Movie Nation

Perhaps one has been too hasty when one has declared “Is there anything worse than Imitation Tarantino, than Guy Ritchie Lite?”

Because when wild card and now Oscar-winner Sam Rockwell’s involved, and Simon Callow and a bevy of screwy British character actors, all wrapped up in a cascading catastrophe of carnage-covered capers titled “Blue Iguana,” all bets –as we are given to say –are off.

Producer turned writer/director Hadi Hajaig (“Cleanskin”) gives away the game by having a character, the chatterbox ex-con Paul (Ben Schwartz of “Parks and Recreation”) dream of making “MY indie film. Do you like LENS FLARE?”

Hajaig doesn’t give us much of that, but he takes a shot at filling the screen with “the cool parts” — slo-mo shootouts, blood spray played for laughs, one-liners, Brit-vs-American slang and mob mores.

“Shambolic” is the perfect word for it, even if he does have one of his dopes wonder, “What’s shambolic?”

And if it gives you the creeping feeling that he’s some hack spending a lot of mummy’s money making himself a movie career, it’s still laugh-out-loud funny as often as not.

Eddie (Rockwell) and Paul (Schwartz) are ex-cons riding out parole in a New York chain restaurant/diner when in strolls England’s Plain Jane — aka Katherine, a British lawyer referred to them by a fellow hoodlum “English Tommy.”

She’s got a job for them In London. Travel arrangements, pay, parole? She’ll take care of it. Even though she’s frumpy, clumsy and seemingly out of her depth, the boys buy in.

Phoebe Fox (“Eye in the Sky”) plays Katherine with kind of posh-accent, dressed-down guile. She knows just which screws to turn because she’s not just a lawyer, she’s a barrister with an ear for illegality she can leverage in her favor.

She needs the Yanks to intercept this satchel that’s to be handed off in a natural history museum. They can be armed, but “no violence.” Naturally, with Paul a bit high-strung and Eddie plainly careless and/or rusty, much that can go wrong does.

That pursuit of the package leads to another heist, this one involving the “Blue Iguana” of the title. Katherine is mixed up with Mr  Big, with a name referencing an Orson Welles thriller (Peter Polycarpou), and he’s got Deacon (Peter Ferdinando of “Tommy’s Honour” and other films, hilarious here) as his “muscle.”

Deacon minds his mum’s pub, The Prince of Wales, loves double-crosses, his ’70s vintage mullet and denim jacket.

“They were me Dad’s.”

He hates Katherine and REALLY hates his mum. As she’s played as a braying, insulting, over-sexed harpy with a smoker’s laugh by Amanda Donahoe (a stitch), we can see where his “issues” come from.

“You stink of ketchup and…farts.”

The more complex the caper becomes, the more competent Eddie seems. Maybe he’s just trying to impress Katherine. Hard to tell. Lose the glasses, the shapeless sweaters, ’60s school teacher hair…anyway.

That rising list of plot complications is where Hajaig rather loses the plot. Fortunately, he’s got a lot of funny people on set riffing around some amusing twists.

Paul wonders just where one’s prostate is, and somehow takes a shine to Deacon’s mom, filling the pub with lies as he stakes her out.

“I work for NASA. It’s crazy, Stephen Hawking got me the job…Name’s Teddy Roosevelt.”

Eddie takes an interest in Cockney slang — “‘Throw a pint down my Gregory.’ What’s that mean?” Gregory Peck, and what rhymes with Peck? “Preh-ey good, innit?”

The shootouts in enclosed spaces create an awful mess, and a chance for Paul to try out his tampon-as-bullet-hole-plug theory.

And so on.

As the Americans, with the erudite and fey English Tommy (“We know what we are, but not what we would be.”) stake out the pub, they enlist Tommy’s thespian uncle (Callow, amusing) and his “old gang” — old actors who take notes in the bar and plummily recite the profane clues they overhear in Royal Shakespeare Company English.

Like lesser Ritchie and most Tarantino, there’s a lot of “just go with it” to “Blue Iguana.” There are built-in ’80s pop conceits that reward the viewer on the same wavelenth, “Private Idaho” era B-52s and the like.

Rockwell does this sort of ditzy cool as well as anybody, and as shocking as the violence is, it’s as funny and not as horrific as the stuff we saw him win the Oscar for in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

“Blue Iguana” could fall on either side of the sliding “whatever” scale, probably more Netflixable than something to run out and see. But Rockwell, Schwartz, Fox, Ferdinando and Callow make it engaging in between its darkly-funny bursts of slow-motion violence — be their characters expertly menacing, or just mean and inept.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Phoebe Fox, Ben Schwartz, Peter Ferdinando, Amanda Donahoe, Al Weaver, Simon Callow,  Peter Polycarpou
Credits: Written and directed by  Hadi Hajaig. A — release.

Running time: 1:40

Two strangers dressed in black arrive by train at a small Hungarian town.

It’s August 1945 and this little corner of Hungary seems all but untouched by the World War that is just now winding up in the Pacific. Aside from the sparsity of motorized vehicles and the presence of bullying, loutish Russian occupiers and the bursts of pro-Soviet propaganda on the radio, the locals would seem to have few complaints.

They’re plump, almost prosperous, especially István, the town clerk, landowner and drug store operator. His son Arpi is about to marry the farmgirl Rozsi, and he’s finishing the day’s arrangements.

But something about these two strangers rattles István and almost everybody around him. Who are they, what’s their business here and what’s with those outfits?

“Jews have arrived!”

The cinema has never seen the likes of “1945,” a Hungarian Holocaust Western, a “High Noon” testing a complacent, complicit town, pricking the guilty consciences of most of the people.

Because their prosperity put blood on their hands, and any Jews who “return” or just show up with packing cases for luggage are a potential threat — unwanted business competition, legal action, reclaiming property taken from them or just plain revenge could be on their minds.

No wonder the station master (István Znamenák) tells the wagoneer hauling the old man and his son’s cases to “take your time” (in Hungarian, with English subtitles) getting them to town. The officious railwayman has to dash in by bicycle to alert the village.

No wonder István, played to small-town fat-cat perfection by Péter Rudolf, has a drink at every stop he makes after he gets the news. No wonder he’s sweating, blustering and chain-smoking his little cigars. He bullies his depressed, drug-dependent wife (Eszter Nagy-Kálózy) and his panic-stricken flunky (Jozsef Szarvas), “Bandi.”

“We have to give it back,” Bandi drunkenly declares, “ALL back.”

Nobody else thinks that way. The folks they took their houses, businesses and money from all those years before made their lives better by their absence, so the burning of evidence — promissory notes, etc. — commences in earnest. Venomous mistrust and hostility are the orders of the day.

Co-writer/director Ferenc Török (“Isztambul”) teases out the suspense here, folding in layers of melodrama on top of the tension. The would-be bride (Tünde Szalontay) never got over the handsome farmer (Tamás Szabó Kimmel) who went off to war and came back an ardent socialist. Her would-be groom (Bence Tasnádi) isn’t half the man Jancsi is.

The Russians are not shy about throwing around their weight in an occupied Axis country. Any moment we expect a beating, robbery or rape, or just a summary arrest.

And nobody, not the priest, the spouses of the various guilt-ridden men or the local constable, is able to keep his or her darkest feelings about Jews buried for long.

“You just can’t get rid of them.”

The spare, black and white cinematography won’t take anybody back to the golden age of monochromatic films. But the compositions are simple and succinct and the score — the rattling of coins in a pocket punctuating scene after scene, like spurs clattering down a dusty street — underlines the Western vibe Török was going for here.

Few subjects have dominated film to the extent history’s worst genocide has, resulting in the “Holocaust film” becoming a cultural punchline, a way of backhanding Jewish Hollywood with its obsession with the 20th century’s darkest hour.

But “1945” takes a familiar subject and well-worn theme — collective guilt — and finds a new way to bring us into that story, to connect us to that crime and its aftermath. Here’s a clever, sideways take on the grimmest of human horrors, a clever parable that delivers the same heavy message, but with mordant wit and originality.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking

Cast: Péter Rudolf, Bence Tasnádi, Tünde Szalontay, Tamas Sabo Kimmel

Credits:Directed by Ferenc Török, script by Gábor T. Szántó, Ferenc Török. A Menemsha Films release.

Running time: 1:31

How do you film a movie about the infamous jungle prison colony of French Guiana in Serbia and Malta, which have no jungle?

Badly and cheaply, it turns out.

“Papillon” was a best selling if largely discredited autobiography of French criminal and escaped convict Henri Charrière, one of the publishing sensations of the ’70s.

A tale of endurance, survival and inhuman cruelty, I must have read it 25 times in my high school years. It became a sturdy Franklin J. Schaffner epic starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman and every character actor Hollywood had on hand back in 1973.

The new “Papillon” was directed by the Dane Michael Noer (“R”), who is no Franklin J. Schaffner (“Patton”) it turns out. And it stars Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek, who know they’re no McQueen and Hoffman and should have avoided this pointless, note-for-note, almost scene-for-scene photocopy of the original film.

Hunnam has the title role, and in the film’s unneeded opening scenes, we see him in the life that put him in the French prison system. He was a safe cracker, with a hooker-girlfriend (Eve Hewson), framed for a murder he did not commit.

The original script left some mystery about Charriere, who had a butterfly tattoo on his chest (“Papillon” in French), who was a criminal and pretty much a pathological liar. But no, let’s strip that mystery away from him.

Malek of TV’s “Mr. Robot” and the upcoming “Bohemian Rhapsody” Freddie Mercury bio-pic, is Louis Degas, a forger who got rich selling fake government bonds, which made him enemies far and wide.

You remember the set-up, the shrimp who lived well and avoided jail needs protection from the hardened criminal Papillon, and they stick together, more or less, through decades of imprisonment, murderous assaults and escape attempts, winding up on Devil’s Island, the most notorious of the prisons of French Guiana, a remote, shark-surrounded rock from which there was no escape.

Well, not according to Charrière.

The book’s shock value, its vivid depiction of the violence and the novel way inmates had of storing their valuables (a tube, called “a plan,” shoved up your rectum, because “A man had to have a plan.”) has been updated in the new film.

And to be absolutely fair, the rocky isles off the northern coast of Latin America can be desert-dry, like Malta. Curacao, which I’ve visited, is not far removed from from Cayenne (Devil’s Island) in geography and climate, and is arid and rocky.

But that’s about all one can say for this malnourished remake, a real Bleecker Street debacle.

The supporting cast, aside from Tommy Flanagan as a grizzled fellow inmate, is seriously cut-rate, folks who wouldn’t mind a Serbian/Maltese vacation. Yorick van Wageningen, for instance, plays the callous warden. Funny in “The Way,” a not-quite-horrific heavy in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” he doesn’t eviscerate hope with his wooden, half-hearted threats.

“Keeping you is no benefit, destroying you is no loss.”

Hunnam is game enough, a tough guy from TV’s “Sons of Anarchy” who has made plenty of regrettable big screen choices (“Pacific Rim” was a woebegone hit, “King Arthur” and pretty much every thing else deservedly a bomb). He isn’t the most charismatic screen presence, however — blandly pretty, inexpressive.

Malek is a dull big screen presence in this, none of the twitchy nervousness Hoffman brought to this part makes it into his interpretation, none of the guile or hard life-and-death calculations cross his bespectacled eyes when he says “I have trouble seeing hope in hopelessness.”

For all the period detail, characters are a little too healthy and well-scrubbed to be convincing and the actual look of the film is video-flat and dull — ugly. Cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski did “The Young Victoria” and “The Physician,” but here — there’s no contrast to the lighting, no menace in the darkness. It’s a real “throw up your hands and collect a check” job, as if he saw the production design and gave up.

My over-riding gripe with this is that they relied so heavily on the original film’s script by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and didn’t really dig into the books (“Banco” was Charrière’s further tales of Papillon memoir).

And by “they” I mean screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski, who when he rewrote the Icelandic hit “Contraband” for Mark Wahlberg, at least got a decent thriller out of it. This is the laziest cut and paste job imaginable. Why even take the credit?

MPAA Rating: R for violence including bloody images, language, nudity, and some sexual material

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Rami Malek, Eve Hewson, Tommy Flanagan, Yorik van Wageningen

Credits:Directed by Michael Noer, script by Aaron Guzikowski, based on the Dalton Trumbo/Lorenzo Semple Jr. 1973 film script and the book by Henri Charrière. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 2:13

Two men try to keep themselves and their families alive during the Rwandan Genocide and a rich Nashville businessman reaches out to his rape-victim daughter in “Beautifully Broken,” a not-inspirational-enough real-life drama directed by music video veteran Eric Welch.’

You can guess what’s wrong with it from that plot summary. Flatly-scripted, unevenly acted and pointlessly patriarchal, it clumsily ties three three grossly-imbalanced stories together and basically loses its way every time it leaves Africa.

The tragedy of a teenage girl’s rape is somewhat muted, and suffers in scale when you’re comparing it to mass murder by machete in 1994 Rwanda.

Benjamin A. Onyango of “God’s Not Dead” is William Mwizerwa, a righteous, pious husband and father whose middle-class life (he’s a manager with a coffee exporter) is disrupted by the explosion of tribal violence that turned Hutu against Tutsi.

The radio reveals the call to arms, and thugs take to the streets in gangs piled into pickup trucks — “The cleansing has begun!”

William has no sooner said “We’ll be safe here” when he, his wife (regal Eva Ndachi) and little girl have to flee their home and make for the coffee company compound. They face execution in the streets until a timely, heaven-sent explosion spares their lives.

Tezan and Mugenzi (Sibulele Gcilitshana, Bonko Khoza) are a farm family with a toddler daughter when the fighting begins. Mugenzi is “not a soldier, not a fighter” his wife insists. But when neighbors are butchered at their front door, he joins the gang of murderers just to go along, and draw them away from his family.

Meanwhile, in Nashville, workaholic businessman Randy (TV veteran Scott William Winters) is keeping daughter Andrea (played by Emily Hahn as a teen) in riding lessons and on the cheerleading squad in their little corner of affluence.

The men’s lives cross in mysterious ways involving violence, refugee sponsorship, daughters-as-pen pals and faith. One saves another one’s life.

“The life you spared will not be wasted.”

And another is drawn into this world by a kid who is learning altruism at an early age.

“Helping those in need gives you back twice the love!”

The five-handed script goes to some pains to level the playing field of pain, suggesting that great hurt is an equalizer. “We are all equally broken” a mother counsels her child, and that makes us all merit redemption.

But I have to say the flatness of the Nashville scenes sucks the energy and heart right out of “Beautifully Broken.” Bland characters acting in mostly mundane moments of melodrama, relying on emotionally-lacking performances.

Heck, Eric Roberts was cast as the Nashville dad’s father, and given absolutely nothing to play. You get a name, you need to give him something value-added to do.

The African story has tragedy as well, and guilt and forgiveness. It’s a modern parable about great crimes and the greatness of spirit it takes to get over them and move on. Frankly, the acting in the Rwandan scenes is more compelling as well. The Nashville scenes are patronizing and tepid in comparison.

You cannot fault “Beautifully Broken’s” message. It rejects Christian conservative xenophobia and embraces immigrant outreach in the form of sponsoring the less fortunate, charity that is taught and reinforced at an early age. There’s even an “action step” at the end of the sermon that this film almost wants to be.

It’s the movie-making, the acting, that let it down. One lump in the throat moment with all these trials, all this tragedy and the path to uplift the story takes is hardly enough, considering the subjects engaged here.

Faith-based cinema has had its financial successes. But the brutal truth of the genre is that it rarely attracts charismatic, accomplished talent behind the camera or in front of it, people who can transcend the genre and lift it to the next level. Until that happens, you’ll get hackwork like this, a music video director content to preach to the choir, and a choir content to buy tickets to inferior work just because they agree with its proselytizing.

Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content involving violence and disturbing images, and some drug material

Cast:Benjamin A. Onyango, Scott William Winters, Emily Hahn, Bonko Khoza, Sibulele Gcilitshana, Eva Ndachi

Credits:Directed by Eric Welch, script by Brad Allen, Chuck Howard, Martin Michael, Eric Welch. An ArtEffects  release.

Running time: 1:48

If you or your child ever shed a tear when yet another Roomba bit the dust, then “A.X.L.” may be the movie for you.

A misguided kiddie action pic that combines motocross and a fetching, tail-wagging, howling robotic military dog that chews on pieces of pipe instead of bones and can keep up with you no matter how fast you drive your motorbike thanks to JATO — Jet Assisted Take-Off, it has no laughs, no thrills and little that would distract, much less entertain a child.

Unless that child is inclined to go “Awww” at anything resembling a dog, even a digitally-created metal Skeletor like A.X.L. He’s a prototype whose name means “Attack, Expedition, Logistics,” “the War Dog of the Future” from Craine Industries and mad scientist Andric (Dominic Rains) and his whiny tech assistant Randall (Lou Taylor Pucci).

A.X.L. has busted out of the desert Southwest lab where the $70 million killing machine was being developed. Why? Not getting enough walks and trips to the dog park, apparently.

That’s where motocross master Miles (Alex Neustaedter) stumbles across it…”him.” He’s just been conned by a conniving rich rival Sam (Alec MacNicoll) who urged him to “rip some gnarly whips” (get his bike airborn) before causing him to crash.

And the robot dog, hiding from search drones, finds him. The lad says the same thing boys always say to strange dogs in the movies.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” Thus, the motorized, macerator-mouthed mutt is “tamed” by the kid who electronically imprints on it. “HIM.”

The too-hot/midriff-baring girl his rival has under his thumb Sara (Becky G) becomes Miles’ partner-in-crime as he resolves to not give the machine back to its owners, as “He’s been abused.”

Thomas Jane shows up to collect a check as Miles’ dad, and Ted McGinley defies all logic by continuing to find work playing Sam’s rich jerk of a father.

We’re meant to get all gooey and fear for the “dog” as assorted cruel threats present themselves to it — “Him” — but good luck with that. “A.X.L.” the film and A,X.L. the War Dog is as cuddly as a Battle Bot, with and all the warmth of the Craftsman section of your neighborhood Sears.

MPAA Rating:PG for sci-fi action/peril, suggestive material, thematic elements and some language

Cast: Alex Neustaedter, Becky G, Thomas Jane, Dominic Rains, Lou Taylor Pucci

Credits: Written and directed by Oliver Daly. A Global Road release.

Running time: 1:40

Her momma could’ve warned her, about that deal with the Devil you make when you get yourself marked with that “sexual” label.

Granted, a “Suspira” remake (sort of) with Tilda Swinton and erotic modern dance is not “Fifty Shades Shakes It.” But that’s dull actress Dakota’s specialty these days.

Amazon Studios made this and unleashes this Dance of Death on Nov. 2. 

There’s nothing scarier than a little girl with the right glower.

Ellie has it.

Red hair tied in a bun, freckles, she’s imp-sized. But when we first see the “Prodigy,” it’s from behind. She’s in a straight jacket.

“Do not leave ANYTHING near the subject’s hands. Do NOT for any reason remove the subject’s restraints.”

As the colonel giving these instructions has a big ol’black eye, Dr. Fonda (Richard Neil) is inclined to listen.

She fixes him with those eyes, comments on Fonda’s “sweater vest” and “bargain bin” appearance, glares at the unseen observers on the other side of the one-way mirror, and smirks. “How quaint.”

Ellie (Savanah Liles) sizes Fonda up, deducts that he’s widowed or divorced, that no woman would let her man leave the house looking like a movie cliche of a distracted academic.

“That’s quite an evaluation, Eleanor.”

“Don’t call me Eleanor…Spare me your pandering.”

“Prodigy” is a “two hander,” basically a “bad seed” and a shrink (“Actually, I’m a psychologist.”), parked at a table in a darkish interrogation room, engaging in a battle of wits.

Ellie is a self-diagnosed “maladjusted pre-pubescent.” “Spoiled little psycho” say her keepers.

She is manipulative, hyper-observant and the fact that she calls her interrogator “Jimmy” suggests that she can hear through walls. Fonda? He didn’t even read her file. And it’s a thick one.

“I think I’m ready for anything at this point.”

If only the filmmakers had realized “This is just a two-hander.” The room full of guards, techs, doctors and officers on the other side of that mirror are a mere distraction. The tension, the drama is at that long table — Ellie and Fonda, the aloof, creepy kid and the kindly, elbow-patched therapist.

“Her walls are built high,” Fonda says. “It make take a while to pull them down.”

Don’t mention “love” to her. And don’t untie her hands to eat her banana and peanut butter sandwich.

“I’m going to hold up a card, and I want you to tell me…”

“I KNOW how it works.”

Dead dogs, gas chamber inhabitants, bloody car accident victims. Ellie’s not seeing happy fluffy clouds in the Rorschach Test.

“What possible reason could they have for strapping a nine year old to a chair like this?”

We wonder. So does “Jimmy.”

“Eleanor can do things…that we’ve never seen before.”

There’s nothing for it but for them to play chess. She doesn’t need to touch the pieces to move them. Apparently.

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

Truth be told, hanging the film on young Miss Liles would be a hard argument to make. She’s menacing, but not memorably so. She’s an ordinary looking kid whose line readings are venomous enough, but her gestures lack the coiled fury we’re meant to fear. The cat-and-mouse game lacks stakes if we (and Neil, playing Fonda) don’t fear what the monster/child is capable of.

Truth be told, there are entirely too many “mice.”

To be fair to the leads, the insipid “Dr. Fonda Explains it All For You” scenes in “the other room” suck the tension out of the film every seven minutes or so. “Punishment” for her actions (“zapping”), lame one-liners about the demonic child and what she “knows” about her captors don’t raise the stakes enough.

The effects are limited, the performances a tad muted and entirely external, even as each character is pushing the other’s buttons.

If they’d workshopped this, they might have figured out that “Prodigy” would make a perfectly suspenseful play. That being the case, leaving the “control room” inhabitants an unseen (but perhaps heard) menace, ratcheting up psychological suspense between doctor and patient in that room with far sharper, more pointed writing, cutting the constant “explaining” of it all, might have let this “Prodigy” reach its full potential.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Richard Neil, Savannah Liles, Jolene Andersen

Credits:Written and directed by Alex Haughey, Brian Vidal. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:20

The major (and minor) Hollywood studios tend to dump movies onto the last two weekends in August, films that have limited box office prospects, damaged goods that their research tells them audiences won’t care to see, word of mouth won’t help and critical acclaim won’t save.

“Searching” appears to be the exception to this rule this late August, a cyber thriller/missing daughter story starring John Cho. Previewed in a few markets, good reviews, thus far. Screen Gems is “previewing” it tonight where I live AFTER the first paid showings of everything else.

“Happy Time Murders” was not previewed widely either. STX is trotting out releases, but is barely a studio at this point. Throwing stuff against the wall.

“Papillon?” It’s Bleecker Street. Even if it’s good they can’t market people into wanting to see it.

The mechanical dog movie, “A.X.L.”? Not previewed anywhere. Global Road is, I think, a Chinese-financed distributor. Mostly crap.

It’s no wonder the theater chains are financing their own productions, which they can promote the heck out of and hope, every now and then, one connects with viewers.

“Beautifully Broken” is making its way into Regal Cinemas this weekend, not previewed or reviewed, a faith-based drama of families in crisis, one of them caught in a bloody African civil war. Eric Roberts is the big name in the cast, so it didn’t cost much.

A cleverly calculated risk that perhaps pastors in the pulpit will push and make it a hit.

As Hollywood is doing them no favors dumping dogs into the Dog Days, I’ll put off seeing the pics Hollywood chose not to preview here and check this out instead.

The grey gathering gloom that hangs over “Super Dark Times” seeps into your bones.

It’s a ’90s teen thriller that has hints of “Stand By Me” and “River’s Edge” about it. And when it isn’t annoying the living hell out of you, it’s a grim, spare story with funereal reality and some pretty impressive performances.

The only problem with it is it entails spending 100 minutes with 16 year-old boys.

The morbid humor, boorish banter, trolling the school yearbook telling dirty lies or dirtier truths about the girls whose pictures they see therein, the warped values, creepy lack of a sense of proportion, the insane, inane admissions about why they watch their parents’ copy of “True Lies” late at night (Jamie Lee Curtis striptease), the ’90s fashion sense, impotent rage at bullies, not knowing what to do with your older brother’s pot stash now that he’s in the military, the tentative blunders in approaching that first real crush — it’s excruciating — to an ex-“Boy” any way.

And that’s before the precipitating incident and perverse, psychotic dreams and rising hysteria that this accident prompts.

Josh and Zach (Charlie Tahan and Owen Campbell) are best buds, hanging out too much in the days just before Christmas in their corner of upstate New York.

They meet up with the oafish Darryl (Max Talisman) and his friend Charlie (Sawyer Barth). As long as they avoid the subject of Allison (Elizabeth Cappucino), things should be cool, right? Josh worships her.

She’s just started to reciprocate his interest when it happens, and all of a sudden Josh has a secret to keep. They all do, except for the one who’s dead.

We see it coming far too soon, guess its outcome before it happens — the grim, shocked, panic-stricken death that comes from bleeding out.

The screaming — “WHAT DID YOU DO?”  — the wrenching gasps of denial, the stunned ” I need you to calm down” replies. “It was an ACCIDENT.”

A full minute doesn’t pass before the feeble attempt to cover this up begins.

“I think we should hide this, too.”

The victim’s bike?

“I’ll take care of that.”

Native cunning has this one building an alibi for all this blood, that one remembering to forget that he knows the others. And there’s nothing like trying to talk to the girl you have a crush on when you’ve just begun a cover-up.

Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski’s script narrows the focus here to Zach, and Campbell (“The Miseducation of Cameron Post”) takes us into soul-sucking guilt and manic paranoia. His nightmares suggest a lifetime of therapy thanks to morbid, confused, hormonal sexuality is on its way, the waking nightmare that began with an accident is his rising terror at discovery and what might come from it.

Campbell makes us feel the deflating impact of telling that first alibi lie — to his “cool mom” mother (Amy Hargreaves). He quickens our pulses with his breathless sprints to “manage” the cover-up.

Director Kevin Phillips, making his feature filmmaking debut, makes the film a triumph of chilling, depressing tone. It’s a thriller, but it mimics the feel of a song from the era sampled on the soundtrack — “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand.”

We don’t see all of this coming, just enough to make us dread the next inevitable stage of this “Simple Plan.” The finale lacks much in the way of logic.

But “Super Dark Times” — boy, there’s a title that’s all truth-in-advertising.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Charlie Tahan, Elizabeth Cappucino, Owen  Campbell, Amy Hargreaves, Max Talisman. Sawyer Barth

Credits:Directed by Kevin Phillips, script by Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:41

It’s the Everest of dramatic roles, an actor tackling King Lear once told me, and it stuck.

Old Men play Lear, and surround themselves with dazzling younger women.

So it is for this modern dress British dramatization of “King Lear.”

An Oscar winner in the title role, Oscar winners Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent, along with Emily Watson and Florence Pugh and Jim Carter of “Downton,” all assembled for Richard Eyre’s film for Amazon Prime. Glad to see Hopkins get the chance to put his Lear on the screen, and I’ll be watching Prime Sept. 28 to see what could be a definitive take on a classic character.