Movie Nation

There are hard and fast rules to submarine thrillers.

A gauge — any gauge — has to stick and somebody has to tap it to get it to work.

Everybody thinks it, but SOMEbody’s got to actually say “I’m not gonna DIE down here!”

And it’s always just a matter of time before that first rivet pops or seal fails.

“The Chamber” is a pitiless and cliched but compact undersea thriller about everything that can go wrong at depth. Everything.

Johannes Kuhnke) of “Force Majeure” is Matts, a Scandinavian submersible pilot who is ordered to take his vessel, with three U.S. agents of some sort, to the bottom of the Yellow Sea. As they vessel had been under contract to a South Korean research team, he can guess where they’re going, if not what they’re looking for. And he’s not happy about it.

“You may be in charge of this mission,” he hisses to Ms. Bossypants (Charlotte Salt of “The Tudors”). “But I know this sub.”

Who cares? She’s got muscle (James McArdle) and brains (Elliot Levey) with her. She can run this show without him.

He quickly catches on that he’s caught in the middle “of a very large geopolitical situation,” and he resists. With dire consequences. Fist fighting in an aged, fragile and compact submersible is never a good idea.

“We will COMPLETE the op…in full,” Red (Salt) says with as much cryptic menace as she can manage. And that’s a lot. No matter how many times Matts shows he won’t play along, she refuses to keep him restrained. No many how many times she calls him “Matt,” he won’t warm to her.

And the survival of one and all and the success of the mission depends on correcting both those shortcomings. At least until that first rivet pops.

Writer-director Ben Parker folds in all the requisite crises here, compounding every melodramatic flourish with the claustrophobia of this very tiny space they’re bickering, brawling and maybe breathing their last in.

There’s a modicum of suspense, the sense that not all will survive and casting that gives away who has the best chance. It’s a shame everybody involved, including self-righteous Matts, is so unpleasant there’s nobody to root for.

Salt manages the flinty one-note she’s asked to play, and despite being Australian, she never lets on that she’s not an American. McArdle flies off the handle well, even if his character’s supposed to have been trained out of that.

Kuhnke makes Matts a pacifist who isn’t shy about fighting the insensate brutes (Red included) who have the power of life and death over him. It’s a trickier tightrope that the actor has to walk and Kuhnke manages it with a little sea/street cred.

The “mission” or “op” is a standard-issue “Macguffin,” a plot device of less import here than is usual in such movies. Parker doesn’t ratchet up suspense by keeping us aware of the clock ticking down on their oxygen, their battery life or their options.

And don’t even ask about the payoff.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Charlotte Salt, Johannes Kuhnke, James McArdle, Elliot Levey

Credits:  Written and directed by Ben Parker. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:30

Odeya Rush is the high school outcast who becomes pen pals with a foreign (Cockney?) ruler in this wacky comedy, whose trailer suggests something we might have seen in the ’80s, an SNL comedy during comedy’s “Cocaine” era. Just…nuts. Remember, Sean Connery hung it up after “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” Out of shame. Let’s hope Sir Michael isn’t similarly embarrassed. Katie Holmes also stars.

  “Winchester,” a haunted house period piece with a promising premise and Oscar-winner-headed cast, lurches into theaters as the first major movie disappointment of 2018.

All those spooky trailers, the promise of Helen Mirren as the surnamed firearms heiress sure that the ghosts of those killed by her family’s guns haunt her California mansion, all dashed and generally botched in a tediously tidy supernatural thriller about determining if the lady was insane or onto something.

Aussie Jason Clarke co-stars in this Australian production, playing Dr. Eric Price, a dissolute San Francisco psychotherapist hired by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. to declare the widow of its found not fit to run it.

Dr. Price is lost in drink and opium (Laudanum), just the guy you want to ascertain the sanity of the lady who keeps an army of contractors working around the clock, building, sealing up, tearing apart and rebuilding a vast, multi-story mansion in an effort to lock up the ghosts she senses all around her.

And wouldn’t you know it, the stoned head-shrinker sees people who aren’t there, too.

Being a man of science, he’s sure it’s his altered state that’s making this happen, and not “The unmendable souls” which “prey upon the innocent and pure.”

That would be Sarah Winchester’s nephew, Henry ( Finn Scicluna-O’Prey). The old woman, dressed in black, having visions of the rooms she is to add to this house, is sure that Henry, his mother (Sarah Snook) and her entire family is cursed. “Conditions can be cured, Doctor. Not curses!”

The filmmaking Spierig brothers of Germany co-wrote and directed this, and after their clever vampire tale “Daybreakers” and downright intellectual/supernatural thriller “Predestination,” they got lost in exposition and architecture. Though they make mention of the “guns leave ghosts” theme, repeatedly, they don’t boldface that hook. And the one historical connection to the deadly rifle is an anachronism, a Civil War soldier who blames a rifle that wasn’t invented in the Civil War and a company that didn’t come into existence until 1866 for his dead comrades.

As simple as haunted house tales are, the conceit plum evades the Spierigs.

The vast, gloomy 1906 house has only the odd jolt and endless chairs rocking with no one in them, doors opened by unseen hands. And then there are the seen hands — claws, really. All of which poor Dr. Price is sure he’s just seeing in his altered state.

This isn’t the most riveting turn by Clarke, so memorable as an interrogator in “Zero Dark Thirty.” Nor is it one of those performances Mirren will claim as one of her great credits. It’s hard to call “Winchester” a squandered opportunity when good actors can’t hide their disappointment at the material they’re performing. They’re at a loss to express the shock at what they cannot be seeing.

Back where Dame Helen comes from, they’d call this “weak tea,” and indeed Lionsgate and CBS figured this out probably before they’d released the second trailer to the film, picking Super Bowl weekend to release it, not previewing it for the reviewing press.

But late last summer, when we got our first peeks at “Winchester,” we could be excused for getting our hopes up. Now we can only cling to the notion that maybe this will be the biggest let-down of a year that is almost certain to serve up greater examples of that, too.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, drug content, some sexual material and thematic elements

Cast: Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke,  Sarah Snook

Credits:Directed by Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig, script by Tom Vaughan, Peter Spierig, Michael Spierig.  A CBS Films/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:39

Bloody, kinetic and near-as-makes-no-difference plot-less, “Kill Order” is about a human super weapon hunted by his creators.

It’s a psychotronic martial arts/sci-fi mashup where all the mayhem is rendered in slow-mo, or sped-up motion. As you’d expect from a stuntman turned writer-director, it’s all about the fights. Even the effects. Especially the effects.

Writer-director James Mark cast his felllow stunt-man younger brother Chris Mark in this, a tale of a schoolboy who turns out to be an escapee from some psyche experiment run by “The Organization.”

David Lee has crimson-coated nightmares, awakening to visions of a flaming zombie. The dreams cause him to snap, something only his “uncle” (Daniel Park) can stop with a quick injection. David is deeply disturbed, which is catnip to classmate May (Jessica Clement).

When commandos clad in black storm their classroom, she’s the one person he can reach out to. After “Uncle.” Who is nabbed by “The Organization” before he can be of any help.

David is hounded by assassins, alone or in teams, clad in black and coming after him in broad daylight and in public, at times. He does a Bruce Banner freak-out, his eyes blaze blue, and it’s On like Donkey Kong — brawls and swordfights aplenty. Bullets? They’re just for bystanders.

His wounds heal instantly, and the only thing that makes the fights fair is many of his foes — male and female — have the same special abilities.

As he flees, David has flashbacks, to “the experiment” and his training. “I remember the pain.”

“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional,” he is told.

Those running his experiment lecture him, “You have no name, only purpose.”

“My name is DAVID…I don’t want to kill. I want to LOVE!”

There’s a lot of insanely confused mumbo jumbo (some of it in Japanese) by “The Organization,” or are they “The Great Five?” Villains exchanging non-sensicalisms like “How can I say this?” and “I want the codes to the massive project.”

As the film is no longer titled “Meza,” one can assume that’s what that line actually said. But lacking that title, well, I didn’t catch a first reference to “Meza.”

The fights are impressive, in a retro R-rated “Power Rangers” way. Few are performed at real speed.

No performance stands out as so much as competent, no character is compelling enough to root for and the whole, empty-headed mess isn’t worth interrupting scrolling down your phone over.

In other words, let’s make this a FRANCHISE.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Chris Mark, Jessica Clement, Daniel Park, Denis Akiyama

Credits: Written and directed by James Mark. An RLJ Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:17

“The Purge” movies have been politically charged from the start, and have only grown more blunt in their class warfare/”thin the herd” ethos with each sequel.

The new one is the “original” Purge, a prequel that unlike the 2013 sleeper that took America by storm, aims to fill in the back story of how we came to “accept” an annual unfettered slaughter of revenge, class conflict and Darwinian survival of the fittest.

We don’t need a “Make America Purge Again” hat to know where this is going. Love the Sam Elliott impersonator narration. In theaters July 4. ‘Ere ya go.

  “Becks” is a gay romance so old fashioned it feels like a period piece, a film from the earliest days of what came to be called “queer cinema.”

It’s about a folk singer falling in love with a married woman, family disapproval with just a hint of titillation. It’s a more polished “Lianna” (1983) or “Go Fish,” with a light enough touch to pass for queer cinema comfort food.

The title character (Broadway star Lena Hall) plays guitar with a band in the Big City, where she’s deeply involved with the band’s younger, exotic lead singer (Hayley Koyiko of “Jem and the Holograms”). Lucy, however, is playing the field.

The shock of this sends Becks into enough of a tailspin that she goes home, to the Midwestern town where she grew up, to her somewhat tolerant mom (Christine Lahti). There’s an old pal, Dave (Dan Fogler) running a bar, Perfectos.

“Dave was the first guy I ever slept with,” she jokes, “and the last.” He remembers how she was outed in high school, nicknamed class “vale-DYKE-torian.”

But hey, she could play at the bar, for tips, if she wants — “lesbian folk rock.” And maybe she could give guitar lessons on the side. The bar is how she meets Elyse (Mena Suvari of “American Beauty”), and guitar lessons are how she connects with her.

Elyse being married puts the romance in “It’s complicated” territory. It takes the more old-fashioned mom to register stern disapproval. Busting up a marriage rarely gets the buster chewed out in such films. The hoary cliche is that Becks is “awakening” Elyse’s true sexuality, and “Becks” only narrowly avoids that.

What the three credited screenwriters, two credited directors and the cast get across is a sense of lived-in lives, acceptance decades removed from social shunning and a kind of flippant riff on such gay romance cliches. “Lesbian Folk Rock?” Totally a thing, predating The Indigo Girls by decades.  The romances here are melodramatic, as indeed romance can be.

Hall anchors the picture, at home on stage singing and playing, and a bit of an impulsive, arrested-development mess off it. Becks is 34 and making the mistakes of a 24 year-old, and Hall lets us see how infuriating it is to live that way and realize it.

She, the under-used Suvari and jovial Fogler, most recently of TV’s “The Goldbergs,” make “Becks,” comfort food familiar as it is, a likable movie with characters we don’t mind spending time with even if we know their mistakes long before they make them.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Lena Hall, Mena Suvari, Christine Lahti, Dan Fogler, Hayley Kiyoko

Credits:Written and directed by Elizabeth Rohrbaugh and Daniel Powell, additional writing by Rebecca Drysdale. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:30

Mixed Martial Artist Ronda Rousey’s recently announced move to pro wrestling had to give Gina Carano pause. Rousey’s movie-star-pretty predecessor in the MMA spotlight may have made a splash in the movies with “Haywire,” and had her shot at playing a Marvel villain in “Deadpool.”

But the movies are starting to hit the “diminishing returns” side of the ledger for her, these days. A D-movie like “Scorched Earth” is enough to make one wonder if maybe Rousey isn’t making the smarter play.

Carano can still, at 35, deliver in the fight scenes. But this post-apocalyptic dog of a picture shows her racing into “over the hill so I’ll just use guns” territory, something Chuck and Jean Claude and Jackie only got around to when the stunts got to be too much.

She plays Atticus (HAH!) Gage, a bounty hunter in the post-climate collapse future who wanders the wastelands hunting down outlaws. Their biggest crime? “Fossil abuser.” As in, they’re rapists, kidnappers, murderers and slave traders in a world where the air is so foul everybody has to wear filter-masks, even the horses.

Until the star needs her close-up, of course.

“Belching” pollution in the few fossil fuel vehicles left is a no-no, punished by “the authorities,” who pay Gage her bounties. Reluctantly, it turns out. The only difference between her and the cretins she hunts? “I’m still above ground.”

Maybe she inadvertently frees hostages here and there, kills off a quarry up to no good. She’s not responsible for their safe-keeping, getting them to “civilization.”

“Not my problem.”

No wonder the “Doc” (John Hannah of “Four Weddings and a Funeral”) at New Montana (“Population, 24) is her only friend.

The never-ending search for powdered silver, useful in the post “Cloud Fall” atmospheric collapse filter masks, means she’s hellbent on catching the biggest outlaw of them all, Jackson ( Ryan Robbins). She’ll just steal the hat and scarf of the black-toothed harpy she just brought in (dead, not alive) and pass herself off as an ally to get close to Jackson, before grabbing him and taking him back to face rough justice and collect her silver bounty.

Jackson’s town has a silver mine which needs slaves and a saloon that needs a torch singer. That’s where Melanie (Stephanie Bennett) fits in, all slinky and sexy because otherwise, the locals would notice that’s not her voice coming out when she sings the blues. Worst. Lip. Sync. Ever.

Carano isn’t the only one whose presence here denotes hard times in the movie biz. Director Peter Howitt (“Johnny English,” “Sliding Doors”) has seen better days. So has his “Sliding Doors” star Hannah.

One and all are stuck with rehashed exchanges such as “Where you from?” “What do you care?” and lines like “I think perhaps I’m just an outlet for all this misplaced rage,” and “It’s a fine line between ignorance and arrogance.”

Say what now? Fighting words, in any event. They all are.

“Shall we begin?”

The performances are stock and unsurprising, with Carona showing a lot of teeth in an era when most everybody else’s are brown from the lack of Crest.

The locations are mostly Canadian deserts, quarries, ghost towns and the ruins of a marine (boat) wrecking yard. The color palette is “Deadwood” brown. There’s even a poker game in the saloon. I could swear they were playing for marshmallows.

Which, as everybody knows, will survive the apocalypse. But can this cast and crew survive the ignominy of “Scorched Earth?”

MPAA Rating:R for violence and some language

Cast: Gina Carano, John Hannah, Ryan Robbins, Stephanie Bennett

Credits:Directed by Peter Howitt, script by Kevin Leeson, Bobby Mort. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:36

A strained marriage, a tipsy New Year’s Eve party and a deadly road accident are but the opening gambit of “Midnighters,” a just-taut-enough thriller about ordinary people faced with extraordinary dilemmas.

It’s about secrets and betrayals, shifting loyalties and the grim, heartless calculus of death when it’s “either him or me.”

Lindsey (Alex Essoe of “Starry Eyes”) and Jeff (Dylan McTee of TV’s “Sweet/Vicious”) are renovating their house and struggling to make ends meet, as he can’t find work. The last thing either of them needs is hitting a pedestrian on a dark country road after having a few New Year’s Eve drinks.

To their credit, that’s not the first thing they think of. They try to save the guy, even though he’s got facial tattoos. But when they lose a pulse, it’s “We need some place where we can think about this” and even though “This isn’t ‘Goodfellas,'” that’s what they do.

When Lindsey’s trouble-in-mind younger sister (Perla Haney-Jardine) gets home from her own New Year’s Eve party, things get even more complicated — and deadly.

The cops are suspicious, especially this one detective (Ward Horton) who shows up, side-eyed in his oily-charm.

“You must be a Capricorn! So honest and…forthcoming.”

Veteran TV editor turned director Julius Ramsay, working from an Alston Ramsay (military speechwriter turned screenwriter) script, keeps the lights off and the mood menacing. The performers manage to make even the lapses in logic in that script skim past with barely a “Wait, nobody’s that naive/stupid” pause, though there are a few.

Some of the abrupt shifts in attitude seem like core beliefs abandoned simply to let the story move along, but the players let on that these characters have agendas that steel their inner resolve.

The twists become increasingly obvious as the layers of intrigue are peeled off. But the third act, with its stark choices and grisly cliffhanger of a brawl, pays off, even it that payoff feels a tad more conventional than is promised.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Alex Essoe, Dylan McTee, Perla Haney-Jardine, Ward Horton

Credits:Directed by Julius Ramsay, script by Alston Ramsay. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:34

Long been a big fan of A24 Films, the best of the arty boutique film distributors (“Ex Machina,” “Lady Bird,” “The Florida Project,” “The Disaster Artist,” etc.). Here’s the trailer to their upcoming horror tale, “Hereditary,” starring Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne, and involves a family legacy. June 8 is when we see it.

There’s not much to say about the enervated romance “The Boy Downstairs,” except that literally every character and actor playing that character is more interesting than the leads. Every last one of them, down to the accented waiter at the Italian restaurant where our would-be couple bickers over there being no lemons for their ice water.

“But…you have lemon risotto on the menu!”

“Lemons are for food, only!”

Zosia Mamet of TV’s “Girls” is Diana, newly moved in to the same apartment building as her ex, Ben (Matthew Shear of “Mistress America”).  Through her eyes we revisit their affair, the break-up precipitated by her two-year move to London, and the regrets that wash over her with every fresh flashback.

And with every rose-colored recollection, we scrunch up our noses and wonder, “Yeah, and?” Rarely has the big screen exhausted 91 minutes on a romance with less sexual heat, with leads who have compatibility — they’re equally dull — but little chemistry Seldom have we met an aspiring writer (Diana) and musician (Ben) who make meeting and falling in love in the Big City more boring, with less evidence that either has anything going on.

She has a prettier and funnier BFF (Diana Irvine) and he has a prettier and funnier new girlfriend (Sarah Ramos), actually the real estate agent who showed Diana the apartment. And they both have a landlady (Deirdre O’Connell) with a more interesting back story (a widowed one-time actress) than we suspect these two bores will ever achieve.

Few things are duller on the screen than the process of writing, and adding Apple product placement to it adds no pizzazz. There’s more promise in Diana’s day job — working in a bridal boutique. Ben? We see nothing of his life outside Diana. Mamet, yeah she’s HIS daughter (with Lindsay Crouse), has little animation to her acting, her voice a mousy “vocal fry,” her face a near blank beneath inexpressive jet-black eyebrows.

What first-time feature writer-director Sophie Brooks was going for is a meditation on longing and romantic regret, with Diana pining away even as she recalls the disapproval of her father (Arliss Howard) and the warm but cautious embrace of Ben’s parents, the ho-hum routines of her life with Ben and the abrupt but understandable end to the affair. The fictive present is filled with Diana finding ways to put herself back in Ben’s path, to the growing irritation of his new girlfriend, despite the blunt evidence that there’s nothing going on.

Which unfortunately makes an all-too-apt blurb describing “The Boy Downstairs” — the movie, the “boy” himself and the dull young woman who lives above.  Nothing but nothing goes on.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual material, brief strong language and drug references

Cast: Zosia Mamet, Matthew Shear, Deirdre O’Connell, Diana Irvine, Arliss Howard, Sarah Ramos

Credits:Written and directed by Sophie Brooks. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:31