CRISPIN Glover has two new movies debuting this month. They couldn’t be more dissimilar.
“Beowulf, ” opening today, is expensive Hollywood pap aimed at the multiplex crowd. (Glover plays the beastly Grendel.)
“It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine!” which Glover co-directs with Utah filmmaker David Brothers but doesn’t appear in, begins a one-week run next Wednesday.
Unlike “Beowulf,” the movie is daring, original and aimed at sophisticated moviegoers.
The late Steven C. Stewart, a wheelchair-using victim of severe cerebral palsy, penned the script and has the lead role. He died in 2001, one month after filming was completed.
The film begins with Stewart, who was in his early 60s, lying on the floor of a nursing home.
While he’s being carried back to bed, his mind wanders into a fantasy world in which, despite his physical disability, he beds a series of willing women – then kills them.
The lovemaking scenes leave nothing to the imagination: Stewart and the women are nude, and some of the sex is real.
One of his conquests, a divorcee, is played by German actress Margit Carstensen, a veteran of films by the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Another victim – a woman confined to a wheelchair who dreams of dating a man who is not handicapped – is portrayed by Lauren German, who appears in “Hostel: Part II” and the 2003 remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
“It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine!” was financed by money Glover earned making “Charlie’s Angels” in 2000.
It is the second part of a Glover-directed trilogy about the physically handicapped. Glover’s aim is to show that people with less-than-perfect bodies are as human as anyone else.
It’s a worthy and so-far successful crusade.
IT IS FINE. EVERYTHING IS FINE!
Running time: 74 minutes. Not rated (sex, nudity). Opens Wednesday at the IFC Center, Sixth Avenue and Third Street.
vam@nypost.com