Movie Nation

“Mister America” is a sequel to “On Cinema at the Cinema,” an intentionally bad, vigorously half-assed movie review show that went from podcast to web series, eventually part of the Adult Swim Cartoon Network brand.

It’s pretty much the definition of a “cult series,” cringe-worthy comedy with fans who follow its stars — Tim Heidecker (of “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and “Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories” etc.) and Gregg Turkington (of the dark and offbeat indie film “Entertainment”) — into other, spinoff projects such as “Decker,”  an incompetent action-comedy,  playing versions of themselves, the lazy, delusional and doltish Tim and movie-obsessed, weird and just-as-delusional Gregg.

And I’ve put more effort into reciting their credits than I ever have in digging into their shows. The deep dive dullness (irony) of their comedy never drew me in. I reviewed “Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie” when it came out and found it excruciating.

But then, I’m too cheap to imbibe or smoke whatever it is their fans are into that keep them tuned in and this “comic universe” employed.

“Mister America” is closer to genuine political satire, a droll but deathly-dull take on the worst candidate and worst campaign for office ever. And lest you confuse Tim for anybody else, he “ran” for District Attorney of San Bernadino, California, in this mockumentary.

This is after “On Cinema,” after “Decker,” after Tim and Gregg have had a falling out. One of Tim’s many details-disoriented later “schemes” was a desert music festival where the Chinese vapes the promoters (Tim) were giving to the crowd left a bunch of people dead.

Tim so resented being prosecuted for mass murder — he got off, thanks to a hung jury — that he’s running against DA Rosetti (Don Pecchia) out of spite and revenge.

Sound familiar?

But everything about this quixotic campaign is a fiasco. He doesn’t live in San Bernadino, so he’s “living” in a hotel, and running the campaign out of a hotel room.

“I don’t have to have lived here my entire life to know the problems” the place has. Those “problems?” “The rat” they have for a district attorney.

He has no volunteers to help him canvass for voters to get on the ballot. So irritable, rude, arrogant Tim is stuck going door to door, hailing people in parking lots, trying to get signatures.

“What’re you running for?”

“District attorney! Sorta like gov’ner,” he drawls. “I’m’o bring CHANGE!”

Punctuated by, “I’ve told you THREE times what I’m running for!”

Charming.

There’s a sucker/press secretary/campaign manager (Terri Parks), stumbling from one media failure to the next. She’s so harried and hapless she can’t even place a newspaper ad, much less take dictation for this or that Tim “statement.”

The DA he is running against is ignoring him. The judge who oversaw the trial where Tim ineptly, angrily and ignorantly represented himself, bullied witnesses and threw tantrums…and won — retired.

Campaigning or strategizing, he can’t keep from contradicting himself within a single breath.

Drunk tweeting his rage at his inability to get attention? Been there, done that.

And then there’s this film crew, following him, mentioning that disastrous musical festival and digging into his past.

That “past” would be Gregg Turkington, who has stories about their TV efforts together, Tim’s general incompetence and the movie Gregg — who spends his days dumpster diving for VHS “classics” — figures that Tim’s campaign “is an unofficial remake of, “The Shaggy DA” (the Disney Dean Jones version, not the one with Tim Allen).

“Good thing you’ll never finish the movie and Tim’ll never see it,” Gregg crows. Gregg knows cinema.

Clumsy but not funny appearances, incompetent cell-phone video “ads” and appearances — also not funny — pad the picture.

This is tedium itself. Want to see this “delusional dunce failing, and dragging others down with him” thing done better? Hunt up the Steve Coogan Brit-series about Alan Partridge, whom we meet as he launches his national TV talk and variety show, and who fails and fails downward, into local radio, personal appearances as a “has been,” voicing over infomercials, the works.

Maybe that’s the ironic difference Heidecker & Co. are getting at here. In America, hustlers and con men like Tim don’t fail downward. They fail upward.

Hell, he might even get to be president some day.

But he has yet to show he can deliver anything the least bit amusing to the big screen.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some drug use.

Cast: Tim Heidecker, Terri Parks, Gregg Turkington, Don Pecchia

Credits: Directed by Eric Notarnicola, script by Tim Heidecker, Eric Notarnicola and Gregg Turkington. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:29

First of all, great title. If you’re going to round up a bunch of young people — college coeds, stoners and frat bros — for a “dead teenager movie,” you’re going to need to do a “Head Count.”

The rules of “dead teenager movies” being what they are, frequent head counts are in order. I mean, if they’re picked off, in classic Poe and Agatha Christie style by whatever killer or evil is attacking them, we want a running tally of “Who’s left?” and “Who’s NEXT?”

Great setting, too. “Head Count” takes place in Joshua Tree, California, one of the most beautiful, iconic deserts in America. Tourist friendly, too. College kids rent a house here for spring break?

“Anybody wanna do some SHROOMs for breakfast?”

It’s a natural.

But Elle Callahan’s film upends the “types” and “tropes” of such movies by making the menace familiar. It’s the person sitting next to you, two thirds wasted, during a game of “Never have I ever,” the gal you’re sweet on and sidling up to when the call goes out, “Who’s ready for some SHOTS?”

There is no “one by one” order. Something is slipping in under a familiar guise and spooking this group of ten. Somebody’d better figure it out before it’s too late.

Those are novel twists. It’s just that the movie, which manages some early chills, fails that most basic horrof picture test. It isn’t scary.

Evan (Isaac Jay) isn’t headed to Mexican beaches or Daytona for spring break. He’s off to stay with his wastrel, wandering “free spirit” brother Peyton (Cooper Rowe), who lives, meditates and hikes on the edge of the Joshua Tree National Monument.

Peyton’s the guy who never returns a call, never answers his phone and is lost in his own head. Fun vacation.

Well, it is once the brothers are out hiking and stumble into nine college kids on a boulder-top bender. That’s over-selling it a bit. They’re just…mellow.

“You wanna smoke with us?”

Camille (Bevin Bru) is just looking out for her girl Zoe (Ashleigh Morghan), a photographer who likes keeping this Evan fellow in the frame.

First surprise of the picture, the “responsible” college boy younger brother says “Yes.” Peyton?

“Thanks, but I don’t smoke.”

The invitation to follow them back to their rented hacienda includes tequila. Peyton? “Thanks, but I don’t drink, either.”

Thus does “Oh, this guy’s a Joshua Tree stoner/dropout” expectation get upened. and Peyton will avoid the horrors that await the others, including his brother.

The booze, mushrooms and weed aren’t the issue, though they don’t help. It’s the Internet ghost stories they share around a campfire, the “shapeshifter” Evan mentions and probably shouldn’t — out loud.

The threat makes itself known with the usual “What was that?” Somebody saw something, Somebody heard something. You know the drill.

Callahan, who also came up with the story, treats us to chilling tracking shots, glimpses of the body whose point of view we are seeing the house and its out-buildings from in the dark. Photo bombs let us see what Evan sees. He doesn’t know everybidy there, but there’s an extra blonde in that background, in this doorway.

If he doesn’t get around to taking a “Head Count,” and quick, he’ll never ID the threat, get the others to heed his warnings and make up with his brother.

Because whatever else this kid is, he flunks the Good Brother Test, repeatedly. And the Potential Boyfriend Test, too.

The performances are indifferent, with only a couple of these “Ten Little Indians” in this gathering (Bru, Billy Meade and Hunter Peterson) making an impression, standing out from the crowd.

The dialogue is indifferent, but the plot intriguing.

It’s just that Callahan, a sound designer turned director, broke one horror “rule” too many in this rule-bending genre pic. The menace you believe in without seeing is much scarier than the one a modest-budget thriller can cook up to show us — in the flesh.

Yeah, “Head Count” loses its head in the third act.

Whatever promise it had is long gone by then (there’s little urgency among the stoners, the threat seems more existential than real). And in a crowd of characters we have zero time to develop empathy for (like their director, they’re all beautiful), when the Big Moment comes, the only sane response is “Who cares?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, blood, substance abuse, profanity

Cast: Isaac Jay, Ashleigh Morghan, Bevin Bru, Billy Meade, Chelcie May, Amaka Obiechie, Hunter Peterson, Tory Freeth, Michael Herman, Sam Marra and Cooper Rowe

Credits: Directed by Elle Callahan, script by Michael Nader based on an Elle Callahan story. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:30

Scorsese’s mobsters and Jimmy Hoffa picture shows up Nov. 27.

On Netflix.

The scariest clown movie of 2019 is a documentary.

Nothing’s hiding in the sewers, nobody is bullied and beaten until he becomes Batman’s nemesis.

“Wrinkles the Clown” is about an aged “retired” party clown who offers “behavioral services” to parents. They are clients stretched thin by work and life in a gig economy where social safety nets and family support have eroded, distracted adults who aren’t so much raising their children as looking up from their phones long enough to see how out of control those kids are.

Kids acting out, throwing tantrums, flouting parental authority? Call Wrinkles the Clown to scare the bejesus and Beelzebub out of them.

It started in Naples, Florida, where Wrinkles stickers offering his services papered telephone poles and beach bathroom toilet stalls. A video popped-up on Youtube, showing a clown in a despairing, horrific mask, polka dot jumpsuit and elbow-length rubber gloves, crawling out of a sleeping little girl’s trundle bed on the bedroom’s closed-circuit TV.

Filmmaker Michael Beach Nichols tracks Wrinkles to the van where he works and sometimes “lives” — between nights in the occasional budget motel. He samples Wrinkles’ work, some of it available online.

We’re shown the wave of local, regional and national news coverage that swept the country when this guy with a gimmick first broke out, and get a taste of what being in the middle of a tornadic national phenomenon is like.

He lets us listen in on scores upons scores of calls from reporters, booking agents, and from little kids and alleged adults, asking Wrinkles who he really is, wanting to know if he’s killed children, small kids leaving graphic death threats about what they will do if Wrinkles ever dares to show up to correct their out of control behavior.

“It never ends,” the clown sighs. Here he is, just an old man “living out my last years” in Florida, “trying to contribute something to society” and receiving “multiple death threats a day” from gullible strangers (children, mostly, but not entirely).

“It’s kind of disheartening to hear,” Wrinkles says, his white-bearded face hidden, his voice masked.

Director Nichols interviews a child psychology professor (“Misguided,” he calls Wrinkles, and the people who “hire” him.), the author of a “Bad Clowns” book, a folklorist and others, including a children’s party clown.

“Real clowns aren’t scary,” the happy clown declares, slathering on the greasepaint, as old video of news anchor David Brinkley intoning his intro to the story of the December, 1978 arrest of Chicago clown and mass murder John Wayne Gacy.

But the scariest and yes funniest material in “Wrinkles the Clown” comes from online videos, where parents have let their 10 and 11 year old kids have their own Youtube channel, or concoct a video where a little girl discusses Wrinkles with her discipline-averse Dad, who listens and laughs when she says “I know where the gun is” when the idea of a Wrinkles visit is broached for her bratty behavior.

The film travels to Jonesboro, Georgia and Wytheville, Va., Knoxville, Tennessee to several points in Texas, capturing kids — many entertained by this clown mythology that consumes them, more than a few on the Honey Booboo media and junk food diet.

“I really don’t think of it as ‘child abuse'” one lamentably dim procreator says of Wrinkles and the services he wants provided by him.

The Wrinkles presented here is both a product of groupthink — a myth that enters modern folklore like Bloody Mary and Slenderman (also discussed) — and cultural preconceptions.

Nichols does a ride-along with Wrinkles as he hits the strip club. Because he’s a creepy old loner living in Florida. What else is he going to do?

He’s a cross between “The Simpsons” cynic, Krusty the Klown, and Pennywise — the monster of “It.” Because that’s descriptive shorthand we all understand.

Wrinkles stages and acts-out video horror child-abduction fantasies, complete with a lynch mob in hot pursuit. Law enforcement officials talk about dangers to public safety posed by such figures who incite such mobs.

And then, the copycats sweep the land — pranks and stunts and alleged crimes and hysteria, swept along by CCTV videos all over the Internet.

Fun, fun stuff. And scary? Yes, but not necessarily in the ways you might think going in.

I used to have an editor at a newspaper where I worked who recited her grandmother’s favorite aphorism every time such proof of human manipulation, ignorance, gullibility and cruelty surfaced.

“Fall of Rome,” she’d say. “Fall of Rome.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with horror images, threats and profanity

Credits: Directed by Michael Beach Nichols, script by Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:18

Some of us put a lot of stock in a script that tickles the ears with its witty banter, putdowns, twisted jargon and the like.

By that measure, “The Day Shall Come” is the funniest film in months and months. It’s a dark satire about a comic “black jihadist” in South Florida, building his religion/cult around a peaceful upending of the status quo.

And Moses (screen newcomer Marchánt Davis, a stitch) gets off the first of a flood of funny lines when he interrupts some frat bros’ spring break drug deal.

“May you live to see the end of the accidental dominance of the white race!”

“May Black Santa prevail!” he’s prone to declaring, either to his “flock” as they brown-face yard-santas, or to the fake Middle Eastern sheikh he’s been conned into meeting to “finance my (urban) farm revolution.”

“Yes,” the Syrian (Pej Vahdat) blackmailed into helping the FBI purrs. “And hail Black Caesar, Black Snow White and Black T-Rex!”

Venus (Danielle Brooks), Moses’ wife, is always pushing the “Star of Six” (they use the Star of David as their religion’s symbol) Farm’s produce on sympathizers.

“You want eggs? Eggs that taste like eggs before science fiction?”
The local FBI boss (Denis O’Hare) has all manner of creative epithets for the growling cluster-cluck that this “case” is turning into.

“Nails of CHRIST, people!”

I mean, think of the stakes involved here — terrorism, “radioactive” or otherwise. “Next thing you know, the Statue of Liberty will be wearing a burka and we’ve beheaded Bruce Springsteen.”

At least everybody’s given his crack agent (Anna Kendrick) the perfect Anna Kendrick nickname — “Agent Chipmunk!”

Sorry, Anna.

The plot, “based on a hundred true stories” is about a sting that goes wrong and the backup sting the FBI (Agent Chipmunk) comes up with to CYA. This Miami Beach fixture who talks a big game about black nationalism, Jesus, Mohammed and “General Toussaint,” could be just the ticket.

Moses is noisy but non-violent, and desperate for money to keep his flock together. They’ve been given their eviction notice, although the landlord hints that they could barter something to get a break on the rent. Something…radioactive?

There are all these Middle Eastern emigrees that the Feds have something on, forced to be informants, and there’s a turf war-pissing match that involves the FBI, the local police, and the Federal prosecutor (Michael Braun) who is cynical about the process, and contemptuous of the FBI’s blundering efforts, taunting Andy (O’Hare) that he should try to “retire on a better case.”

“Hey, Mexican Hezbollah IS planning an attack on Orlando!”

And in the middle of it all, ensnared but with “the threat signature of a hot dog,” is Moses, who is dying to tell one and all about “the day God talked to me through a duck.”

Random moments, like Moses making somebody who is trying to set him up do calisthenics as he interrogates him, are laugh-out-loud funny.

There isn’t a bad performance in the lot, with Kendrick adding a dash of menace to her stacatto come-backs and put downs. Yeah, pal, you’re looking at “twenty years in a penitentiary that uses your screams to power the lights.”

Davis flirts with dazzling, at times, all dolled up in a tri-cornered hat, a shower curtain for a cape and a horse to ride into negotiations with. It’s a delightful performance as a deranged character, somebody who has let the proliferation of construction cranes in Miami drive him nuts.

The third act is entirely too pat to leave one with the same taste in the mouth that the first two promise. But director and co-writer Christopher Morris (the Brit who did the jihadi joke fest “Four Lions”) and his players hit more than they miss.

Especially when it comes to the banter, right up to the moment when Moses has a meeting with “Honky Hitler” (Jim Gaffigan), a guy who’s “a racist, but one of the GOOD ones.”

Agent Chipmonk couldn’t have put it better.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with some violence, lots of profanity

Cast: Marchánt Davis, Danielle Brooks, Anna Kendrick,Denis O’Hare, Kayvan Novak, Pej Vahdat and Jim Gaffigan

Credits: Directed by Christopher Morris, script by Jesse Armstrong, Sean Gray, Tony Roche and Christopher Morris. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:28

An artist, the old saying goes, “pounds the same nail, over and over again.”

So the generations exposed to Shirley Jackson’s most famous work, the short story that became a play that became various TV movies, “The Lottery,” will pick up on her favorite themes in the Netflix adaptation of her 1962 novel, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.”

The small town monsters, fears of mob mentality and seemingly mundane “big twist” are all here in this beautiful, polished production directed by Stacie Passon, scripted by Mark Kruger and featuring a dazzling acting quartet at its dark, dark heart.

Like Jackson’s best work, it is more about the chills of recognition than “gotcha” frights. She was a writer of “The Twilight Zone” era, not a child of it, like Stephen King. “Castle” is more to be savored than feared.

Taissa Farmiga is our narrator, Mary Catherine Blackwood, and the very definition of “the unreliable narrator.” We know she’s not giving us the complete story when she says how the family “never hurt anyone,” that the village near their “castle” “hates us.”

“We will never leave here, no matter what they say or do to us.”

She is reliable in one regard — reliably creepy.

Something happened to the Blackwoods six years before, and most of them ended up dead. Her ever-smiling adored sister Constance (Alexandra Daddario) was blamed, so Mary Cat says.

Another survivor? Uncle Julian. If the gaunt and menacing Farmiga is “on the nose” casting for Mary Cat, putting Crispin Glover in a wheelchair for this disturbing, not-quite-right relative is “on the nostril.”

He spends every dinner hour talking about the book he’s writing about “that day,” test-marketing how he will begin each chapter to his nieces.

Mary Cat? She recites assorted poisons, their source and their effect on the human body.

We are treated to Mary Cat’s rituals and superstitions. She is convinced they are under metaphysical attack, and is always burying coins and other talismans — nailing her late father’s book to a tree — to ward off the bad mojo that has descended upon them.

Constance? She just beams in that 1950s TV debutante/housewife way, pretending everything’s hunky dory.

Mary Cat’s weekly trek into town for supplies — accompanied by taunting, ridicule and threats — reminds us that all isn’t well.

Even when the local garden club tries to coax Constance back into the fold, the air of “all of those who hate us” hangs over it.

“You have a right to be happy. Come back into the world, dear!”

Then cousin Charles (Sebastian Stan) arrives. He is dapper, charming, drives an Austin Healey sports car (the setting is the early ’60s) and is the spitting image of the girls’ late father.

And he’s here to “help out” the extended Blackwood clan’s “black sheep.”

His handyman work is one thing. But the utterly icky moments between him and Constance hint at what might come next, and what might have happened in the past.

Mary Cat? She knows when an existential threat is also a tangible one. “That crazy girl” is the nicest thing her dear cousin says about her.

The filmmakers treat Jackson’s “illusion of normalcy” obsession with respect and capture the quiet menace of the plot. We fear for the girls, the uncle, the cousin and the cousin’s car.

You know what 1962 Austin Healeys are going for these days?

It’s an immaculate production, beautifully shot (in Ireland), edited and scored, with just a hint of the playful horror music you’d hear in a Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket picture.

Farmiga gives Mary Cat a blank-faced restraint that robs the story of some of its menace, but Stan more than makes up for that with the rising fury of recognition of what’s really going on here.

Daddario and Glover are spot on, one playing the “nothing to see here, tra la la” card she’s been dealt, the other doing “doddering, trapped in the past and kind of scary” as if he’s been doing that forever. Which he has, save for the “doddering” bit.

“We Have Always Lived in the Castle” isn’t for the torture porn crowd, and R-rated horror fanatics will no doubt find it dull. They won’t be totally in the wrong for thinking so.

But the rest of us can appreciate the chill and growing dread that only a most sympathetic Shirley Jackson adaptation can deliver, that only a production as accomplished as this can manage.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, adult situations

Cast: Taissa Farmiga, Alexandra Daddario, Crispin Glover, Sebastian Stan

Credits: Stacie Passon, script by Mark Kruger, based on the Shirley Jackson novel.

A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

These “World” movies have been dull recyclings of the original “Park.”

So why not make one all about nostalgia?

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“The future is female,” as has been pretty obvious this past year or so.

So let’s put the little kids in their proper order, and give the witch her scary due.

This has a very creepy, classic fairytale of horror feel.

Every January has a break out horror hit, and “Gretel & Hansel” could be the winner of Jan. 21, 2020. We shall see.

It’s become common knowledge, largely thanks to a cartoon that generations of children have seen — “Balto.”

If you walk through Central Park in New York, you can see the well-rubbed (for luck) bronze statue of “Balto” in tribute to the dogs who did the unthinkable back in the 1920s.

No, the dogs didn’t actually talk, but the tale of the Nome, Alaska diptheria outbreak and the town’s rescue by serum delivered in an epic sled dog trek is essentially true.

This version stars Brian Presley, Brad Leland, Treat Williams, Henry Thomas, Brea Bree, and Bruce Davison and opens Oct. 25.

The pithiest review possible for many a movie is a single word — “forgettable.”
Add “instantly” in front of that and you get an idea of the virtues of “Little Boxes.” 

It’s soooooo familiar that I know I’ve seen it before, and I NEVER see a movie without taking notes on it and reviewing it. Ok, plainly “ALMOST never” is true.

But nothing from this, and I’m a Melanie Lynskey fan. Just vague recollections of the “oh, yeah” variety as I re-watched it.

The plot elements are weary tropes  — New York family moves to a small college town in Washington state and copes with moving company delays, a house with mold, a middle school son (Armani Jackson) taken from “blerd” (black nerd) to sexualized teen by the tweenage tarts down the street, an art faculty at the college where the feminist wife/mom (Melanie Lynskey) which believes in meeting over “a liquid lunch” and an African American writer-husband (Nelsan Ellis) who gets profiled — repeatedly — by the well-meaning “liberal” locals.

The best line is directed at the writer. “If you close your eyes, you can’t even tell he’s black!”

The unkindest cut comes from the too-friendly drama teacher, whose fallopian trio of tenure track drinkers get Lynskey’s Gena — “the new hire” (photography, with a “gender informativity” focus) — sloshed. And then comes the slurred “getting sloppy in a small town” lecture from said dramaturg (Janeane Garofalo).

The kid? His exotic good looks and epic Afro have the little lily white girls (Oona Laurence, ringleader) gushing “We like, TOTALLY needed a black kid…This town is sooo white!”

Director Rob Meyer can’t gin up much comic interest in the slow-motion movie where all these characters and plot elements lope — not “hurtle” — towards that moment when the wheels totally come off.

There’s a funny movie in the “big city sophisticates SHOCKED by the transgressive nonsense that goes on in a small (college) town.” This isn’t it.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, substance abuse (pills, alcohol), sexuality and profanity involving tweens.

Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Nelsan Ellis, Armani Jackson, Oona Laurence, Janeane Garofalo, Veanne Cox and Christine Taylor

Credits: Directed by Rob Meyer, script by Annie J. Howell. A Gunpowder & Sky/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:24