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.

VOD/DVDebut for traumatized adolescent numbskulls in Amanda Kramer's LADYWORLD

Whew! Characters, situation, scenario, dialog, behavior and movies in general do not come much dumber than LADYWORLD, a film co-written (with Benjamin Shearn) and directed by Amanda Kramer that hit theaters earlier this month and is now available on VOD/DVD.

The pre-visual opening -- in which we hear the sounds of what might be the apocalypse or perhaps just a large, out-of-control land-mover -- is by far the best thing about the movie, after which we see the apparent results of this "event," which strands a group of girls who seem not to know each other yet one of whose birthday they are soon celebrating (as below). Ah, kids!

If you are at all familiar with the blog of TrustMovies, you'll know that he does not generally direct his ire at fledgling filmmakers, and he is trying his best not to do so here. But this is a losing battle, having just sat through what seems like the worst film he has seen in his adult life so far. It does not work on any level -- realistic, symbolic, as fable, prediction, warning, nor even, god help us, as camp.

As conceived by Ms Kramer, shown at right, these girls make almost no intelligent effort to get out of the house in which they're suddenly trapped. Even if we decide that the film is not meant to be taken realistically, then why do they seem to care so much but do so little? Except, of course, scream and yell and act in an utterly insufferable manner -- even for teens (who, as is often the case, look a decade older that they ought).

I cannot recall a movie with worse dialog. It's almost as though Kramer and Shearn are deliberately trying to set our teeth on edge, while giving their characters ever more reason to be "dramatic." There is enough screaming, yelling and stupidity here to fill a dozen Dumb and Dumbers but only a single trace of humor. (Even of the unintentional sort: Yes, it's that bad.)

Normally I'd point out a movie's cast members, but I don't want to inflict any more damage. Maybe I'm just a typical man who can't or won't appreciate what women must go through in this world, though I do wonder how many women would get behind something this wrong-headed? Comparison has been made with this film and a certain classic entitled Lord of the Flies. Well, OK. But then please refer to this one as Lord of the Gnats.

To its credit, the film does have one moment of humor, as either the filmmaker or her cinematographer (Patrick Meade Jones) captures a parody of da Vinci's The Last Supper. From MVD Entertainment Group and running 94 minutes, Ladyworld hit the street on DVD and digital yesterday, August 27 -- for purchase and (maybe) rental. 

Daniel Di Grado's ALENA: The Swedes attempt to make a horror movie (and fall on their face)

Supposedly based on a graphic novel by Kim W Andersson, the movie ALENA offers just about all those "graphic novel" tropes, from utterly-obvious to simple-minded-in-the-extreme to piled-mile-high-with-cliches. Watching this film -- for anyone over the age of, say, 21 who has seen a few other horror movies in his or her lifetime -- is rather like serving out a prison sentence that at least offers up a few enticing visuals and lasts only 83 minutes. As co-adapted and directed by Daniel Di Grado, the film pretty much defines the word predictable.

Mr. Di Grado, pictured at left, hands us themes and scenes such as bullying, mean girls, the lonely outsider with a troubled history, deserted classrooms and showers, stalking, and a little lesbian sex and then stirs them all together for maximum effort and minimum fun. The only at all surprising thing here is that our "heroine," the titular Alena (played by Amalia Holm, shown below at Lacrosse) almost never seems in the least concerned about the bullying or possible harm that might come to her. And for good reason. To suggest that she can take care of herself quite well, thank you, is to put it mildly.

Our Alena has a "friend" -- the identity and actuality of which should be apparent from the second time we see her, if not the very first -- who helps (or maybe hinders) Alena along.

She is also surrounded by those mean girls (below), in particular one who proves so very entitled and nasty that you just know she going to get hers -- and big time!

And, yes, there is a new best friend, below, who maybe wants a bit more than mere friendship. As usual, the teachers are weak or foolish or not nearly enough concerned, and if there is a cliche in all this that Mr. Di Grado managed to leave unearthed, I missed it.

Surely the Swedes (the film was made in Sweden) can do better than this so far as something horrifying is concerned. Otherwise, please stick to just about any other genre.

From the KimStim Collection via Icarus Films, the DVD of Alena hits the street this coming Tuesday, May 9 -- for purchase and/or rental. You've been warned.

David Bezmozgis' NATASHA explores the Russian emigrant community in Canada

Beginning with some promise, as we view a family of Russian emigrants in Toronto and soon learn that one of the family, an "uncle" with pretty consistent marital problems due to some rather bad choices, is once again about to embark on matrimony, NATASHA -- the 2015 film from Canadian writer (of Latvian birth) David Bezmozgis -- soon concerns itself with the title character, the daughter of that uncle's new wife, and her budding relationship with Mark, the teenage son of one branch of this family. Mark's mother encourages her son to introduce little Natasha, unhappy and estranged from her own mom, to her new city.

That introduction soon includes sex, lies and teenage obsession, the latter on the part of poor Mark, who turns out to be the perfect mark for the wiles of this budding Russian trollop. Mr. Bezmozgis, shown at left, is said to be an acclaimed writer in his native land, but on the basis of this movie, an acclaimed filmmaker he ain't. Natasha is as tiresome, trashy and obvious as its non-heroine, with just about enough content to fill a half-hour television show.
Unfortunately, the film lasts 96 minutes.

It also offers up an ending that simply stops dead -- exactly at the point where we finally have a bit of interest in "what happens next," the preceding portion having been more than apparent and utterly predictable.

Performances are perfectly OK, befitting the material to a tee, with Alex Ozerov (above) making a hale, hearty and hot-looking teen with those typically raging hormones, and Sasha K. Gordon (below) providing a blandly non-expressive face in order to make us understand how coolly deceptive our little girl really is.

Other family members fare better and are more interesting, but there is finally no getting around just how banal and obvious is Bezmozgis' message. The Eastern Europe emigrant experience in the West is, of course, an often fraught and difficult one, but I find it odd that My Father's Guests, a French film by Anne Le Ny that you can stream via Netflix -- a comedy no less -- offers a much more nuanced, interesting and even believable look at an emigration-for-marriage situation than does this supposedly "dramatic" movie.

While we get a bit of family conversation regarding Israel, politics and the Jewish experience during the course of Natasha, the movie's main goal seems closer to titillation than anything else. This tiresome exercise, from Menemsha Films, opens tomorrow, Friday, April 28, in New York City at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema. Further playdates? Nothing appears to be on the agenda as yet.

However, Mr. Bezmozgis and the film's two young stars will make personal appearances over this coming weekend at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema. Click here or here to see the appearance schedule.

Andrea Arnold's AMERICAN HONEY--with an able cast of kids--hits Florida and elsewhere

Having enjoyed the work of British filmmaker Andrea Arnold (Red Road and Fish Tank), I looked forward to her latest movie and her first to be made here in America, AMERICAN HONEY. And for the first half of this long and rambling road trip that features a kind of very low-end Capitalism at work, I certainly did. Ms Arnold and her casting directors (Brit Lucy Pardee of Attack the Block) and Yank Jennifer Venditti (Lost River) have come up with a fine group of kids who play the group of kids that grounds the film. Each is odd and specific and real.

Ms Arnold, shown at left, has also gifted us with a beautiful and charismatic new actress named Sasha Lane (on poster, top, and two photos below) who will surely be seen again if she chooses to pursue this new career. Ms Lane has a face and body from which one does not want to remove one's eyes. And she is moment to moment so emotionally "there" that she helps fill this movie with life and meaning.

The rest of the cast includes the likes of  Shia LaBeouf (below, right) and Riley Keough (below, left) as the "leaders" of this pack of kids whose job it is to comb our country's south and southwest, selling magazine subscriptions. (Yes! This, at a time when print magazine are mostly dead and dying. But no one, neither the kids nor the would-be suckers to whom they're selling the subscriptions, ever brings up this fact.)

This is but the first of a host of believability problems the movie has. Yet so feisty and so much fun (for a time, at least) are these kids and their keepers that we let it pass. Ms Arnold's oeuvre so far would indicate that one of her favored themes is the resilience of teenagers, despite severe problems economically and with their irresponsible parents. So it is here.

This makes for some moving moments along the way, and Ms Lane is particularly adept at making us feel these without ever seeming to jerk us around. The movie and its plot, however certainly do. As writer and director, Arnold simply leaves out any logical consequences to our protagonists' behavior -- which grows more and more crazy as the movie progresses.

The filmmaker might have at least once thought to have the cops show up at one of the motels' the kids stay in and tell them to quiet down (if not haul them off to the nearest jail). These kids rob their marks of jewelry, too, but -- hey -- no problem. The most ridiculous scene arrives as LaBeouf brandishes and shoots off a gun and steals a car from some rich and, from what we can tell, rather powerfully-connected men. No problem. No consequence.

As the movie goes on and one for two hours and 43 minutes, this makes for quite a bit of blather and a near complete loss of credibility. If you buy into American Honey and stay there, you'll either have checked the logical portion of your brain at the door or will need to treat the movie as some kind of fantasy. We do get a couple of  hot sex scenes between Lane and LaBeouf (above), and a very interesting scene in which Lane attempts to play prostitute to a needy but decent oil rig worker.

There is good stuff here, intermittently, but I just can't help but wonder why Arnold didn't think out her movie with a bit more rigor and the kind of logic that would insist on a more honest and encompassing look at this entire situation. From A24 and having already opened in our major cultural centers, American Honey lands this Friday, October 14, here in South Florida in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Boca Raton theatres. Click here then click on GET TICKETS in the upper left-hand corner to find a theater near you.

Joost & Schulman's NERVE has some verve -- along with a whole lot of nonsense

Alternately ugly and silly, suspenseful and ridiculous, the new would-be thriller NERVE -- from that Catfish duo, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman -- proves a trying time at the movies. For all its timeliness (giving us an online game more popular than this new Pokemon nonsense), the film keeps asking you to suspend your disbelief over and over until you're ready to scream, "Fuck it!" and take that disbelief behind the barn to permanently put it out of its misery. Younger audiences may be able to manage this. We older folk will want to call it a day well before this 96-minute movie does the same.

Part of the problem here is the so-so screenplay by Jessica Sharzer (from a novel by Jeanne Ryan) in which, necessarily I suppose, the "game" at the center of the film overrides all else. The filmmakers, shown above, with Mr. Joost on the left (photo is by Jimi Celeste, courtesy of Getty Images) are at this point -- after Catfish and some of the Paranormal Activity drivel -- well-versed in hand-held, by-the-bootstraps filmmaking, and they do a good job or putting us in the role of voyeurs in the online game in which you are either a watcher or a player (you pay money to be the former, and perhaps considerably more than that if you choose to be the latter).

The game is basically one of those Do-you-dare-attempt-what-we-tell-you? deals, in which the stakes grow higher and higher, after which most of us would simply say, "Oh, please!" and move on to something else. But this is "the movies" and so instead our heroine (an ever-game Emma Roberts, above) and maybe hero (the slightly-sleazier-than-his-older-brother, Dave Franco, below) do the dares and take us along with them.

Some of the dares have built-in suspense aplenty (driving a motorcycle at 60 mph while blindfolded) and the directors milk these for what they're worth. Others (hanging from skyscraper construction beams or waking across a horizontal ladder placed between buildings) seem awfully tired. And some (trying on pricey clothes at a posh department store, and then...) are rather fun.

Much worse is the movie's lame try at characterization. Ms Roberts hasn't much, except to be the usual ugly duckling/hang-backer who suddenly develops into a feisty swan. But Ms Roberts is always pretty and real, with charm aplenty, all of which she must rely on bigtime here. Mr. Franco is relegated to the role of is-he-or-isn't-he a cad and so must rely on his very sexy body to do the heavy-lifting.

Worst of all are the subsidiary characters who either fade into the wallpaper (Miles Heizer, above, right, as the lovestruck best male friend) or change character completely and unbelievably (Emily Meade as the best female friend and Colson Baker/aka Machine Gun Kelly as the top competitor in the game). Themes of ambition, fame, and the meaning of friendship rear their somewhat tired heads, too, and all are given as shallow a treatment as you might imagine.

The movie takes place in New York City and its boroughs (mostly Staten Island), yet the penultimate scene, set in what looks something like the Roman Coliseum by night, seems to be housing maybe twice the population of Rome. (How did these thousands upon thousands of kids get here without attracting a little police attention or supervision?)

Nerve, which becomes uglier and uglier as it goes along, finally offers too little of what its title promises. Think of it as Saw for the PG set. It would like to be a warning call regarding the morality of online game playing, but in its rush to finally make everything all right, not only does it not have the courage of its convictions, it turns out to have lacked any convictions in the first place. But, yes, it is -- off and on -- bad, silly fun.

From Lionsgate and set to entice the marginally-intelligent teen crowd, the movie opens today all over the place. Click here, and you'll be greeted with a venue (or ten) near you.

Pat Mills' gloriously goofy GUIDANCE is a politically incorrect, liberating hoot-and-a-half

What a jolt of deliciously "wrong" behavior, attitude and appearance is offered up in the new comedy GUIDANCE, all about perhaps the worst guidance counsellor ever observed on film or elsewhere, and embodied to loony-tune perfection by a certain Pat Mills (how simple a name is that?), who has the audacity to hand us a character -- a gay character, at that -- utterly devoid of just about any likable characteristic except the ability to entertain us royally via his mis-deeds, -words and -ideas.

Movies don't get much more politically incorrect that this, and because Mr. Mills (shown at top, below, and above, au bain) has had the even-greater audacity to write, direct and star in his movie, were it not so damned funny and enjoyable, I'd be tempted to call it a "vanity production." But, hell, this guy actually possesses talent enough to be vain about.

His movie, surprising and liberating from its opening scene onwards, introduces us to pretty much a complete loser: narcissistic, drunk and in absolute denial regarding just about his entire life. What's not to like? Everything from self-help to teenagers to the actor's mentality gets skewered in the course of the film, and our boy David (Mr. Mills), soon to be better known under an alias, manages to hold up a mirror to the hypocrisy of our present-day mores, even as he himself comes off as a first-class ass.

Now, just how long can even an ace movie-maker manage to keep this up without finally giving in to sentimentality and the force of feel-good? Longer than you might expect, in fact, and even when Mills' movie eventually teaches us those lessons-we-must-learn, the filmmaker manages to simultaneously avoid and embrace his happy ending, turning the expected on its head and keeping us laughing still.

If I've made the film sound like a one-man show, it pretty much is, and yet Mills has written his subsidiary roles well and cast them so, too -- with very fine work coming from actors like Zahra Bentham (at bottom) and Tracey Hoyt (above). Everyone does a good job, and the fact that most of the actors will seem fresh and new just adds to the movie's originality.

Of course the film is completely unbelievable, but Mills' style -- loosey-goosey and off the cuff -- goes a long way in making its incidents and events palatable and fun. Once again, a Canadian film manages to top most anything that's come out of Hollywood in terms of political incorrectness.

Guidance (what a perfect title!), from Strand Releasing and running a swift 80 minutes, opens today in New York at the Village East Cinema. If you're not near NYC, don't despair, as the movie also opens this coming Friday, 8/28 in L.A. at the Sundance Sunset Cinema. Additional screenings can be found by clicking here then scrolling down and clicking on the word Screenings. Further, the film will certainly reach DVD and digital platforms before too long, 

APACHES and TO KILL A MAN: Two from Film Movement to make their DVDebut next week

Usually TrustMovies uses Thanksgiving Day to highlight one of the year's top turkeys. But since he's already posted on Interstellar (and, really, it's not that bad), and the "promised-to-cover-them" films are piling up faster than he can manage, he'll spend today's post on a couple of interesting movies about to make their DVDebut from Film Movement: one worth seeing and the other a tad iffy. APACHES occupies the latter category, being one of those movies about really dumb teenagers at work and (mostly) play, as well as being about the island of Corsica, which would of course include everything from Colonialism to class, race, religion, gender, tourism and most of the rest of the usual check-list.

There is evidently a large influx of Muslim immigrants to Corsica, as throughout much of the rest of Europe, and while this movie covers them, it does them no favors. Though, in truth, everyone we see in this film seems pretty close to worthless: kids, adults, French, Corsicans, Italians, immigrants -- you name 'em, and you (and the world) could easily do without 'em. Apaches is one of those more and more oft-seen movies that would seem to predict the coming apocalypse via the behavior of their dumb-as-they-come characters. You watch awhile, and before long you're murmuring, "No wonder the world is coming to its end...."

The story simply follows a two-man immigrant cleaning crew at a very expensive house on the island, one of whom returns later with friends to make use of the house for fun. Some of the friends also use it for sex, drinking, vomiting and burglary -- and it's the last of those that makes for the most difficulties.

Before long we're knee-deep in fear, betrayal, murder, and perhaps the silliest bleach job in the history of motion picture hair (I told you these kids were dumb). The performances are certainly as real as you could want, the direction (by Thierry de Peretti) and writing (by de Peretti and actor Benjamin Baroche) are adequate (I do wonder why the use of the old-fashioned ratio of 1.33 : 1?). So. Is this movie believable? Absolutely. Is it worth watching or caring about? Barely.

The second film under consideration, TO KILL A MAN, is no less unsettling but a lot more interesting. It is being billed as revenge story. But it actually is not. Instead it shows us what happens when the father of the family (living apart but still clearly concerned with the well-being of his ex and his kids) comes up against a genuinely nasty, sociopath, criminal type who will not stop harassing the family. Add to this mix a police department and judicial system that, for whatever reason, refuses to provide any real help or protection. You can't watch this film without finally wondering, "What would I do under these circumstances?"

The movie, from Chile and written and directed by Alejandro Fernández Almendras,  is anything but a revenge thriller. It's not even a thriller, exactly, because it seems far too real for that. (It's based on a true story, which we don't learn until the film's conclusion, but which is quite easy to believe.) We follow our "hero," Jorge (very well played by Daniel Candia, above and below), in both thought and deed as tension builds to the breaking point and beyond.

We see enough of both the man's family and the villain and his crowd to be able to easily take sides, and I suspect that very few viewers will be able to insist on any simple-minded Thou Shalt Not Kill platitude where this story is concerned. If Jorge were a large and powerful guy, the movie could easily begin to take on some Hollywood gloss. But, no: Instead he's on the short side and running to flab. And he doesn't want to become this avenger; he's pushed into it by circumstance-- via  the actions of the sociopath and the wretched security of the state.

Filmmaker Almendras doesn't let his hero (or us) off the hook, either, as a Hollywood movie would have done. This makes his film all that much more frustrating -- and fulfilling. You can see both these movies, beginning this coming Tuesday, December 2, on DVD and streaming via their distributor Film Movement  -- for sale or rental. If history is any guide, they'll be available via Netflix and Amazon soon, as well.