Mitchell Altieri & Lee Cummings' STAR LIGHT proves a pretty strange 'n scary genre jumper

A rock star, her hunky/sweet fan, and his several good friends come together oddly and violently in the new slow-burn (for awhile), what's-going-on-here? survival thriller, STAR LIGHT.

As genre jumpers/genre mashers go, this one proves quite watchable, thanks to smart co-direction (on a tight but well-used budget), decent writing and nice performances all around.

The film's two directors (Mitchell Altieri, below, who also co-wrote) and Lee Cummings (shown at right) have clearly watched and learned from a whole mess of movies. Still, what they juggle and rearrange in Star Light is clever and different enough, TrustMovies surmises, to keep fans of survival thrillers, slasher movies, and extraterrestrial/ otherworldly motifs at least semi-on their toes.

We open at a rock concert of a famous and quite popular singer named Bebe, and then we're watching her through the eyes of that

heavy-duty, handsome young fan -- who, though he's smitten beyond belief, has no hope or expectations of ever meeting this woman. Funny how things work out.

How they work out is put together with enough skill and pizzazz by Altieri and his co-writers (Jamal M. Jennings and Adam Weis), then brought to fruition via the relatively swift and nicely focused direction and performances that combine to bring the fairly clichéd characters (with the exception of the rock star, her "handler," and her number-one fan) to brisk, if utilitarian, life -- so far as this tale's immediate needs are concerned.

Bebe, the star singer, is played by Scout Taylor-Compton (above, right), and that fan by Cameron Johnson (above, left). Mr. Johnson gets the juicier role, and he handles it with aplomb, while that very queasy-making handler, played by Bret Roberts (below), delivers the film's villainous role equally well.

The movie gets plenty gory (hence my inclusion of the slasher genre) but certainly not beyond the pale, and its consistent and near constant mashing of genres creates its own interesting and thankfully not over-explanatory little sub-genre.

So if  you're in the mood to try something a bit different, remember the name Star Light -- from 1091 and running 90 minutes -- when you're combing the streaming sites for the evening's (what the hell, afternoon's or morning's, too) entertainment. It becomes available this Tuesday, August 4 -- for purchase and/or rental.

Our July Sunday Corner With Lee Liberman -- DA 5 BLOODS: Apocalypse Here

This post is written by our

monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman

Spike Lee’s journey into the Vietnam miasma with black vets (Netflix) is a hot mess and a painful experience for this (white) viewer — it’s his scream of rage following millennia of white discrimination against non-whites because the white establishment could. I hated/loved/admired the 2.5 hour ungrammatical screed for making me suffer knowing what has been suffered. Watching Spike’s film is like the misery of our communal watch of George Floyd, boot-on-neck, for nine+ minutes. But Spike is also funny, witty, affectionate, honest and a lively storyteller — DA  5 BLOODS is a crazy ride, a comic-book page-turner, a lesson.

Spike, above left, with his stars in chief, Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr., ), Paul (Delroy Lindo), David (Jonathan Majors), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), goads you through their mission that starts full of joy at lively bar in Vietnam named Apocalypse Now. There, in modern Ho Chi Minh City, four (fictional) aging vets of the now old despised war have reunited to launch the recovery of the body of the fifth Blood (‘Blood’ is a term of brotherhood among black servicemen); below, they find their brother’s skull.

The departed is hero-turned-myth, ‘Stormin Norman,’ on whom the light shined, killed long ago in a firefight. He is played in flashbacks by Chadwick Boseman (below) a face known for his movie roles playing other myth-makers: Black Panther, Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and James Brown.

The buddy group have also tasked themselves with finding a buried trunk of gold bars and figuring out how to divvy up the haul. Lee juxtaposes the Vietnam of the 60’s-70’s with race wars at home, setting apart the flashbacks using a square format and period camera equipment. It works seamlessly, as though you were busy in the present while seeing the past in your mind. He also puts today’s aging vets into flashbacks with heroic young Norman (second and third photos below) kaleidoscoping past and present.

Hanoi Hannah’s Famed North Vietnamese propagandist Hanoi Hannah (above l, who died at 87 in 2016, and Ngo Thanh Van, who plays her) comes through the portable radio on the battlefield to report Martin Luther King’s assassination and the uprisings in 122 cities that followed with near a third of the fighting men in Vietnam being black. She says: ‘Is it fair that you are fighting the white man’s war? Have a good day gentlemen…stay safe’. Da Bloods react to the news of King’s death with rage and grief....(below)

Otis quotes Norman’s influence on them to his godson, David, who has joined the quartet to repair emotional distance with his father Paul: ‘Norman taught us Black history when it wasn’t popular...schooled us about drinking that anti-commie kool-aid they was selling. Yeah, he was our Malcolm and our Martin…..’

Otis quotes Norman: ‘The man was using Bloods for cannon fodder. White boys who stayed in college, they’d dodged that shit. They put our poor black asses on the front lines, killing us off like flies…..War’s about money, money is about war. Everytime I walk out my front door I see cops patrolling my neighborhood like it’s some kind of war; I can feel just how much I ain’t worth…..’ You’d be wrong to expect ‘Da Bloods’ to actually feel like the polemic it is. Spike, a spiritual descendent of Berthold Brecht, jumbles politics, history, and theater into a film that acts like a play, here making a flamboyant ride with the jocular, noisy, squabbling, limping compatriots. Lindo’s Paul, the rogue in the MAGA cap, is the depressed, manicky central force speaking directly into the camera at the viewer, harnessing moments of desperate everyman (gaining him buzz for best actor nominations).

It is the busy plotting and sidebars (some being silly but contributing to the daily-life-ness of the messy whole) that allow Lee’s underlying political truths to seep into the brain with ease — fact relief from intense Paul and the noisy thrum. And there’s more, much more that Spike embeds in his today/yesterday Vietnam patchwork including assorted miscreants chasing after the about-to-be-found gold.

There’s double-crossing French businessman, Desroche, (Jean Reno) whom the Bloods hire to launder the golden horde. A group of French volunteers are wandering around in country to defuse landmines under the banner of ‘LAMB: love and mines/bombs’. LAMB’s founder is pale beauty Hedy (Mélanie Thierry), an heiress expiating guilt because her family's rubber plantations had exploited the Vietnamese during France’s colonial occupation of Indochina. Both Thierry and Reno are major stars of French cinema here in supporting roles, a nice touch for us and them.

Along the journey upriver to the Vietnam interior to find Da 5th and gold bars, local Vietnamese stray in and out of frame (‘you Americans killed my brother...my mother, my father’) — those who, like Da group, were also pawns of global power. Not least, Otis reunites with his former lover/sex worker and meets his/their grown daughter (below).

Spike has blended a good ol boys reunion, a noisy heist, a father-son (and other family) melodrama, drug addiction, and matters of morality and conscience into a film so packed with action (including good endings for the players who survive the junket) that it just about gets away with its long running time. Spike couldn’t have planned better than an accidental film debut alongside the largest mass movement at home since the 1960’s, driven by revulsion at the murder of George Floyd. Lee told Yahoo News …”People are fed up ...tired of the debasing, the killing of black bodies.” The throughline is the pain of black men fighting for rights overseas in a war they are losing at home. But today’s search for the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and yesterday’s (commie kool-aid) patriotism end up the same — guns blazing, brothers dead.

Some Notes: 

1. In the following story,from The Atlantic, the screenwriters discuss the evolution of the original script (Oliver Stone to have directed) into the film that matured into one featuring Black vets, directed and co-written by Spike Lee.

2. Spike Lee shares much with Berthold Brecht in temperament and political moxy. Credit to SJ Horton (who has acted in ‘Threepenny Opera’) for the apt Brecht reminder.

3. Watch this lovely rendering of Frederick Douglass’s speech of July 4 recited and commented upon by 5 of his young descendants -- and, in more current news, RIP, John Lewis, image below.

4. Experience the flavor of Da 5 Bloods in the movie trailer. 

Tyler Cornack's BUTT BOY arrives for Easter Sunday. And, no, it's not a gay porno film.

It is, however, just about everything else you can imagine, should you decide you mash one genre into another into another into another until you've exhausted the field, yourself and perhaps your audience, as well. 

BUTT BOY, the new film directed and co-written (with Ryan Koch) by Tyler Cornack (who also co-stars) is an utterly weird combination of (all deadpan) comedy, workplace/business satire, fantasy, family movie, kidnap thriller, police procedural, and neo-noir featuring kinky-sexual-pleasure. There's no science-fiction, however (even if the publicity material suggests there is), because there's absolutely no science present here, just some bizarre fantasy.

Mr. Cornack, shown at right and in some of the stills below, has created something different, all right, and for a good portion of this 100-minute movie, his initial quiet, suggestive style -- perhaps due to a very low budget not allowing for many special effects, which he saves in any case for his finale -- keeps us guessing and often in thrall.

The story here takes us into the seemingly tired, boring workplace and marital life of a man named Chip (Cornack, below), who, during a routine visit to his urologist/proctologist. experiences something so life-changing that he discovers he is able, and so begins, to suck various items -- these grow larger and larger -- up his butt. When a local child goes missing, things come to a halt and suddenly it's nine years later, when Chip's s addiction re-surfaces.

Oddly enough, the movie Butt Boy most reminds me of is the very recent film, Swallow, in which a newly-married and wealthy housewife begins swallowing small-but-dangerous items until something needs to be done about this.  The style and theme of both films are quite different however, but the premise of a woman who inserts odd objects down her mouth and a man who does this up his butt seems bizarrely similar. (Even one or two of the swallowed/sucked-up objects are rather alike.) 

Swallow is a serious film, while Butt Boy is anything but, and so, for a while, the deadpan comedy -- as a suspicious detective (Tyler Rice, above) tracks our non-hero -- helps keep things afloat. How and why this detective has managed to put together his theory is neither intelligent nor believable (one single clue is all it takes?), but once past this point the movie opts for total fantasy and then, during the final third, the special effects kick in and the film becomes downright silly/crazy.

One must  give Butt Boy, along with Cornack, credit for doing something original, at least, even if his movie goes on for ten to twenty minutes too long. With this kind of thing, less is definitely more. And during the first half of the film, Cornack's elliptical, suggestive style works well with his deadpan humor; then the too-muchness takes over.

Those who prefer "too much" may embrace Butt Boy more easily than did TrustMovies. Either way, this is pretty much a one-off kind of film -- something you might have seen in days of yore from Troma Entertainment, but handled with more taste and subtlety (for awhile, at least.) And the film's final "they are risen!" moment makes it a shoo-in for coverage today, Easter Sunday.

From Epic Pictures and running 100 minutes, the movie makes its debut -- now that theaters seem a thing of the past -- via VOD, digital streaming and Blu-ray disc, beginning this Tuesday, April 14. Click here to learn how you can view.

With IN FABRIC, Peter Strickland is back with more great ideas but only so-so follow-through

Offhand I can't think of another current filmmaker whose movies combine exotic erotica and creepy behavior in any more memorable fashion than those Peter Strickland. His Berberian Sound Studio combined audio for a giallo movie with an all-out dissolution of character; The Duke of Burgundy offered S&M, butterflies and the very bizarre world of all women; and now IN FABRIC he gives us a sexy red dress that tortures and then murders its wearers, and perhaps the hottest and most perverse sex scene of the decade, involving a nude and prone mannequin. You aficionados are hooked already, right?

Fair enough, but be warned: You'll have to put up with Mr. Strickland's (the filmmaker is shown at left) predilection for very slow pacing and some tiresome repetition.

Here, in fact, he has the naughty dress pull a series of nasty stunts on its first victim (which turns out to actually be its second), and then he parades this same series all over again with victims number three and four. Please.

A genuinely sophisticated filmmaker would know better and do things a little differently. And yet Strickland sure can thrill us with his inclusion of gorgeous, outre sets; creepy ideas; and sexual stunts.

The "fashion" shop (above) in which much of the movie takes place is a wonder of glossy, gleaming 1930s and 1950s off-kilter glamor, complete with that old-fashioned and fun pneumatic tubing used in the department stores of yore.

Visually the movie is mostly a treat, as you'll have expected if your seen the filmmaker's other work. He also casts his leading characters well: Borgen's Sidse Babett Knudsen in Burgundy, Toby Jones (giving a terrific performance) in Berberian. Here, he uses Secrets and Lies' Marianne Jean- Baptiste (above), and she proves as watchable as ever as a newly single mom put upon by her employers, her shit-ass son (the very hot Jaygann Ayeh, below), his callow girlfriend, and now this homicidal dress.

Strickland's film makes yet another pass at indicting our increasingly dumbed-down consumer culture (Dawn of the Dead did it earlier and 2016's Nocturama one hell of a lot more stylishly), and has at least, in that dress idea, come up with an original-though-not-terribly-interesting "villain." He also does a little indicting of bankers and banks, via mom's sleazy/screwball employers, personified by (below, left and right respectively) Steve Oram and Julian Barratt.

The writer/director also casts his supporting roles well, and each is performed with the requisite relish. That's Gwendoline Christie, below, receiving some oral pleasure from her aforementioned hot boyfriend, as mom watches with, hmmmm, a combination of pleasure and envy (yes, another perverse and over-the-top sex scene).

The film's next round of victims, an about-to-be-married couple, are played with nice comic brio by Leo Bill (below, relentlessly fucking) and Hayley Squires (beneath and putting up with it). These two, who appear maybe halfway along, add some needed humor to the proceedings.

In a most interesting casting coup, the aforementioned Sidse Babbet Knudsen (below) appears in the film as the dress' initial victim, seen only via newspaper and catalog ads -- which leads TrustMovies to suspect that this noteworthy actress may have had a much larger role, one that might now be on what we used to call (pre-videocam films) the cutting room floor.

As it is, the film is already two (too-lengthy) hours long, and more, no matter how good Ms Knudsen might have been -- see Borgen to lean just how good she can be -- would have been a surfeit indeed. Overall, there is plenty here for film buffs to savor but not, I think, for more mainstream moviegoers, even those who claim to love comic horror films, which In Fabric pretty much/sort of is.

From A24, the movie opens this Friday, December 6, in limited release, in 25 venues -- from New York to Orlando, L.A., DC, and elsewhere across the country. (Shown above is the impressive actress Fatma Mohamed, who plays, perhaps quite literally, the saleslady from hell.)

Sebastian Gutierrez's genre-mashing, what's-going-on-here? delight, ELIZABETH HARVEST

For TrustMovies, one of the things that distinguishes a Sebastian Gutierrez film is how downright enjoyable it always is. His movies, no matter the genre, are just plain fun to see and hear. Several of his films, as both writer and director, are ensemble comedies of connection (Women in Trouble, Girl Walks Into a Bar), though he also ventured into would-be arty neo-noir (Hotel Noir) and even the horror genre (Rise: Blood Hunter).

Gutierrez's latest to hit theaters is a bizarre mystery puzzle entitled ELIZABETH HARVEST, which is simultaneously a very nice addition to the mash-up genre of sci-fi/horror/thriller. Once again, as with all of this filmmaker's work (Gutierrez is shown below), it proves to be enormous fun.

From its opening scene, in which a polished and very wealthy older man (the spot-on Ciáran Hinds) brings his new young bride (the lovely Abbey Lee) to his rather spectacular modern mansion and, during her tour of the premises, explains that she now owns and should feel comfortable with everything and in every room of the house -- except one -- the viewer's "Bluebeard" antennae will immediately start to wiggle. As they should.

But, oh my goodness, don't even begin to imagine that you have figured things out. That is it, so far as my spilling any "plot" beans is concerned. I will simply suggest that you stick with this movie for a wonderfully wild, visually enticing and often shocking/funny ride in which things are exactly as -- and then nothing like -- you expect.

Even the mention of a few other movies to which this one owes some thanks might spoil things, so I shall keep my mouth closed and fingers halted and concentrate instead on the performances. Mr. Hinds (above, left, and below, right) is as good as we now always expect him to be: particularly classy and rather scary, too.

Ms Lee (above, left and further above, right), with her model-slim figure and beautiful face, at first seems a tad too inexpressive. But, as the film moves on, she grows and changes -- for reasons the viewer learns almost at the same time as does her character. This is hardly an easy "role," but the actress not only takes it and runs with it, in fact, she crosses the finish line in rather remarkable fashion.

Supporting  roles (except they are hardly that; more like secondary leads, really) of the mansion's butler and maid are played by Matthew Beard (above) and Carla Gugino (below). The latter, having played in almost all of the Gutierrez's films, seems like something of a muse to the writer/director. Both actors are excellent, in Mr Beard's case, turning on a dime until we can hardly keep up with this character or what he wants.

TrustMovies often complains about the manner in which certain filmmakers choose to use exposition. Well, here, Gutierrez piles it on so heavily -- visually and verbally, using dialog, diaries, flashback and more -- during the second half of the film that it may just take your breath away. Yet, he does it all with such good humor and wit that it actually adds to the enjoyment to be had.

As I say, what goes on here, as sometimes bloody and naughty as it gets, never ceases to be great and increasing fun. And just about the time that you imagine things can't possibly get any crazier.....

From IFC Films and running 105 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, August 10, in New York City (at the IFC Center) and Los Angeles (at the Arena Cinelounge Sunset). If you're not located on either coast, no worries: The film will simultaneously open via VOD.

Joe Lynch's very violent MAYHEM goes gleefully and crazily over the top

Ah, the workplace. Isn't it fun? We've just seen the French version, Corporate, via Nicolas Silhol, which gets a one-time run today in NYC at FIAF (until some smart distributor picks it up for further attention). Best of all, maybe, would be Joe Johnston's little gem from 2014, Not Safe for Work, a B-movie workplace thriller that gets everything right. Add now to your list of workplace goodies, MAYHEM, from Long Island filmmaker Joe Lynch, who a few years back gave us the the very tasty and so politically incorrect vengeance thriller, Everly, in which Salma Hayek strutted her very impressive stuff.

Now Mr. Lynch (shown at left) turns his attention to the corporate world and all (or much) of its malfeasance with his usual grin and copious squirts of the red stuff. Mayhem arrives at its titular state rather quickly, but prior to that it provides a bit of exposition regarding a new virus that has arrived to give humanity ever more problems. Thankfully (and a good deal more creatively) this virus does not turn folk into zombies.

Rather, once infected, the host's eyes turn red and he (or she) loses all inhibitions, becoming ultra-violent, ultra-horny and ultra-, well, just about any naughty thing you might be able to imagine. (One of the film's funnier moments has to do with emptying wastebaskets.)

So when our hero, Derek (played by a fine and feisty Steven Yeun, shown above and below, pre- and post-mayhem), who has risen to a higher rank in the corporate world by becoming an ever-better shit-heel, even if (as we note in an early scene) he has not yet lost quite all of his humanity, is suddenly made the fall guy for the mistakes of others, he plots revenge on his "horrible bosses."

Along for the ride is a pretty young woman named Melanie (Samantha Weaving, above, right, and below), who has come to the corporation to plead with it not to evict her from her family home -- the mortgage of which the corporation now owns. When the virus infects the building, including our sort-of good guy and gal, and the corporation headquarters is quarantined, the opportunity arises to redress certain grievances.

Among the numerous villains are some very fine actors playing people who've been given just enough specific and nasty qualities that each is enable to endow his/her character with some lip-smacking fun via a clever, on-target performance.

These would include the estimable Kerry Fox (at extreme left, above) as the corporate dragon lady, and Stephen Brand (above, front and center) as the would-be fellow in charge. Ms Fox is always a treat to see, and she nails it once again in this juicy supporting role.

Also on tap is the very hot actress, Caroline Chikezie (center left), as the firm's lower-level dragon lady known as The Siren, who provides a lot of nasty, sexy fun. As the violence escalates (it's all pretty cartoonish, from which the recipients keep rising up again and again) and our heroes make their way to the "top," things get dicier, funnier and ever more actionful.

It may seem odd to describe a movie this bloody and violent as an enjoyable romp, but given what keeps unfurling in the real world about our corporate culture and its negative impact upon us all, I suppose we can be forgiven for indulging in a little fantasy payback now and again, especially when it is this inventively staged. So thank you, Mr. Lynch. And keep up the good work.

From RLJE Films and running a swift 86 minutes, Mayhem opens this Friday, November 10, in theaters, via VOD and digital high def. In Los Angeles you can view it at Laemmle's Monica Film Center, in New York City at the Cinema Village, and at the other eight cities/theaters listed below: Atlanta/AMC Conyers Crossing 16, Dallas/AMC Hickory Creek, Houston/AMC Yorktown, San Francisco/AMC Deer Valley, Phoenix/AMC Arizona Center, Chicago/AMC Woodridge, Detroit/ AMC Gratiot and Tampa/AMC Sundial.