Movie Nation

Oscar winner Fraser is scary, Oscar winner Marisa Tomei reteams with Dinklage as (once again) his love interest, Oscar nominee Glenn Close as the siblings’ psycho-mom and Fraser as the nutty “I AM JUSTICE” cop-avenger-seeker of the emeralds in this dark comedy.

Amazon Prime has this one, and t’s coming out Oct. 17.

Lotta star power for a dark comedy that goes straight to streaming. Something not quite come off? We’ll see.

Lionsgate has this November 8 release, an Irish period piece based on a Claire Keegan novel.

Watson’s a scary nun, Murphy’s a father stumbling into something awful about the Catholic church’s stranglehold on his small. town.

Sandra Mae Frank plays the deaf eye witness a newly-deaf detective must “interpret” and protect. Mark Strong is his “partner,” Mekhi Pfifer leads the gang out to tie up loose ends.

Oct. 11.

A blind date with a creep thriller, this one comes to Netflix Oct. 15.

A deadpan comedy about what a guy will go through to recover his significant other’s dog.

Desmin Borges has the title role, with Kelly Sullivan as She Whose Dog Must Be Found before she returns from a trip.

A husband and wife director/writer team cooked this existential crisis comedy up. Whattaya wanna bet that they lived through it?

Oct. 25.

Marco Pigossi and James Bland play the lovers whose paths cross in this Marco Calvani (“A Better Half”) melodrama. Oscar winner Marisa Tomei and character actor and clown Bill Irwin also star.

“Aaallrighty, my flockers,” the Rev intones at the “first ever” marriage between a human and a zombie, punctuating his sentences with random James Brown howls. “The zombie apocalypto is upon us!”

But first, there must be “The Zombie Wedding.”

“Dearly bi-partisans,” let the bride, dolled-up to perfection, and the groom — a zombie — take their places.

“Love knows no race nor color,” The Rev sermonizes. “Love knows no rich or poor. Love KNOWS no living or DEAD. Love knows NOTHING.”

Wait for it.

“Love…is an IDIOT.”

The Rev, played by “Walking Dead” alumnus Seth Gilliam, touches on the tone that this Micah Khan/Greg D’Alessandro comedy wants to hit. A lot of famous faces — and a few faces obscured by this latest variation on zombie makeup — take their best shots at making a half-assed “Tony & Tina’s Wedding Goes Zombie” script funny.

Heather Matarazzo (“Welcome to the Dollhouse”) is a “zombie control officer.” Cheri Oteri of “Saturday Night Live” and Siobhan Fallon Hogan (“Seinfeld”) go at it as zombie mother of the groom vs. Arkansan mother of the bride.

Mickey Dolenz of “The Monkees” is the wedding DJ (zombified) booked for the Vineland, N.J. occasion.

And Aijay Naidu plays the Weekly World News editor — “The world’s ONLY reliable news!” — whose interview frames the story and provides (unfunny) narration.

But no big names or small names in the cast can save this corpse of a comedy from sliding into rigor mortis.

The plot sees a zombie virus outbreak interfere with the Vineland wedding plans of Ashley (Deepti Menon) and Zack (Donald Chang). But after the slaughter, the inane news coverage (by Christine Sprang and Mu-Shaka Benson) and family fighting over the wedding venue, the zombie groom and his groomsmen will be theref, and the bride and her menacing, not-to-be-trifled-with bridesmaids will show up to close the deal.

What could go wrong? Or funny?

For years, it wasn’t uncommon for me to sit at traffic lights in eastern Orlando and notice that the car next to me was stuffed with zombies. The for-profit Full Sail University and its cash college students who couldn’t get into “real” film schools were always making zombie movies.

They’re cheap, easy and fun…to be in, at least. No wonder film school students flock to the genre. Sometimes they can even be fun to watch.

But comedy is quick and “The Zombie Wedding” lumbers, staggers and stumbles up to the wedding, and flails like a tortoise sinking in quicksand after the “I do’s.”

“Hey, it’s supposed to be ‘The WALKING Dead!’ Get a move on!”

Actors hit lines they expect to play as “funny” hard enough to draw blood, but not laughs.

“We’re dead Americans, and we’ve got rights” could have been cribbed from the later seasons of the interminable zombie-genre-killing “Walking Dead,” but it was never going to be a funny one.

That kills this zombie apocalypse before the first joker in whiteface can yell “BRAINS.”

Rating: unrated, comic gory violence, innuendo

Cast: Deepti Menon, Donald Chang, Aijay Naidu, Christine Sprang, Mu-Shaka Benson, Siobhan Fallon Hogan,Vincent Pastore, Heather Matarazzo, Seth Gilliam, Mickey Dolenz and Cheri Oteri.

Credits: Directed by Micah Khan, scripted by Greg D’Alessandro. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:42

Lack of sleep will drive you crazy quicker than most anything, doctors tell us. And what your sleep partner is doing to interrupt that sleep just speeds up the process.

That’s the premise of the Korean thriller “Sleep,” about a couple waiting for a baby, struggling to get enough sleep to keep them sane and what happens when they don’t get it.

In writer-director Jason Yu’s slow slow SLOW burn debut feature, supportive, practical partnering and medicine run up against superstition in a tale that begins mildly and finishes in a fury.

Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) is a pregnant cubicle worker. Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) is an actor, a bit player, living from small role to small role.

Late one night, he sits up, announces “Someone’s inside“(in Korean with English subtitles), and promptly flops back to sleep. After she’s the one left to frantically search their flat in the dark, rattled by the odd loud noise, they try to figure this out in the AM.

Is it from a script he’s memorizing? Probably.

But as nights go on, Hyun-su sleep-walks up to a window he tries to jump through, wakes-up bloodied by scratches and loses work because of his issues.

Is this safe for the baby to to be born into? Is it safe for their Pomeranian?

When they finally get to a doctor, “REM sleep disorder” is the diagnosis. Her mom (Lee Kyung-jin), seeing this growing distress as “grounds for divorce,” has another idea.

“He needs divine intervention.”

Yu’s script lurches from the comic — an over-the-top shaman (Kim Keum-Soon) bowls in and bowls them over with her diagnosis — “ghost” — and prognosis, to the grimly tragic.

Dreams turn dark and menacing and spill over into reality, especially after the baby is born, as Hyun-su’s”medical” treatment seems to work and she starts imagining their infant in every trash bin, every boiling pot of soup.

There’s little that one could call “psychological” in their analysis of the problem, but a little more in the way of questioning the nature of their relationship.

And once the supernatural is suggested, with all the Korean “rules” about ghostly possession and what-not, who is sane and who isn’t is kind of up in the air.

I found the early acts boring with moments of shock. But the finale to “Sleep” is a corker and well worth Yu’s perhaps unintentional efforts to encourage the viewer to doze-off. That climax is a waking nightmare of the worst-fears-confirmed variety. Whose worst fears? Watch and see.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, innuendo

Cast:Jung Yu-mi and Lee Sun-kyun

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jason Yu. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:34

Go for weird, sometimes you get there.

Freestyle has this limited release (NYC) Sept, streaming release.

Screen legend James Garner has been dead ten years, but by Leon he was trending on the Twitter this weekend.

It started with fans celebrating the anniversary of the premiere of “The Rockford Files” on Friday, and quickly shifted to his other roles, his civil rights activism and what the icon of cool had to say about Ronald Reagan, subject of a recent film hagiography, an actor-turned-politician who was president of the Screen Actor’s Guild while Garner served as vice president.

“Ronnie never had an original thought and we had to tell him what to say.”

As kismet would have it, “Support Your Local Gunfighter” was popping up on assorted streamers and HDNET cable. It’s Western comedy comfort food to some of us who grew up in the ’70s.

So in appreciation of Garner, who talked me into buying my first Mini Cooper — “Looooove my Mini,” he drawled, confirming that yes, a tall Oklahoman like himself could fit in one — the one time I interviewed him (for “The Notebook”), I watched it again.

This 1971 comedy is the slightly inferior but still funny follow-up to 1969’s “Support Your Local Sheriff!” Garner and his director pal Burt Kennedy, best known for these films and a couple of lesser Duke Wayne Westerns (“The War Wagon,” “The Train Robbers”) rounded-up much of the same repertory company for a not-really-a-sequel — “Support Your Local Gunfighter.”

Garner was once again joined by Jack Elam, Harry Morgan, Walter Burke, Gene Evans, Willis Bouchey and the comical shrew Kathleen Freeman (“The Blues Brothers”) for an upending of movie and TV Western archetypes and tropes.

Joan Hackett, Walter Brennan and Bruce Dern, as the spitfire love interest, the patriarchal villain and the villain’s problem relative in “Sheriff!” are replaced by Suzanne Pleshette, a year before her “Bob Newhart Show” gig, the owlish harrumpher John Dehner and Ellen Corby a year before she became Grandma on “The Waltons.”

There was a hint of the TV comedy that launched Garner, “Maverick,” in “Support Your Local Sheriff!” Garner, Kennedy and Oscar-nominated Western screenwriter James Edward Grant (“The Sheepman,” “The Alamo” and “The Comancheros”) go all-in on Bret Maverick in all but name this time.

Latigo Smith (Garner) is an unlucky gambler and a gigolo, an overdressed dude in the Western sense of of the word. He travels from town to town, seduces wealthy madams from the local brothels, lets them bury him in gifts and cash, and skedaddles when wedding bells start to chime.

He does this by train. “I don’t ride...A man’s gotta’ be numb on both ends to earn his livin’ sittin’ on a horse. I just don’t like horses.“

We meet him as he’s evading impending nuptials by getting off a train in scenic Purgatory, a mining town where rival mines are racing for “The Mother Lode,” and the mine operators (Harry Morgan and John Dehner) are willing to do most anything in ensure that the other mine doesn’t beat them to the gold.

A telegraph to the notorious gunslinger Swifty Morgan has one and all assuming that this sharp looking fellow with Elvis sideburns and a hefty sidearm is him.

One mine owner’s daughter (Pleshette) takes it on herself to solve this “Swifty” problem (he’s allegedly been hired to shoot or intimidate everybody who works for her Pa’s mine).

“I’m a ROTTEN shot and I’m gettin’ awful tired of missin’ you!”

Then the unlucky gambler loses it all, as he always does, betting on #23 at roulette.

“Care to place a bet, sir?”

“You lookin’ for TROUBLE, mister? Do I LOOK DIMwitted enough to play that game?”

Throwing in with a down-on-his-luck cowpoke, Jug (Elam), Latigo fast-talks the town into believing that slap-happy Jug is the “real” Swifty. And that he can be bribed into switching sides in the mine wars.

That might just work, unless or until the REAL Swifty Morgan (Chuck Connors) shows up.