Movie Review: “Found Footage” gives us a glimpse of the witch they call “Beezel”

The 60 year witch-haunts-a-house story “Beezel” seems to have been kicked around a bit before Epic got hold of it and gave it a streaming release.

That’s a shame, because this creepy, low-budget horror tale certainly passes the “Well, I’ve seen Lilworse” test.

It’s a “found footage” thriller where the footage changes as decades pass and grainy video replaces grainy home movie film stock, making its way to the HD video in standard use today.

We see horrific goings-on in a suburban Massachusetts ranch house, first in the 1960s, then in the ’80s, early 2000s and 2013.

A New York documentary filmmaker (LeJon Woods) is summoned in the ’80s by the owner of the house (Bob Gallagher) who lets on that he wants to “clear my name” about the family murdered there decades before. He’s quick to dismiss the myth surrounding the house. And his wife even “acts the part” of a witch, scaring off annoying, taunting kids who harass them.

“Beneath the house, inside the room, the blind witch waits anon, to sniff and crawl and feast on all,” Harold Weems (Gallagher) recites, claiming that’s a rhyme local children made up. As if any child of the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s would use “anon.”

As we’d expect, first act Apollo (Woods) hears more than he should and faces his doom, with a twist or two in that.

Caroline Quigley plays the latest hospice nurse to come in to care for the widow Weems (Kimberly Salditt Poulin) and freaks out about what must have happened to the nurses who preceded her.

And screenwriter Victoria Fradkin plays a young woman who married a Weems offspring (Nicolas Robin) and lives with him in Paris. She comes to the house in 2013, camcorder in hand, to talk about “the murders” and grumps that “The worst part is, now nobody wants to buy” the place.

The frights are standard issue jolts, heightened by the strident strings of the truly alarming musical score (can’t find who composed/performed it). The pall of creepiness sets in from all these wintry, underlit scenes, some of them shot in the “found footage” element of the story.

“Beezel” won’t surprise anyone who has seen more that three or four horror films. But it’s far from awful, with decent performances, makeup, effects and “shock me, baby” editing.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex and nudity

Cast: Bob Gallagher, Victoria Fradkin, LeJon Woods, Caroline Quigley, Nicolas Robin and Kimberly Salditt Poulin.

Credits: Directed by Aaron Fradkin, scripted by Aaron Fradkin and Victoria Fradkin. An Epic release.

Running time: 1:22

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Movie Preview: A Serial Killer Thriller with an “on the nose” title — “The Man in the White Van”

Ali Larter, Madison Wolfe, Sean Astin and Brec Bassinger are the stars of this “true story” of a Florida serial killer NOT named Ted Bundy.

“I think he’s following me.”

“You have to stop over-exaggerating.”

Not often we get that kind of butchery of English grammar in a movie trailer. But hey. “FloriDuh.”

Dec. 13 this hits theaters.

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Movie Review: Keaton reconnects with his kids, including Mila Kunis, as “Goodrich”

There’s no heavy lifting in “Goodrich,” the Michael Keaton/Mila Kunis dramedy about a workaholic second-time-around dad forced to reconnect with his kids, including the one old enough to be pregnant.

The jokes about trying, after 60, to learn to be a dad, are easy to reach to the point of cute and mostly low-hanging fruit. The formula in play is another “I did my best” parent facing a sometimes comic, sometimes sad reckoning.

At its most somber, it reaches for “Kramer vs. Kramer.” In lighter moments, one can wonder if all involved could have just turned this into a sequel to one of Keaton’s earliest hits, “Mister Mom.” The edgiest thing about it is its rating, “R,” for profanity. It would have reached a wider audience as a PG-13.

But this it’s well-acted and it plays. More or less.

Writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer was an actress before getting that first writing-directing (Reese Witherspoon’s “Home Again”), but is still most famously the daughter of writer-director couple Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, who remade “The Parent Trap” and “Father of the Bride” before divorcing. She doesn’t embarrass herself and give Hollywood “nepo babies” a bad name here any more than she makes her name with this slight, derivative star vehicle.

Keaton has the title role playing the embattled owner of a tony, boutique art gallery struggling to stay afloat by surfing the ever-changing tastes of Left Coast art lovers, the ups and downs of “the market” and the mercurial moods of artists he needs to please.

Goodrich Gallery may be going under (Kevin Pollack plays the not-so-silent “business” partner) if he can’t land The Next Big Thing. But that’s not what wakes owner Andy up in the middle of the night. His wife is calling. From rehab. She’s checked herself in to shake her pill addiction.

“The woman that I live with doesn’t have a drug abuse problem!”

He’s the last to know, she tells him, because “We live totally separate lives.” And by the way, she’s leaving him.

Sixty-something Andy might be on his own with those two late-life nine-year-old twins, Billie and Mose (Vivian Lyra Blair, Jacob Kopera). He can only lie to them about where Mom went for so long. Maybe his 36 year old daughter (Kunis) can pitch in, as he’s “got a thing” pretty much every night, wining and dining artists and buyers.

The movie is about Andy’s belated transition to attentive father, and his oldest daughter’s resentment that this transition didn’t happen thirty years sooner.

The jokes are of the Dad-doesn’t-know-which-grade-his-kids-are-in variety. That drone Mose is playing with in their expensively-decorated house in the Hollywood hills?

“Who GOT you that thing?” “You and Mom got it for us last Christmas!”

The father/oldest-daughter banter may not be original, but Keaton and Kunis make it work.

“This is me begging you. How often do I do this?”

“Do you want me to answer that?”

“LATELY. I was going to say ‘lately.'”

The script doesn’t do a great job of zeroing in on that relationship, as it drifts off into gallery concerns, with the daughter (Carmen Ejogo) of a just-died famous artist to charm and a divorced gay dad (Michael Urie) of a sickly child at their kids’ school to, um, bond with.

Honestly, the picture teeters on the edge of “hackneyed” more than once, although at least some of that is recognizing comic crutches and “types” we’ve seen in plenty of screenplays by our writer-director’s Mom Nancy Meyers and to a lesser degree Dad, Charles Shyer. That new gay friend, his no-nonsense Israeli babysitter? Vintage Nancy and Charles. Did they offer their daughter tips?

But Keaton still has the timing, and aiming for “sweet” as his career veers towards repeating himself (“Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice”), TV, B-thrillers (“Knox Goes Away”) and lesser superhero fare wasn’t a bad choice. Kunis gives her pregnant, resentful daughter some edge.

And Ejogo and Andie MacDowell (as Goodrich’s artist “first wife”) make decent impressions.

There’s nothing about “Goodrich” that would scare producers away from working with a filmmaker whose only goal might be to become “Nancy Meyers: The Next Generation,” even if there’s little original to lure them in either.

Rating: R, for profanity

Cast: Michael Keaton, Mila Kunis, Carmen Ejogo, Kevin Pollack and Andie MacDowell.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer. A Ketchup Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:50

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Movie Preview: A Monster who is Gremlins cute — ” The Legend of Ochi”

Willem Dafoe’s presence gives away the A24 take on a vampiric Gremlin monster rescued by a tweenage girl.

A Scandinavian music video director brings this tale to the screen next spring.

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Movie Preview: A New Mexican-Californian tale of kids from two worlds — “In the Summers”

Mom’s raising the kids in California, but “In the Summers” they go to Las Cruces, New Mexico to stay with their troubled but loving father.

This saga about kids growing up with and without their dad did the festival circuit, got a limited release in Sept. and hits streaming Nov. 5.

Looks brittle and lovely.

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Movie Review: Sex Farce fails at “Advanced Chemistry”

“Advanced Chemistry” is a sex farce, which is not to be confused with “romantic comedy” as a genre, although that distinction has rarely been applied to a more “PG” picture.

Clunky, timid and tame-right-to-the-edge-of-chaste, it’s a dull dive into biochemistry, “monogamous attraction” via hypodermic needle, air guitar as an art form and “full facial nudity.”

That’s as romantic and as sexy as this one relationship — with a germophobe and central to the plot — gets.

Samba Schutte and Kiaran Deol play chemistry students under the tutelage of an impatiently lceherous mentor (Iqbal Theba).

Allen (Schutte) is a hapless doormat when it comes to love. He’s always losing that potential bar pick-up to his aggressive, lesbian bestie. The ladies — even the straight ones — can’t get enough of Marsha, Marsha Marsha (Chaunte Wayans).

Allen and Lisa (Deol) are competing for that one spot to be funded in their university’s program. He’s working on “Bondo,” a drug that will encourage chemical fidelity to a loved one the way voles practice monogamy. Lisa’s “Lixi” promises better orgasms in women.

As Marsha is “a cheater from a long line of cheaters,” she begs to be a human test subject for Bondo. That’s how Allen tumbles into a world of misdirected needles creating irresistible attractions — few of which he has any interest in.

But Lisa might be different, a co-conspirator in his illegal “test” case and a germophobe repelled by the idea of physical contact, much less physical attraction.

Every so often, as this or that person in the broader plot gets injected, on purpose or accidentally, they have to hide Allen’s actions from wacky, over-committed Safety Officer Nancy (T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh), who pops up like zealous “safety” Nazi.

Director Etana Jacobson keeps the tone light and screwy. The players do their utmost to take things over the top. But the pacing is flat, few jokes come close to landing and the cast’s “utmost” just doesn’t get us there.

“Advanced Chemistry” has problems with the basics.

Rating: unrated, sex, profanity and “full facial nudity”

Cast: Samba Schutte, Chaunte Wayans, Sarah Burns, Kiaran Deol and Iqbal Theba.

Credits: Directed by Etana Jacobson, scripted by Alec Moore. A Good Deed release.

Running time: 1:35

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Movie Preview: Stephen King’s “The Monkey” becomes R-rated horror with Elijah Wood and Theo James

Osgood Perkins was an actor who became a writer and then a writer-director (“Longlegs,” “Gretel & Hansel”), and now he’s tackling a Stephen King short story.

Horror hits home via a wind up “Monkey” Feb. 22.

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Movie Review: A stumbling mush through memories of “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point”

A little holiday cheer is expressed and even more is shown, or at least sampled, in “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.” And almost nothing is explained.

The idea behind Tyler Taormina’s (“Ham on Rye”) warm, aimless and largely laugh-free Christmas Eve wallow in nostalgia is the selectivity of memory, and perhaps how drab the “colorful” memories our director and co-writer decides to show us turn out to be.

Unexplained, disorganized and cluttered with characters we strain to identify in banal situations that go nowhere, this isn’t one that’s going to replace “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Story” or even “The Family Stone” or “Feast of the Seven Fishes” on anybody’s holiday movie list.

What we figure out — eventually — is that this extended family is gathering on snowy Long Island for what could be the “last Christmas” with Grandma Antonia (Mary Reistetter). Eventually, a “Carmine” is mentioned and a couple of other names that suggest this is an Italian American clan.

We see a flip phone, a ’90s Buick wagon and a ’92 Jeep Cherokee and piece together that this an “Eve” in the early 2000s.

A couple of siblings bicker with a couple others over “Sunrise Nursing Home” or “live in aid” options for their mother, over who is not doing enough to help this situation and who is.

The little kids are kind of passed-over — merely underfoot — as the adults cook, smoke cigars, kvetch and reminisce, and the teens and tweens experience traditions such as “the walk,” “the bird” (cooked) and “the parade” — decorated fire engines that pass in a blur. Some kids borrow a family Cherokee for a run out to a cemetary, a little drinking and carrying-on shared in dark close ups and hook ups.

“Car equals FREEDOM!”

We assume they’re not kissing cousins, but hey, when you don’t explain Jack, there is is some doubt.

A couple of local cops (Gregg Turkington and Michael Cera) gawk at some of this while on duty and get into one awkward conversation meant to be comical.

And the soundtrack to it all is early ’60s doo-wop and pop, perhaps for its Italian-American connotations.

I found the entire experience a dissonant disconnect as there is barely anyone to identify, much less identify with, there’s little novelty to anything presented here and nothing to root for because basically a lot of nothing or nothing much is all that happens.

Save yourself the drive. Rent “Feast of the Seven Fishes” and get a load of THOSE Italians if you want to see a memorable period piece about a memorable Christmas.

Rating: PG-13, smoking, teen drinking, sexual situations, profanity,

Cast: Elsie Fisher, Maria Dizzia, Francesca Scorsese, Ben Shenkman, Matilda Fleming, Sawyer Spielberg, Leo Chan, Gregg Turkington and Michael Cera.

Credits: Directed by Tyler Taormina, scripted by Eric Berger and Tyler Taormina. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:47

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Movie Review: A mourning comedy becomes Thai travelogue? There’s a “Cautionary Tale

In the cinema, there are dramedies and tragi-comedies, and whatever the heck the indie “Cautionary Tale” turns out to be.

It begins as a funny dark comedy about two men bickering over the ashes of their loved ones.

Neil (Ted Limpert) lost his ex-wife and daughter in a car crash. Jake (Andy Baldeschwiler) lost his wife. And stepdaughter.

They used to be “best friends.” So blame is flung back and forth. About “brake pads.” The phrase “Jake the homewrecker” comes up, as does “Neil the cuckold,” and who won’t have “my daugher in a box” on whose “table.”

And then Neil, who plays a children’s TV entertainer named Safety Sam, finds out that his show’s revival depends on its sale to Asian markets. His contract requires him to go to Thailand and glad-hand buyers.

Nice change of scene, free travel, a chance to mourn.

But Neil fights it, tries to insist he’s more than just this one character, picks up his guitar again and tries his hand at insipid folk pop. And he makes the contractually obligated trip.

That hijacks the movie, which doesn’t really grapple with the mourning that well as Neil lies his way through the country and into a friendship with a musical expat (Steve Calalang) and a Thai singer (Napak Boonruang) who needs help with English translations of her lyrics and who might be the woman who brings Neil back to life. Or not.

There’s an unemotional emptiness to the travel and Thai “coming to grips” sequences that left me cold.

There’s even an off-mike issue with many scenes and characters, on-camera and off, set in New York that isn’t present in the Thai travels and negotiations. Thailand has elephants, which Neil’s daughter loved, and better on-location sound recordists.

The germ of a good indie dramedy idea is here. But the execution — script, direction, acting and editing — never climb far enough beyond amateurish to be affecting.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Ted Limpert, Napak Boonruang, Matias Proietti and Steve Calalang

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Zawadzki. A FilmHub release on Tubi, Apple TV

Running time: 1:27

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Movie Preview: Barry Keoghan stars in new grit from the director of “American Honey” — “Bird”

Nykiya Adams has the title role in this latest “How the other half life, love and grow up” tale from Andrea Arnold.

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