and revealing him at the same time.

“Can you encompass a man’s life in 50 minutes? Do you think by doing that you will, in any way, help him? In Peter’s case, he’s mostly defenseless…He desperately needs to be left alone, and knows he cannot.”

Despair for Peter Sellers trap, Mulligan sermonized, a lucky clown whose “only compensation was his money.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with plenty of off-color humor

Cast: Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Raquel Welch, Lawrence Harvey, Richard Attenborough

Credits: Directed by Tony Palmer, narrated by Spike Milligan.

Running time: :50

Oh to be say, 13 and trapped indoors with AC and Netflix during a long, hot pandemic summer.

That’s your target audience for “Malibu Rescue,” the TV series, the (now two) movies from Savage Steve Holland, who got his start making teen-friendly entertainment in the ’80s. Who remembers “Better Off Dead” and “One Crazy Summer?” Just me?

This franchise is a cheerfully cheesy and harmless “back to the beach” comedy, with goofy-flirty “Junior Rescue” teens mimicking “Baywatch” — in their dreams.

The scripts aren’t much, the cast is set, so Savage Steve and his minions can crank this stuff out — episodes and (short) movie-length features — in bulk. Which they do. “Malibu Rescue: The Next Wave” arrives less than a year after “Malibu Rescue” the movie and the series first appeared.

The new movie finds our tanned, toothy team from Tower Two facing a “shut the program down” moment. That comes as they’re doing support work for a Beach Master Challenge obstacle course with the world’s elite lifeguards competing for the top prize.

SOMEbody intentionally serves the obnoxious four-time champs, Team USA, tainted cole slaw. (Port-a-Potty humor) Because maybe SOMEbody didn’t like the “winning streak” joke the jerk (JT Neal) with Team USA taunted him with.

“The longest streak you’ve ever had was in your SHORTS!”

SOMEbody has to take Team USA’s place — “How hard can it be?”

It’s a good thing SOMEbody — Gina (Breanna Yde) is the daughter of a drill sergeant. Welcome to “Hell” you “MAGGOTS.”

“She’s ‘Mom’ mad. That’s the maddest you can be.”

Eric (Alkoya Brunson) is Urkeling all over Lizzie (Abby Donnelly). Blonde goddess Dylan (Jackie R. Jacobson) is so obsessed with Tyler (Ricardo Hurtado) it’s interfering with uh, grammar.

“I don’t have TYLER for this right now!”

But whenever the chips are down, at least they can count on surfer dude/bus-driver Vooch (Jeremy Howard) in a pinch, or Tyler’s punk stepsister Sasha (Ella Gross) for a dirty deed or two aimed at their arch rivals, the slang-slinging trash-talking Team Oz (Australia).

Too right.

This is generic tween-to-teen TV junk food, harmless enough and hammed up by the cast so that even the slowest kid will get the jokes. Holland knows how the formula works and finds little laughs in the fumbled flirting.

And he cast amusing people in some of the adult roles, which makes it pass the time easily. Carly Hughes vamps the part of the summer school art teacher, fooled into thinking a blow-up dummy animated by squirrel power is one of the junior rescuers who is supposed to be in her class. Howard, a “Breaking Bad” veteran, gets laughs out of his “Duuuuuuude” speak, and from a cute gag where he narrates Tyler’s romantic thoughts about Dylan as Tyler gawks at her across the parking lot.

Parental viewers will pick up on who the janitor is in that summer school running gag. Why, it’s Curtis Armstrong from “Risky Business,” “Revenge of the Nerds” and, yes — “Better Off Dead.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, toilet humor

Cast: Breanna Yde, Richard Hurtado, Jackie R. Jacobson Alkoya Brunson, Abby Donnelly,  Jeremy Howard and Curtis Armstrong

Credits: Directed by Savage Steve Holland, script by Jeff Elinoff and Scott Thomas, based on the TV series. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:11

When you name your junky-abducted-by-aliens genre movie “Fried Barry,” you set up certain expectations.

When your opening scene is an early ’60s looking “official warning viewers of what is coming, that it’s “classified” as “18,” and all manner of violence, drug abuse and sex will be shown in all their unsparing grossness, you prompt giggles as you further those expectations.

Slapping an “intermission” interstitial in it adds to the sense of “fun” you’re conveying.

Character names such as Fried Barry, Little Beast and Sticky Vicky and Caveman promising amusing “types.”

Brag about how it had no actual “script,” just a breakdown of scenes, thrown together over a weekend. Dialogue? The actors came up with that on the set. Thus, the “writer/director” credit in the opening morphs into “A Ryan Kruger Thing.”

But man, bragging about that lack of prep for this in-your-face, gross and grimly unfunny “romp” through Capetown’s street life? A little premature, sport. “Fried Barry” lacks the one thing you’ve promised with everything listed above — a light, loose touch.

It sets up as a “Brother from Another Planet” meets “Crank” genre mash-up, a goof on junky tales, alien abduction stories complete with penile probe and alien insemination.

But every tin-eared line of trite, slapdash dialogue (There isn’t much of it, but none of it is good.), every sophomoric “let’s throw Barry into another sexual situation, the uglier the better,” every leaden encounter — friendly or unfriendly —  undercuts any sense of “fun” the picture might generate.

Granted, I wasn’t watching it in a theater full of hooting, hardcore genre devotees, but I found it just a slog.

Barry (Gary Green) is a high-mileage junky — he might be 50, he looks 60-plus — with a woman (Chanelle de Jager) who curses him, in English and Afrikaans, a toddler and an addiction that’s far more important to him than either of them.

He’s always looking for that next chance to cook up, and there’s a whole support system or barflies and fellow users to give him those chances.

But walking a back alley after his latest plunge — Kruger illustrates drug trips as diving underwater — he’s immersed in light, and lifted into the sky where a hallucinatory blur of probing, laser-scanning and aliens eyeballing him, etc. ensues. Yeah, that’s funny.

And then, still tripping, he’s dropped back on the street — catatonic, wild-eyed and high as a kite.

Barry’s “strange trip” takes him, staggering like a robotic zombie, through hookers, a rave and a bar pickup, because this gross, weathered slob of an addict is just catnip to the ladies.

He is assaulted and abused, nagged (the “wife” finds him) and kidnapped. He also lays a healing hand on a heart attack victim and makes an instant baby, conceived in bile, with a fetching sex worker.

Quite the night.

That which is offensive is meant to be humorously so, and never quite gets there. Barry’s odyssey has hints of a personal journey to it, a rebirth. Not really.

There are suggestions of “Starman” to Green’s performance, that puzzled, alien-in-a-strange-land who regards the world like a stoned pigeon and parrots what is said to him because speech is a “new thing.”  But strip all the charm from that, give the guy one slack-jawed look, and that’s the “acting” we get.

The spare effects are terrific and just flashy enough to not seem out of place in a lowdown exploitation picutre like this.

One can see why the fanboys might buy into “Fried Barry” — the sci-fi/horror elements, the exploitation touches, the primitive sexism (all harridans and whores). But not me.

Let’s just say I got it, but I never got into it. Ever.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, drug abuse, explicit sex, nudity and profanity

Cast: Gary Green, Chanelle de Jager, Kelsey Egan, Joey Cramer and Sean Cameron Michael

Credits: Written and directed by Ryan Kruger. A Rock Salt release.

Running time: 1:39

Thrillers by their very nature string you along. The good ones invite you to second-guess the heroine or hero, put yourself in that person’s shoes, collect your wits and think your way out of a life-or-death jam.

And the not-as-good ones? They manipulate, abandon logic and make you grope for reasons for “Why did he do that” “Why did she go back?” “What sane person would go down there?”

“What Keeps You Alive” sucks you in and lets you off the hook entirely too easily. Its set pieces seem to lumber along in slow motion. When one of them is a rowboat chase, well, that’s a given. Its finale abandons every rational thought a human being would have, even as the writer-director is having a smirk over how clever it is to hide a climactic confrontation. And hell, it’s got one of those “talking villains.” Need I say more?

Young marrieds Jackie and Jules show up at her grandpa’s “rustic” lakefront frame house in the wooded Canadian wilderness. Their get-away is coitus-interrupted by a neighbor, and that’s when Jules (Brittany Allen of TV’s “The Boys”) first starts to wonder, “Who IS this woman I’ve married?”

Jackie used to be Megan. But as she’s played by Hannah Emily Anderson, she with the “X-Men: Dark Phoenix” scary eyes, well you’d think Julie would have had a clue or two earlier, maybe when “Jackie” starts plucking out a modern murder ballad, “There’s a demon inside, BLOOD let it out” on the guitar.

Questioning that neighbor (Martha MacIsaac) when Megan/Jackie isn’t around just leads to more questions. Here’s a deal-breaker worth mentioning in couples therapy. When your partner says “I was cleared of any wrongdoing,” sounding like “that’s what my lawyer allows me to say,” run.

All the obvious bits of foreshadowing? Colorful “anecdotes” from Megan’s past, etc? Well, you’ll see.

Jules ends up injured and limping/rowing/pleading/fighting for her life from a very talkative psychopath.

I went along with this further than I probably should have. But the lack or urgency and Jules’ maddening refusal to take flight — we see mailboxes all along the road to the house, know at least “some” neighbors are at home — bugged me, right from the start.

There’s all this ominous Beethoven on the soundtrack, throbbing along as we wonder what Jackie — who rehearses panicked 911 calls the way others internalize Blanche DuBois — can say or do to explain her actions and the times she seems to abandon her own logic.

The performances are good, and the gay marriage twist seems a long way from the old “homicidal homosexual” stereotype. Sort of.

But the endless monologues — Jules diagnosing and narrating her injuries, aloud, for the audience, Jackie giving away her fake distress and switching to instant-threats early and often — punch holes in what would have been a tighter, tenser narrative.

Why tell us everything when good actresses can simply SHOW it? That’s something any filmmaker fretting over making a “not-as-good” thriller should mutter as a mantra, even if what they’re showing us grows more preposterous than fun.

MPAA Rating: R for violence including bloody images, language, and brief nudity

Cast: Hannah Emily Anderson, Brittany Allen, Martha MacIsaac and Joey Klein

Credits: Written and directed by Colin Minihan. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:38