On one hand, I can count the number of times a movie’s audience burst into applause at the climax:
• In 1981, when E.T. levitates the kids and their bicycles o’er the heads of authorities.
• Six years later, in Fatal Attraction, when Anne Archer shoots Glenn Close dead.
• And now, when four dogs — spoiler — rip Will Forte’s dick off.

Strays, ladies and gentlemen. Whereas singer Sarah MacLachlan famously tugged at your heartstrings in ASCAP commercials to get you to spend $18 a month to rescue dogs, Universal Pictures spent $30 million on a live-action comedy in which dogs’ mouths are animated to say “fuck” a lot. We’re talking Scorsese and Scarface level of “fuck”s. Add all the humping and the pooping — oh, do they ever hump and poop — and Strays is nothing if not filthy.

To be clear, that’s a plus, but only because the doers are adorable dogs instead of asshole adults. Will Ferrell voices Reggie, the canine so clueless he has no idea his ever-stoned, trailer-trash owner, Doug (Forte, MacGruber), has ditched him. Jamie Foxx’s Bug, a Boston Terrier, immediately befriends Reggie to share his street smarts. That includes an intro to his park-hanging pals, a pretty Shepherd (Isla Fisher, 2018’s Tag) and a cone-necked Great Dane (Randall Park, Office Christmas Party) who go all-in for a sausage string of episodic encounters — involving hungry eagles and hallucinogenic mushrooms — accompanying Reggie on his way back home to de-dick Doug.

Is there a normal child in America who wouldn’t laugh their ass off scene to scene? But Strays is hard-rated R on purpose, and that subversiveness often compensates for its narrow range of jokes, much like how Bug talks big to make up for his small size. And I don’t mean his penis, although the movie sure does. Several times.

Like Reggie, the film from director Josh Greenbaum (Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar) and screenwriter Dan Perrault (TV’s American Vandal) is cute, scruffy and just dumb enough you can’t resist giving it a little affection. Even if the CGI to animate the mutts’ mouths is often dodgy, like a paid version of your iPhone’s My Talking Pet app. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Maximum Truth’s premise is so close to how the game of politics is played today, it’s not even funny. Luckily, the movie is.

The mockumentary follows political consultant Rick Klingman (Blockers’ Ike Barinholtz) on his latest assignment: digging up dirt on a California Congressional candidate (Max Minghella, 2021’s Spiral) who appears to be squeaky-clean.

Like that will ever stop Klingman — grifters gotta grift. For help, he ropes in his backward-capped bro bud, Simon (The Maze Runner himself, Dylan O’Brien), a protein-powder entrepreneur. Their boneheaded investigations lead them to the candidate’s former classmates, past co-workers, mere acquaintances — hell, anybody — who might point them to sexual harassment cases, sex tapes and other potential reputation besmirchers. At every turn, they fail with spectacular incompetence. Even with the crap allegations they invent.

Halfway through, I realized Klingman and Simon are basically the intentionally funny versions of real-life conspiracy theorists/convicted felons Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl. Barinholtz and his co-scripter, director David Stassen, allow viewers to draw parallels from the duo’s chicanery without smacking them across the face while asking, “Didja get it?” Another good example: After we meet Klingman leading a protest against a play about a gay Abe Lincoln, we meet his “roommate,” Marco (comedian Tony Rodriguez, stealing each scene); rather than underline the hypocrisy, the film lets it exist without comment.

With choice bits from Beth Grant (Little Miss Sunshine) as Klingman’s pain pill-popping benefactor, Kiernan Shipka (Sally from TV’s Mad Men) as a gun-loving would-be donor and comedian Jena Friedman (one of the funniest people on the planet, period), Maximum Truth feels more outlined than scripted, meaning I suspect the film is largely the result of improvisation.

That’s all fine and dandy since I laughed to myself throughout. I laughed out loud — and I mean loud — once, right after Klingman compares Simon to Jason Bourne; not top-of-mind known for comedy, O’Brien reacts with a move that’s entirely physical and one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen all year. I just wish the climax, lacking proper payoff, packed half that much punch. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Pardon me, but my American heritage is showing. Since childhood, I’ve occasionally confused Heidi with Pippi Longstocking. One Euro white-girl kid-lit icon is the same as another, right?

Until now. Heidi is the one who says, “Rest in cheese, bitch,” as she shoves a rubber hose of milk up her enemy’s pooper. According to the movie Mad Heidi, that is. (Or is that action part of 1880 canon?)

For 20 years, all cheese has been illegal, except the Meili’s brand (“Now 30% lactose!”), owned by and named for the president of Switzerland (Dracula 3000’s Casper Van Dien, clearly having a ball). As the Swiss National Day celebration approaches, Meili schemes with his chief cheese scientist (Pascal Ulli) to ensure his cheese will make his subjects “dumb as fuck.”

But not if mountain girl Heidi (newcomer Alice Lucy) can help it. After her goat-farming boyfriend (Kel Matsena) is murdered for his underground goat cheese operation by Meili’s Kommandant Knorr (the Joe Pesci-esque Max Rüdlinger), she trains in the ways of pointy spears for vengeance.

Her pigtails and Swiss Miss clothing belie her prison-honed makeover as a killing machine, programmed with quips straight from a discarded draft of the Book of Schwarzenegger. “Now that’s what I call a swan song,” she states upon murdering a man with his accordion.

As if you needed telling, the movie is a side-of-barn broad comedy packed with cheese puns, cheese sight gags and cheese allusions — all played out by the second scene. If you think I’ve gone overboard with the word “cheese,” director and co-writer Johannes Hartmann takes note and exclaims, “No whey!”

All a goof, Mad Heidi is cut from the same cheesecloth as the ironic likes of Sharknado, Snakes on a Plane or Hobo with a Shotgun, desperately and transparently attempting to achieve instant cult status through sheer willpower. It doesn’t deserve it, nor will it be granted that, yet the flick is hardly a cash grab or lazy exercise.

Mad Heidi is best when it parodies the women-in-prison subgenre or goes strictly for gore, as purposely garish as the Alps are spacious (and no doubt the influence of Troma veteran Trent Haaga as one of four screenwriters). However, no moment is as funny or knowing than its Swissploitation Films title animation, spoofing the Paramount logo. I give Hartmann and his cast credit for dedicating 110% of themselves to the joke, even if it would work better as a 90-second fake trailer than the 90-minute feature it is. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Six months before William Wellman Jr. and James Stacy went all Winter a-Go-Go in a Beach Party knockoff, they had themselves A Swingin’ Summer in a Beach Party knockoff.

As the respective Rick and Mickey, Wellman and Stacy play different characters than they would that Winter. With Rick’s scorching-hot redheaded girlfriend in tow (Quinn O’Hara, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, the California teens head to Lake Arrowhead for the weeklong job at its dance pavilion. When that gainful employment opportunity suddenly dries up, they decide to run it themselves, Andy Hardying the heck out of the place. That way, the likes of Gary Lewis & the Playboys, The Righteous Brothers and The Rip Chords can give full performances — each rockin’ and rousin‘ — to fill precious running time.

No doubt director Robert Sparr (Once You Kiss a Stranger …) was all for that plan, seeing as how the script is absent a plot. Prepare for one light kidnapping, some fistfighting, one instance of asphalt surfing and a lot of butt-shaking, not to mention gratuitous Frugging with a side of Watusi.

Not long after Mickey creepily takes a tape measure to girls’ bikini-topped busts (two decades before Screwballs‘ similar but rapeier breast-exam prank), he engages in a “poultry contest,” which is to say a game of chicken on water skis. Most teenpics would slate such an action-packed sequence as the climax, but A Swingin’ Summer instead sticks it in the middle section. That leaves room for quite the twist ending: that the psych student played by a debuting Raquel Welch — shrinking heads while enlarging others — is actually hot, once she removes her glasses and shakes her hair out of a bun. Can you fucking believe it?

Fun enough and equally inconsequential, Swingin’ dog-paddles behind the aforementioned AIP fare. Still, by recruiting Pajama Party’s Diane Bond as The Girl in the Pink Polka Dot Bikini, it’s doing something right. Pop a cap on a return-for-deposit bottle of Bubble Up, then press play. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdparty.

As memorably harmonized by The Free Design, kites are fun. But they’re not that fun. And so it is with Killer Kites, a decent but ultimately self-immolating creature-feature parody from the makers of the more enjoyable Sewer Gators. This follow-up marks the third movie within the BPU, aka the “Brock Peterson Universe,” so named (by me, just now) for director/producer Paul Dale’s recurring role as an obnoxious TV news reporter.

Also reappearing, albeit in a different role, is leading lady Manon Pages. Here, she’s Abby, whose brother is killed is by a kite passed down from their dead grandfather. (Just roll with it.) Perhaps a visit to the Kuntz Yeast Bread Festival can clear up what’s going on? A total goof with purposely awful effects to poke fun at Birdemic, that’s what, with a few Twin Peaks homages thrown in. The more you’re familiar with those, the more you’re in tune with the movie.

Dale and co-director/writer Austin Frosch exhibit good-natured humor even when the jokes are rimshot-ready bad. To wit:

Abby: “You just want to get in my pants.”
Daniel: “Please, Abby, I can’t fit into those.”

As witnessed in a training montage and semi-buried in-jokes (like “PUT STRING HERE” seen amid the thumbtacked pages and photos on a crazed character’s clichéd wall o’ research), the players seem to be having a ball. Not all of it transfers as well as Sewer Gators did — even Pages seems a little uncomfortable compared to last time — but how many other movies dare to depict kite attacks in 1956 Berlin? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.