Clearly filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden didn’t work out all their 1980s love on Captain Marvel. The decade’s aesthetic — from green neon to VHS tracking fuzz — is all over Freaky Tales like an infection. No can of Bactine stands a chance against the interlocking foursome of stories set in ’87 Oakland, California. (But bookended by unapologetic Nazis and sports stars’ homes robbed mid-game, the movie could take place in ’25 Anywhere, America.)

A simple siege of a peaceful punk club by skinheads, the first story establishes Freaky’s darkly comic, heavily violent tone. The second concerns a different type of war: one of words in a rap battle between Too $hort (Symba) and two young ladies (Normani and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Dominique Thorne) who might be set up to lose. This bit would be entirely incidental, if not for introducing the movie’s ultimate villain (Ben Mendelsohn, Ready Player One) as an ultimate piece of shit. 

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When I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, years ago, somehow I fell into a commune-like situation, with plenty of wheatgrass juices, patchouli incense and Kundalini yoga — woven, parachute-like pants sadly not included.

With all the flatmates, bunk buddies and transitional couch surfers really into the crunchy granola lifestyle as they professed, I slowly noticed they didn’t bring their free love and other wanton charges around me. To be sure, it’s because I was so darn square and far too fat.

Such is life, right?

Viewing the movie Performance, my counterculture dreams became my transient nightmares, as well as a revelatory cream dream of the demeaning sod I would’ve become around the arousing ’60s temptations and erectile ’70s eruptions.

The musings and teachings of Mick Jagger and his Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request have been accurately depicted here, even if the album’s drug-swaggered, free-loving altera-utopia was never to be seen in real life (mostly due to the release of Running Out of Luck in 1985, but that’s a whole other story).

In the rogue hands of director Nicolas Roeg, Performance’s prince/pauper fable might have been overlooked, if not for its dispassionate narrative and drab surroundings making it one of Roeg’s definitive defective works.

East London gang member Chas (James Fox) goes about muscling the wrong people — beating, extorting, shaving a man’s head bald. It’s sitar raga in basic 4/4 time, man, as the scared Chas goes on the run and finds himself in the slovenly boudoir of strung-out rock star Turner (Jagger).

In addition to a drug habit, Turner has quite the sexual addiction. He leads Chas into drab games of master and servant, with bisexual Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton) feeding him LSD and handling loaded weapons in a slim bathtub while smoking cigarettes and, probably, scissoring.

As Turner performs the movie’s lone single, “Memo from Turner,” he and Chas physically and metaphysically transform into one another, resulting in not only the type of spiritually devolved finale Roeg was wont to do later (in Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth), but also one of his most troubling films, all in a syncopated tabla-beat way.

With all the pomp and circumstance a man can muster, Jagger’s performance is very invasively tight, but Fox is no slouch, giving an enthusiastic, bleak portrait like he did in films such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Together, they’re a satanic pair of spilled wine decanters filled with all the vice in the world, and it’s impossible to take your eyes off them.

But, in the end, Roeg’s masterfully hypnotic direction, aided by artist Donald Cammell, is the burning, the consumption and the dying of the fading rock star and his homunculus’ wet ashes, mystically and masochistically buried along with their names.

I never found my hellish opening to that detached, debauched, hedonist rock-star lifestyle I so secretly craved, but Jagger — and, really, Roeg — were kind enough to show me their vacation photos. That’s good enough for me. —Louis Fowler

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A white-trash travelogue through the scabies-infested underwear of the crusty underworld of destitute hell, Gummo is the overpriced souvenir photo you get the world’s worst gift shop.

Featuring budding sociopaths, disabled sex fiends and freshly killed pets, the rancid smell of this movie is a combination of rotting trash, decayed carcasses and dirty jean shorts. Filmed in a cinéma vérité-style anti-style somewhat within the boundless boundaries of the supposed Dogme 95 movement, it’s an art film for the perpetually artless.

In the ruins of Xenia, Ohio, a traumatic tornado has decimated the mostly white population and their malformed brethren in a drastic cycle of abject poverty, serious non-education and, for the most part, death metal. Gummo starts with an emaciated boy in dingy bunny ears, spitting and urinating from an overpass. From this first minute, things get progressively worse with the mostly amateur cast of jobless ne’er-do-wells excreting the most anti-social behavior.

In small, disparate sections, a kid feeds glass-riddled food to stray cats, platinum blondes with puffy nipples dance on a bed, skinhead brothers engage in bareknuckle horseplay, a pair of foulmouthed youngsters shoot cap guns, director Harmony Korine sexually assaults a gay little person, and, in the most suitable section of the film, the world championship of chair wrestling goes down.

Even with all that, Gummo has a through line of two junior delinquents like to huff glue, score with an underage prostitute, murder a comatose granny, drown numerous kittens and, worst of all, take baths in the foulest green water while eating sparse spaghetti.

Known for his shock-based indie features like Spring Breakers, Korine has assembled a stellar cast of the worst possible losers, users and in the case of Chloe Sevigny, poseurs. It’s a remarkably pathetic time at the movies — and one that is infinitely watchable.

It’s a totally class-based scare film about that one house on the block whose residents drunkenly play their music too loud at 3 a.m. and then pistol-whip you for complaining. You know the one!

Some people think Gummo is truly destitute outsider art — actually, most of Korine’s work is like that, but that’s a whole other thing — leading me to wonder if this is an actual narrative film or a documentary of the most homeless order.

Or both?

Either way, it’s that type of movie that will make you claw deeper into your white-bread Christian worldview of opioid-addicted sinners or expand your holy subconscious into venereal medicines usually administered though the penis. —Louis Fowler

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Mistakenly thinking they were the glam-rock band Sweet (the passionate ones, oh yeah!, according to “Ballroom Blitz”), I now realize the musically similar band Slade is, of course, the glam-rock band Slade. (But no disrespect to Sweet!)

Known for their kinda-sorta bottom-tier glam-slams in the ’70s, Slade had a few hits like “Mama Weer All Crazee Now,” “Cum on Feel the Noize” and that one festive Christmas song that everyone in Britain seems to like. In America, they are incorrectly known as a Quiet Riot cover band.

In 1975, at the height of polyester-uniform infamy, the band was an overseas hit machine that somehow starred in the rabble-rousing, rags-to-riches fable Slade in Flame. They play the fictional band Flame, a working-class combo that starts from the bottom and, in a drastic move, stays there.

The movie, with the benefit of hindsight, goes nowhere but down, down, down.

After being the backing musicians for a tepid wedding singer with a lounge act that really is terrible, the guys — Dave Hill, Jim Lee, Don Powell and Noddy Holder — drop all their pretensions and precognitions and become the band Flame, a very popular (I guess) but volatile musical act.

But this is no A Hard Day’s Night, as Flame burns out with stuffy money men, wanton groupies and a seemingly terrorist organization that takes down pirate radio stations of the middle of an estuary — the brightest spot in the movie, referencing Radio Caroline — as they all tire of fame and stardom, disbanding after a (pretty good) show.

As expected, the members of Slade are semi-passable as working-class musicians and real ne’er-do-wells. With footage of the screaming audience passing around Flame merchandise, banners and signs, I was led to feel that the act was truly real.

And that’s great, but the one thing that should work here is the soundtrack. Sadly, it’s ho-hum, reworking Slade’s already formulaic music that already doesn’t do much, except go in one ear and out the other. A band with their own movie should have some real rippers, but instead they had to concentrate on their acting. And scene!

Though Slade in Flame has been rediscovered by a minute cult audience over the past decade, there are so many other gems in the rock era to cover. While the real Slade is a serviceable band that can rest on their laurels; much like the wholly fictional Flame, they should go their separate ways with no reunion tour. —Louis Fowler

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Lance Kerwin, God rest his soul, was the master of losing his virginity on prime-time TV: first on a controversial episode of the celebrated James at 15 series, then again in the rightly uncelebrated telepic Side Show. (Did he ball a vampire in Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot? My memory’s not what it used to be.)

With an open mouth forever stuck on flabbergasted mode, Kerwin plays Nick, a 16-year-old runaway and puppeteer with a killer Jimmy Durante impression right down to the last “ha-cha-cha-cha.” Back when those were marketable skills, that’s enough to earn him a spot in the traveling circus. In the freak show tent of the traveling circus, that is, but a job’s a job — and then some, with the fringe benefit of seduction by the luscious, post-Scorchy (and grown adult) Connie Stevens!

Directed by actor William Conrad after his long run on Cannon, Side Show offers little for viewers to grasp between the murder occurring in the final stretch and Nick’s intro (via Red Buttons, When Time Ran Out …) to his co-workers: the tall lady, the fat lady, the snake lady, the tattooed lady, the sword swallower, the man with no face and a little-people couple with the last name Tiny. With respect to the latter, the movie’s big conflict is whether Nick can finagle a reunion with their normal-sized son so the Tinys can meet their granddaughter. Can your nerves stand it?

Pay no attention to the entirely misleading VHS box art that sells this particularly low-wattage melodramatic number as some kind of slasher. Its horrors are, at best, the clowns, trained chimps and Stevens’ soon-abandoned Hungarian accent. Still, in concept, Side Show gives producers Sid and Marty Krofft their version of Freaks. Just don’t expect the brothers to employ their usual brand of Saturday-psychedelia disturbia, ladies and gentlemen — neither the encephalitic H.R. Pufnstuf nor the monstrosities of D.C. Follies. —Rod Lott