Are you ready for the summer? Are you ready for the sunshine? If so, sorry — you’re bound to be disappointed by Meatballs Part II.

Although Ivan Reitman’s original is no great shakes, Ken Wiederhorn’s in-name-only sequel is uninspired idiocy — a half-assed, quarter-hearted attempt to lovingly spoof the summer-camp subgenre, as well as the rite of passage itself.

Run by Richard Mulligan (Scavenger Hunt), who deserved better, Camp Sasquatch houses misfits of various school grades for four weeks. The newest counselor-in-training is a bad boy (John Mengatti, Tag: The Assassination Game) only there to avoid reform school. Mulligan grooms the teen — not that way, calm down — to don the boxing gloves for the annual Champ of the Lake competition against the neighboring military-minded Camp Patton.

Meanwhile, the nerdy counselor (Archie Hahn, Amazon Women on the Moon) tries hard — really, really hard — to get the busty counselor (Misty Rowe, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion) alone for nookie. And, most memorably, an alien that looks like a gray turd is dropped off by his parents’ spaceship for camp. The younger Sasquatch boys hide the E.T. in their cabin and name him Meathead. Soon, Meathead gets stoned, which is the movie’s idea of high comedy.

The product of three writers and Eyes of a Stranger director Wiederhorn, Meatballs Part II suspiciously lacks sauce. It best serves as a time capsule, capturing the moment just before bit players Paul Reubens and John Larroquette saw their dwindling careers rescued — if not supercharged — by, respectively, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and a four-Emmy run on TV’s Night Court. After being reduced here to a lisping, gay-panic stereotype, Larroquette has to be especially grateful.

Establishing pieces suggest the pic aimed for an Airplane!-style spoof, then prove it fell far short. Even the unmemorable theme song is lazy: “We’ve been waitin’ for the summer to hit the beach / No more apples for the teacher, gonna eat a peach.” Wow, movie, you really went all out to earn that rhyming badge. —Rod Lott

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As the title card of Don’t Tell Larry informs us, every office has that one weirdo. (To which I say, “One?“) At the cruise company of this movie’s case, the resident oddball is the titular Larry. Played by the Ed Helms-ian Kiel Kennedy (It’s a Wonderful Binge), he’s a dimwitted, socially awkward new hire who eats raisins one by one, spearing each with a sharpened pencil.

So when the CEO (Ed Begley Jr., Strange Darling) suddenly plummets to his death under dubious circumstances, company MVP Susan (Patty Guggenheim, The Happytime Murders) suspects Larry. Recruiting her office bestie, Patrick (Kenneth Mosley, Searching), Susan schemes to plant evidence to get Larry fired — less because he could be a threat, more because she doesn’t want him to discover she purposely didn’t invite him to the CEO’s retirement party.

Speaking of co-workers, Greg Porper and John Schimke share writing and directing duties on Don’t Tell Larry, adapting their 16-minute 2018 short into a full feature. The high-gloss result may bear the rhythms of a well-timed comedic engine, but lacks the type of jokes to make it purr. The scenarios into which Porper and Schimke drop Susan and Patrick are the stock and trade of 1970s multicamera network sitcoms, with no circumstance more far-fetched than passing off a jar of urine as kombucha.

Only at intervals do punch lines land as intended. Most of them involve either Molly Franco’s dead-on savage portrayal of an egocentric influencer or Kennedy, whose supporting-player status takes him offscreen too often. —Rod Lott

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Of all the wavering output of the early 1970s independent studios, most of the Apple Films catalog have been the hardest movies to find. Usually, I have to go for bootlegs, downloads and other shady dealings.

That’s strange, because it was part of the Beatles’ far-reaching Apple Corps, a freewheeling production company investing in records, books, electronics, and numerous Pop Art items that have filled the dumpsters of time. In the end, Apple Corps was a good deal gone bad, with really only the music remaining. Apple Films’ only big hit was Yellow Submarine, maybe also Let It Be. Other films like Born to Boogie and The Concert for Bangladesh are essentially forgotten.

Which brings me to Son of Dracula, the apparently world’s “First Rock-and-Roll Dracula Movie!” according to the advertisements. It’s a take on the vampire mythos starring songster Harry Nilsson and ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, who also produced. But that’s not the most surprising thing about this — instead, this is: It was produced by Jerry Gross, the guy behind Mondo Cane, Teenage Mother and The Black Godfather. The father of the backbeat and the father of cinematic slime, together again!

One dark and ultimately confusing night, Count Dracula is assassinated by an unseen hand and his midget friend. Afterward, Merlin (Ringo Starr, in perhaps a prequel/sequel to Magical Mystery Tour?), the guardian of the netherworld, is summoned to his vampiric concubine to give birth to an immediate scion.

A hundred years later, Nilsson’s new count, Count Downe —ugh — comes to town in a stylish motorcar wanting a lay of the land. After going over some astrological charts with Merlin, he heads to Piccadilly Circus, performs a rousing cut of  “At My Front Door” for the bar patrons and, appropriately, sucks the blood of the buxom maiden. So far, so good!

In case you were wondering, the backing band has Ringo on drums, as well as rock luminaries Peter Frampton, Leon Russell, Keith Moon and John Bonham. Where was that supergroup in the early ’70s and beyond? That’s the movie I’d like to see.

Son of Dracula instead shows Count Downe wanting a life-changing operation to make him a mere human. He does it, of course, to find his one true love. To mark the occasion, Downe has a party, with his hit song “Jump in the Fire” riding up the charts and heating up my speakers. During his preliminary operation, Dr. Van Helsing pulls Downe’s vampire teeth and commits other somewhat-laughable tortures.

This is where the movie loses me: Frankenstein’s monster attacks the Count, aided by a werewolf, a black cat, and, once again, a midget, for, I’m guessing, some revenge plot that seems to try everything while doing nothing. Look, by this time, I don’t know what’s happening, but the music is really good! True to form, it’s truly top-notch, top-shelf and above-board, as it should have been.

Directed by famed cinematographer Freddie Francis, the story and screenplay, the production values and the very bad acting — Nilsson’s nonexistent on-camera talent should live without you — is why most audiences avoided this in droves.

While Dracula and Frankenstein fanatics are not in any way clamoring for this home release, Son of Dracula has never been distributed on any home media format, leaving Beatles completists and Nilsson apologists in the lurch. It’s not very good, but I’d take a big box set with a pristine copy of the film, a 180-gram vinyl soundtrack and other associated memorabilia, like a swatch of Count Downe’s cape to make our own solo-Ringo dreams come true. While we’re at it, how about getting Ravi Shankar’s Raga reissued for my own personal edification … please? —Louis Fowler

In the early ’90s on the most basic of cable, I saw Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson’s acerbic dramatic comedy that’s basically an acid-laced coming-of-age tale, except the protagonists are failed actors already-of-age in their late 20s.

Along with The Young Ones, Time Bandits and a supple diet of Benny Hill, this film gave me the basic groundings of British comedy, one I fell in love with over its “God Save the Queen” pathos that embrace the rigid anarchy of the UK punk subculture I wished I were a part of.

Growing up in Blooming Grove, Texas, I reached for the entertainment section of each Friday’s Dallas Morning News. It ran small ads for an indie, esoteric and outré theater called the Inwood, which showed titles so outrageous and provocative, it made me wish I had cool parents with a sense of pop culture but, you know, whatever. The ad for How to Get Ahead in Advertising always stuck with me, wondering about this monstrous movie from the guy behind Withnail.

This week, these two life-influencing greats came together in a way I wasn’t expecting: I finally got to screen Advertising. It’s a semi-monstrous monster film — as much as brash, witty and brazen indies could be then — about slick ad exec Bagley (Richard E. Grant) and the somewhat sleazy ways his marketing campaigns become successful.

He’s working on a pimple cream campaign with no luck — until a small pimple fortuitously grows on his neck. The zit develops eyes, a mouth and, eventually, a speaking voice. Of course, it makes Bagley’s life hell. Like David Cronenberg’s The Brood, but far more stiff-upper-lipped with a starched white collar, the living canker sore engulfs Bagley and his whole persona. “Boils,” he says, “are beautiful.”

Like many things in 1980s Britain, How to Get Ahead is a rancid, devious take on the politics of Thatcher (which I was far removed from then and now) and the dark policies of coke-sniffing, ink-suffering capitalism that smothers every man, woman and child in a drowning pool of commercials.

Grant is more nuanced than usual as the staid Bagley, then becomes more manic as the film goes on, looking like Rik Mayall’s older, calmer brother. With machine-gun barbs, his performance is so cutting, it’s better than Withnail and I. I’m glad I finally saw it.

Today, the Inwood is still a movie theater, but mainstream, with screenings of A Minecraft Movie and other non-indie films. I guess How to Get Ahead in Advertising‘s selling-out prophecy came through in spades. That, I can truly say, is the worst. —Louis Fowler

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It’d be tough to follow up Joe Dante and Allan Arkush’s Hollywood Boulevard, a self-deprecating paean to the Roger Corman filmmaking machine coming from inside the house. So Hollywood Boulevard II doesn’t try. It kinda just shows up, stands in the corner and shuffles its feet ’til it’s time to go home.

Directed by Steve Barnett (Scanner Cop II), the in-name-only sequel that’s actually a remake leverages the combined star power of Ginger Lynn Allen, Eddie Deezen, Robert Patrick and Morgan Freeman … ’s name on a Lean on Me marquee to once again spoof low-budget filmmaking.

In particular, its soft target is the bread-and-butter junk genres that carried Corman straight to the bank’s deposits-only line throughout the ’80s: your jungle war epics, sword-and-sandal-and-sex adventures and marked-down space sagas. The latter appears right away, flaunting four breasts in the first minute as part of a Star Trek parody aboard a spaceship shaped like a uterus and fallopian tubes.

As aspiring actress Candy Chandler, Allen gets her big break when a stuffed-animal bomb explodes, taking Miracle Pictures’ reigning starlet off the cast list, forever. And that’s hardly the last of the “accidents.” Taking a page from Traci Lords going legit via Corman with the 1988 makeover of Not of This Earth, Hollywood Boulevard II represents Allen’s own sprint for mainstream stardom after nearly a decade of hardcore porn (Beverly Hills Cox, Poonies and Supergirls Do General Hospital). She doesn’t embarrass herself, but Candice Rialson she is not.

Three first-time screenwriters follow Dante and Arkush’s template, including judicious use of B-roll from other Corman flicks, but not jokes that land. This second stroll down the Boulevard simply isn’t funny. I found one exception in a romantic ballad. Playing over Candy making sweet, sweet love amid rear-projected footage, its mocking lyrics include “Two hands / Two breasts / C’mon, don’t tell me you don’t know the rest” and “There’s passion in the air tonight / I know, I know, I know cuz I can smell it.” Hardly enough to take a whiff. —Rod Lott

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