For American youngsters in the 1970s, myself included, star-spangled daredevil Evel Knievel was a real-life superhero. The dude was all over network TV; his Stunt Cycle was one of the hottest toys; and Hollywood even made two movies about him. (The internet didn’t exist, so we didn’t know any better.) 

But Ken Carter, the self-proclaimed “Mad Canadian”? Never heard of the guy. Until now, with Michael Dowse’s riotous biopic, The Stunt Driver, starring BlackBerry’s Jay Baruchel as Carter. Having zero knowledge of Carter makes the movie work even more in your favor, so don’t go a-Googling. 

Just know this: In 1976, the cross-eyed, adoration-hungry Carter yearns to out-Evel his U.S. rival with a milelong jump over the St. Lawrence River in a rocket car at about 280 mph. Ignore, as he does, that he can’t swim; doesn’t matter, as long as he secures the services of Dick Keller (Ed Helms, The Hangover trilogy), Chicago creator of the Blue Flame, the fastest car in the world. 

Working as director and writer, Dowse (Goon) traces Keller and Carter’s efforts — respectively pragmatic and foolhardy — toward a shared goal. At least both men have physics on their side. It’s a pleasure to see Helms cede doofus duties for once, doing superb work as essentially the straight man to Baruchel’s well-meaning motormouth. Carter’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, in part because he can’t afford a shed. That risks turning the subject into a caricature, but Baruchel is too skilled. (In my mind, he’s no longer “the kid from TV’s Undeclared” first and foremost.) His is a real performance; you root for Carter, despite his voluminous naïveté.

As the woman who loves him regardless, Laurence Leboeuf (Turbo Kid) grounds The Stunt Driver with support and sanity. She’s an excellent actress who deserves a little more to do. There’s a lot of love to go around for the ensemble, including Ben Foster (2011’s The Mechanic) nailing the smarm in an Evel cameo and especially Joe Cobden (2010’s Devil) as the filmmaker shooting a documentary about Carter’s fast and furious folly. The real-life result, 1981’s The Devil at Your Heels, informs Dowse’s script and provides footage of Carter’s various feats. 

With as many great scenes as it has broken bones, The Stunt Driver revs in as an unexpected gem — a rowdy, winning comedy about a man whose ambition hit heights his souped-up vehicles could never achieve. It’s mighty funny and deeply moving, in both senses of the word. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

I’ve always had a fondness for one of the first PG movies from Walt Disney, Midnight Madness. Like a It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for the Mickey Mouse-derived teen set, it involves color-coded college students scurrying around L.A., looking for a big prize.

As the catchy theme song (“When midnight madness starts to get to you!”) begins to play, a couple of PG-rated buxom roller-skaters pass out invitations to the game. It’s all part of a called “the Great All-Nighter” or something to that effect.

The teams include:
• some Regular Joes, led by David “I’m a Pepper” Naughton
• the slobs, led by Stephen “I’m a Flounder” Furst
• the nerds, led by Eddie “The Deez” Deezen
• the jocks, led by Dirk “Dan Blocker’s Kid” Blocker
• and the Nameless Tomboy Crew, complete with two big-boned girls sitting in the back of a truck while eating many, many snacks.

The game is orchestrated by the PG-rated slovenly gamemaster Leon, who I think runs a cult because he not only has the buxom sexpots as his slaves, but a whole cadre of old-timers with cartoonish voices who stay up with him as they learn more about the game and, I assume, Leon’s teachings.

The assembled teams gather around L.A. sights and sounds like the Griffith Observatory, where a PG-rated big-breasted woman is ogled though a telescope; and Johnie’s Fatboy Burgers, where a PG-rated big-breasted woman gets splooshed by condiments and other liquids.

In addition, there’s a trip to the Pabst Blue Ribbon factory, where a guy drowns in a vat of beer; a piano museum, where a debuting Michael J. Fox joins in the “fun”; and Pinball City, where a Western-coded Paul Reubens (Pee-wee Herman) is the change boy with a six-shooter that dispenses quarters.

After a few racist jokes directed at Mexicans and metal detectors, they converge at the stately Bonaventure Hotel, where the lax security allows every team to wear bellhop costumes, play around with the elevators, and, why not, unsafely use a high-pressure water hose to thwart those pesky security guards.

And “FAGABEEFE” — if you know, you know.

Though I hadn’t seen Midnight Madness since the ’80s on a weathered VHS, I watched it almost every day that summer, instilling lifelong memories about the sanitized L.A. scene, mostly involving cheating with a late-’70s supercomputer that melts a bag of marshmallows and, more to the point, having a heart-to-heart with Michael J. Fox and forgetting his birthday.

Sure, it’s truly lame, but I will never cop to that; I still have singular fandom for it and will watch it every so often when no one else is around. That being said, maybe I can come out of the closet if Disney ever does a five-part retrospective on its impact, culture and legacy … but, I’m guessing, that will never happen. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

To my eternal gratitude, my eldest child slid out his mother’s birth canal a year or two tardy to fall victim to the late-’90s Barney indoctrination. Something about that PBS peppy purple dinosaur seemed … off.

Casper Kelly, subversive mastermind behind the Adult Swim classic Too Many Cooks, knows this. With Buddy, he explores what you always suspected lingering somewhere within those too-perfect wooden fences: fodder for a potential Dateline NBC investigation.

Buddy’s Barney is, duh, Buddy, an orange unicorn with a pear-shaped middle and the voice of Keegan-Michael Key (2015’s Vacation). As his theme song goes, he’s huggy and a li’l bit nutty. His show is your usual Easter egg-colored fantasia of cute kids, anthropomorphic objects, dance parties, safety tips, gaslighting, murder plots and — with the second act’s hard left turn around the block, onto the highway and off the ramp into everyday suburbia — existential crises.

To know any more is to deny yourself the pleasure of discovery. Admittedly, I was reluctant because while Kelly excels in short-form (e.g., the Cheddar Goblin commercial in Mandy, a segment of V/H/S Halloween), I found his first movie, the Adult Swim Yule Log parody, tiresome — inventive, yes, but tiresome, inevitably by nature of the format spoofed. With Buddy, he’s calculated how to sustain his unique stamp of surreality for the duration of a feature. Although the final showdown remains 10 minutes overdrawn, this black comedy is ingenious, unpredictable (mostly) and alarmingly funny, with the kid actors tuned in to its weirdo wavelength; lead Delaney Quinn (The Roses) is going places.

Barney may be the dead-center target, yet Buddy couldn’t exist as is without the crown jewel of children’s programming, Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Kelly owes a sizable debt to that series’ production design and puppetry. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Kelly swiped the backpack, Strappy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), straight from the Playhouse closet coat rack. Thanks to the leeway of an R rating, Kelly gets away with things CBS would never allow Paul Reubens to attempt, like a Michael Shannon-voiced ventriloquist’s dummy making out with a disheveled, bare-bellied drifter played by Clint Howard — in front of children, no less!

America, we must protect Casper Kelly at all costs. —Rod Lott

In theaters Friday, Aug. 28.

A recurring bit in Survive Style 5+ finds hitman Vinnie Jones asking each person he may or may not execute, “What is your function in life?” It’s a question the Japanese film itself cannot answer. As its nonsensical moniker suggests, logic commits harakiri. Mind you, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Set in the run-up to Christmas Eve, five stories separately unfurl their setups before interconnecting thereafter to varying degrees of success. Aside from Jones (Snatch) and his interpreter (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Cloud), we meet three young burglars, and a man (Tadanobu Asano, 2021’s Mortal Kombat) constantly fighting with his wife (Reika Hashimoto, Blind Beast vs Dwarf) because she won’t stay dead no matter how many times he murders and buries her.

An advertising executive (Kyôko Koizumi, Tokyo Sonata) constantly churns out ideas for concepts that amuse herself, but not her clients, one of whom is played by legendary Street Fighter Sonny Chiba.

Finally, a hardworking family man (Ittoku Kishibe, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi) is stuck thinking — and acting like — he’s a chicken after the hypnotist (Hiroshi Abe, Godzilla 2000) dies in the middle of his stage show. Although Kishibe’s mantle is hardly bare, he deserved an award for diving in headfirst, no matter how ridiculous.

As absurdist as it is go-for-broke, Survive Style 5+ is one of those movies better experienced than described. In fact, its state of delirium seems designed to resist description. Prior to this energy-to-burn omnibus, Gen Sekiguchi directed shorts and commercials, which may be why none of his debut feature’s segments quite lands with a satiating payoff. Among the quintet, the chicken dad comes close, but I know that’s strictly my adoration for Cake’s cover of “I Will Survive” talking.

When Survive Style 5+ works, as in the action-packed battles of spouses Hashimoto and Asano, it casts a spell. And when it doesn’t? Well, to jostle back to Jones’ pre-assassination inquiry of purpose, his unluckiest targets are swiftly dismissed and dispatched with a curt “You’re not necessary.” I wish Sekiguchi asked himself the same and excised the burgling trio — the one story that adds or offers nothing. As is, the movie stands at two hours, which can be death for a comedy, even a bizarro one operating by its own intermittent rules. Survive Style 4+ might have had fewer negatives as a result. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

When he’s not practicing black magick, the “perfectly oiled killing machine” Ricky Valente fights the Mexican yakuza. They’re a cult of red-robed ninjas who deal coke and worship a shark god. Ergo, Narco Shark.

Lest ye think Gerardo Preciado’s $10K epic is yet another lazy exercise in microcinema’s put-on-a-shark-on-it obsession, the ocean predator is incidental, even removable. The flick would work just as well without it, being a gleeful genre parody informed by a lifetime’s consumption of direct-to-video Mexitrash action, half-assed kung-fu tapes, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. And yeah, probably something with a shark.

Valente’s gift is neither his mullet nor his fanny pack, but his hypnotic pull on others by playing “the sexy sax.” Just witness the boiling horniness of his fully naked wife as he blows the instrument an inch from her Barbie-smooth ladyparts. (She’s played by a department-store mannequin.) Her brother, Tico Suave, desperately wants Ricky to teach him how to be cool instead of a bucktoothed, bespectacled, friend-free weirdo who, I suspect, collects orders from area grammar schools establishing acceptable radii. Ricky eventually relents; the lesson involves breakdancing.

Presented as a VHS cassette from 1989, Narco Shark opens with a (fake) note that Suave died during the film’s making, so Preciado has used all the tools at his disposal — alt takes, doubles, mo-cap recreations and other Furious 7-sounding tricks — to allow for completion. A title card promises, “You will not be able to tell the difference,” which of course sets up a running joke that never tires.

That goes for the movie’s whole as well. Usually these spoofs with few resources have one joke to tell and stretch it past a breaking point, often by the 10-minute mark. Remarkably, Preciado knows just when to quickly pivot to something else, whether cutting to commercial or even fast-forwarding itself.

No matter how lo the fi, Preciado isn’t dicking around; this is at least a couple levels up from that. So boneheaded and yet sharp-witted, it earns a spot in the same league as similarly minded ’80s pastiches Dude Bro Party Massacre III and Lethal Force. Narco Shark’s faux FBI warning orders in part, “Do not see this film by yourself. It is meant to be seen by a party of at least 4 people.” Although I endorse that thinking, I had a blast watching all by my lonesome. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.