Movie Nation

For insipid, heartless, tone-deaf and generally inept romantic comedies, “My Perfect Romance” is hard to be beat.

Bland leads, dull story, witless dialogue — it all pays off in this insipid time-waster/cash-suck from Team Netflix.

Vivian, played by pretty but spark-free Kimberly-Sue Murray, is a “love scientist,” actually a software developer with Robinson Tech, the woman in charge of the MyPerfectMatch app project. It’s an online dating with a twist — no swiping left or right, no photos.

“Compatibility matters,” she argues. Her algorithm is all about compiling compatibility data from your online profile, your social media footprint.

Her callow, womanizing boss (Christopher Russell) has his doubts — “You’re talking about taking the passion out of dating?”

“People say ‘love is blind,’ but has anybody ever put that to the test?” Vivian declares, and he agrees to a launch.

“My Perfect Match” then spends 90 minutes trying to put these two dullards together.

There’s the joint TV promotional appearance where the two are dared to “try their own product out,” the boss’s wily older assistant (Lauren Holley) “interfering,” pressure from the CEO’s mom (Morgan Fairchild) to get the stock price up, and a montage of failed MyPerfectMatch dates that would have been cut out of any sitcom not made 30 years ago.

MyPerfectMatch has cutesy pink heart graphics, a big Valentine’s Day online push behind it and apparently, zero chance of working.

All the Facetime chats with Viv’s sister (Jodie Sweetin) hint at the problems — “Not every man is Dad. You need to start giving them a chance.”

Russell plays Robinson as all muscles, smirk and forelock. He is referred to as “devilishly handsome” and “some kinda handsome.”

And Gottamighty, he’s boring, or just written that way. (Probably NOT just the writing, but…).

Murray has no trouble convincing us of the reality that “It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s everything you stand for.”

The whole tedious affair is one long, limp smirk — chaste and heartless, with that TV movie lighting that makes kisses look like soap opera actors straining to save their makeup for another take.

For all the sweet, empty smiles of the principals, nobody here seems to be having a good time, nothing romantic is said or done and nothing, absolutely nothing, delivers a laugh.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast: Kimberly Sue Murray, Jodie Sweetin, Christopher Russell, Lauren Holley, Morgan Fairchild

Credits:Directed by Justin G. Dyck , script by Stella Bagwell, based on a novel by Amanda McNeice. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

The only time to watch “El Camino Christmas” is far-removed from the Christmas season. No sense ruining Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanza.

But truth be told, there is no “good” time to watch this sour, mostly-humorless holiday hostage “comedy.”

It wastes a lot of funny folks in a deathly debacle of a farce, a bullet-riddled bloodbath that, like its central situation, “didn’t have to go this way.”

A young guy, Eric (Luke Grimes) rolls into town, looking for the father he never knew. The foul-mouthed drunk (Tim Allen) who now lives in the old man’s last known address is a ‘Nam vet, more than happy to hustle drinks out of the kid in the vintage Chevelle.

“This a ’71? That’s the year I found our lord and savior, Jesus Christ. And the honorable Jack Daniels. Jack’s still with me.”

Kurtwood Smith is the jaded, insult-prone, hired-too-many-relatives sheriff, Dax Shepard is his well-meaning boob of a deputy and Vincent D’Onofrio plays the hothead, drunken burnout deputy.

Michelle Mylett is Kate, a single mom with an “on the spectrum” son she has to bring to work at Vincente’s Liquors.

They’re all thrown together when the cops railroad the young guy, which devolves into a hostage situation with the trigger happy deputy and bystanders trapped along with Eric, “the suspect.”

We’ve seen how worthless Carol (D’Onofrio) has became as a cop, how he and hapless Billy (Shepard) arrested the “stranger” on suspicion of making meth because he bought a bottle of Drano.

“What is this?”

“It’s an interrogation!”

“Am I being charged here?”

“You’re fixin’ to be.”

Theodore Melfi and Christopher Wehner cooked up this script, and couldn’t figure out a way to unravel that arrest, the prisoner’s “escape” and the ensuing Christmas Eve hostage situation that wasn’t tone deaf and bloody.

They put all their wit into sketching in one or two-scene characters suck as Kate’s trashy mom Jewels (Kimberly Quinn) on the prowl for a new man — “You want somethin’ in life, you gotta GROWL for it.”

Jessica Alba’s a very pregnant small-market TV reporter who smells her “big break” in this story.

And lonely Vincente (Emilio Rivera), who owns the liquor mart, still mourns his late wife.

We’re treated to incompetent cops yelling “Shots FIRED!” when they’re the ones doing the shooting, Vietnam War stories and “We Got Married in a Walmart” on the soundtrack.

All in a little Nevada mountain town where it never snows (hint hint), where the town drunk goes by “Bukowski, Charles” and dozes off, topless, so that his burning cigarette wakes him up before he sets the place and himself on fire.

The drunk provides the best one-line review for this mess, one a pretty talented cast should have taken to heart before taking Netflix’s money.

“Not all ideas are good ones.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Dax Shepard, Jessica Alba, Luke Grimes, Kurtwood Smith, Tim Allen, Vincent D’Onofrio

Credits:Directed by David E. Talbert, script by Theodore Melfi, Christopher Wehner. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

“Scruffy little comedy” is critic-speak for a movie that, whatever its shortcomings, makes up for them with little grace notes.

It could be a scene, here and there, a particularly charming story thread, grand cinematography, a stand-out funny performance or the mere presence of say Peter Stormare that lifts it.

And every one of those applies to “Age of Summer,” an engaging if “scruffy little comedy” about a boy’s coming-of-age during a summer training to be a lifeguard on California’s Hermosa Beach.

It’s got likable leads, a very funny supporting player, and Peter Stormare as a Sage of the Sea nicknamed “Rock God.” And it is just beautifully shot and cut by DP Darin Moran and editor Daniel James Scott. Director Bill Kiely’s specialty is youth culture skateboard and surf videos, and he and his crew make this as pastel-sunny and foamy as a California summer of memory.

Percy Hynes White, who uses his middle name for obvious reasons, is Doug, who insists everybody call him “Minnesota.” He’s moved to Cali with his family in 1986, a principal confused Chicago for a city in “Minnesota,” and it’s a nickname he can live with.

His “bros as we grows” pal is Woods (Jake Ryan, whose parents or agent must have loved “Sixteen Candles”). Woods is still into LEGOs and “He-Man” cartoons. Minnesota? He’s taken to the beach, and noticed all the bikini-clad surfer girls there.

Somehow, both of these chicken-breasted 13-years olds have made the cut for a summer long train-and-try-out for South Bay Lifeguards. Their supervisor/mentor/drill instructor isn’t from around there.  Do NOT call address Tony (Diarmaid Murtagh of “Vikings”) the wrong way. Seriously.

“Who in a buzzard’s dangly bits are you callin’ SIR?” He is “as mad as a meat ax” and his junior lifeguard charges have “a few ‘roos loose in the top paddock.”

What language is that?
“Scottish, I think.”

Tony hazes his recruits, works them, uses an indelible magic marker to label them with nicknames on their backs. Because Woods is a wuss, “a flaming gash of a peckerwood,” Minnesota gets labeled “Peckerwood’s Friend.”

Brooke (Charlotte Sabina) is the muscular surfer who makes every boy’s heart pound, but every female on guard here is “Baywatch” worthy

Over the course of the summer, Woods and Minnesota will be bullied, Minnesota will make friends with the older-savvier Mathis (Jonathan Daviss) and the disreputable teens Pots (Kane Ritchotte) and Pans (Mccabe Gregg).

Minnesota will learn to surf, taste his first beer (in a white can labeled “beer,” very scruffy) and lose his shiny new “ripper” (BMX bike). It’s the loss of his bike that sends him into “The Rocks” in search of “The Rock People.” And that’s where he obtains the wisdom of Rock God (Stormare).

“Age” is saddled with inane voice-over narration, the “adult” Minnesota, who sounds suspiciously like that MTV sports dude, Dan Cortese.

“The Pacific Ocean was cold, dark and deep,” we learn.You don’t say.

Murtagh makes the movie worth a giggle, all by himself, singing Tony’s made-up drill instructor cadences with Aussie (He’s actually Irish) gusto.

“Swimmin’ in the surf ’til my eyes fall OUT, that’s what the Junior Guard’s all about!”

A little naughty nudity — an introduction to “girlie magazines” — give this teen comedy its sole moments of “edge.”

White (“The Gift”) makes an amiably scrawny leading not-remotely-a-man (his voice changed during the shoot),

Stormare is winning as the Rock God, Sabina turns Brooke into more than just an object of desire and Murtagh gets a laugh in every single scene he’s in.

And the situations, no real adults included, amuse just enough to make this “Summer” worth remembering.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, marijuana, profanity

Cast: Percy Hynes White, Charlotte Sabina,Diarmaid Murtagh, Jake Ryan, Peter Stormare

Credits:Directed by, script byDavid B. Harris, Bill Kiely . A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:27

“Lost Child” is a moody Missouri thriller about a soldier who comes returns, scarred by war, only to contend with the superstitions of the foothills village she called home.

It’s got remote locations and a hint of folkways going for it, and a solid performance by leading lady Leven Rambin to build it around.

But there’s not much of a story here, nothing remotely chilling. The script, co-written by director Ramaa Mosley, just tends to wander around until it stops.

Fern (Rambin) gets off the bus in West Plains for the first time in 15 years, checks into her late father’s remote cottage and stumbles into a local bar where she comes on strong to the bartender (Jim Parrack). She’s announced to one and all that she’s looking for her brother Billy, but a gal’s got to start looking somewhere.

Waking up with Mike doesn’t get her any closer to her missing sibling. But when she stumbles across a filthy urchin (Landon Edwards) in the woods behind her house,  she has a genuine mystery on her hands. The locals, being rural and Southern, are more direct.

“Who’s your people?”

Taking him to the local doctor gets the boy, who goes by “Cecil,” more of the same.

“Who’s your Lord and Creator?”

Seems they have this legend about “The Howler,” a creature of the forests. That connects to this “demon” or woodsprite that she’s taken in, a “Tatterdemalion” in local folklore.

The local social worker — who happens to be the bartender she picked up — cons her into keeping the kid until he can track down the family, which nobody else believes this “tatterdemalion” has.

Fern doesn’t believe, and considering what she went through to adopt a dog from the animal shelter, we sympathize. She’s back among the primitives. Fern was advised to get a dog “for protection.”

“From the living or the dead?” the  drawling shelter clerk wants to know.

“The living!”

The dogs are baying, it’s bedlam. And the clerk shouts “Which ONE’a you can PROTECT this woman? SPEAK!”

Dead silence until one dog dares to whimper. He has been selected.

That’s the best scene in “Lost Child,” previously titled “Tatterdemalion.”

The matter of fact way everybody suggests “The Howler git him?” or “Maybe you’ve got ghosts” is promising, even if the bright daylight of most scenes don’t create the creepy atmosphere Mosley needed for this to amount to something, even without big action beats or frights.

Rambin, a rawboned character actress with “Hunger Games” and “True Detective” credits, is faintly interesting as this character, but she can’t spin gold out of paw-paw blossoms.

“Lost Child” never finds more than her character and her performance, and that’s just not enough.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Leven Rambin, Taylor John Smith, Jim Parrack

Credits:Directed by Ramaa Mosley, script by Tim Macy, Ramaa Mosley. A Breaking  Glass release.

Running time: 1:40

There’s a little confusion over the title — IMDB calls it “First Light.” 

And then there’s the release date from Gravitas Ventures. They showed it at South By Southwest, just released a trailer. So “Coming soon.” Looks like sci-fi on a tight budget, but potentially smart and original.

He’s performed in films of Wilde plays, been an openly gay actor longer than any of his far more timid comperes, so this had to happen. Stephen Fry played Wilde, Everett’s Oscar captures more of the fun, so it would seem.

He wrote and directed “The Happy Prince” as well, which earns US release Oct. 5.

Oscar winner Colin Firth, Emma Watson and Tom Wilkinson also star in “The Happy Prince.” 

It’s generally unwise to complain when something or someone “tries too hard,” because the alternative is always far worse.

But everybody in “Fun Mom Dinner” wanted ever-so-much to make Paul Rudd’s wife’s script funny, that cast and crew must have worn out the film’s insurers with their hernia truss claims.

Land Toni Collette and Molly Shannon for it, let Bridget Everett (“PattiCake$,” “Trainwreck”) steal it, summon Paul Rudd himself for a funny legal pot dispenser cameo, and you’d think this “Bridesmais/Bad Moms” wannabe should spontaneously burst into laughs, right?

Nope. It’s a flute of cheap champagne left out too long, an 82 minute fizzle with barely a giggle in it.

The California Happy Days Elementary moms are single-mom Jamie (Shannon), who has the “Shares too much on Social Media” give-away — divorced and a little sad. Her mantra, “You are not just a mom, but a hot HOT single lady…educated female person with a big set of t–s. ”

Her pal Melanie (Everett) is super-upbeat super-involved mom — on pick-up/drop-off traffic patrol, a wound-too-tight/take-everything-too far matriarch to a brood she exhausts herself trying to cheer up.

Emily (Katie Aselton of “Black Rock” and “The Gift”) is the sad, pretty mom in the withering marriage (Adam Scott plays Tom), constantly on call for two kids including a toddler who gives her a “poop facial” when he’s curious about what’s in his diaper.

Kate (Collette) is the odd-mom out, chased out of her own bed by the kids most nights, not interested in volunteering at school, clinging to a minute of alone time to smoke a cigarette in the tub — then the minute’s up.

“I’m mommed out. I’m over it. Mom yoga. Mom juicing...all of it.”

Emily was her pal in college, but to the other moms she’s just “that bitch Kate with the twins,” self-absorbed and checked-out. Emily has to trick her into joining the others — she HATES Melanie — for a night of “Lotsa wine, NO kids.”

The guys? Well, Tom and Kate’s husband Andrew (Rob Huebel) agree to “baby-sit.”

“It’s not BABY sitting when they’re your kids. It’s PARENTING.”

What ensues is  a night of quarreling and bonding over “a quick one, when Kimmel’s on commercial break,” learning what “rosebudding” and “Vajazzling” and “Youtube boxing” are, setting each other and then restroom smoke alarms off, the joys of a Walgreen’s gift card and late night visits to Kate’s favorite medical marijuana dispensary.

“Anybody have glaucoma?”

Paul Rudd and David Wain are the yarmulke-wearing pot peddlers, purveyors of “Ruth Bader Ganja!” to the giggling, nibbling, vaping and eventually karaoke-singing “No WAY I’m f—–g doing BEDtime tonight!” moms.

“We’re sticking together, like SISTER wives.”

You watch enough made-for-Netflix or dumped-on-Netflix comedies, aimed at teens or 40ish mothers wondering where their youth went, and you pick up on a screenwriter’s crutch. “Sixteen Candles” references abound, “Jake Ryan” lust is re-declared and The Go Gos, The Cars and The Pretenders bounce through the soundtrack. It’s the most exhausted item of ’80s nostalgia of them all. Knock it off, screenwriters.

One-liners hang in the air and die of loneliness — “OK, Oprah, Gayle, wanna let us into your ‘friendship circle?'”

The occasional surprise — Everett delivers most of these — are never funny enough. And as cute as the “Dads left alone with the kids” sequences are, they’re a distraction from the alleged mayhem these not-really-buttoned-down, F-bombing mothers aren’t actually creating.

It sounds like an R-rated comedy, but plays like a Disney Channel one littered with profanity, pot and bloodless life lessons about getting older, being a parent and losing yourself.

Rarely has an 82 minute comedy felt more like a complete waste of one’s time.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, crude sexual material, and drug use

Cast: Toni Collette, Molly Shannon, Katie Aselton,  Bridget Everett, Adam Scott

Credits:Directed by Alethea Jones, script by Julie Rudd. A Momentum release.

Running time: 1:22

“Cruise” is a coming-of-age melodrama seemingly displaced in time.

It’s a car culture summer romance built around transportation, sex and petty theft and set to the soundtrack of what’s playing on everybody’s car radio — an “American Graffiti” parked in Flushing and Whitestone, Queens, in the late 1980s.

This Cuisinart collection of bits from “Diner” and “Graffiti” and “Saturday Night Fever” and what-have-you never quite gels, for reasons to do with its derivative narrative and those performing it — and one reason that’s as obvious as the setting.

Who out there is nostalgic for say, the Chevy Chevette or anything else of the boxy era in American and international (VW Cabriolet, anyone?) motoring?

Gio, played by Spencer Boldman of TV’s “Lab Rats,” is a “greaser” in all but name. He wears his hair in some faux 1950s pompadour and leaves his spotless white Ts in their packages until he’s ready to take them out, iron them and head out for the evening’s “cruise” around Flushing and environs.

He’s got his “boys” and “the routine” — a cruise past the regular haunts, a drag race out on the edge of the Long Island suburbs, hit the diner and call it a night.

Unless one of the local lasses can talk him into a little parking lot sex in his rare, pricey (even then) turbo-charged Buick GNX.

All that changes when he spies the girl who calls herself Francesca (Emily Ratajkowski) with her girls in her Cabriolet. Catching up with her at the Carvel brings out his best “guido” pick-up line.

“That is one…lucky cone!”

Thus does a summer romance blossom between the auto parts store clerk and the college girl who, it turns out, is no “Francesca” at all, but Jessica Weinberg from the high rent district across the Long Island tracks. She’s “slumming,” he figures, although he doesn’t connect those dots right away.

Gio gets to play “your Italian stallion” showing off “The Carvel Crowd,” “The Guidos,” “Bon Jovi Chicks” and “The Nicks” and their various burger, ice cream and baklava hangouts to the college girl.

But while she kept her name and background a secret, just for a bit, Gio’s keeping a bigger one. He and his pal (Lucas Salvagno) like to boost car radios, back when that was a thing, for extra income. They’re experts at it and they never get caught.

So he’s a bad boy? Catnip to the ladies, or this particular one.

Writer-director Robert Siegel might be drawing on his own memories of the place and the era, but he’s built his script out of cliches and stereotypes and his soundtrack out of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Stacey Q (“Two of Hearts”) and what the “cool kids/college kids” were listening to — New Order.

Gio’s thick-accented dad gives him, “Gio, you gotta thinka the FUTURE,” the local cops ride him for disconnecting his catalytic converter — “I could hear you in FLUSHING!” — and Gio starts to look at the world’s broader horizons thanks to dating the somewhat rich college girl.

He still hits the diner. But he wants to “look at the MENU” now. His synth-pop soundtrack is really shaken when she turns him on to New Order.

Boldman can’t do much to lift Gio out of the stereotype he seems to be when we first meet him. Ratajkowski, still most famous as the nude dancing model/lust object of the music video to “Blurred Lines,” can’t do much with Jennifer other than make her alluring.

The relationship allows “compatibility” questions to pop up, which Siegel either ignores or gives us the most trite and true answers to.

And the extremely melodramatic third act (robbing “the wrong car”) doesn’t fundamentally improve or even alter the course of this well-worn “Cruise” down streets and narrative byways we’ve traveled many times before.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drugs, sex, profanity, theft

Cast: Emily Ratajkowski, Spencer Boldman, Noah Robbins

Credits: Written and directed by  Robert Siegel  A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:30

Long before his death in 2009, the painter Andrew Wyeth had to deal with “dead white male” dismissals.

A painter of “extreme realism,” whose skill matched his talents, and whose subtlety got lost in mass popularity, high priced sales and the sneering of the New York art establishment, this son of a famous illustrator found himself too often lumped in with the likes of Norman Rockwell — “sentimental,” a “kitsch meister” — at least among the art world’s opinion makers.

The ebb and flow of his critical reputation is aptly summed up by simply checking the running time of the “American Masters” documentary devoted to him (premiering Sept. 7 on PBS) and the recently-repeated 2016 “Masters” on abstract contemporary painter and collage artist Eva Hesse.

Hesse, important in the art world between the East River and the Hudson and really from the years 1965-70, a Holocaust survivor, pretty, died young — merited an hour and 45 minutes of film. Wyeth, the most important American painter of the last 75 years? A humbling 53 minutes.

Nobody “saw” like Wyeth, sitting on the hood of his Jeepster, sketching in the woods, farm fields and shorelines of rural Pennsylvania and Maine. Critics might praise his “un-paralleled draftsmanship,” as if the training, practice and tendency to “work on it until it couldn’t be better,” as his wife put it, was some sort of disqualification for serious consideration.

Glenn Holsten’s brisk film, contrasting with the numberless, repetitive and duller films attempting to fluff and inflate lesser talents celebrated on “American Masters,” generously samples the works, the life story and the ethos of Wyeth, son of illustrator N.C. Wyeth, father of painter Jamie Wyeth.

Painting to him, Wyeth said in a 1970s TV interview, “is a matter of truth…and maybe of memory.”

He rambled through Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and Cushing, Maine and environs, peeking into stoic, occasionally tragic farm lives, fisherman’s work, at nature and into the psyche of his subjects. His first famous piece, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art later, “Christina’s World,” shows a woman, a disabled neighbor, seemingly crawling to what looks like a haunted, possibly abandoned farmhouse on the horizon.

Wyeth experts — family, contemporaries, scholars and curators — compare his compositions within the frame to the more celebrated abstractionists like Rothko and Pollack, And Wyeth’s personal history is sketched in, his courtship of wife-manager Betsy, the way his art changed when his father’s life was cut short in a car accident that also killed his young nephew.

“Paint your life history,” was his father’s message to him (so he thought). “Paint your life.”

And so he did, from the dead deer he contemplated in the forest the way the poet Robert Frost might have, had he taken up a brush, to his African American friends in Pennsylvania, to the mysterious model “Helga,” subject of a vast collection of scandalized nudes that came out late in his life.

Many many paintings and drawings are shown, a few dissected, their inspirations and antecedents revealed.

His “conversation with” his contemporaries in the art world, carried out via the canon, is a little undeveloped. One can wonder if the Rauschenbergs, Pollacks, Rothko’s, Kusama’s and Hesse’s didn’t chase attention through their more expressionistic/impulsive “express my feelings” works simply because they knew they could never compete with Wyeth, whose works still bring onlookers to tears in the museums where they’re displayed.

Popular or not, it’s an amazing body work, poignant, symbolic and stunningly skilled. And it’s why he’ll be cherished in ways mere market-chasing collectors of his more abstract contemporaries never will.

MPAA Rating: unrated, Nudes

Credits:Directed by Glenn Holsten. A Sept. 7 PBS release.

Running time: :53

Sleep Paralysis, a sort of paralyzing nightmare, is a real phenomenon that affects a very large portion of the population, a graphic at the beginning of “Mara” tells us.

And historically, people in various cultures over the ages have thought it was caused by demons. That was given a visual manifestation when Henry Fuseli painted “The Nightmare.”

So “Mara,” a new horror thriller in the vein of “The Ring,” is parked on firmer footing than most boogeyman horror tales. It’s got cool-enough effects and moderately gloomy Savannah locations. For a genre picture, it’s not awful, which in horror is saying something.

Olga Kurylenko of “A Quantum of Solace” stars as Kate Fuller, a police psychologist called to a crime scene to A) because “You need to understand the reality of what we’re dealing with,” and B) talk a frightened little girl (Mackenzie Imsand) into saying who she saw do it. The cops are sure Mommy  Helena (Rosie Fellner) is the one who twisted Daddy’s neck.

Helena is alternately catatonic and hysterical. Sophie has her own answer to “Who hurt Daddy?”

“Mara!”

The detective (Lance E. Nichols, good) may want to label Helena a “certifiable fruit loop.” But Dr. Fuller hears her out.

“There was something EVIL in the room! And then I heard this awful music. And then I saw her, as real as you’re sitting there. MARA. I KNOW how this sounds!”

Kate immerses herself in sleep paralysis — talking to experts, sitting in on a support group. And that’s when she starts hearing noises in her house, seeing things in her tub, wondering how that glass of red wine shattered.

Supernatural thrillers like this require an “explainer,” and than man is a suspect. “Dougie” is British, lives like a hermit, “off the grid” and takes over the support group AND the movie as horror veteran Craig Conway (“Doomsday,” Estranged”) goes full-tilt crazy on everybody.

“She’s a DEMON! Whatever you do, do NOT sleep! Mara is REAL!”

Dougie pulls his eyelid down to show a blood blotch on the hidden part of the eyeball.

“Once you’re marked, that’s it. It’s over.”

“Mara” stumbles along between loving closeups of Kurylenko sleeping, extreme closeups of her waking in a start, stalked by this hairy skinny/bendy wraith that crawls through sheets and shower curtains.

The puzzle of the plot is far more interesting than frightening. Dougie has been taking the “Beautiful Mind” approach to “finding the connection.” He’s the one who gives us the etymology of this “demon,” the one who brings up this painting, now at the Detroit Institute of Art.

Director Clive Tonge, who also came up with the story, was onto something. The picture has a clever hook.

The deaths are grisly and flashes of closed-circuit TV footage deliver flickers of fright.

But there’s a reason those “Ring” and “Grudge” and many similar pictures make the demon zip into and across the frame. It’s a lot scarier than having this thing walk/stagger via insectoid joints, even if that’s the whole idea behind a nightmare that paralyzes — we see what’s coming, and we’re powerless to flee.

But when you slow everything to sleepwalk pacing, you deflate the frights and strip away the urgency that we and the characters should feel, the sense that something terrible is coming, that time is running out.

MPAA Rating:R for disturbing violent images, and language

Cast: Olga Kurylenko, Lance E. Nichols, Craig Conway

Credits:Directed by Clive Tonge, script by Jonathan Frank. A Saban Films release.

Running time:1:39