Movie Nation

Josh Hartnett, Alison Pill, Hayley Mills and some relative of M. Night’s star in this Aug. 9 release.

A big pop concert is used to capture a notorious serial killer, who apparently is a fan of the “Gaga-esque” singer, played by Saleka Shyamalan, oldest daughter of M. Night.

A big question to ponder, thanks to this weekend’s emerging box office figures. What happened to the horror movie audience? Where did they go?

For most of this millenium, this has been the most reliable corner of the movie-going public, with most titles opening in the $17-20 million range, and sequels to established franchises rolling in $25-27 million+ on their first weekend.

In recent months, we’ve had “Immaculate,” “The First Omen” and now “Abigail” open at $11 million or under.

There was a time if you put an actress in a nun’s habit and made her scary or had scary things happen to her, it was money in the bank. You’d reboot an “Exorcist,””Halloween,” “Scream” or now “Omen,” you’d automatically sell lots of tickets.

Now, you’ve got a bloody-minded vampire comedy with a monstrous child and reliable, “name” talent in the supporting cast. And it may claw its way to a box office win. But maybe it won’t.

As of Sat. AM, the race is too close to call, based on previews and Friday’s take. “Abigail,” with good reviews and a being new film in a formerly reliable genre, still has the edge.

The jaunty “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” was thought to have a shot at $11 million. It too earned good reviews and is a fun night out for action fans. But Deadline is suggesting that Friday’s take means it’ll be lucky to clear $9.

And the more serious “Civil War,” even with a political edge that won’t appeal to all, is holding audience thanks to good reviews and decent word of mouth and may earn another $11 million after opening in the $26 million range last weekend.

Saturday’s numbers will be the tell here, with “Civil War” the most likely to steal first place from “Abigail” and those who would kill her.

With the fading appeal of comic book movies, one can see genre fatigue settling in. Filmmakers have run out of things to say and do in these films and their once-reliable audience is getting wise and — relatively speaking — moving on. They’re still making money, but they’re not guaranteed to make bank.

Horror fans haven’t all flocked to streaming. The big site Shudder has endured huge layoffs in recent years.

Is inflation chasing the horror crowd off? Movies are still a relative bargain, but did theater chains leap past a price point that makes younger viewers, teen couples and older fans of the genre wince?

There’s also the possibility that the audience is tired of these films, that at least part of that audience has outgrown the movies, and that big stinkers such as the latter “Halloweens” and endlessly recycled “Insidious” et al franchises have scared fans off.

I wonder. With studios setting up boutique nameplates such as Blumhouse, and reviving distributor brands just to service the horror side of the business, Hollywood has to be concerned, too.

“Godzilla x Kong” will pull in another $8.5 million and change, meaning that Dan Stevens stars in two thrillers (“Abigail”) in the top five this weekend.

A new anime release “Spy x Family Code: White” is drawing the anime faithful to the tune of $5 million or so. They’re showing this on a lot of IMAX screens, oddly enough.

The “Ghostbusters” and “Kung Fu Panda” sequels won’t crack the top five this weekend, and are finally fading away.

As always, I’ll update this post as other data comes in from Box Office Pro, deadline.come and others.

“The Roaring Twenties” is a summation of the classic “gangster movie” era, all rolled up into one swift, sprawling narrative.

Produced by THE gangster movie studio, Warner Brothers, released in that pinnacle cinematic year of 1939, we can look back at it now as heralding the end of one crime thriller era, with the more subtextual and highly-regarded film noir genre about to emerge.

It’s the final teaming of two of the great screen gangsters of the age, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. It has themes and threads that run through the cinema of that age and ages to come — social circumstances creating a criminal, a career and a “business” in the making, corruption and shifting values minimizing the nature of the crime and a powerful man trying to win a beautiful woman by making her a star.

Director Raoul Walsh would come to be seen as one of the masters of genre after this film, and the later “High Sierra” and “White Heat,” the latter Cagney’s greatest gangster picture, the former one of Bogart’s.

But compared to them, “The Roaring Twenties” can seem stodgy and dated — almost quaint. It has more in common with “Little Caesar” than the classics to come, a movie of newsreel/newspaper montage “history lessons” underscored by stentorian, lecturing voice-over narration.

“An era of amazing madness. Bootlegging has grown from small, individual effort to big business, embodying huge coalitions and combines.”

The sound-staginess of it all, with even World War I battlefields recreated indoors, and the sprint-through-the-era nature of the narrative seriously date the picture, dulling some of the impact of the tight performances and crackling dialogue.

But Cagney and Bogie, nearing equal stature and both behaving like it, pop off the screen, two movie tough guys going toe-to-toe one more time.

Eddie and George meet in a shell crater in France, one a working class New York guy “doing my bit,” the other a hardened mug, a cynic who may be figuring out he doesn’t mind this killing thing. “Harvard boy” Lloyd (Jeffrey Lynn) winds up in that hole with them, and all three characters are established with a few words and actions.

“Harvard” is rattled and gun-shy. George (Bogart) is harsh in his manhood/class-warfare judgments of him. Eddie (Cagney) isn’t having it.

“I don’t like heroes OR big mouths!”

Back home, Eddie finds an economy that isn’t adjusting in time to help returning doughboys. His female pen-pal (Priscilla Lane) turns out to be a high school girl who dresses older for roles in school plays.

His cabbie pal Danny (character player Frank McHugh) is the only one who might help with both his problems — a driving job, and a “maybe you can help her with her homework” crack about Miss Underage.

“Prohibition” is arriving, our narrator reminds us, without a hint of the moral and wartime logistical arguments that made banning liquor attractive in the late teens. Eddie, driving a cab, gets suckered into making an illegal booze drop-off. The club owner, Panama Smith (Gladys Smith, portraying a version of New York actress, “entrepreneur” and speak-easy owner Texas Guinan,) mixed up in the arrest gets off.

And that’s how Eddie gets a rap sheet and a foot in the door of the budding bootlegging business, which leads to an empire of “taxis” at his command, which leads to illicit hooch manufacturing, which puts him back in touch with hardened criminal George, who becomes a partner and rival, and not exactly in that order.

Eddie’s clout means he can seriously court the older but still young chorine Jean (Lane) and pay some people off to make her a star, even if the street-savvy and slightly older Panama might be more his speed. Panama thinks so.

“She seems like a nice kid,” a speak easy wag notices. “I hope she can out-talk him.”

“I hope she can outrun him,” Panama cracks with a sigh.

And that “Harvard” guy from the trenches of France? He’s a lawyer, a handy guy to know when you’re setting up a complex illegal business, not quite as handy when he crosses-over to the badly-corrupted law’s side, and starts making eyes at Eddie’s arm’s-length girlfriend.

A trio of writers took New York critic turned studio exec Mark Hellinger’s notion for a “Roaring” era gangster saga and peppered it with enough snappy dialogue to pass for a screwball comedy.

George complains about the partnership. “First, you used to ask me about things, then you began to tell me, now you ignore me. My feelin’s is gettin’ hurt.”

“Oh, my poor delicate little rose bud,” Eddie snarls.”Ain’t that a shame. Just as long as your bank roll ain’t hurtin’, you got nothing to squawk about.”

The best recommendation of this dated but very entertaining picture is the battle-among-equals nature of the Cagney/Bogart billing. Bogie was finally getting a foothold of stardom, and while Cagney was the energetic, charismatic dynamo of a lead, Bogart’s more internalized intensity draws attention to him in their scenes together.

The power imbalance of their earlier pairings, and much of Bogart’s supporting player career, is vanishing right before our eyes.

“The Roaring Twenties” was made just when this history was fresh, further removed from the Jazz Age than “Little Caesar,” arriving well into the Depression and end of Prohibition which unraveled some of the power of the booze-built gangs.

But Hellinger’s idea and Walsh’s riveting film based on it ensured that the narrator’s opening words would be the least prophetic ever uttered on screen.

The Twenties will never be “An era which will grow more and more incredible with each passing generation until someday people will say it never could have happened at all.”

Rating: approved, “TV-PG,” violence

Cast: James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Priscilla Lane, Gladys Smith, Paul Kelly, Jeffrey Lynn and Frank McHugh

Credits: Directed by Raoul Walsh, scripted by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:46

The two most beaten-to-death tropes in thrillers? “Serial Killers” and “Hit Men.”

Here’s a Richard Linklater “true story” movie about a college prof (Powell of “Anyone But You,” “Top Gun: Maverick”) whom the police use as a play-acting fake “hit-man” for would-be criminals trying to hire somebody as their murderer-for-hire.

This could be really clever, playing with the MOVIE stereotype of what a hit-man is like — urbane or Eastern European and soulless, world traveler or low-rent sociopath.

The most “accurate” hit man movie is probably “The Iceman,” a true story that depicted a dull, cruel and soulless mob murderer and “family man” played by Michael Shannon.

But the dunces hiring “a hit man” only know the hit-men in the movies — the Pierce Brosnan, Liam, Jean Reno “cleaners” and killers. That’s where “Hit Man” sets up shop.

June 7, the suddenly hot Powell makes his mark on Netflix.

The blood flows, “Swan Lake” plays on 78 rpm records and “tiny dancer” jokes abound in the revolting and funny “Abigail,” a “dead before dawn” thriller about a kid ballerina kidnap victim who turns out to be a vampire.

One and all mutter and even sometimes shout “WTF?” or the words that acronym stands for, and repeatedly, as that’s a natural human response to “What do we know about vampires?”

“That they aren’t real.”

Entirely too much of the tale is given away in the trailers, which causes this Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett film, scripted by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, to lumber out of the gate and take a while to get going. And there’s a lot of momentum-killing “explaining” in the second and third acts that stops the gory fun in its pointe-shoes tracks.

But as little Alisha Weir jetes and pirouettes through a kidnappers’ hide-away mansion that has become “a trap,” a mansion supposed to be somewhere in New York state but which the six kidnappers (Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, William Catlett and the late Angus Cloud) plainly race by the unique Samuel Beckett Bridge (in Dublin) in their getaway van to get to, one and all are reminded of the simple fact that there are few things on this Earth as terrifying as an entitled twelve year old girl.

And this one can’t be killed, or so it is said of the toothy undead.

We meet the kidnappers, “professionals” of varying degrees of professionalism, as they pull off the complicated kidnapping of a child, all alone in her mansion after she’s been deposited there by her chauffeur-driven Rolls after an evening of dancing “Swan Lake” in an empty and ornate opera house.

The man who hired them (Giancarlo Esposito) gives these “rats” “Reservoir Dogs” style nicknames — straight out of Sinatra’s “rat pack.”

There’s the “brains,” Frank (Stevens, just seen in the “Kong X Godzilla” movie), the blonde hacker Sammy (Newton, “Ant-Man’s” daughter, all grown up), the cluelessly hitting-on-the-women driver Dean (Cloud, of TV’s “Euphoria”), the dim-witted French Canadian muscle Peter (“Locke & Key” character actor Durand) and the sniper Rickles (Catlett of “Constellation”).

The only one with empathy has to be the ex-Army nurse, Joey (Melissa Barrera of the recent “Scream” reboot), in charge of sedating their quarry.

“It’s a 24 hour job,” Lambert (Esposito) reassures one and all. That $50 million ransom is as good as in the bag as “the hard part’s over.”

But we know it is. Oh yes we do. We’ve seen the trailers.

Referencing the Agatha Christie book originally titled “Ten Little Indians” is a cute inside joke, as all thrillers of this sort spin out of that killing-off-the-kidnapper/victims one by one, “And Then There Were None” formula.

The overarching joke is how this “tiny dancer” is such a monstrous, unstoppable killing machine. Kudos to Ms. Weir for getting across a personality in between the effects that give her oh-so-many teeth and cover her in gore. She’ll never be unemployed, from this day forward, so long as there are fan conventions where she can sign autographs and grin for selfies.

“I’m sorry about what’s about to happen to you.”

Stevens, the most oft-employed of the class of “Downton Abbey,” brings a snippy impatience to his “leader” role, with Durand grand at playing “dumb” muscle and the late Mr. Cloud rendering another version of an amusingly-dopey and tone-deaf stoner-villain.

Newton, Catlett and Esposito deliver what limited goods their characters are charged with carrying.

But Barrera, bringing back the ’70s shag haircut all by herself as “Joey” accidentally sets the horror in motion, and then tries to work-the-problem their way out of it, carries the picture. She is an arresting presence and a serious candidate for horror’s new “Scream Queen.”

Out of all the comical, panicked and despairingly serious “WTFs” delivered in this revolting romp, even after it stops romping, Barrera’s are the ones that make you go “indeed. What the eff can they do now?”

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Kathryn Newton, Giancarlo Esposito, Alisha Weir, Kevin Durand, Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Will Catlett, Matthew Goode and Angus Cloud.

Credits: Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, scripted by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick. A Univeral release.

Running time: 1:49

A driven and heartless tabloid photographer finally grasps why some cultures believe a photograph steals part of your soul in “Disappear Completely,” a cerebral and seriously stylish thriller from Mexico.

It’s a tale of supernatural comeuppance for a do-anything-for-the-shot mercenary who takes one scandal/tragedy/crime-scene photo too many.

Santiago (Harold Torres) is the first guy the cops he bribes calls when there’s a gory traffic crash, a murder with the corpse still warm or a scandal involving a public figure.

Their rule, thanks to the palms Santiago keeps greasing, is call Santiago, and once he’s on site THEN “call it in.”

He’s the guy who ducks under the crime scene tape, or climbs in through a window. Because even when he’s late getting there, he’s not leaving without a shot, the gorier the better.

His glib labels for the photos often make it into the headlines on the cover story his photos generate. An aged senator finds himself eaten alive by rats? Senator “Cheese Man” (in Spanish, with English subtitles) it is.

Nurse Marcela (Teté Espinoza), his live-in love of 14 years, can’t break his mania for staying on call, even on a supposed date night. Even their dog Zombie takes a back seat to Santiago’s hours sitting overnight in his VW Golf, listening to the scanner or waiting for cops Lupe or Catoche (Vicky Araico, Fermin Martinez) to call.

Sometimes, he’s beaten-up for doing his job. As long as he’s got the negatives — he shoots on film and digitally — that’s no great bother.

But that senator? That’s a body, a story and a scene that haunts Santiago. His first hallucination about it happens while he’s shooting it. That’s his first clue that it’s all about to come apart for him.

Director and co-writer Luis Javier Henaine (“Ready to Mingle” was his) puts a lot of craft and ambition on the screen with this story, which immerses us in Santiago’s twisted soul. He spies on Marcela at work comforting a teen suicide survivor, and photographs them. Then Henaine shows Santiago grappling with the consequences for what he’s done, that one photograph that he never should have taken — one of many he shouldn’t have taken.

When the police can’t help and the medical profession has no answers, Santiago takes advice from a superstitious policeman. And that’s when things turn seriously weird.

Henaine treats this entire tale as an odyssey, following Santiago through the looking-lens and into the dark corners of his psyche and the worst things he imagines might happen to him, some of which really do happen to him.

Torres (“Silent Night” and “Memory” were two Hollywood credits) makes Santiago compelling without being sympathetic, an ambitious man consumed by his art and his competitive drive, a guy who doesn’t want children but who doesn’t screw around when his livelihood — to say nothing of his physical well being — is threatened.

One clever conceit — an assault, by bug or “beast,” on his hearing is accompanied by an increasingly distorted and eventually even silent soundtrack.

The film, titled “Desaparecer Por Completo” in Mexico, mimics its director/co-writer’s ambition as Santiago dreams of his lurid night shots of the dead being shown in a gallery. Henaine has made a self-consciously artsy thriller, a Mexican “Night Crawler” with the supernaturalism and search for a “cure” a nasty new wrinkle in this study of the media creatures of the night.

Is “Disappear Completely” art? Sure. Kind of. Close enough.

And if its jolts are few, the chilling tone sells it as one of the smarter horror tales to come along of late, north or south of the border.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, horrific images, sex

Cast: Harold Torres, Teté Espinoza, José Manuel Poncelis, Vicky Araico, Fermin Martinez and Norma Reyna

Credits: Directed by Luis Javier Henaine, scripted by Ricardo Aguado-Fentanes and Luis Javier Henaine. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

“The Big Bend” is a classic “film festival movie.”

That’s a quirky indie with several elements that land it in lots of film festivals, where audiences who are down for anything new and novel might find and embrace it. Such movies often lack “name” stars, and generally find it hard to get the public’s attention outside of the rarefied air of Festival World. Many can’t even find distribution. But within their natural environment, word of mouth about their novelty gets around.

Brett Wagner’s movie has an arresting setting, the titular “Big Bend” region of Texas, a bucket list National Park for those of us into nature, scenic vistas and quiet. Into that gorgeous, forbidding and dangerous world, our writer-director tosses two families, each with their own “crisis,” and an escaped convict.

What Wagner finds to do with all this can be predictable and almost too-patiently presented, or surprising enough to make you go, “Wait, THAT’S an interesting turn. Where IS this headed now?”

Jason Butler Harner and Virginia Kull play Cory and Melanie, the “city” parents of two little girls, driving to the Big Bend to meet up with old college friends, Georgia (Erica Ash) and Mac (David Sullivan).

They’re all in their 30s, with Cory and Mel parenting two little girls and Mac and Georgia trying to tame two little boys.

Mac has fixed up a remote homestead in the park-adjacent middle of nowhere, with big dreams of renting it out, buying more land and duplicating that “off the grid” vacation experience “for Austin hipsters.” Mac has a lot of “big dreams,” we gather.

Cory and Melanie have a secret or two they’ve decided not to share as it might spoil this pleasant visit. Georgia and Mac might have a secret as well.

Unbeknownst to them all, a bearded convict (Nick Masciangelo) has escaped from prison, wounded and on the run, or on a canoe, which is where we first see him. There’s a region-wide manhunt underway.

Foreshadowing? Well, this very nice remodel is hobbled by an ancient, thumping water heater. There’s “no cell” out here, which is why when they venture out, walkie talkies are the comms of choice.

“Is there a gun in the house?” Melanie asks, a tad too obviously thanks to the screenplay.

And then there’s the list of all the things to “watch out for” in the desert. “Snakes and cacti,” Mac’s list begins. “Scorpions,” a child pipes up. “Mountain lions” another adds. “Black bears!”

This screenplay is textbook — create characters, flesh them out, set up a smorgasbord of jeopardies facing them, then picking and choosing which ticking time bombs to set off.

Not every idea pans out and not every scene reaches a payoff that we see on camera.

But this film’s slow, deliberate opening acts immerse us in this beautiful place and the somewhat troubled people in it, and then finds a way to throw into crisis and conflicts that can be surprising, or at least narratively defensible and somewhat satisfying.

Not bad. And now you don’t even have to go to a film festival to visit “The Big Bend.”

Rating: unrated

Cast: Jason Butler Harner, Virginia Kull, Erica Ash, David Sullivan and Nick Masciangelo.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brett Wagner. An Eammon Films release.

Running time: 1:43

The wee ballerina with the ever-so-sharp teeth tale looks to be a classic “Ten Little Indians,” Who will survive her thriller, with splatter film bloodletting.

The names in the cast some will recognize will include young Kathryn Newton, pretty Melissa Barrera, veteran Giancarlo Esposito, Kevin Durand and the estimable Matthew Goode and works-all-the-time Dan Stevens.

Very young Alisha Weir has the title role, bless her heart.

Very curious to see how “Abigail” performs when it opens Thursday (tomorrow at this writing) night, as horror has had a general fall-off in viewership this winter and spring. With comic book movies slipping in quality and appeal and dropping off of release slates, could we be seeing a shift in theatrical release audiences?

Guy Ritchie’s “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a jaunty burlesque of the conventions of the combat commando film.

Peopled with genuine characters, in every meaning of that phrase, and a piece of the real history that inspired Ian Fleming to create James Bond, it’s a light, bloody-minded vamp of 007, and maybe the closest we’ll ever get to seeing Henry Cavill, at his dashing, flippant best, in a James Bond film.

The history is, well, close enough to get by. The militaria is just off enough for ordnance and tactics buffs to turn the anachronisms and far-fetched derring do into a drinking game.

Think of it has a more lighthearted “Dirty Dozen,” a “Navarone” tale with laughs, a “Kelly’s Heroes” with a character who likes to carve the hearts out of his Nazi prey.

Set in early (but never wintry) 1942, the last year the outcome of the war was really in doubt, it’s about a Churchill (Rory Kinnear) backed acknowledgement that “Hitler does not play by the rules, so neither are we.”

Over the objections of defeatists in his war cabinet (?), he pushes Brigadier Gubbins, aka the first “M” (Cary Elwes) to form a team to disrupt the Germans’ plans to resupply their U-Boats and turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic.

There’s this Spanish possession off West Africa, Fernando Po, where a merchant ship, the Duchesa, and two tugboats are stocking up to head out to resupply wolf packs of submarines. “M” figures he has just the man for the job…in prison.

Captain Gus March-Philips (Cavill) is a bearded rogue and a charmer, who cadges cigars and good whisky and the privilege of hand-picking his team from M and M’s assistant, young Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox, of “Black 47,” son of famed British actor Edward Fox of “Day of the Jackal”).

He’ll need an arsonist-turned-underwater-demo expert (Henry Golding), an Irishman with sea experience (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and a hulking sadistic brute of a Swede (Alan Ritchson, who all but steals the picture).

That guy with inside knowledge of U-Boat ops and this resupply mission (Alex Pettyfer)? They’ll have to break him out of a German jail on the Canary Islands on their way, sailing a two-masted schooner south to the equatorial island.

March-Philips is so persuasive he has but to note “I’ve got to get a coat like that” for it to magically turn up in his possession. Friend or foe are helpless to his persuasion, whatever form it takes.

Eiza González of “Baby Driver” is a female spy of allure and nerve, and Babs Olusanmokun of the first “Dune” movie and TV’s “Star Trek” Strange New Worlds” is the African casino/club owner who works with her on the island to pave the way for the commandos.

Til Schweiger is the particularly sadistic German in charge of the resupply base.

“The only thing worse than a Nazi is him.”

This crew must shoot, with silenced Bren guns and bow and arrow, and punch and kick and stab-stab-stab their way through a lot of Nazis. Somebody’s going to sultrily croon “Mack the Knife” to entertain the “sausage and sauerkraut and black bread” eaters. And somebody’s on the lookout for a Gestapo overcoat in just his size.

Here we are and here we go. Review to post by 11 Eastern if I’m lucky.

(The review is now live, posted here).