In most biopics, the truth is often tangled, even fabricated. While I know many people already look at them as reality stretched to a breaking point, I tend to give the benefit of the massive doubt with cultural biopics I’m more entertained by.

And, like the snack food they epitomize, Flamin’ Hot is a real maltodextrin of a film, with the classic Cheetos taste reimagined for a new hungry audience. In other words: Latinos like movies based on our own snacks. (Hey, Bimbo: Your screenplay about the raisin pound cake is in turnaround!)

Born and brought up in a Southern California labor camp, Richard Montañez was a small-time businessman as a kid, charging students a quarter for a bean burrito. Of course, once he had the money to pay for candy bars, a cop said he was a thief, charging him with robbery. Fuckin’ cops, man!

As times change, Richard (now played by Jesse Garcia) and his girlfriend are petty criminals in the barrio. But with a kid on the way, they put that stuff behind them and look for work while white people call them “wetback” multiple times. Richard finds a job at Frito-Lay. With his only qualifications being a Ph.D. — “poor, hungry and determined” — he starts at the bottom: janitor.

While still pushing a broom (despite a stalling economy, thanks to Reagan) he learns all about the chip factory from “engineer maintenance leader” Clarence C. Baker (Dennis Haysbert), which leads him to develop Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and the whole Flamin’ line of products.

With actress Eve Longoria’s capable direction, Garcia is very affable as Montañez, playing a respectable former cholo who makes it to the top. I was also taken back by Annie Gonzalez as Richard’s supportive wife and, unsurprisingly, Emilio Rivera as his stern dad. I hope I never get on this cabron’s bad side!

Snack foods are forever dominant with Latin flavors. Even better, there really is a great story here, even though opinions differ regarding the truth of Montañez’s story; to be fair, I enjoyed the cinematic story anyway. Besides, for every businessman getting a biographical film — from Steve Jobs to Ray Kroc — what’s wrong with a movie based on the snack-work of Montañez? Growing up, not everyone could have a computer, but they always had a big bag of them in their Cheeto-dusted hands!

On it surface, much like the food it fully endorses, Flamin’ Hot looks like a good movie to snack on. But when you get to the meat disodium inosinate/disodium guanylate of the matter, it’s a five-star multicourse meal for many viewers, served Flamin’. —Louis Fowler

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For any psychotronic trailer compilation worth its salt, like Only the Good Parts: Volume 2, the intermission is the mission. Film Trauma‘s follow-up to first portion packs nearly 40 uncut previews into 70 fun-filled minutes, nary a one wasted and many featuring narration by guys who pronounced “horror” as “har-uh.”

With grindhouse icons like Al Adamson, AIP, Hammer and Paul Naschy represented, the program covers exploitation, sexploitation, Mexploitation — even Orson Wellesploitation, if that’s a thing. This second batch comes stool-loosely organized into themes of vampires, mad scientists and their experiments, high school hellions, hairy beasts and haunted houses. Heck, you’ll even find a run of half-dozen trailers for Don’t movies, warning against everything from answering the phone and going inside to looking now.

Speaking of not looking, the trailer for René Cardona Sr.’s Night of the Bloody Apes notably features an eyeball squeeze that today looks like YouTube’s ever-popular pimple-popping videos.

While that Mexican monster classic may be a common offering among trailer tapes, the same can’t be said for Japan’s disturbofest Bijo No Harawata (aka Entrails of a Beautiful Woman), Claudio Fragasso’s goopy After Death (aka Zombie 4) or especially the nude and hirsute sideshow attraction The Gorilla Woman (aka Dwain Esper’s Forbidden Adventure, I assume, represented by footage assuredly not in the 1935 picture).

Further proof the collection doesn’t skim off the top are The Loreley’s Grasp, The Unseen and House of Missing Girls. We can’t leave without mentioning The Raw Ones, whose narrator (“They throw their cares and their clothes to the wind!”) has the audacity to claim the 1965 documentary is “wholesome,” just as a totally nude woman jumps rope and a totally nude man trampolines. (Dramamine sold separately.)

The DVD of Only the Good Parts: Volume 2 features a bonus program, VHS Madness, merely an extra 10 minutes of spots. You’ll see Bloodeaters, Blood Farmers, Bobbie Bresee boobie and a kick-ass ad for Orange Shasta. —Rod Lott

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For good reason, The Fisher King is one of the most heralded works of filmmaker Terry Gilliam, but one I had never watched before. Originally, I thought it was about some modern-day knights and the late Robin Williams cast as a chief Central Park bum. To be fair, I did own a previously viewed copy of it on VHS. Does that count?

I had embarked on a long-forgotten quest to find the time to watch it, which I finally did with the Criterion Collection edition last week. I realized the movie was so much more than another Gilliam visual feast for the mind, because of it has a soiled, ramshackle heart.

Jack (Jeff Bridges) is a stereotypical ’90s shock jock, putting callers through the metaphorical meat grinder. This all goes bad for him when a crazed fan shoots up a party of full of people (back when things like that weren’t everyday occurrences). Three years later, he’s a clerk at a rundown video shop. When a young boy gives him a Pinocchio puppet, it sends Jack into suicide mode. And when a duo of New York toughs try to immolate him, thank God for Parry (Williams) and his homeless cadre rush out of the storm to slay this murderous party.

From there, Parry charges Jack to find the Holy Grail, with comedy, drama and, most of all, the rusted heart. The film does this without being too cloying and superficial — something much of Williams’ work came to be in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Sure, the artistic angles, the grating noise and the sheer claustrophobia are all there, but Williams’ performance stands out most as remarkable. Perry acts like a man out of time — the “janitor of God,” he puts it — with this quest helping to work out demons of his own. We learn the source of his mental anguish when all goes south.

Gilliam is masterful at nightmarish scenarios. Here, one with a bold-but-dirty face gets a happy ending, but it’s one this movie truly deserves. Also, out-of-the-norm actors like Amanda Plummer, Tom Waits and Michael Jeter are excellent in their supporting roles.

Fear of the unknown is one of Gilliam’s mainstays, but The Fisher King is about embracing it. —Louis Fowler

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In an obsession that’s just plain unhealthy no matter how you slice it, a Brian Bonsall-ian 5-year-old boy worships Gus, his friendly neighborhood garbageman. Said fixation burns at such a white-hot intensity, the tot sets his alarm early for garbage day, starred with serial-killer detail on his bedside calendar. With the pee-your-pants anticipation of Christmas morning, he rouses his father from sleep with “Dad! Dad! Wake up! It’s garbage day!”

I, for one, believe it’s safe to say this is why the straight-to-VHS children’s program bears the title of Garbage Day!, exclamation theirs — and, we can be certain, the misguided youth’s. Let’s call him “Kid” since he’s not given a name. In that spirit, for reasons you’ve already surmised, neither a writer nor a director is credited.

Dad (William Schreiner, who also produced) happily helps his son (Quinn Schreiner) tote their trash receptacles to the curb to await the arrival of their sure-to-stink pal in public service. Kid even has a Thermos of coffee tied around his neck for Gus’ consumption.

“I wish I could see everything on garbage day,” says a starry-eyed Kid, a budding li’l John Hinckley Jr.

“You do?” answers Gus (Steven Diebold), in an overtone decidedly hushed and sinister. “Well, maybe we can work something out.”

We’re spared the fevered negotiations and whatever exchange occurs. Instead, we leap right to Dad and Kid as they follow Gus on his route. Gus fills his truck with water balloons and lets his mentees watch them explode in the trash compactor. Do the taxpayers know Gus engages in such rascality on their dime?

Lest you risk injury, make sure you’re properly seated before the riotous bloopers involving the inability of the truck’s automated arm to lift cans correctly. Scoring this montage is a Yello-styled synth track that swaps hooks for the disturbing coos and giggles of an unseen baby. Sequence complete, the lid on an unsanitary garbage container lifts, revealing Kid. Way to supervise, Dad.

Informing his passengers that milk bottles are recycled to make Frisbees, Gus asks, “Why throw anything away when it can be made into something else?” I know Gus’ line is rhetorical, but does the oily man live in some fantasy land where used condoms, tampons and toilet tissue don’t exist?

To demonstrate how bulldozers crush refuse pancake-flat, Gus smashes a line of perfectly good watermelons instead of, oh, I dunno, actual trash.

As the poignant 20-minute video reaches its end, our trio stands atop a landfill at sunset, looking over the fetid pit of filth as if it were the goddamn Grand Canyon.

To pay Gus back for the field trip, Dad and Kid have a crazy surprise awaiting him the next week: a trash bin filled with colorful balloons! Not only that, but the guys have gone to the trouble of getting them custom-printed with the line, “Have a nice GARBAGE DAY!” While this gesture may have come from the heart, it’s pretty stupid if you ask me. My reasons number three:

1. Because the balloons are helium, they immediately float away. Some gift!
2. Think of all the birds soon to be killed by the string-tied rubber orbs of death. Suffice to say, those avians will not be having a nice garbage day.
3. Even if Gus grabs a couple of balloons, you know he’ll waste no time popping them with his vehicle of doom, grooming Kid for the day they inevitably move to heads. —Rod Lott

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What’s going on in Room 508 of a hotel in Palatine, Illinois? Gaudy decor aside, a lot and yet nothing: mistaken identity, sexual trysts, power flashes, disturbing visions, out-of-body experiences.

A business traveler, a cam girl, a cowboy in the lobby, an alcoholic, a nudie photographer using the pages of a Gideon Bible to play “she loves me, she loves me not” while seated for a bowel movement.

Plus subliminal imagery, television static, temporal leaps, gibberish dialogue (“I taste like blueberries”) and equal-opportunity full-frontal nudity.

Marking the first film for director Julio Maria Martino and screenwriter David Hauptschein, both heralding from the world of the stage, the genre-defying Country of Hotels owes a lot to David Lynch — both Lynch in general and his Hotel Room in particular. Like that 1993 pilot for HBO, this picture is an anthology of three stories, all taking place in the same room. While the guests differ from segment to segment, the staff members reoccur.

With the proceedings so intentionally cryptic, determining its level of success is tough. If appearing like programming from another planet was the intent, Country of Hotels passes. It’s just oddly engaging (or engagingly odd) enough to give it a look. Among the large cast, Siobhan Hewlett (2013’s Redemption) and Eugenia Caruso (Berberian Sound Studio) struck me as particularly brave. And for the ears, the score by newcomer Christos Fanaras is fantastic. —Rod Lott

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