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You may have seen “Psycho Beach Party,” director Robert Lee King and writer Charles Busch’s wickedly funny send-up of classic Hollywood, while surfing on late-night cable channels in the early aughts. Based on Busch’s own play from 1987, which was itself inspired by Frederick Kohner’s late-’50s Gidget character and her initiation into surf culture, “Psycho Beach Party” is exactly as the title sounds: part slasher, part beach movie, and all pastiche and split-personality.

That’s apropos, as a then little-known, pre-“Six Feet Under” Lauren Ambrose plays Florence, aka Chicklet, a schizoid who becomes the prime suspect in a series of comically mounting beachside murders. She plays the role as a careening cross between Tallulah Bankhead and Sandra Dee — who of course originated Gidget, the original wannabe surf girl, onscreen in 1959. Screenwriter Busch, who, gay and in his 30s, played the 16-year-old teenage girl Gidget — sorry, Chicklet...

Intended or not, the Criterion Channel’s programming of Maurice Pialat and Michael Roemer pairs two auteurs who spoke the same death-riddled language. August’s lineup will bring nine features and one short from the former, four features and one documentary by the latter, while series on Sammo Hung and Bigas Luna will combine the misery with something poppier, sexier, more violent––the perfect way to close out summer.

On the series side, “’90s Soundtrack Movies” finds the overlap between Lost Highway and Pump Up the Volume; a highlight of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project features major works like Kalpana and Chess of the Wind; and a new anime program starts with Ghost in the Shell and Paprika. Criterion Editions feature The Red Balloon, Prince of Broadway, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, Trainspotting, Eastern Condors, and Deep Cover. Restorations of Michael Imperioli’s The Hungry Ghosts, Christophe Honoré’s Ma mère,...

Gramercy Pictures has released a special Sinister 2 video message for all of the dads in the world. Also in this round-up: new stills from The Vatican Tapes, a second clip from The Gallows, and release details on the Psycho Beach Party Blu-ray.

Sinister 2: The malevolent entity known as Bughuul haunts a mother and her twin sons in Sinister 2, arriving in theaters on August 21st.

"The sequel to the 2012 sleeper hit horror movie. In the aftermath of the shocking events in “Sinister,” a protective mother (Shannyn Sossamon of “Wayward Pines”) and her 9-year-old twin sons (real-life twins Robert and Dartanian Sloan) find themselves in a rural house marked for death as the evil spirit of Buhguul continues to spread with frightening intensity."

Directed by Ciaran Foy (Citadel) from a screenplay co-penned by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill (the pair that scribed the original Sinister), Sinister 2 hits theaters on August 21st.

Kevin Kline, Tom Selleck kiss, In & Out Following my Valentine's Day post featuring lots of male-female kisses and embraces (and a few shapely legs, bare breasts, and sensuous lips, courtesy of, respectively, Silvana Mangano, Clara Calamai, and Jane Russell), here's the gay/lesbian version. This Gay Kiss Montage post was originally published in June 2007, when Turner Classic Movies ran a couple of dozen films featuring gay/lesbian/bi/etc. characters as part of their Screened Out series. Created in late 2006 by Robert Eldredge, the video was inspired by the finale of Giuseppe Tornatore's Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award winner Cinema Paradiso, in which Jacques Perrin watches clips — kisses, hugs, embraces, nudity, sensuality, expressions of human desire — that, decades earlier, had been cut from the films screened at his Italian village's old movie house. The local Catholic priest had found those bits of celluloid harmful to the town's morals and family values.

Written and Directed by Reginald Harkema

Featuring Kristen Hager, Kristin Adams, Tom Barnett, Robert Dayton

Review by Maude Michaud

Leslie, My Name Is Evil, is not a horror film, but it is a film that horror fans can appreciate for the same reasons that a mainstream audience might not. It has been getting a lot of press recently, especially since John Waters publicly expressed his outrage at the film, which might be misleading as to what exactly is so shocking about it. Also, reviews are mixed in a 'love it or hate it' way; I personally loved it and will try my best to demystify the common misconceptions about the film...

First off, Leslie, My Name Is Evil does not claim to be an accurate historical film; rather it falls in the 'let's take an historical event/person and add a fictional story around it to retell it in a different way' category.

It's quite apparent -- right down to the hot pink lettering in the advertising -- that the distributor of "Slap Her ... She's French" would very much like it to be mistaken for another "Legally Blonde".

The only problem is, the Reese Witherspoon picture wasn't a gratingly unfunny groaner littered with zero-dimensional, unlikable characters and hackneyed, threadbare comic setups.

Fortunately, few -- aside from those who might mistake this German-financed production for a breezy foreign-language art house import -- will take the bait, ensuring that "Slap Her" beats a hasty retreat to the video store.

Wasting a potentially workable "All About Eve" premise, the film concerns the seemingly charmed life of one Starla Grady (Jane McGregor), the most popular student at Splendona High School, located somewhere deep in the heart of Texas.

That is, until one fateful day when, needing to amp up a little audience sympathy during another beauty pageant (Sending up pageants? How novel!), she announces her family will be taking in an exchange student from Paris in yet another gesture of her unfailing goodwill.

Enter the mousy, bespectacled Genevieve LePlouff (Piper Perabo), who seemingly worships the ground Starla struts upon. The beret and really bad French accent might fool some people, but it's clear from the get-go that Genevieve, or whatever her name really is, has major plans to dethrone her not-so-gracious hostess.

Naturally, Starla doesn't take kindly to people attempting to appropriate her life, and with a little detecting assistance from her bookish kid brother (Jesse James) and the nice-guy school photographer (Trent Ford), she exposes Genevieve as a vengeance-crazed wannabe.

But Genevieve isn't the real culprit here -- it's writers Lamar Damon and Robert Lee King and director Melanie Mayron who are truly deserving of a group smack.

Rather than striving for anything resembling sharply observed satire, the filmmakers have instead opted to mine lazy laughs from tired targets, and the bottom-feeding results leave behind an irritating, slimy residue.

While King, who directed the appropriately campy "Psycho Beach Party", and Damon seem to be biding their time until the next cat fight, actress-turned-director Mayron allows all the squandered comic opportunities to fall with an awkward thud, as if anticipating a laugh track to bail her out.

The cast, which also includes Julie White, Brandon Smith and Michael McKean as an improbable French teacher (maybe that's where Perabo learned the lame accent), doesn't fare much better, while the technical aspects, including the work of production design team Anne Stuhler and Roswell Hamrick ("Boiler Room", "Made"), are more proficient than the picture deserves.

SLAP HER ... SHE'S FRENCH

The Premiere Group

The Premiere Marketing & Distribution Group and Constantin Film present in association with Bandeira and Key Entertainment a Beau Flynn, Emcke/Augsberger and IMF 2 production

Credits:

Director: Melanie Mayron

Screenwriters: Lamar Damon, Robert Lee King

Producers: Beau Flynn, Jonathan King, Matthias Emcke

Executive producers: Bernd Eichinger, Thomas Augsberger, Stefan Simchowitz, Matthias Deyle, Volker Schauz

Director of photography: Charles Minsky

Production designers: Anne Stuhler, Roswell Hamrick

Editor: Marshall Harvey

Costume designer: Julia Caston

Music: David Michael Frank

Cast:

Genevieve LePlouff: Piper Perabo

Starla Grady: Jane McGregor

Ed Mitchell: Trent Ford

Monsieur Duke: Michael McKean

Bootsie Grady: Julie White

Arnie Grady: Brandon Smith

Randolph Grady: Jesse James

Running time -- 93 minutes

MPAA rating: PG-13...

NEW YORK -- The film version of Charles Busch's long-running 1987 off-Broadway play provides further evidence that camp, at least of the deliberate kind, doesn't work nearly as well on film as it does onstage. Although watching "Psycho Beach Party" will no doubt prove to be a hoot under the right circumstances -- say at midnight in a packed theater in the right neighborhood -- the film is too self-conscious to be fully engaging.

Spoofing a variety of genres -- including '50s melodramas, '60s beach party movies and more recent slasher fare -- the film basically plays like an elongated sketch. After an amusing horror movie-within-a-movie opener, the main plot concerns 16-year-old virgin Florence (Lauren Ambrose), who lives with her sexually rapacious mother (Beth Broderick) and a hunky Swedish exchange student (Matt Keeslar). When several of her teenage friends turn up brutally murdered -- one of them has his sole testicle stuffed in his mouth -- Florence comes under suspicion by the investigating female homicide detective (playwright Busch, in drag). The fact that the bubbly teen has several other personalities, including a dominatrix named Ann Bowman and a tough-talking homegirl named Tylene, doesn't help her case.

Florence falls in with a group of surfers, led by the "great Kanaka" (Thomas Gibson), who delightedly discovers how to unleash her dominatrix persona whenever he's in the mood for sex.

Busch's screenplay is not without its hilarious moments, and director Robert Lee King, working with a low budget, works in many clever touches that affectionately parody the stylistic devices of the various film genres. The young and attractive cast members go through their paces with obvious enthusiasm, with particularly fun work from Ambrose as the troubled heroine and Busch effectively underplaying as the tenacious cop who has a sexual history with Kanaka.

Also effective are the appropriately cheesy production design, the wittily tacky costumes and the guitar-heavy surf-music soundtrack by Ben Vaughn.

PSYCHO BEACH PARTY

Strand Releasing

Director: Robert Lee King

Screenwriter: Charles Busch

Producers: Ginny Biddle, Jon Gerrans,

Marcus Hu, Victor Syrmis

Executive producer: John Hall

Co-executive producer: Jeff Melnick

Director of photography: Arturo Smith

Editor: Suzanne Hines

Production designer: Franco-Giacomo Carbone

Music: Ben Vaughn

Color/stereo

Cast:

Chicklet/Florence Forest: Lauren Ambrose

Kanaka: Thomas Gibson

Starcat: Nicholas Brendon

Bettina/Diana: Kimberly Davies

Lars: Matt Keeslar

Capt. Monica Stark: Charles Busch

Mrs. Forest: Beth Broderick

Rhonda: Kathleen Robertson

Running time -- 95 minutes

No MPAA rating...