Since the big Hollywood movie that’s opening this weekend is the sequel from a franchise that’s been dead for 10 years with a budget that ballooned out of control (eventually landing at close to $230 million) and had to stop filming this time so the script could be finished (I’m looking at you, “Men in Black 3”), let’s just skip it and talk about some other movie options.

Also, I didn’t see “Men in Black 3,” so I really don’t have much to say except that I’ve heard from others that it’s pretty pointless. The fact that it’s a family film, stars Will Smith, and has a significant 3D upcharge means it will probably be the first movie to dethrone “The Avengers” from the top of the box office heap.

http://www.lawrence.com/users/Eric_Melin/photos/2012/may/24/235393/

It’s been a year now since the original mash-up film series called “Horror Remix” has been screening regularly in Lawrence. Each month a different compilation/mash-up of old horror not-so-classics is presented FOR FREE at The Bottleneck with the tagline “All killer, no filler.”

Each “Horror Remix” show has a different theme, and next week’s showing is called “Shopping.” This Tuesday May 29 at 9pm, Dallas artist/editor E.J. Anttila presents two hours of shopping-mall slashers from the 1980s that may have you running for a barf bag at the food court. Puppet MCs Cheesecake and Thunderclap are your onscreen hosts, while Anttila’s remixed films will be “The Initiation” (1984), “Hide And Go Shriek” (1988), and “Chopping Mall” (1986).

HorrorRemix.com says: “Each of the 3 films featured in SHOPPING make some veiled attempts to be satire, invoking consumerism, security, technology and progress. However, the half-hearted rhetoric is squeezed in to make the films more than they really are. Bottom line, the “trapped-in-the-mall” scenario is ripe for slicing and dicing teens in the 80s (similar to “lost-in-the-woods” in the 70s). Let’s leave the groundbreaking allegory to the rest, because slashers at the mall are the best!”

This screening promises plenty of extra scenes as well, because some movies don’t even have a half an hour’s worth of good/campy horror content, so you just got to go for the highlights, right? “Horror Remix” has been steadily growing a fan base for the past year in Lawrence, one of eight cities showing the film.

This coming Thursday May 31 at 7pm, the 4th Annual Lawrence Food Garden Tour is holding a kickoff event at Liberty Hall — and its a film screening of “Fresh! The Movie.” Films For Action, the Community Mercantile, Local Burger, and the Lawrence Food Garden Tour are sponsoring this one-time showing of a documentary that “celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system.”

Films for Action regularly partners with local organizations to bring forward-thinking docs to the attention of Lawrence citizens, and this film is no exception. Lawrence/Douglas County Sustainability Coordinator Eileen Horn will be speaking briefly before the screening to share information on the ways the city and county offer opportunities for the community to have a local, healthy, and sustainable food system accessible to everyone.

Ana Sofia Joanes directed the 2009 film, and she’s turning the awareness created by the issues the movie raises into an organized force to be reckoned with. She says the movie now has “a community of over 100,000 advocates for healthier, more sustainable food” and that the film is “used all over the world as a platform to raise awareness and connect people to solutions in their community.”

Finally, the producer of the “Paranormal Activity” series of ultra-low-budget ghost stories has a new realistic-aesthetic horror movie opening today across the U.S. called “The Chernobyl Diaries.” Oren Peli co-wrote and produced (but didn’t direct) this film, about a group of twentysomething tourists who decide to visit an abandoned city after Chernobyl’s notorious nuclear disaster and find it may not be so abandoned after all.

In keeping with the limited charms of his particular style of scary films, “The Chernobyl Diaries” is a short 87 minutes. I get pretty sick of cheap “jump scares” pretty quickly, and I’ve seen and reviewed “Paranormal Activity” (directed by Peli) and “Paranormal Activity 3” (NOT directed by Peli). One early review seems to suggest some of the same problems:

Screencrush.com: “The film just isn’t framed in a unique way and the poor kid actors have no idea what they’re doing. One of the frightened tourists, I don’t have the heart to say which, is operating at a sub-high school play level here. With such uninspired shooting and a dearth of acting talent, the dialogue – no doubt written to sound ‘natural’ – comes off as laughable. There will be cackles on opening night.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2qEtw7–3I

There may be a reason Peli chose not to direct this film and instead focus his creative efforts on the shrouded-in-mystery “Area 51,” due later this year.