Diehard fans of the 1975 classic direct-cinema feature Grey Gardens will get a serious kick out of HBO’s dramatic riff on the original documentary. When the fraternal filmmaking team of Albert and David Maysles set out to make a film about the lives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s relatives, they came across a mother and daughter, Big Edie and Little Edie respectively, who were living in squalor in a once-fabulous, dilapidated mansion in the Hamptons. The film immediately drew the ire of critics, who complained that it exploited the two women in the film, one apparently experiencing dementia in her old age, the other seemingly in the throes of mental illness. But the film became a huge cult hit—especially among gay men—and has since spawned a veritable cottage industry, including a Tony-Award-winning musical, books, a sequel, and now this.

Michael Sucsy directs from a screenplay he co-wrote with Toronto-based filmmaker Patricia Rozema—the two share an Emmy nomination for the writing, one of many for the project—with this HBO flick, which attempts to show us precisely how Big and Little Edie ended up in such a mess. There’s some very imaginative stuff here, and the entire affair is met with such bravado by Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore (as the Edies), it’s like watching a surreal drag act. The best scene comes when Jackie O (played brilliantly by Jeanne Tripplehorn) comes for a visit and Little Edie proceeds to give her hell: “I could have been First Lady!!” Totally brilliant stuff—and Barrymore is clearly loving every minute of it.

Not quite so brilliant is the ultra-low-budget Sea Beast, about—you guessed it—a sea beast that devours a bunch of young people. There are some fun scenes, and director Paul Ziller is an old hand at trash like this (look up his IMDB page)—though it’s never really explained why the creatures are invisible about half the time. Skimping on CGI, I guess.