Movie Nation

“Hell Fest” falls on the “Why’d they even bother releasing this one?” end of the horror film spectrum.

Then you look around at the late Thursday preview audience and see a theater half-full for a movie that was so crappy it wasn’t previewed for critics, that arrives with so little marketing only the horror faithful know about it and will show up. For a day or two, anyway.

It’s a about a spree killer who shows up at a “Halloween Horror Nights/Howl-o-Scream/Haunted House” traveling expo, an impressively staffed and elaborately staged immersive horror experience.

The last thing you’d expect in a place with a Zombie Maze, Deformed School, Deadlands and other hellish hands-on frights is an actual nut with a knife stalking and killing people.

He did it a couple of years ago in a distant town, which we see in the opening credits. How he’s out to create more dead teenagers in this deathly dull “dead teenager movie.”

Three couples — Brooke and  Asher (Reign Edwards and Matt Mercurio), Taylor and Quinn (Bex Taylor-Klaus, Miss Tries Too Hard,and Christian James) and first-date crushes Nat and Gavin (Amy Forsyth and Roby Attal) get VIP passes for “Hell Fest.”

It’s a vast set-up (entirely too big to be a traveling troupe), and they’re not alone. Thousands have shown up. So has one guy in a hoodie. He brought his own mask, and he knows where to cadge a knife.

The stalk is on, the “What is WITH this guy?” questions, the taunting and then the one-by-one killings of characters so colorless describing them is pointless.

Horror-phobe Nat witnesses the first murder, and doesn’t believe it’s real. “Just DO it,” she says, getting into the spirit of things. “We came here to be SCARED.”

The killings aren’t particularly gripping, there’s little suspense in the earliest ones and the menace is pretty watered down for much of the movie.

There are two pretty tight sequences though — one involves a guillotine and an MC played by horror legend Tony Todd (“Candyman”). The other doesn’t. Don’t bother calling the cops, either.

“You came here to be scared. I can’t arrest people for doing their job.”

Aside from that, we have to get our jollies out of the detail in the various rooms (the grope-a-torium is a favorite). What must admission the admission price be, with all these buildings, all those employees and all that neon and technology?

MPAA Rating:R for horror violence, and language including some sexual references

Cast: Bex Taylor-Klaus, Reign Edwards, Amy Forsyth, Tony Todd

Credits:Directed by Gregory Plotkin, script by Seth M. Sherwood and Blair Butler. A CBS/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:27

Here is Orlando, city of “Halloween Horror Nights,” home to “Phantasmagoria,” we know a thing or two about spooky live events.

We’ve never had a Halloween “get your fight on” invaded by a spree killer, but otherwise “Hell Fest” has the ring of the familiar, the chill of “What COULD go wrong?”

CBS and Lionsgate didn’t preview this one for critics, but ah — “Hell Fest” opens tonight. So let’s see if they were protecting its secrets or hiding a dog from those who would name it thus.

They must teach this in schools where filmmakers learn the art of making documentaries.

While there are many subgenres of nonfiction film — historic, sport, art, nature, biographical profile — one can’t-miss shortcut to getting your film made and seen is “obsession.” Find something esoteric that a corner of the culture is fanatical about and try to figure out why. Let its adherents — Scrabble players or orchid thieves, snake–handling Christians or pop singer Tiffany or Rick Springfield fans, any kind of collector — articulate that obsession.

“The Surrounding Game” is an intriguing look inside the world of Go, an ancient board game whose mostly Asian adherents — it was born in China thousands of years ago, and took Japan by storm 1200 years ago — proclaim has aesthetic and competitive advantages over chess.

But for all its popularity in the East, Go has never taken hold of the West. “The Surrounding Game” is about American efforts to popularize the game and select America’s first-ever professional-level Go players, who’d be the first in the Western world.

“The Surrounding Game” introduces us to guys like Andy Liu, who play the game practically non-stop, tournament competitors, veteran players patiently waiting for the rest of the country to share their passion, and one 20ish fanatic who ventures to a Go Academy in Seoul to study “with little kids” (in Asia, players start training for professional careers at five or six) to polish his game.

“Yeah,” Ben Lockhart says. “I don’t have much of a choice.”

It’s a simple game played on a board covered with criss-crossed with lines. “Stones” are placed on intersections of those lines with two players, taking turns, playing their stones. A stone is placed once, and the object is to cut off your opponent’s stones by blocking every intersection around them.

Academics and other experts talking on camera speak of the game’s “aesthetic” in the ways it requires “a feel,” a board game where memorization and left brain mastery is important, but right brain “creativity” reigns supreme.

A famous endorsement from a chess grandmaster introduces “Surrounding Game” — “The rules of Go are so elegant, organic and rigorously logical,” Edward Lasker once said, “that if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.”

We meet Terry Benson, president of the AGA, the American Go Association, and hear from him and others how close this small group has come to disappearing altogether over the years. They are Americans trying to “take something that is not a part of the culture and add it to the culture.” It’s an uphill climb.

Frank Lantz, professor of game design at NYU, discusses the “subtlety” of the game, with its myriad variations and outcome possibilities. Legendary pros from China and Japan talk of the years it takes to master it, and assorted Americans marvel at how reaching each level in the hierarchy of Go makes you realize “I know NOTHING.”

We glimpse Asian tournaments and take in the rituals — players bow, sit on knee chairs and play at a low game table made from a solid block of yew wood — and visit the craftspeople who cut and age the wooden tables, covering them with hashmarks, and others who drill out fossilized giant clam shells to make the most expensive “stones” high-end players play with.

The history is covered, we learn of the vast skills of the great Go Seigen, a Japanese master whose contemporaries said he “didn’t seem human.”

We check back in, now and again, on players like Andy Liu and Ben Lockhart (Go fanatic Will Lockhart co-directed the film) and gauge their progress toward their ultimate goal.

And we watch a 2012 tournament unfold, looking for the first Americans capable of reaching professional status, old men who have played a lifetime watching young men (all male, overwhelmingly Asian) battle to become America’s first certified pro.

The various Asian experts, historians and masters do their best to give the game that
“inscrutable” quality that the East likes to imprint on Western interlopers. The game is like “the rings of the tree” you can see in the most valuable, hand-cut boards, one craftsman waxes philosophically. Legend has it that the simple game was a way of making sense of the infinite night sky in ancient China.

“The board is a window to the human mind. It reveals what’s inside us.”

And the Americans put their imprint on it — competitiveness, and our other national obsession, a yen to “follow your bliss,” even if you don’t measure up to the challenge.  Other Americans marvel at the way life’s cares, clutter and distraction melt away while playing it.

“Time just melts away,” one adherent notes. “You learn to come to terms with your own imperfections.”

Go is not being Westernized, it is Easternizing at least some of its Western fans.

The film has a lot of airline miles to it, and a lot of history and Asian aesthetics packed into its scenic 95 minutes. There’s a spare quality to the visuals, music and quiet of co-directors Will Lockhart and Cole D. Pruitt’s movie that seems to mimic the experience of playing the game, elegant ritual and minimalist design meeting in a mental contest.

Co-director Lockhart doesn’t acknowledge any connection to competitor Ben Lockhart, which seems a cheat (No relation? Brothers? Married?). And I can’t say I’m sold on the game itself, which seems fun but inherently less interesting than chess or poker.

Mastery of Go is made to seem particularly daunting.

But “The Surrounding Game” accomplishes what it set out to, explain the obsession its most enthusiastic adherents share. It’s playable on computer (computer programs can now beat the best players), and should real money get behind it, it’s hard to see it not catching on here. Eventually.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Michael Chen, Terence Benson, Myungwan Kim, James Davies, Ben Lockhart

Credits:Directed by Will Lockhart, Cole D. Pruitt. A Moyo/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

It’s taken a while for her to get there, but Joey King’s finally made a movie that cements her growing girl-who-wants-to-be-bad reputation.

No “Kissing Booth” this time. With “Summer ’03” she goes full Aubrey Plaza.

I’d say watching “Summer ’03” will send you straight to Hell, but who believes in that?

It’s one long “trigger warning” of a coming-of-age (sex) comedy, sexually charged (and explicit), virulently anti-Catholic and tone-deaf as only Hollywood can be.

“Wait, you mean throwing a ‘libidinous Jewess’ stereotype at a cute-young seminary student in a lose-your-‘mouth-virginity’ farce ISN’T mainstream? Huh.”

King (“Slender Man”) is pouty, pert Jamie, a 16 year-old Cincinnatan/Cincinnatite who, in 2003, was deep into Harry Potter, sexually curious and waiting for Grandma to die.

But before she does, Granny (June Squibb, funny enough in a hospital bed) wants to get a few things off her chest. Little cousin Dylan? She’s sure you’re a homosexual and could be “fixed.” Dad (Paul Scheer)? I never told you who your REAL father was.

And Jamie, even though your mother (Andrea Savage) is “a dirty Jew…I had you BAPTIZED without you knowing” so you won’t “go to Hell.”

OK. And one more thing, the secret to a happy life as a woman?

“Learn to give a good blow” you-know-what.

The whole family is hurled into a tailspin, with Dad dashing off to find who created him, foul-mouthed Mom having to plan a Catholic funeral for a woman she hated, who hated her very existence, troubled young Dylan (Logan Medina) acting-out a never-punished runaway fantasy (he is 12 and keeps stealing car keys and trying to drive off).

Jamie? She’s best-buds with new-student Emily (Kelly Lamor Wilson). “She came from Los Angeles, where the girls are MUCH faster,” thus she might be able to act on Grandma’s edict, drawing on Emily’s vastly-superior knowledge of all things sexual.

Movies of this teen sex genre have taken, in recent years, to giving us graphic oral sex demonstrations, and writer-director Becca Gleason knows a good “How to” idea “for you girls out there” when she steals it.

But who will Jamie try out her new “power” with? Friendly neighbor boy March (Stephen Ruffin) or the priest-in-training (Jack Kilmer) whom she meets and has dirty Hogwarts fantasies about?

Which one would be more wildly inappropriate? Which one seems to have no trouble heading for trouble when he takes in Ms. Wear a Tight, Low-Cut little Black Dress to Sunday Mass? I mean, “No vows YET, right?”

Endless voice-over narration is a tried, true and trite cinematic device, and it’s trotted out here. No sense putting Jamie’s discovery that the very old “lose whatever filters they had” or “the control and power” she feels in acting on what granny was telling her to master when you can just have the star sit in a recording booth and read it.

Lazy. Cinema is a visual and active medium. If you can’t SHOW it, why include it? If you’ve shown it, why hammer the point home with voice-over?

For instance, when Jamie wonders why she hasn’t gotten a call, if she’s got the image of  “hard to get” when “I’m EASY to get,” we’ve already gotten that message. We don’t need it narrated.

Women are writing and directing a lot of today’s female-centric teen sex comedies, which lends the imprimatur of “empowerment” to what has traditionally been an objectifying, crude and sexist male-dominated genre quite-rightly labeled “horny teenager” movies.

Attempts to make “Summer ’03” transcend that genre are all over the place, flirting with serious subject matter (Kids have to learn about anti-Semitism somewhere, right?) but lapsing into genre conventions, letting story threads unravel.

While “Summer” is lightly amusing, here and there, it treads heavily on some pretty slippery ground. Gleason makes all the checkpoints that the plot passes through feel perfunctory. Of COURSE the young priest won’t hesitate in playing with fire. March? Totally undeveloped as a character, as is Emily. Only Savage’s intense, infuriated mother stands out in the rest of the cast.

When Jamie’s Mom lets slip “You’re not the only one this has happened to” re the unholy fooling around, she’s referencing the then-just-emerging Catholic sex abuse scandals that have since swept the planet. But is that really a suitable subject for a teen sex comedy?

The culture has shifted, and one way teen movies have reflected that in just the past couple of years is the profanity and frank-to-the-edge-of-crude sex talk parents and other adults in these films have in their conversations with teens. But even in church? And who Gleason has doing all this cursing and blowing is pretty tone-deaf, too.

King is an interesting young actress who is making the most of her emerged “lady shape,” as she called it in the Netflix summer phenomenon “The Kissing Booth.” She’s not limiting what she chooses to film, but she is staking a “new Chloe Grace Moretz/Bella Thorne” claim to a genre — sexing it up like there’s no tomorrow.

Aiming to be ogled seems like taking the low road. Sure, when you make sex your brand, the kids tune in by the score when this one hits Netflix (very soon, I’d guess).

But then what?

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, teen drinking, profanity

Cast: Joey King, Andrea Savage, Paul Scheer, June Squibb, Kelly Lamor Wilson

Credits: Written and directed by Becca Gleason. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:35

The year of “Captain Marvel” and “Birds of Prey” begins with “Dark Phoenix,” a new X-Men feature which brings back the non-Wolverine/Fassbender-McAvoy-J. Lawrence cast for a Fox payday and a fresh start.

Sophie Turner’s Jean Gray, who turns bad badder baddest as “Dark Phoenix.”

Just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Vanessa Grasse stars as a young woman who cannot escape her horrific past in “Open 24 Hours.”

Making quite the career for herself, covered in blood (“Leatherface”).

This just played at Fantastic Fest. Looks visceral.

Think of “Bleach” as the Harry Potter of manga, the epic Japanese illustrated books (comics) that inspire many an anime outing.

It’s a fantastical struggle between good and many faces of evil waged by teenagers who could hold second jobs as models on Instagram idols.

And boy, do the Japanese have down Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” down cold.

Consider — a little boy and his mother are walking home through the rain. Ichigo takes her hand and says “I’ll protect you.” Then he breaks free, runs ahead to offer him umbrella to a strange little girl standing beside a lake. Mom dies, and the boy carries the guilt with him the rest of his life.

In Karakura Town, a fictive present day of strange sinkholes and mysterious calamities is just everyday life for the school kids, including pop idol hunky Ichigo (Sôta Fukushi), an androgynous dreamboat with flaming hair and a special power.

He can see ghosts. Disrespect a roadside shrine for, say, a little boy who died after being hit by a car, and you have to answer to Ichigo. Bullies kowtow before his mad martial arts skillz.

“Don’t hang around here,” he lectures the child only he can see. “Go to heaven.”

That sort of thing will get you noticed by the supernatural powers that be. When his family is menaced by this giant birdlike masked monster, he’s gutsy enough to fight to rescue his sister.

But it is this samurai-clad badass named Rukia (Hana Sugisaki) who saves the day.  She is handy with a sword and quick to wield whatever it takes to hold a fellow teenager’s attention.

“BINDING SPELL!” she shouts (in Japanese, with English subtitles). He’s tied up with strands of psychotronic electricity to hold him still while she explains she is a “Soul Reaper.” What attacked him and his family was a Hollow. He can fight the beast all he wants, “but only a Soul Reaper can destroy a Hollow.”

There’s this Grand Fisher of the Hollows who threatens humanity, this race of wiped-out spirit warriors called Quincy (M.E.?) and a power struggle within the Soul Reapers about the rules and what not.

Which Rukia flouts as she passes her powers on to Ichigo. she will train him, use this “Ghost” style bit of shoving to bring out his inner warrior — and use pitching machines to train his reflexes.

The kid gets a REALLY big sword in the bargain.

It’s all cheesy, good-natured fun — even the occasional impaling. The Hollows, who like The Grinch have this big hole where their hearts should be (Awwww) are fanciful creations, animals in nature Kabuki-converted into monsters — tentacles, spiders with spear-pointed legs, etc.

There is noble sacrifice and second chances to be the hero mixed in with epic swordfights, colorful settings and like any good Godzilla movie — a lot of destruction of private property.

Director Shinsuke Sato of “The Library Wars” movies (got your attention there) ladles out effects with care, giving us an action fantasy that tosses cars and buses around, turns swordfighters into twirling tops and uh, uses canned smoke when needed.

It’s not to be taken seriously, though movies like this one can make for an amusing window into the soul of a culture.

Which is to say, I’m not familiar with the bats of Japan, but I know they must have them. Every now and then they give the world something that can only be described as “bat-s— crazy.” Like “Bleach.”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Sôta Fukushi, Miyavi, Hana Sugisaki,

Credits:Directed by Shinsuke Sato script by  Daisuke Habara, base on the manga by  Tite Kubo. A Warner Brothers/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

October 1, Universal is putting Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy’s Oscar hopes in front of the fans, as they host nationwide “preview” screenings of “First Man,” the Neil Armstrong/Apollo picture.

Here’s where it is happening. No, I didn’t alphabetize the list, Universal took a stab at that.

   Markets that will host the special FIRST MAN screenings on October 1 include Phoenix, AZ; Orange County, CA; Palm Desert, CA; Riverside, CA; Sacramento, CA; San Diego, CA; San Francisco, CA; Simi Valley, CA; Ventura County, CA; Denver, CO; Hartford, CT; Washington, D.C.; Ft. Myers, FL; Miami, FL; Orlando, FL; Tampa, FL; West Palm Beach, FL; Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; Indianapolis, IN; Baltimore, MD; Boston, MA; Detroit, MI; Minneapolis, MN; Kansas City, MO; St. Louis, MO; Las Vegas, NV; Albuquerque, NM; Buffalo, NY; New York, NY; Charlotte, NC; Raleigh, NC; Cleveland, OH; Cincinnati, OH; Columbus, OH; Oklahoma City, OK; Toronto, ON; Portland, OR; Philadelphia, PA; Pittsburg, PA; Nashville, TN; Austin TX; Dallas, TX; Houston, TX; San Antonio, TX; Salt Lake City, UT; Norfolk, VA; Seattle, WA; and Milwaukee, WI.

The showtimes, theaters and RSVP forms for getting in the assorted cities is accessible here.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead made a magnificent drunk in “Smashed,” so it should be no surprise that she kills as a stand-up comic in “All About Nina.” 

Drunken/druggy, needy and emotionally-crippled comics are a cultural cliche, like critics “in it for the hate.” And Winstead makes the most of her best big screen role since “Smashed,” one that builds of her formidable “Fargo” turn. She plays Nina Geld, a veteran stand-up hoping, at last, to land that big break “and not screw it up.”

Her material is killer, and let’s give a round of applause to writer-director Eva Vives for that. And Winstead, as Nina, plays it with the confidence of a queen bee who knows she stands out in a male-dominated field because she’s not just raw and funny, she’s beautiful.

How raw? Her act is blue and sex-heavy and her menstruating routine references it happening “right now” and dives into “Saving Private Ryan” comparisons.

How beautiful? She can sidle up to any bar in New York and makes her interest known — “Hey, wanna buy me a drink?” She’s just like she comes off on stage — direct, not interested in “dating.” Sexual.

How damaged? She throws up the moment she’s offstage, has screwed up her other big chances by screwing anything that moves — the doorman at the venue, anybody. Well, not the even more grizzled stand-up Mike (Jay Mohr). She has her standards.

Her latest bimbo bar pick-up meets the guy she’s been trying not to see any more (Chace Crawford) — at her apartment.

“He’s a cop, so yeah, he hits me.”

He’s also married with kids, so maybe a change of scene, maybe trying LA again, hoping for a Comedy Prime TV showcase — every comic’s dream.

Vives, whose biggest previous credit was writing the story of “Raising Victor Vargas,” stumbles into assorted Angelino cliches as Nina gets to play the jaded, superior New Yorker mocking the “feel your energy” writer/crystals-consulting screwball who hosts her (Kate del Castillo, quite funny).

And Nina also meets a guy she “won’t have sex with,” a “nice guy” (she thinks), down to Earth and all that. Common brings an easy charm to Rafe, a contractor curious enough to see “which is the real you,” Nina’s blunt, bluff and funny stage persona, or the brittle and equally blunt, but vulnerable and prone to drunken lash-outs woman she is without a microphone. Rafe’s background has its messiness, too.

Nothing in “All About Nina” is all that surprising. They just handed out a bunch of Emmys to TV’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” after all. But this detour into relationship land is least surprising of all.

As the scenes on stage, in the clubs, bantering and competing with the other women in her field for that “one spot” a comedy network has set aside for a “girl comic, “crackle with showbiz energy and “Punchline/Comedian” bite, the lovey-dovey stuff tends to drag the movie to a halt.

If Ms. Vives can write that well about comedy and create an act with this much pop, how can she not see that the love affair isn’t what the movie is about? Common is rarely this at home in a part, but less of him might’ve let this movie reach the realm of something special. Sex scenes, lovers’ quarrels and tender dates stop the picture. Leaning into a feminine sensibility works against “All About Nina.”

Scenes with her very pregnant workaholic agent (Angelique Cabral, alternately no-nonsense and nurturing) , her equally distracted mother (Camryn Manheim), other comics and even a buttoned-down network chief (Beau Bridges) have more substance.

Winstead/Nina in that world is fascinating — talking through new material in her apartment, naked, dismissing the boys of her profession, cutthroat with the other “girl comics.” When “All About Nina” drifts away from that, so does our interest.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content and language throughout, some nudity and brief drug use

Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Common, Camryn Manheim, Chace Crawford, Jay Mohr, Clea Duvall, Kate DelCastillo, Mindy Sterling

Credits: Written and directed by Eva Vives. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:40

A zombie end-times musical?

Already fanboy endorsed at South by Southwest and Fantastic Fest.

But they’re soulless zombies themselves, on occasion. Lemmings, actually, and they do love them some hot starlets singing about zombies. So we’ll see about that.

It looks quite mad, I’ll give’em that.

“Anna and the Apocalypse” opens in early November in the UK, late November in the US