Remember when summer movies helped you escape the heat. . . and reality? Maybe it’s a sign of the times — but from documentaries like “Fahrenheit 911,” Michael Moore’s agit-prop attack on the Bush Administration, and Chris Smith’s funnier and more revealing profile of “The Yes Men,” a group of merry prankster-activists who take on the World Trade Organization, to feature fare such as Roland Emmerich’s global-warming-as-disaster-flick “The Day After Tomorrow” and Jonathan Demme’s forthcoming remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” — there’s just no escape on the silver screen this season.

Surprisingly, the latest crop of documentaries entertains more than most feature films, and the features disturb more than many docs. A dark satire like “The Yes Men,” for example, mocks the most tragic aspects of global free trade while still maintaining its fiercely comic edge. (It had me laughing so hard I cried.) And Moore’s latest controversy, dumped by Disney only to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, opens June 25 - so ‘Moore’ on that later.

But Demme’s “Manchurian Candidate” — spawned by Richard Condon’s 1959 best-selling novel and starring Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep as his evil mother — could prove the most controversial of all.

First made in 1962, (and then, upon JFK’s assassination, taken out of release for decades), the political thriller tells the story of a brainwashed military veteran who unwittingly becomes a programmed assassin to further the political ambitions of a cold, manipulative mother.

Far out fiction? Actually, “The Manchurian Candidate” is based upon real cases of U.S. government-sponsored brainwashing, torture, Nazi collaboration, bizarre interrogation tactics, and biological warfare. In 1950, for example, the government established its first program to develop human mind control techniques, designed to exert such control, according to declassified documents, that an individual would do another’s bidding, “against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation.” And of course 25 years later, the Rockefeller Commission uncovered CIA plans for “programmed assassins” and said that American citizens had been drugged, kidnapped and tortured on American soil.

One of them was Army biochemist named Dr. Frank Olson. The government paid $750,000 restitution to his family in 1975, after admitting that the CIA had slipped Olson LSD days before his 1953 fatal fall from a New York City building twenty-two years earlier.

But that’s not where the story ends. In a 2002 press conference, Olson’s family reported that they had discovered he had been involved in “assassinations materials research,” “biological warfare experiments in populated areas” and “terminal interrogations.” They also charged that his death was a murder, not a suicide because of a reaction to LSD. Frank Olson died, they said, because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation programs, and the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.

Finally, the family said, the truth about Frank Olson’s death was concealed from his family as well as from the public for decades. The cover-up of the truth was carried out at the highest levels of government, including the White House, and involved the participation of persons serving in the current Administration — including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Boy, what will they dream up next in Hollywood? To find out more, go to www.FrankOlsonProject.org.