When I was a kid and didn’t know any better, I was enthralled with Texas-area, Texas-born wrestlers the Von Erichs and their contribution to the (fake) sport of pro wrestling. Back in the day, you could actually believe in their superheroic leaps and bounds, no matter how trashily presented.

In our small town in Blooming Grove, my father would buy The Dallas Morning News on Sundays, when the sports section had posters on the last page, giving us prime opportunities for experiencing the Saturday night fights, all without pay-per-view. To hell with the WWF!

I had switched to watching Saturday Night Live and its comical ephemera around ’86 or ’87, around the time the brawny Von Erich brothers had some “trouble” in the extreme sense of the word. They and, for the most part, wrestling became a Lone Star-sized blip on the cathode tube, never to be seen again.

Now, some 40 years later, The Iron Claw brings those memories flooding back.

The biopic sets us sometime in the early 1980s, with the thudding boom of the small-time wrestling Von Erich family. The depressive Kevin (a very buff Zac Efron) leads his equally fit brothers to total takedown victories in the ring — only for all it to be taken by cruel fate, which comes for each of them in the saddest way possible.

Besides sparring with the family’s own demons, their dad is former wrester/then-current WCCW owner Fritz (Holt McCallany). Emotionally abusive, he grinds his sons into the dirt, saying their shortcomings are for their “own good.”

While I knew about the Von Erichs’ mythical stories when their dynasty ruled, I wasn’t privy to much of what’s detailed in the film. From drunken amputations to shame-based suicides, it’s a truly sad story that director Sean Durkin peacefully delivers.

As shown in the epilogue, Kevin was able to break through and turn his life around; for that, I am happier. While some people need to know the whole story, warts and all, The Iron Claw does the legend justice. Even better, I don’t need to watch wrestling again to know it. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

General Lee’s Pawn Shop inconspicuously stands beneath an overpass — an appropriate site for such an off-the-radar film. Since its quiet release direct to video, I’d paid it no mind because the title and poster led me to expect a reality show. Instead, Wayne Kramer’s Pawn Shop Chronicles is a crime anthology of three crisscrossing stories à la Pulp Fiction. Similarities end there.

Each tale is named after the pawned item in question. The constant? Shop owner Vincent D’Onofrio, of course.

In “The Shotgun,” Paul Walker (Kramer’s Running Scared) and Kevin Rankin (2018’s Skyscraper) play neo-Nazi, meth-smokin’, trailer-park hillbillies who rob a drug dealer. “The Ring” leads a stockbroker (Matt Dillon, The House That Jack Built) to rescue his long-missing, kidnapped wife (Pell James, Zodiac). Finally, a down-on-his-luck Elvis impersonator (Brendan Fraser, The Mummy trilogy) pulls into town to perform at the fair, only to be forced to give up “The Medallion” around his neck.

Kramer’s filmmaking style runs hot and cold with me. Pawn Shop Chronicles showcases both, plus the lukewarm in between, by virtue of its omnibus status noncommittal to a single genre. (Tellingly, this is the only movie the director hasn’t also written.) As a comedy — and not a politically correct one — “The Shotgun” works pretty well, thanks to Walker and Rankin’s tweaker act: “Is that my Styx CD in your pants?” And “The Ring” takes an unexpected turn into horror — Sadako-free, mind you — with Dillon encountering a most extreme example of Stockholm syndrome.

But “The Medallion”? With a burst of magical realism that doesn’t quite jive, it bites off more than it can chew, yet keeps on yapping with its mouth wide open. Its dueling barbershops and all-nude choir overdo the quirk at the sacrifice of a point. It’s not Fraser’s fault, though; God bless him, the big ol’ lovable goofball gives the part everything he can.

Also appearing throughout are Chi McBride, Elijah Wood, Thomas Jane, Norman Reedus, DJ Qualls, Lukas Haas and a bumper sticker reading, “At least Jesus didn’t write Battlefield Earth.” Amen. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.