ELECTRIC SHADOWS
unrated, 95 minutes

If you’re the kind of person who likes to settle down with one of those giant, multigenerational novels about mothers and daughters, “Electric Shadows” was made for you. A tribute to movie madness, it’s the directorial debut of Xiao Jiang, one of China’s few female directors, and it’s full of mother-daughter moments, years of suffering and hardship, dead children, trips to the hospital, and, most important, movies. Lots and lots of movies.

Mao Du-bing is a water delivery man in modern-day Beijing who scrapes his microscopic salary together so that he can escape to the movies at every opportunity. One day in an alley, he bumps into a young woman who promptly brains him with a brick. The cops appear and arrest her, but she won’t say a word. Mao, seething with righteous indignation, tries to confront her about her anti-social behavior, but winds up getting conned into feeding her fish while she’s detained in the psychiatric ward.

Her apartment is a shrine to Zhou Xuan, a Chinese screen diva of the 1930s. Intrigued, Mao makes a beeline for her diary, which he immediately reads. This kicks off the heart of the movie, an extended flashback to the Cultural Revolution, when the woman’s mother was raising her daughter alone, and their only comfort during one of China’s bleakest eras was the local outdoor movie theater.

A minor-key mystery that doubles as “Cinema Paradiso” for Chinese film, “Electric Shadows” reminds us that no matter how bad things get, or how hopeless our lives, there’s always the movies.

– Grady Hendrix

TRAPPED BY THE MORMONS
unrated, 65 minutes

In 1922, British director H.B. Parkinson made a film demonizing Mormonism. The movie under review is not that movie, but a remake, also called “Trapped by the Mormons.” If you haven’t seen Parkinson’s original, Ian Allen’s tongue-in-cheek, straight-faced take on it will seem like just another bad movie, which it is anyway.

Virginal Nora (Emily Riehl-Bedford) falls under the spell of shifty-eyed Mormon Isoldi Keane (Johnny Kat). Little do Nora and the friends she subsequently recruits realize that Isoldi and his Mormon pals are a pack of homicidal vampires who want Nora to be their sex slave.

Mr. Allen hews so close to the original that he keeps his film both black-andwhite and silent (it is accompanied by Richard Renfield’s synth score). It’s a cute idea, but this is a sketch, not a feature. Its biggest laugh comes in the form of a staged blooper at the film’s finish.

– Edward Goldberger