A contemporary adaptation of the iconic 1914 serial, The Perils of Pauline is one Hail Mary of an action comedy, patched together from three episodes of an intended TV series canceled before it could air. The production attempted to capitalize on the mad, mod, quasi-parodic pop sensation known as ABC’s Batman — and boy, is that evident, for good and ill. 

Aging out of the orphanage that’s raised her since infancy, the virginal Pauline (Blue Hawaii cutie Pamela Austin) enters the real world and gets into and out of one scrape after another. Her trouble begins in Africa, where she tutors a 12-year-old royal prince (Rick Natoli, Hang Your Hat on the Wind) who wants her for his harem. The kid’s so horny, he chases her around the palace. She’s also pursued by tigers, dangled over a pit of stock-footage sharks and kidnapped by a gorilla — twice! 

From the sewers to the high seas to even outer space, Pauline’s inadvertent adventures find her pursued by the three über-wealthy men, including Terry-Thomas (The Vault of Horror) and Edward Everett Horton (It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World). But the only one who has her heart is an age-appropriate fellow orphan (’nilla crooner Pat Boone), who spends a chunk of Perils in a block of ice floating in the ocean. Trust me; it’s a long story, figuratively and literally. 

Innocence personified, Pauline doesn’t go chasing waterfalls; they just seem to find her. Every time she faces danger, the parlor piano music kicks in and the film is sped up, all the better to ape its chapter-play origins. Pre-“talkies,” silent films, including serials like The Perils of Pauline, relied on exaggerated physicality to help impart emotions. That performative spirit haunts this update through barn-broad slapstick — a style that pays off in the whimsically entertaining prologue, then lacks ingenuity thereafter. The real cliffhanger is how much of your bat-time you’ll cede before changing the bat-channel.

Try as the producers might to cobble the individual eps into a functional feature, it just doesn’t work in the more demanding format of cinema — even the semi-spoofy kind. Prestige TV, Pauline ’67 was not. Adam West’s Batman influence notwithstanding, this flick lands amid the female-fronted, spy-fi likes of Fathom, Modesty Blaise and Deadlier Than the Male. As with Pauline, each is a sexed-up send-up of pre-existing IP … and we know how those turned out: best viewed via their posters. —Rod Lott

I loved the idea of Garbage Pail Kids and desperately wanted to collect them, trade them and engage in their anti-social behavior. Especially their anti-social behavior.

Sadly, my mother hated them. I wasn’t allowed to collect them, manhandle them, even give a look at the disgusting, fetid, stomach-churning cards. Of course, it made me the odd man out in 1985. Thinking about it, I do wonder how my life would have turned out if I got to take part with the snotty crowd …

Either way, when The Garbage Pail Kids Movie came out in 1987, it ostracized the GPK into nostalgic oblivion — until now, that is, with Frankie Freako coming upon the scene and wiping its butt with it, making me remember that wave of mutilation.

Frankie Freako is the movie that Garbage Pail Kids should have been and, as you can tell, wasn’t. A mixture of gross-out humor and full-on Pop Art sensibilities, it’s all played in a mockingly daft tribute. Frankie Freako provides both a spot-on parody of the “of their time” shock products and a snot-riddled love letter to the terrible fictionalized characters and their very freaky situations.

Freakout!

In the movie’s self-referential, low-rent 1980s universe, utterly boring Conor (Conor Sweeney) leads a sterile life of compressed stability with his British wife. Acting on a TV ad for a 1-800 number, he invites the ultimate party animal, Frankie Freako, and his soft-foam diminutive compatriots to the ultimate freak-out.

Understandably, things get very freaky.

As Frankie and friends tear up his place, Conor winces in discomfort. Eventually, they all come to an understanding that it’s okay to be freaky. But when they’re transported to the planet of the freak, they try to get home in the freakiest way possible, which usually means farting, boogers and other bodily distractions.

Although its budget is moderately low and puppet-rigging is quite lax, it completely works. The limited money makes it work, giving Frankie and friends a ribald, sleazy, grotesque personality that is infectious. The live-action actors, really, are secondary to the Freakos, but it really lets them be their whole slobbish personalities and all their affections and it truly works.

With knowing, mocking direction from Sweeney’s fellow Astron-6 member Steven Kostanski, it’s got a rocking attitude with sheer comic depravity. Besides GPK, Frankie wears its stop-motion inspiration on its sleeve, including Ghoulies, Critters and The Gate. It’s a near-perfect distillation of the wack pack of pint-sized monsters on the loose, making everything in its path disgusting, rotten and, of course, totally freaky. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

One of the most popular shows on Norwegian TV involves uninterrupted footage of trains traveling across the countryside. It can go for hours — even days — to capture actual length one of these journeys take. Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain isn’t necessarily a slow crawl at a lean 90 minutes, but it’s also not necessarily ripe with narrative development. It’s a film that’s as somber as it is funny, washing over you like a walk through a familiar neighborhood.

Shortly after their grandmother dies, Jewish cousins David (Eisenberg, The Social Network) and Benji (Kieran Culkin, HBO’s Succession) reunite for the first time in over a decade to tour Poland. David is a dad and accomplished digital marketer whose neurosis, pessimism and risk-adverse nature keeps him from enjoying life. Benji, who still lives with his mom and is presumably unemployed, operates with an abrasive charisma that’s equally grating and lovable. Together, the two explore their ancestry, get high and gradually work to resolve their 10-year tension.

A Real Pain places an intimate, family conflict against a historical jaunt. And it simply works. Yes, it delves into the Holocaust — including a sequence through a still-standing concentration camp — but it doesn’t do so in an overly dogmatic or heavy-handed way. It also doesn’t get too cerebral with its commentary, subtly weaving in historical context into David and Benji’s relationship.

Eisenberg and Culkin’s acting breathes life into the characters, which is where A Real Pain finds its staying power. The duo’s dialogue is refreshingly natural, true, but their physical performances make David and Benji even more compelling. 

One scene at a train station illustrates this perfectly. We see them on the empty platform having just missed their stop. David is rigid, his posture snapping into sharp angles as he tries to chastise his cousin. Benji, on the other hand, is lax and fluid, shrugging off David’s imminent panic attack. Gradually, David loosens up, and it shows in his body language throughout the film. It’s a subtle shift that speaks volumes in a film of tiny, though nonetheless meaningful moments.

The setting also lends itself to the cousins’ attempt to reconcile. Surrounded by monuments to Jewish heritage and hardship, David uses reverence and respect to shield himself from feeling much of anything. Benji, on the other hand, sees every informative plaque and even the non-Jewish tour guide as a barrier between feeling connected to his past. Yet in a candid conversation with someone else on the tour, a recently converted Jew from Sudan (Kurt Egyiawan, Beasts of No Nation), David rejects the idea of stewing on tragedy and trauma. Benji, however, is undeniably moved and shaken by it. (Admittedly, it’s a little weird Benji makes no mention of Israel and Palestine, though that probably would never fly in what’s ultimately a Disney production.)

Again, A Real Pain never gets to some dramatic moment of reconciliation. It feels more in line with the slice-of-life vibe found in 2021’s C’mon C’mon. Instead, it’s rooted in reality, reminding us that change isn’t always obvious or resonant. —Daniel Bokemper

Get it at Amazon.