Movie Nation

One hour into “Alita: Battle Angel,” the Robert Rodriguez/James Cameron adaptation of a popular Japanese graphic novel series, the combat gets funny, the dialogue snappier and the trash talk flippant and smarter.

We just have time to wonder “Where has this wit, this tone, been until now?” when it’s gone again. And the visually striking, manga-inspired movie mash-up settles back in for another tedious hour.

The “Sin City” director and “Avatar” and “Terminator” co-writer and producer always give us dazzling visuals, and the eye candy here is first-rate, an integration of human actors and their motion-capture animation avatars that is a step beyond “Avatar.”

But Cameron’s plodding storytelling and tin-eared dialogue — The catch-phrase here is “You underestimated me.” I can see the T-shirts now. — overwhelms Rodriguez’s lighter touch for a movie that plays and feels like an ungainly Frankenstein lacking the humanity that might give it life.

I can’t speak to the manga that inspired it, but Cameron, Rodriguez and third screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis give us settings, characters and story elements from “Blade Runner,” “Robocop” and “Rollerball,” all hanging from the framework of Cameron’s TV series, “Dark Angel.”

Whatever comfort these over-familiar tropes deliver, “surprise” and “invention” don’t figure here.

Five hundred years hence, “three hundred years After the Fall,” Earth is a crowded, crumbling but functional dystopia where The Singularity seems to have set in. Most people have varying levels of machinery grafted onto their persons.

We’ll get to the “sexless future” this sort of dystopia suggests and popularizes in movies of this genre later.

Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) keeps the assorted worker drones, street toughs and bounty hunters of this lawless “technarchy” going. And in his spare time, he rummages through the hi-tech garbage dropped from the last sky city floating above his home here on the ground, Iron City.

That’s where he finds the remnants of a teen girl cyborg whom he names Alita and re-assembles. Alita (Rosa Salazar of “Maze Runner” and Netflix’s “Bird Box”) “wakes up” with a lot of memory loss. But her new “father” lets her play outside after imparting just the occasional life lesson.

“People do terrible things to each other here.”

Such as scavenge parts off their fellow cyborgs or carve up flesh and blood humans whose organs, we figure, wind up re-used in Salem (pronounced “Zalem” here), the oligarchical promised land floating just over their heads.

Alita meets cute, souped-up unicycle driving hustler Hugo (Keean Johnson of TV’s “Nashville”). He takes a shine to the “hard body,” hangs out with her and teaches her about the popular, no-holds-barred motorized roller-blading sport of Motor Ball.

The masses LOVE Motor Ball. Champions there have the promise of making it up the drooping pipelines that take people and supplies up to Zalem.

Alita has a warrior past which shows up in martial arts form when assorted murderous scavengers and hunter-warriors menace her and her new “family.” Instincts are programmable, but mental flashbacks show her the soldier’s life she used to lead, battling on the moon or Mars.

Chiren (Jennifer Connelly) is another cyborg-fixing doctor who takes notice of who Alita is and what she was. Local “Factory” boss Vector (Mahershala Ali) keeps siccing his motorized man-mountain (an unrecognizable Jackie Earle Haley) on her, and Zapan the hunter-warrior (Ed Skrein) is always pulling out his “Damascus Blade” (guns are banned) and trying to take Alita’s head off.

They’re all staggering forward to the Big Game/Hunger Game/Rollerball finale where they’ll settle scores on the track.

The fights — and there are many — are even more technically impressive than the interface between human actors and animated ones. If it’s physics-defying combat (Alita leaps and changes trajectory, mid-leap, from time to time) you want, “Alita” is hard to top.

But they introduce us to a world that feels barely sketched-in — a polyglot of races, languages (as in “Blade Runner”), technology and government by “Factory.”

The Alita-Hugo romance has, technically and romantically, nowhere to go, and Johnson, acting opposite a leading lady wrapped in a motion-capture suit, fails to generate any hint that it can.

Alita is an impressive creation, with huge anime eyes, a perfectly-contoured face (a little scar on her nose, pores) and minimal emotional expressiveness. Whatever the limitations of the technology, at least a little of that falls on Salazar. It’s got to be daunting “acting” under these conditions. The body motion is a lot more natural looking.

Among other cyborgs motion-captured by real actors, Skrein, Michelle Rodriguez and Jeff Fahey are recognizable, though none are really wholly developed characters.

Of the supporting cast, only Connelly makes much of an impression — icy, heartless, posed in futuristic lingerie in one scene, “Alita’s” sole suggestion of sex.

So back to that “sexless future” thing. Manga got its start in Japan, first described by Western outsiders as “comic books for grown men.” The fantasy worlds woven with their pretty boy heroes and eternally school-girlish heroines have proven to be catnip to a worldwide audience, including North America.

Anime and video games have deepened the immersion into this obsessive cosplay-friendly fantasy world, but with consequences. The “sexless future” that the chaste, adolescent romance of “Alita” portrays seems to be a part of that appeal, pandering to those looking for an emotional remove that lumps the film in with online avatar “hook ups,”  guys with lifelong schoolgirl fantasies and sex-with-dolls-until-we-can-have-sex-with-robots dreams.

In Japan they have a name for the arrested development men (mostly) who go deep into this cosplay lifestyle — Hikikomori. A plunging birthrate there is at least partly blamed on this addiction and the infantilization that often accompanies it.

Cameron and his fellow screenwriters altered and Americanized this Japanese tale (that always had American settings), but not that permanent pubescent American Hikikomori appeal. Because nobody knows what fanboys want better than JC.

“I will not stand by…in the presence of EVIL.”

But they’ve made a movie where they can crow about the technology and the eye candy they deliver, conveniently skating past the chilly inhumanity of it all and ignoring its quasi-perverse asexuality. They may have a new franchise on their hands. It’s a pity they’ve manufactured one without a heart.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, violence, sci-fi action, profanity

Cast: Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Keean Johnson, Mahershala Ali and motion captured versions of Rosa Salazar, Ed Skrein, Michelle Rodriguez and Jackie Earle Haley, Casper Van Dien

Credits: Directed by Robert Rodriguez, script by James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis and Robert Rodriguez, based on the Yokito Kishiro graphic novel series “Gunnm. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:02

I’ll Grant you, maybe it’s just my own personal movie Hell.

The rare 16mm concert footage sat in a barn, undeveloped for “30some odd years.”

As it was of a performance by Jimi Hendrix, with the infamous legal complications that tied up his music, estate and legacy after his death involved, we don’t have to wonder too hard why that was.

But it was shot by cinematographer soon-to-be-director (“The Buddy Holly Story”) Steve Rash, who kept it. And it’s Hendrix live, the “Voodoo Child,” for Pete’s sake. It couldn’t stay hidden forever.

“Jimi Hendrix: Electric Church” premiered on Showtime. But no matter how big your TV, you have to think the biggest screen is where this wondrous relic of the pop festivals of the 1960s belongs. Now his 48 minute late-night set from the July 4, 1970 edition of the Atlanta Pop Festival is making its way into select cinemas. (The current booking list is here.).

John McDermott’s film opens with a relatively thorough half hour of context — with people like Billy Cox (the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s last bassist), Paul McCartney and Steve Winwood singing the praises of the original “Guitar God.”

Paul McCartney says it was the Jimi Hendrix moment — “He was finally coming in the front door,” a star whose time in Britain gave him the swagger and confidence to accept his due — great fame. “We worshipped him.”

Rick Robinson of The Black Crows marvels at his “purity of intention.” Derek Trucks opines that “When something’s real, it’s going to last.”

And Kirk Hammett from Metallica adds that “He took a fairly pedestrian instrument, a (Fender) guitar primarily used by surf bands and country musicians, and turned it into a lethal weapon.”

Context? The Atlanta Pop Festival was staged on a race track and neighboring pecan orchard, with epic traffic jams, a lot of nudity, sex, pot and litter, hundreds of thousands of “hippies”  in the middle of segregated South Georgia (in Byron, Ga., 100 miles from Atlanta) pretty much without incident. It was the “last great pop festival” of the era, coming before The Rolling Stones/Hell’s Angels debacle at Altamont, California.

Jimi’s soundman, Abe Jacob, recalls that everything this band needed on tour was packed into a 19 foot truck — sound system, instruments and merchandise to sell to the fans, plus a sound man, two roadies and a driver. That turned Abe into a philosopher of rock.

“The amount of talent you have is inversely proportional to the number of trucks it takes to put your show on the road.”

And this “Electric Church” that Jimi was ministering to? Dick Cavett asked him about this “ambition.”

“It’s a belief I have…That the electricity comes through us to the crowd,” Hendrix told Cavett on his TV show. The Jimi Hendrix sound “doesn’t hit through the eardrums…we plan for our sound to go through the soul of the person” listening, “waking something inside of them…There are so many sleeping people.”

The audience of 500,000 was the largest live audience Hendrix ever played for. He overdosed and died two months later.

The set, launched at 1230 or so at night — epic in hindsight, but was just another blistering Jimi jam — begins with Jimi apologizing.

“Really hope it isn’t too loud for you.” At one point, he starts into “All Along the Watchtower” and backs away from the mike. He’s in the wrong key, but so unflappable he doesn’t let on. He chunks through the guitar intro again and repeats “As I was sayin’, ‘There must be some kinda way outta here…”

“Purple Haze,” “Hey Joe,” “Foxy Lady,” “Voodoo Child” “Stone Free” finishing with the solo guitar version of “O Say Can you See?”

As the lone sheriff of the town at the time remembers the teeming mass of humanity that flooded the village, “It was July the fourth, and they were gonna hear ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ by golly.”

And so they did. And so, now, can you.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity

Cast: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Merlis, Billy Cox, Susan Tedeschi, Paul McCartney, Derek Trucks, Kirk Hammett

Credits: Directed by John McDermott. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:28

Fox is showing this one early, and opening tonight’s showings up to fandom (and not just critics) nationwide.

They have high hopes for this Robert Rodriguez directed/James Cameron-produced adaptation of the Japanese graphic novel/manga series “Gunnm.”

Of course, they had high hopes for “The Kid Who Would be King,” too. A good movie, well-reviewed, screened early for critics, and “kids” didn’t turn out for “The Kid.”

“Alita” opens Valentine’s Day.

“Haze” is the best movie about the excesses of the Greek System that you’ve never seen.

An alcohol, coke and Moly-fueled fever-dream of rituals, tradition, group bonding and groupthink, intimidation, violence, vandalism, sexism and every other “ism” you can think of, it is damning in ways the frat bros cannot fathom. Writer-director David Burkman has rounded up and fictionalized moments that cover every shocking fraternity and sorority news or gossip item of the Internet age.

“Animal House” romanticized the booze-and-sex obsessed side of the college experience to such a degree that it single-handedly revived the clannish, clubbish, classist social clubs that date from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, developed because getting to go to college was no longer “elite” enough.

“Haze” takes a box-cutter to that, showing the depravity, soul-sucking amorality and personal and human cost of giving yourself over to the mob.

Burkman follows one promising freshman at an unnamed college, Nick (Kirk Curran), from Rush Week through Hell Week. It’s the promise of sex, epic parties that would make Bacchus envious and “lifelong friends…I want a family…loyalty” that has Nick pledging “I will do whatever it takes to get into this frat.”

The smirking brothers of Psi Theta Epsilon take that as a dare.

They’re the party house on campus, which is tricky as the campus has gone officially “dry.” A kid died during a fraternity hazing ritual the previous year. There are plenty of students who sneer at fraternities, along with phony contrite (and not contrite) frat bros who say “I don’t feel complicit” in the kid’s death, “Sir.”

The “sir” they say that to is Nick’s older brother Pete (Mike Blejer), an earnest upperclassman making a documentary about the Greek System and its role in that pledge’s death. That makes Pete the enemy of the Greeks. That forces Nick to make a choice. It’s his first test, and it’s one he fails — at least as far as his humanity, family loyalty and morality are concerned.

Nick has a female BFF from high school, Mimi (Kristin Rogers) who pines for him. But Psi Theta Epsilon promises a smorgasbord of sin. Why confine yourself to the girl next door when the compliant Delta (sister sorority) “mother” (Sophia Medley) and her sisters each fall under the understanding that they are the Psi Theta’s “sure thing?”

That’s the second predictable test Nick flunks on his “hero’s journey” through eight weeks of hazing, memorization of fraternity chants, mottos, creed and rituals while other students march to “Stop Hazing NOW!”

Burkman’s little no-budget indie is an expert exercise in montage — a blizzard of edited pledge interviews, jumbled cell-camera accounts of parties and Pete’s footage interviewing kids and the dean (Brian St. August) supposedly riding herd on this unruly mob of dedicated Dionysians.

We drop into classes where Greek mythology, the psychology of “pressure to comform” and the like are explained to the sleepy kids who promptly drift back to The House to engage in peer-pressured over-drinking, drugs, vandalism and hate sex.

Mimi succumbs to the pressure to join a sorority. Nick finds himself having to prove his “loyalty” by betraying (and worse) his brother. And Psi Theta, with every passing day, sinks its claws deeper into him and drifts further away from the “right” side of “know the difference between right and wrong.”

Burkman takes us in familiar directions, but repeatedly trips up expectations and fakes us out.

Just when we think we’ve seen it all, things turn uglier, with Nick and his fellow pledges intimidated into complying.

Carol Randolph plays the dead pledge’s mother, and her on-campus talk lets us see flashbacks of what her son went through the night he died. We see variations of that play out with Nick and the Psi Thetas — brutality, groupthink callousness, degradation and worse. Always worse.

I roomed with a rowdy TKE brother as an undergrad, and remember the stash of vending machine loot (a favorite group prank, busting into snack machines), designated drug storage, stolen (and archived) tests and class assignments, and raucus all-hours visits leading to parties he was dragged off to.

Dude, who made a quick trip from “nice guy” to “copycat jerk” in record time, flunked out his freshman year.

Whatever Bluto and Otter and the “Animal House” boys promised, that soured me on the Greeks for life. That, and a girlfriend who thought joining the “Little Sisters” of her college’s campus TKE chapter was a good idea. I knew what she was soon to find out.

But Burkman’s every-nasty-news-story-combined take-down goes far beyond that, sickeningly so.

He gets good performances out of his “students” and a movie that works as polemic and entertainment, a whirling, swirling, dizzying in-the-action no-budget jewel of hand-held footage and editing that if it offers few real surprises, sure as hell makes his point.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, explicit sex, violence, drug use, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Kirk Curran, Sophia Medley, Kristin Rogers, Mike Blejer, Jeremy O’Shea

Credits: Written and directed by David Burkman.  A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:45

Marshall Curry’s Oscar nominated film is an editing of footage — silent and with sound — of a February, 1939 “Support the Nazis” rally — not in Nuremberg, but at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

It’s all there, the nationalist co-opting of the flag, the “Star Spangled Banner” and American icons like George Washington, Americans giving the Nazi salute, just another night in America’s most “liberal” metropolis, 20,000 true believers voicing support for the most un-American dogma imaginable.

German-accented speakers spouting anti-Semitism, urging violence on protesters (and getting it), rallying the Make America Great Again bigots of their day.

Chilling and Fascinating. The link to watch this Oscar nominee is here.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/nightatthegarden/video-nightatthegarden/

“First Man” tried to show us an intimate portrait of Neil Armstrong, and succeeded.

No, the Ryan Gosling/Damien Chazelle bio pic wasn’t a blockbuster and made NO noise this awards season. But it outshone many of the films we’re making bets on winning “Best Picture” this year.

Part of the problem is the filmgoing audience today would rather see Avengers or Superman or the “Guardians of the Galaxy” in space than watch a movie about space history.

That’s what Neon, the edgy studio releasing “Apollo 11” runs up against, something Ron Howard showed us began back “Apollo 13” — a hit movie showing an America that had already grown complacent about human space flight — many years ago.

This Todd Douglas Miller (“Dinosaur 13”) film, which just premiered at Sundance, faces apathy in the movie market place. But CNN co-produced it, so it’ll reach a TV audience.

I live within sight of KSC, so this is promises to be a thrill to me. But I know I’m the exception these days.

The first image in the trailer shows the NASA’s massive crawler, that hauls spacecraft from the VAB (Vehicular Assembly Building) to the launch pad. The guy who used work on the diesel engine on my sailboat was a NASA layoff post-Apollo. His job? Keeping the diesels running on the crawler.

Dan Myrick’s “Skyman” has that “appearance of ‘real’ history” look of “The Blair Witch Project.”

But “Skyman” is about a man who met a “Skyman” decades earlier.

A mockumentary format, with “interviews” rather than “found footage,” is what the film is built around.

Reminds me a little of that Bob Lazar UFO doc.

This isn’t the first time a co-director of “The Blair Witch Project” has taken on this subject. Ed Sanchez’s “Altered” (originally under a much better title, “Probed”) beat it to the punch.

But hey, go with what you know.

You can fight back the grin that wants to creep onto your face, every so often, during “In Like Flynn,” the good-natured, not-totally far-fetched Aussie film based on the early life of Australia’s first and greatest screen icon — the swashbuckling rake, Errol Flynn.

It’s a patchwork affair — with four credited screenwriters, including a “Flynn.”

There’s not a lot of star power in the cast and Aussie director Russell Mulcahy’s big-screen career went off the rails with “The Shadow” and “The Real McCoy” nearly 30 years ago.

But Mulcahy, who did a few “Highlander” pictures and a “Resident Evil,” knows how to shoot action. And as long as “In Like Flynn” is playing up the two-fisted, devil-may-care bravado of its subject, it’s on solid ground — brawling, dodging straight razors, daggers and bullets in the days before he “went Hollywood.”

That Hollywood trek could have happened earlier than it did, according to this “mostly true” movie based on Flynn’s memoir, “Beam Ends.” We meet him in the bush of Papua New Guinea in 1930, leading a Hollywood producer (Dan Fogler) on a trek to secure grisly footage of the victims of the primitive natives fighting off a new gold rush, and the intruders that come with it.

The politically correct Flynn (Thomas Cocquerel of “Kidnapping Mr. Heineken”), all of 21, may not be as seasoned as he makes out. But as he fires warning shots into the air rather than at the murderous tribespeople, dodges arrows and a hail of blow darts (which kill a native guide and friend), crossing a croc-infested river to make his Indiana Jones getaway, he shows manliness and star quality to that producer.

“You find yourself in Hollywood, come find us.”

But Flynn has that gold on his mind. He recruits a couple of pals — the tough, hard-drinking cynic Rex (Corey Large) and pedantic, posh-accented Dook (William Moseley) — to join him. They outfight/outwit Achun (Grace Huang, venomously sexy), the Dragon Lady of the Sydney waterfront in stealing her boat — the first Flynn sailing schooner to be named Sirocco (“desert wind”) — and make their way up the wild and wooly coast of Oz.

The previous owner of the boat, a weepy, violent old salt named Charlie (Clive Standen of TV’s “Vikings” and “Taken”), muscles his way into their partnership.

There are prize fights and shootouts when they aren’t threatened with dying of thirst, starvation or drowning by sinking.

Death hangs over the story and marks Flynn’s life, this version of his biography tells us. “Beam Ends,” the sailing slang title of that book, hints at despair, desperation and life of narrow escapes that Flynn says he was living at the time. “Beam Ends” means a boat that’s heeled so far over in a strong breeze that it’s about to capsize.

As we know he got his start in Australian films shortly after this period and that he wasn’t a literal Hollywood “discovery” (“He’s a headliner and doesn’t even know it!”), it’s hard to say where the truth ends and the Flynn memoir and four-screenwriters-adapting-it fiction begins.

The good parts of “In Like Flynn” make you wish there were more of them, and that the movie’s modest budget and modest ambitions weren’t slowing it down, thanks to a screenplay that serves up dead stretches in the midst of action picture cliches.

Digitally recreating Sydney Harbor in 1930 is fine. Digitally adding dolphins to the Sirocco’s wake? Less so.

The Indy opening sequence is quickly topped by a short, riotous, dodge the razors, punch the thugs and kiss the girl brawl that gave me high hopes for the picture. Dropping in on the opium den/brothel HQ of Achun didn’t dim those hopes. Much.

The idealistic young Flynn crows about relishing the moment, as “We will never be these men again,” and expectations rise.

“The sirens of the sea beckon!”

And then the movie unfolds in an updating of the corniest, old-fashioned two-fisted balderdash that Flynn’s movies, way back when, used to be.

Only less fun.

Standen has the best lines and the best role, warning the lubbers on board his boat — “Thievin’ sissies” he calls them — to brace for “Cyclones that’ll blow your foreskins off.”

“Won’t be long before y’get yourselves dead.”

But as the young Flynn revels in the low-rent adventure he’s dragging them all into, the old salt makes him consider his lack of ambition and the future (which Charlie is sadly living).

“You need to hoist your sail a little higher, mate.”

The handsome Cocquerel has an athletic grace and just a hint of the bravado that suits the role, and it’s no surprise to see him standing in the bosun’s chair on the top of one of the schooner’s masts. Young, relatively unknown guys are the easiest to talk into doing their own stunts. But he’s merely adequate in the role, with nothing that suggests Flynn’s brash physical presence or the wicked glint Flynn brought to his camera-loving grin.

Moseley manages a few moments of comic relief. What sort of ‘bath house’ is this?” Dook asks those in the Townsville (Queensland) brothel they’ve ducked into.

“The good kind,” a lady of the evening informs him.

David Wenham (“300”) plays the crooked priest/mayor of Townsville, Callan Mulvey the not-nearly-writerly-enough writer marooned there, and Isabel Lucas of TV’s “MacGyver” is a cunning, brawling hooker/ex-girlfriend of Flynn’s, sort of the Karen Allen to Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones in this picture.

“In Like Flynn” would probably benefit from lowered “cut-rate Indiana Jones” expectations. But Mulcahy is too visual (a music video vet) and visceral a director to not lift them, just a bit, in the best of those early scenes, before the weary screenplay limited supply of charisma in the cast let him and the movie down.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence, drug use and a brief sexual reference

Cast: Thomas Cocquerel, Corey Large, Costas Mandylor, Isabel Lucas, William Moseley, Grace Huang, Nathalie Kelley, David Wenham, Dan Fogler and Clive Standen

Credits: Russell Mulcahy, script by Marc Furmie, Steve M. Albert, Luke Flynn, Corey Large, based on the Errol Flynn memoir. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:46

“He won’t hurt us, right?” the husband of the conjuring woman wants to know, asking about the monstrous entity his wife has summoned with mud and blood and a parchment of secret letters.

“Of course not! He’s here to PROTECT us!”

You know better. I know better. You don’t have to know Jewish folklore or have a grasp of Kabbalah to know “The Golem” may have been brought to life to protect and avenge, but that he — It — won’t limit his vengeance to murderous, Pogrom practicing Gentiles in 17th century Lithuania.

This English language Israeli production makes its moral lesson in the plainest terms. An oppressed people — raped, murdered and exploited for being apart, different and mysterious to the superstitious Russian Orthodox locals– learns the true price of vengeance in this parable.

For the horror fan, there’s grisly violence but little in the line of suspense, terror or performances that embody anything like that.

It begins with a narrated lie — “In Jewish folklore, it’s impossible to separate the truth from myth.” Nah.

A prologue traces the first Golem to ancient Prague, where a rabbi summons a mud monster of Hulk/Thing/Batman’s bad guy Bane proportions to protect his people, who are being murdered for all the usual hate-mongering reasons.

This Golem “must only be used for protection, for the greater good of all.”

It never works out that way.

Centuries later, a small shtetl in Lithuania enjoys relative tranquility, isolated from the Gentile world, its men spending their days in prayer and Torah study, the women raising babies and doing more than their fair share of work.

For Hannah ( Hani Furstenberg of “The Loneliest Planet”), that isn’t enough. She isn’t willing to go full “Yentl,” but she wants the education the men are getting. She slips under the floor of the rabbi’s school and listens, gets her husband Benjamin (Ishai Golan of “The Island”) to sneak a Torah out for her to pore over at nights.

They are childless, so anything he can do to keep her happy and willing to perform her wifely duties (complete with post-coital incantations) is fair game. The rabbi might be lecturing Benjamin that “seven years” without a baby is long enough, but Benjamin is devoted. He knows Hannah’s pain, even if he doesn’t know about her trips to the village “healer” for birth control.

A chance encounter lets the villagers know that plague has broken out among the Gentiles. And you know Gentiles and their ability to find somebody to blame.

When Vladimir (Alex Titenko), cruel on a good day but driven mad by his daughter’s infection, shows up to demand the mystic Jews “cure” his little girl, the unarmed villagers have no choice but to pray and make their best effort.

“Fail, and I will burn this place to the ground.”

But his minions don’t wait for a prognosis. They single out villagers for raping and pillaging, starting with Hannah’s sister. Unlike the passive men, she won’t let this go unavenged. She uses her biblical knowledge to perform the ceremony that summons the avenger from Hell, who might be either a heartless monster or a “savior to us all.”

The pitter-patter and clumsy thumps she hears in the attic tip her that she’s succeeded. But it’s not until she’s dangling from a rope for being caught outside the village confines by the Gentiles that she has her proof.

A naked, skinny mud-covered boy with coal-black eyes dismembers her attackers. She almost thinks it’s her long-dead little boy. But we know it’s “Danny doesn’t live here, Mrs. Hannah.”

It takes a while for the rest of the village to figure out what she’s done, and as she sees the mayhem The Golem unleashes, Hannah has her moment of doubt. The rabbi urges her to get that parchment with the 72 unspoken letters that spell “The Hidden Name of God” that she placed in the child’s mouth and thus kill it.

“It will never die like the rest of us.”

Hannah considers drowning him, but cannot. And to the horror of her neighbors, the avenger has a lot of avenging to do and isn’t picky about who he stabs, whose heart he pulls out of their chest and whose head he makes explode.

“The Golem” is a nicely-detailed period production that reaches a fine climax, where all Hannah and the Hebrews’ and their tormentors’ chickens come home to roost.

It’s a far-from-awful folk tale with a horrific edge. But it’s not suspenseful, and the generally unaffecting performances by the Israeli cast fail to draw us in and create empathy for the endangered.

Hannah is a figure who demands more of a character arc, something more wrenching or embittered or broken or vengeful than what Furstenberg gives us.

The Golem himself? Creepy as only a dead-eyed little boy can be. But scary? Not really. Any number of American B and C horror movies have given us bone-chilling tweenage villains.

But as I said, the parable comes through loud and clear. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. An eye for an eye only makes everybody blind in the end, especially when the eyes look like puddles of crude oil, and just as pitiless.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Hani Furstenberg, Ishai Golan, Brynie Furstenberg, Alex Titenko,

Credits: Doron Paz, Yoav Paz, script by Ariel Cohen. An Epic release

Running time: 1:35