Movie Nation

“The Runners” is a low-budget rural Texas riff on child sex trafficking, with a rural Texas take on “how we deal with’em, down in Texas.”

It’s a straight-up C-movie that reaches its climax, and then stumbles towards a far bigger one because, well, we’ve got to get more guns and a Mexican drug cartel involved.

It’s bad. And as that climactic shootout arrives, with a villain who brings a bolt-action rifle to a gunfight to take on a hero’s shotgun, you chuckle and think, “This can’t get worse.” And then it does.

Older brother Ryan (writer and co-director Micah Lyons) has been raising sister Zoe ever since their parents died. But now that she’s a teen (Netty Leech), rebellion has set in.

She’s been cutting classes, dating a popular jock on the Hallsville High football team, talking back to her “guardian.”

That’s what puts her at the after-game party. That’s where she figures out the jock isn’t faithful, which leaves her there alone. And that’s when she’s grabbed.

Ryan flips-out when she doesn’t make it home, and frantic calls to the cowboy hat sheriff’s department doesn’t even get their boots off their desks. A tip here, an hunch there and he stumbles into a mass kidnapping. The rescue fails, but the otherwise ruthless and murderous kidnapper (co-director Joey Loomis) lets him live.

In bad thrillers, they always let the hero live. They don’t always leave a Polaroid of the gagged victim, and a ROAD MAP of where they’re a-going. But that’s the difference between a B-movie and a C, D or Z one.

Ryan rounds up his bearded doofus pal Kooter (Jason Peter Kennedy) and sets off after an RV loaded with bound teens, held by a Ms. Nasty Braids, Cash Money (Rhoda Morman), a skinhead to provide the muscle and mastermind Marty (Loomis).

The interlocking pieces of how a no-budget film is planned, financed and cast are laid bare in movies like “The Runners.”

Lyons is producing, writing and acting in movies in and around his tiny hometown, Hallsville. He knows the lay of the East Texas land.

He’s making thrillers on hot-button topics. There’s a “COVID-19: Invasion” movie in production.

And he landed an actual movie star for a bit part. That helps get the movie financed. Tom Sizemore plays the preacher a couple of characters consult, the only guy who can get lazy, dimwitted but armed-to-the-teeth law enforcement off its collective butts.

The fights aren’t awful, although the first big shootout is laughably under-armed, by Texas standards and by career-criminals-in-the-movies standards. They saved all their cash for an over-ordnanced finale, which is a Sig-Sauer slaugherhouse of assault rifles.

But the script ranges from bad to worse, with generic character melt-downs and amateurish plot lapses. Why kill a “problem” when you can leave him to keep chasing you, and later capture and then torture him, with a little trash-talk tossed in?

Here’s a tip to film financiers. If the script you’re being pitched has the tritest thriller line of them all in it — “We’re a lot alike, you and I” — drop it and run. Run away like “The Runners.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual assault, profanity

Cast: Micah Lyons, Netty Leech, Joey Loomis, Rhonda Morman, Jason Peter Kennedy, and Tom Sizemore

Credits: Directed by Joey Loomis and Micah Lyons, script by Micah Lyons. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:38

Robots and Theo James and Stacey Martin and Rhona Mitra, with Toby Jones as the heavy.

July 10 it streams.

The singer Duffy experienced something akin to the perverse kidnap/rape fantasy depicted in this Italian Netflix “romantic thriller.”

So she’s naturally a little peeved Netflix would finance an Italian thriller in the “50 Shades” veinan Italian thriller in the “50 Shades” vein that turns kidnapping and rape into something potentially romantic, and then put that on American Netflix, where we take #MeToo issues more seriously.

From The Hollywood Reporter

Duffy is reportedly criticizing Netflix for its “irresponsible” decision to stream the controversial film ‘365 Days’ https://t.co/PNn1ngGcMH https://twitter.com/THR/status/1278824134911365126?s=20

Plenty of Brits have mined this video material to settle arguments about the happy not-quite-accident that brought together the ensemble that became “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

But now Americans can renew that debate as Tubi, one of the free TV channels you can stream through Roku and other means, has the prehistory of Python up for some fun “compare and contrast” bingeing.

The sketch shows that most of the members of the “Flying Circus” appeared on, in competition, in the last two years before they wear teamed up, are paired up on Tubi, which you an watch for free on any Smart TV, Roku equipped set or digital device with online access.

There are traces, rough versions of personas, voices, gags and sketches recycled and polished and made world famous on “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” in the 1967-69 series “Do Not Adjust Your Set” and “At Last the 1948 Show.”

“Set” starred and was partly written by future Pythons Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Michael Palin.

“1948” was built on similar double duties performed by John Cleese, Graham Chapman and break-out (non-Python) funnyman Marty Feldman.

The absurdist humor was there, the obsession with vicars, chartered accountants, cross-dressing, Aussies, “knickers” as a punchline, but spread out over two shows of uneven quality where the stand-outs in each cast were obviously the fellows who’d go on to team up and one-up one another on a series that became a global comedy brand and a calling card for British humor for generations.

Here’s a “1948” sketch you’ll recognize, in slightly more rustic (Yorkshire) form from its later Python version.

“Set” has the musical stylings of Eric Idle and Michael Palin playing annoying shopkeepers who never give the customer what he wants, and plenty of Jones pratfalls.

A key element of the “Adjust Your Set” outings was the participation (once in blackface) of the comical Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

“1948” had Cleese, far and away the most comfortable and hilarious performer, paired with his longtime writing partner Chapman, who finds laughs in sketches that probably wouldn’t have passed “Python” muster.

Most of these programs were thought lost, as they were recorded on videotape and Thames TV “wiped” the masters. But damned if dogged researchers haven’t turned up plenty of them to show how the Pythons journeyed from college “Cambridge Footlights” phenoms into confident TV comedy creators and performers.

Cleese, sitting at a moderator’s desk hosting absurd riffs on schoolkid quiz competitions, newscasts, etc., Chapman’s constantly-ruffed feathers at various affronts to his bowler-hatted, bobby-suited dignity, make “At Last the 1948 Show” the more daft and enduring, in terms of its ability to generate laughs.

But Idle and Jones performing Scottish folk songs in kilts is a bit that could have been recycled to greater glory a few years later.

If you’ve memorized their legendary bits, know “The Lumberjack Song” by heart, have read any of their autobiographies, these competing programs are worth checking out to see them as the budding talents before Minnesotan Terry Gilliam became the glue (I jest. A little.) that turned the two “teams” into one.

Many a thriller has hung its hat on a “big reveal” that was only suitable for hanging itself out to dry.

So it is with “Ingenium,” a tense-if-not-exasperating sci-fi mystery from Germany. You pay attention. You follow the clues. You try to piece it together.

And when you do, you think, “Well, Joseph Gordon-Levitt got there first, didn’t he? And that Hayden Christensen fellow?” And no, I’m not going to explain that any further. Film fans can do the math.

Two little German girls meet in an orphanage, tiny tots who can’t remember exact details of how their parents died.

Years later, one of them says “I can’t remember anything much these days.”

“Sometimes, it’s better that way,” she’s told.

In adulthood, Felicitas (Esther Maaß) is in therapy, undergoing hypnosis to try and pull her past together. Maybe a solo trip to Thailand is just what she needs!

Composer-beau Titus (Adrian Topol) is OK with that. “Just be sure to take your pills.” Naturally, she doesn’t.

But being a pretty young Euro-tourist, she’s offered a tour by the cute local Thai woman who speaks English and German. But when “Feli” nervously returns home, there’s video Gai (Jan Yousagoon) left on her phone, a message straight out of “Ghost.”

“You in danger, girl!” Go find this photo of you and BFF Natascha back at the orphanage. It’ll help.

Dr. Jung’s (HAH!) hypnosis unravels part of the mystery, a murderous attack in a Bangkok alley that Feli has survived but suppressed. Does away with the messy memory of killing somebody.

But now she’s got to go visit the friend who, it turns out, is in a mental hospital. Natascha (Judith Hoersch) is borderline catatonic, easily “triggers” and when she’s triggered, she always escapes to the ruins of the old orphanage.

The homeless sage there (Tony De Maeyer) gives away this. But how does she escape, why is she battered and bloodied every time she shows up?

And why are Feli’s shrink and boyfriend so worried about her and her “pills?”

“Ingenium” talks and talks and never quite trips over itself as it stumbles toward delivering its major revelation. The cast is more competent than compelling (performing mostly in German, with English subtitles).

But truth be told, the tight, effects-driven action sequences in the third act are a nice payoff. It’s just that whole premise, the way it comes out and the muddled manner the story is resolved all but talk “Ingenium” right out of its selling points.

And covering ground Joe Go-Lev and Hayden Christensen have already crossed doesn’t help. “Ingenium” works better as a mystery than as a mystery solved.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Esther Maaß, Judith Hoersch, Jan Yousagoon, Adrian Topol, Tony De Maeyer and Augustin Kramann

Credits: Directed by Steffen Hacker, script by Michael Knoll.  A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:27

Here’s a tepid little “Sex in the Chilean City” that has the odd amusing moment, thanks to a game cast that’s better than the lame script.

“Mujeres Arriba (Women on Top)” is built around sexually frustrated Teresa, “Saint Teresita” as her boyfriend calls her.

That would be the same boyfriend she’s bought sexy lingerie for to try and spice up their two year romance, the same beau Teresa (Loretto Bernal, who co-wrote the script) walks in on as he’s sexing up a younger woman.

Pobrecita Teresita!

Luckily, she has two pals to confide in.

But Maida (Natalia Valdebenito) has been married, with kids, long enough for the spark to gone out of her and Ignacio’s sex life, a spark snuffed out by exhaustion and responsibility.

“Getting ‘hot’ at this point is a job!”

And Consuelo (Alison Mandel) is finally about to marry. But Manuel doesn’t do it for her in bed, no matter how much puppy-dog whining she does to beg him to up his game.

Mierda! Where can a single 30 year-old woman turn when her friends’ best advice is “Have a one-night-stand,” (in Spanish, with English subtitles). “For us! Please!”

That would be sex therapist (Consuelo Holzapfel), whose advice is why Teresa takes up with not one but TWO hunks, one of them her new boss.

“Your boss saw your ‘HOT face?'”

The film is a shiny, silly sex farce where the “walk of shame” the morning after a hook-up becomes a dance, where scaring off Mr. Right is a form of foreplay and where every single move every single character makes is pre-ordained, predestined and damned predictable.

Starting with who Teresa walks in on in the opening scenes.

The coitus is more cute than “hot” or “funny.”

Valdebenito is the stand-out in the cast, a “Samantha” for you who follow the “Sex and the City” analogy. The funniest bits are Mandel’s spot-on puppy dog whine.

The rest? Despierta, chicas!

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sex, sex and more sex

Cast: Loretto Bernal, Natalia Valdebenito, Alison Mandel and Consuelo Holzapfel

Credits: Directed by Andre Feddersen, script by Loretto Bernal, Andres Feddersen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

Grown men and women weep upon meeting him. His aids good-naturedly grump about what it’s like to try to get the man to a plane on time.  Because a walk through an airport might involve 200 stops, requests to shake his hand, pauses for selfies.

Congressman John Lewis is one of the most recognizable, most celebrated members of of the House, a Democratic icon and an aging lion of America’s Civil Rights movement.

Even those who demonize him fear him for all the right reasons. Because when the cause is righteous and the need arises, John Lewis knows how to get into “good trouble.”

For the film, “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” director Dawn Porter and CNN put their home town (Atlanta) 80 year-old Congressman in a chair in front a large video screen, and in “This is Your Life” fashion, take him through the trials and triumphs of his life, getting his reactions and interviewing colleagues, friends and peers for theirs.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley recalls seeing the then-76 year-old Lewis lead a sit-in for gun control legislation (in 2016) in the U.S. House of Representatives, inspired to run for office herself “because that’s just what I would’ve done.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez marvels as “the radicalism” of Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement, ordinary people who rallied, marched and protested until Jim Crow laws were stricken from the books and voting rights were restored in the then-segregated South.

Lewis shakes his head at the Republican assault on voting rights, renewed through a right wing Supreme Court enabling states to close polling places, strike voters from the rolls and fix elections in those same states where people like Lewis literally bled to win those rights in the first place.

“One day we may wake up and find our democracy gone,” he sighs. So, at 80, he’s taken up the cause all over again. If you’re not impressed by a man who counts his arrests — acquired during protests — in the many dozens, perhaps you’re idolizing the wrong leaders.

We hear about his being inspired to join Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s budding Civil Rights crusade — at 15 — see him march in Selma, and hospitalized after state troopers rioted and attacked the marchers.

“I thought I was going to die on that (Edmund Pettus) Bridge,” he recalls, remembering the “Bloody Sunday” in 1965.

It’s an adoring portrait, covering Lewis’s early life (he started wearing a tie in elementary school, and has never stopped) and the breadth of his career, letting him tell the folksy story of “the boy from Troy, Alabama” to crowds of fans and peers.

But being “adoring” means it flirts with crossing over into hagiography. Accounts of how “dirty” his first campaign for Congress, beating hometown favorite, friend and fellow Civil Rights icon Julian Bond, ending Bond’s career is the rare hint of negative coverage here. Several members of the Congressman’s staff are interviewed or otherwise given screen time, hinting at the filmmaker not casting her net nearly as wide as she might have.

And the lone voice from “across the aisle” heard from is retiring GOP Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner from Wisconsin, complimenting Lewis’s efforts to keep the Voting Rights Act alive in the face of GOP assaults on it after the rise of the “Tea Party” wing in that party.

But if Atlanta-based CNN can’t do a bang-up job of documenting the life and career of one of Atlanta’s own, they’d have to hang their heads in shame. Director Porter  — she did the “Bobby Kennedy for President” mini-series — manages that, and more.

Michael Moore might plead for people willing to “put our lives on the line” to save American democracy. Here’s a portrait of someone who actually has, and who continues to do so.

MPAA Rating: PG, scenes of violence

Cast:John Lewis, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , Cory Booker, Elijah Cummings, Hillary Clinton, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar

Credits: Directed by Dawn Porter. A CNN Films/Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:36

Bobby Soto and George Lopez are here to tell this gang protection money murderer that “You’re bad, but you ain’t that bad.”

But it is Shia LaBeouf who has the title role in the new LA gangland thriller from the director of “End of Watch.”

David Ayer’s “The Tax Collector”  is “coming soon.

A little Euro sco-fi/horror to fill your nightmares? Streams July 7.

OK kids, gather round for today’s lesson in “How to get it done” in the movies.

“Homewrecker” is a C-movie with justifiable delusions of B-movie glory.

One simple premise, a couple of characters and a house you aren’t afraid to mess up, maybe spill some blood on — that’s basically all there is to this “Stalker took me captive” thriller.

Cast two decent actresses, get them to collaborate on the dialogue and “problems” each character must solve so that they’re all-in, and blast through it in 75 not-quite-breathless minutes.

There’s not a lot of polish, little in the line of over-the-top action or pizazz. But all involved wring every last drop of entertainment out of this student-film-simple movie.

They keep running into each other in yoga, spin cycle or dance class. Michelle (Alex Essoe) is younger, lithe and 20something. Linda (Precious Chong, yes, you-know-who’s “other” acting daughter) is a generation or so older. And if we know where to look, we notice she’s paying a lot of attention to Michelle.

A “chance” meet-up in a coffee shop gets the ball rolling. Meek and “nice” Michelle doesn’t know what to do with the stranger who notes their shared classes and exercise mania, who insists on sitting down for coffee, who moves her CHAIR so she can look at Michelle’s screen and see the answer to her second pushy question.

“Whatcha WORKIN’ on?”

The first query was about the photo on Michelle’s home screen. “Is that your BOYfriend?” No, it’s her husband. Before we or Michelle know it, Linda is asking nosy questions that reveal they’re “trying to start a family,” but that “he” isn’t that into the idea.

Linda’s questions are relentless, and when she gets around to what Michelle does for a living — interior decorator — the trap is sprung.

“You’re gonna do my HOUSE. It’s close by. C’mon! Let’s take a look at what you’ll be dealing with.”

Michelle, too polite and yes, compassionate — Linda’s wide-eyes scream “NEEDY!” — is in a car with a slightly-off stranger going to a house she doesn’t know in a neighborhood where she’s out of her element.

And once inside — you guessed it. The eyes turn from wide and “needy” to wild and “crazy.” The woman who insists her home be decorated “around this one piece,” a SLEDGEhammer she has hanging from her wall, has Michelle in her clutches.

What does she want? When will Michelle start to resist? How can she escape?

The script starts innocuously and then turns to building suspense. Just over 20 minutes in, the ’80s VHS copy of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” (the movie), the ’80s “Let’s Get Physical” headband, the ’80s teen board game “Party Hunks” stops being amusing and turns unsettling.

We channel surf straight into “This freak is STUCK in the ’80s, and she has a SLEDGEHAMMER!”

Chong manages a “Valley Girl with Malice” vibe with ease. Totally buy her in this, in Linda’s “Life peaked in the ’80s” mania. Chong hurls herself in an imaginary music video in which she acts out Lisa Loeb’s video of “Stay.”

Talk about chilling.

Essoe does well enough by the hapless “victim,” although the fights — struggles to get the drop on her captor, attempt an escape — have a timidity that matches the character perhaps a little too closely.

If there’s a fault to the picture it’s that the life-and-death wrestling and punching are stage-fight tentative. Neither nice young actress wants to hurt the other, seeing as the shooting and editing strategy doesn’t allow time to film from many angles to create the blur of violent close-ups hurtling past that allow stunt doubles to take over.

The film’s coda seems to provide more explaining and logic than the viewer needs or has asked for.

But “Homewrecker” is laugh-out-loud funny and edge-of-your-seat thrilling just often enough to come off. Dollar for low-budget dollar, it delivers fun and value many a Hollywood production would envy.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Alex Essoe, Precious Chong and Tony Matthews.

Credits: Directed by Zach Gayne, script by Alex Essoe, Precious Chong and Zach Gayne. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:16