Movie Nation

You can’t manufacture a “cult film.”

But you can play around with “Hey you guys, this REALLY happened!” Try a new twist on the “found footage” horror formula that “The Blair Witch Project” perfected, a “long lost movie” myth with a touch of “The Ring” about it.

Call it “The Deadliest Movie Ever Made,” and make it about a motion picture that screens as “the work of the Devil,” a movie never truly released because people who saw it died, a theater that showed it burned up and killed a bunch of people.

San Franciscans who tried to watch it decades later rioted, and more death ensued.

“Antrum” is its title, a 1979 American made “indie” film that a couple of film festival programmers screened for admission to their fests in the ’80s — and met untimely ends.

This is the “cursed movie” myth that dogs John Wayne’s debacle “The Conqueror” or more recently, where “Poltergeist” lost a lot of sweet and respected actors, and let Craig T. Nelson live.

Filmmakers David Amito and Michael Laicini wrap their conceit in a mockumentary, complete with “experts” on “Antrum” and “demonology” and horror movies. Their expert testimonials speak of it being “the Holy Grail” of cult films, one that it’s “not safe” to watch.

A favorite amateurish touch? They misspell “Budapest,” the city where the theater allegedly burned down in their “tribute” closing credits. Perfect.

The “only print” of the movie itself is an odd affair, a simple spin on “Pet Sematary” with Cyrillic and English credits, and a bizarre tale of a little boy (Rowan Smyth) who sees his beloved dog Maxine, “put down” by a vet.

Nathan knows “All dogs go to heaven.” But Mom says no, Maxine was “bad.” She’s a hound in hell, now.

Nathan is so distraught that his sister Oralee (Nicole Tompkins) locates a book of necromancy and leads him on a camping trip to the forest “where Satan fell when he was cast out of Heaven.”

They’ll follow the book’s directions, with chapters headed “Before You Get to Hell,” and “Welcome to Hell” (not pictured, the prologue, “So You want to Go to Hell). They’ll find the exact spot, near a hollowed out tree, and dig their way through the layers of hell until they find the one Maxine is in, and bring her home.

They’d better watch out for Cerberus, the multi-headed dog that supposedly patrols the banks of the River Styx, at the entrance to Hell in Greek myth. Nathan thinks he hears him.

Flickering flash-cut black and white inserts interrupt this quest, images of Satan in the shadows, of people being tortured. Odd noises blast out of the soundtrack, too. Which of these trigger viewers’ deaths?

The footage looks properly grainy in some scenes, the light has a hint of that “Eastmancolor at dawn” flavor common to the movies of the day.

And the kids? They soldier on through layers of Hell described by chapters labeled “Nefastas,””Malificus” and “Demonium.”

“Look, it’s a DEMON!” Actually, it’s a stop-motion-animated demonic squirrel with a black tail.

I appreciate the effort here. The idea is sound, but the script needed several more passes before they committed to shooting it. The odd Cyrillic titles suggest a funnier way to go — shoot the damned thing in Hungarian, make the “legend” more exotic and foreign. It’s not like we’re told this is a Hungarian or whatever print that was found recently in Connecticut.

The “Look, a DEMON” bit is the only thing here that’s funny, and that’s another direction one could have taken “Antrum.” Cult films like “The Room” are often laughed at.

“Antrum” has no other laughs, and unless you’re a rube who falls for every “Hey, you guys, this REALLY happened” on the Internet, there’s not much here to hold our interest.

“Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made” isn’t amateurish enough to be charming or professional enough to pull off the con job.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Rowan Smyth, Nicole Tompkins

Credits: Written and directed by David Amito, Michael Laicini. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:34

An ageing actress summons her extended family to scenic Sintra, Portugal, in “Frankie,” a lovely but downbeat and dull showcase for Isabelle Huppert, who has the title role.

You’d think that with a husband, ex-husband, stepdaughter who is contemplating divorce, a son who isn’t the closest to her and a rebellious step-granddaughter about to head off to college, the filmmakers could manage a few sparks, some confrontations — something out of this set-up.

But not really. Director Ira Sachs makes chatty, relationshippy melodramas, for the most part — films that often have gay texts, subtexts or merely a character or two. While “Love is Strange” and “Little Men” or “Keep the Lights On” have their acting moments and other virtues, they are conflicts in a minor key. Not enough happens.

“Frankie” is filled with absurdly frank confessions and moments of over-sharing as a stellar cast breaks up into pairs for scenes that don’t so much go anywhere as flesh in the back stories in front of one of the loveliest tourist towns on The Continent.

Frankie is married to Jimmy (Brendan Gleeson), divorced from Michel (Pascal Greggory), who is the father of prickly, lonely Paul (Jérémie Renier).

Frankie would like to fix Paul up with her favorite on-set hair stylist, Ilene (Marissa Tomei). But Ilene’s shown up with her second unit cinematographer beau, Gary (Greg Kinnear). And he’s all about making their relationship permanent.

“We’d have two homes. We don’t need more than that!”

Sylvia, or Vivi (Vinette Robinson) is Jimmy’s daughter from an earlier relationship. And she’s thinking about divorcing Ian (Ariyon Bakare). They’re British, and daughter Maya (Sennia Nanua) is headed for college, and somewhat trapped in the middle of their very civil, almost loving break-up.

Nobody seems all that thrilled to be here, save for the New York film couple. And they “don’t know.” 

We can guess what’s going on, with the hired-guide pointing them to this or that “miracle fountain,” siblings fussing over jewelry and estates and financial stuff.

It’s just that everybody is too self-absorbed to work those “issues” out. All this pairing up just gives the Michel the chance to admit that Frankie divorcing him was the best thing to ever happen to him.

“I met Thierry, and I finally let myself fall in love with a man.”

Maya meets a Portugeuse boy who tells her much of his life story on a trolley ride to the beach.

Even the guide gets in on it — “Sometimes, I don’t even know why I stay married.”

The awkward moments have a light dramatic charge; the way Ilene tries to brush off Gary’s proposal, Paul’s little anecdote about the origins of the lifelong friction with his mother.

Huppert plays a character with “playing cupid” on her mind, among other things. The odd lightly amusing line and a couple of fatalistic ones are all Frankie has to offer her. She’s the fulcrum around which the other tales pivot, and there’s not enough to her.

The spark of her being scolded by her granddaughter for swimming in the villa’s pool in the opening scene — “They can take PICTURES.” “That’s OK. I’m very photoGENIC!” — is about as lively as the role, or the movie that follows, gets.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language and some sexual material

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Marisa Tomei, Vinette Robinson, Brendan Gleeson, , Ariyon Bakare, Pascal Greggory, Jérémie Renier, Sennia Nanua and Greg Kinnear

Credits: Directed by Ira Sachs, script by Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias.  A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:40

Maybe returning to your high school to coach will help with that drinking problem.

A March release, starring Ben and directed by Gavin O’Connor.

Oh yes, we’re going back under the sea for a few Spongebob shenanigans, Patrick pratfalls etc. Next May.

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is a biographical essay in sweetness and light.

Tom Hanks playing the most beloved TV personality America has ever produced, “Mister Rogers,” may be the epitome of cinematic “on the nose” casting. A “national treasure portraying a national treasure” and all that.

But that’s precisely what is called for in this moving portrait not just of the man, but of his impact on those who came into contact with him in person, and the generations who started life watching him on TV.

“Can You Ever Forgive Me” director Marielle Heller and her screenwriter frame this portait within a fictionalized account of a cynical magazine journalist’s attempt to profile “a living saint,” and falling under the spell of a man who was a veritable “human whisperer.” That would be the soft-spoken Presbyterian pastor with an early childhood development degree, Fred Rogers.

On TV, he preached kindness, compassion, forgiveness and patience. He looked into the camera, as Hanks’ Rogers recalls, and imagined that “one child” he was talking to. And if that child, like him, got frustrated setting up a tent (as Fred does), here’s Mister Rogers showing you how to deal with frustration.

The fictional conceit here is pure manipulation. Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys of “The Americans”) is a hard-hitting investigative reporter assigned by his editor (Christine Lahti) to do a 400 word “puff piece” on Mister Rogers for a 1998 Esquire Magazine issue on “Heroes.”

He gets to write about “Someone good, for a change.” “We’ll see,” he mutters.

Vogel is a journalistic pitbull who chews up most of those he writes about. Rogers quietly and kindly regards him, leaves a lot of long pauses in their chat, and turns the interview around, probing Vogel’s open psychic wound, the reason he shows up in Pittsburgh for their conversation with a cut nose and the beginnings of a black eye.

Vogel has estranged father (Oscar winner Chris Cooper) issues, and a hair trigger rage about the subject. How mad do you have to be to get testy with Fred Rogers? Mad enough to walk out on the interview when Rogers gently turns the questioning on him?

It’s an obvious conceit, the “angry journalist” cliche. The whole movie is framed within it, with Rogers taping his show, dragging Vogel into it (in his dreams) for little childhood lessons about what to do when you’re feeling mad and “forgiveness.” His puppets pitch in. He does what Rogers was famous for doing, taking an interest and kindly devoting all his attention to the person he was with, even though he’s just met them.

The real magazine writer was Tom Junod, and the best reason to change his name for the movie was that all of this stuff is invented hokum. But it works, a motion picture parable built on lessons we’ve forgotten in the rage of adulthood in a divisive age.

Hanks isn’t as wiry and doesn’t attempt the high-pitched voice that made Rogers the target of generations of comedians. But he absolutely masters the hypnotic, soft-spoken calm Rogers projected, a calm that pervaded the set of his show and could seem to follow him into the world.

Lovely scenes in a local Pittsburgh restaurant where the other diners lapse into dead silence so that they can overhear Fred’s zen-like calmness exercise and the homilies that he passes on to Lloyd, or when Vogel and Rogers catch a New York subway, only to be serenaded by the other passengers, starting with the children, with generations of adults chiming in, with “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s” theme song, give the picture its heart.

It’s not just what he meant to us as individuals, it’s seeing what he meant to all of those around us that gets to you.

Rhys makes a marvelously bitter, broken “professional” — new to fatherhood, a bit of an emotional chore for his wife (Susan Kelechi Watson of “This is Us”).

Cooper is a properly inappropriate, clueless and self-centered Dad who can’t figure out why his son will never, ever forgive him for the past.

And “Just Shoot Me” veteran Enrico Colantoni underplays the disapproving TV show publicist who may have warned Fred away from speaking to this hatchet man, Vogel, but who isn’t surprised his boss, who scowled at being called “a living saint,” turns the reporter into a puddle of feelings, just by sizing him up and being himself — empathy personified.

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” isn’t as weepy and sentimental as the fine documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” a film that conjured up not just Rogers’ persona and role in our lives, but childhood itself for millions of viewers. “Beautiful Day” is still a splendid synthesis of the essence of the man and his values, a teacher who never stopped teaching while he was alive, and via another Oscar-worthy performance by Tom Hanks, is teaching us still.

MPAA Rating: PG, (fisticuffs, alcohol abuse)
Cast: Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, Enrico Colantoni, Christine Lahti and Chris Cooper.

Credits: Directed by Marielle Heller, script by Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Noah Harpster, inspired by Tom Junod’s 1998 article for Esquire Magazine. A Sony/Tristar release.

Running time: 1:48

Scary stuff. Horror from Luxemburg?

A 2020 release with Udo Kier and an imperiled young woman learning about her troubling history.

A Hollywood starlet is radicalized, with cause, in this biopic.

Stewart plays the “Breathless” who found screen immortality overseas, and her cause in African American radical politics in the US.

Anthony Mackie, Zazie Beetz, Colm Meaney and Stephen Root also star.

Limited prospects for this one as she was praised but the movie panned in festivals. Amazon made it, so it will live on online.

“Night Sweats” is a nervy indie thriller that never quite overcomes the malnutrition of its budget.

I mean, kudos for casting and shooting it in New York, on the fly, for a just (unconfirmed) $200,000. The story and the most of the action beats, and some of the performances, don’t give away the game.

Sure, we can tell the characters from The Centers for Disease Control are wearing haz-mat suits from an auto body shop paint booth, and are tooling around in a white van with only plastic sheeting in the back as disease “containment.”

A restaurant and apartments all look real and lived-in (and probably are), and if the various offices you want to know aren’t convincing, roll all the action into streets, stairwells and entryways. Which they pretty much did.

That kind of inventive thinking was a hallmark of Orson Welles’ post-Hollywood movies. But the cheapness (Frank Zappa spelled it “Cheepnis” in his ode to no-budget thrillers) can’t help but get in the way in a story about contagion and conspiracy in New York city.

“Night Sweats” arrives in New York with Yuri (Kyle DeSpiegler), a Boulder Colorado skateboarder who moves in with his old pal Jake (John Francomacaro).

He’s barely had time to adjust and find coffeeshop work, when he meets Jake’s friend, waitress-who-wants-to-be-an actress MK (Mary Elaine Ramsey). And things are just getting interesting with her when Jake starts vomiting and slips into a seizure.

Next thing they know, Jake is dead. The flippant medical examiner (Allison Mackie) suspects poisoning. And as Yuri frantically tries to detox the apartment (covering his face with a bandana, because SAFETY FIRST), he starts to puzzle over what really happened.

The EMT (Brett Azar) who barged in, mid-seizure, claiming he heard what was going on “next door” was odd. Him fleeing before the “real” EMTs arrived was odder.

And there was this company Jake worked for, a start-up called True Healing, where he videotaped survivors of trauma for a website’s video library, “data” that apparently has value to Big Pharma.

As the medical examiner expresses alarm at what she’s finding, Yuri sees connections to True Healing and decides to go undercover, taking Jake’s old job, “interviewing” these trauma survivors on video. His boss (John Wesley Shipp of “The Flash”) is VERY touchy about how these interviews should go.

“Stick to the G– D—-d SCRIPT!”

Whatever happened to Jake, it’s happening to others. Could Yuri catch it? MK?

And what is UP with that EMT, who seems to show up –by motorcycle — every time somebody gets sick?

Writer-director Andrew Lyman-Clarke finesses a simple, conspiracy-minded script with a lot of disorienting close-ups, little tricks of having the players run down the street holding a camera on themselves at chest level.

Yuri’s “interviews” with trauma victims have some edge. DeSpiegler’s reactions to what he’s seeing run hot to cold. Sometime, we buy that he’s frantic and fearful. Other times, his callousness and lack of self-preservation defies the logic of the situation.

There’s one funny scene having to do with scaring some answers out of True Healing’s resident germaphobe.

But the suspense is often undercut by the cheapness. Characters say they’re calling for cops who never arrive, vehicles, costumes and haz-mat suits look so cheap they can’t be anything the “real” agency or city bureaucracy would put out for bids, with layers of specifications, and equip themselves with.

So even people who might be what they say they are lack visual credibility. The viewer suspects everyone, because the filmmakers didn’t have the money to give characters authority in their costume. Or hire people to play cops.

The germ of a good idea is here, the dialogue isn’t awful even if the finale kind of is.’ The biggest “name” in the cast is the only one who goes too far over the top. And the simple effects — nothing’s cheaper than vomiting up whatever soup they fed the actors — come off well enough.

You can’t grade on the curve, so no praising “Night Sweats” for its budget. Stick to that rule and what we’re evaluating here is an intriguing cut-rate thriller that (unfortunately) looks it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with sexual content, substance abuse, mild violence and profanity

Cast:  Kyle DeSpiegler, Mary Elaine Ramsey, Allison Mackie and John Wesley Shipp

Credits: Written and directed by Andrew Lyman-Clarke. A Witness release.

Running time: 1:39

No, I’m not the last critic in America to get to see this one.

Close.

Love Tom. Love Mister Rogers.

Bringing tissues.

“Most Likely to Succeed” is an ambitious, smart and affecting documentary that follows four disparate high school over-achievers, kids who collected that title in their respective alma maters, to see how life worked out for them in the decade after graduation.

It may be smaller in scale and scope than the gold standard for such films, Michael Apted’s classic “7-Up,” (and “28-Up,” etc.) series of British films. But Pamela Littky’s four subjects, followed for ten years, give us a healthy dose of white privilege and a taste of the struggle that people who don’t start out on second or third base in life face on the “road to success.”

And what’s striking about this quartet — blonde Sarah, the Florida preacher’s kid, Quidrela (“Quay”) and Charles (“Disco”), both black teens from Detroit, and California boy Peter, the son of two college professors — is how much alike they are.

The arc of the film shows them to be go-getters, piling up awards, club responsibilities, good grades and ambitions at 18. And no matter what false starts or pitfalls life gives them, that shared character trait was still obvious a decade later.

Littky, an on-point off-camera questioner, can’t quite avoid stereotypes, even in her selection of subjects. Two black kids from Detroit — one raised by a single mom, the other abandoned by drug addled parents? That seems too on-the-nose. But they’ve already made up their minds to rise above their childhoods, be the first in either family to go to college.

With her vocal fry, and the vast wardrobe that she moves into the Gainesville dorm, Sarah could easily be set up as “the villain” of the piece, the one who gets on your nerves, with so much of what she achieves seemingly arriving on a selection of silver platters.

But there was work going on as she carved out FIVE semesters abroad during her University of Florida career, a Fullbright Scholarship, a fluency in Hebrew, Turkish and Arabic. Yeah, she wanted to be in the foreign service, maybe Secretary of State someday. At 18. Her focus in not straying far from that course is impressive.

Her love life? “I’m not the kind of girl who will follow a man” says it all.

Quay has some vague notions about “travel” and not wanting “a regular job” at 18. She changes colleges before she even starts school, and starts to work out what she can do with her interests in children and healthcare.

Peter? A musician who is self-aware enough to realize he’s not self-aware, a tad “on the spectrum” perhaps, he starts Ivy League Brown University wishing “I felt emotions more strongly” and “realizing my own ignorance about other people.” He studies Chinese, talks of teaching and ends up exactly where very smart white guys with Ivy League degrees who aren’t the most sensitive to human emotions go.

Charles, abandoned by his parents, only wants to get married someday, maybe become a physical therapist or athletic trainer.

“Life happens” to them over the next decade — a marriage, a first, second and third romance, travel and graduation, first jobs and first careers changing into second or third jobs and different careers. Grad school, a pet chihuahua, funerals.

Who will figure out that white privilege means “opportunities (were) almost handed to me,” who will see a dream deferred and who will want to “Pay if forward?”

I like Littky’s mix of elements used to tell these stories, catching up with some via cell phone video they shoot themselves, social media updates (re-created, typed out on screen). Her questions, heard here and there, elicit great responses.

“I hear you’ve got a boyfriend” to one. “You guys are SERIOUS” to another.

Her film reinforces the thesis of Apted’s British TV films, which tested Aristotle’s theory that “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” These young people were already formed when Littky settled on them as subjects. They might fall into college partying a little too hard, divorce, quit jobs and lose their way here and there.

But they cannot escape the grounded, adaptive and achieving or overchieving kids they were at 18. That can be taken as heartening, because it suggests at least some color-blindness, at least a window they’ve all already half-crawled through at 18, no matter what circumstances stood in their way or gave them a head start before then.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Peter Hayes, Sarah Kaiser-Cross, Quidrela Lewis, Charles Rider.

Credits: Directed by Pamela Littky. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:36