Movie Nation

Movies that look as if the cast had too much fun making them are often cursed. But “Repo Man,” a cult sci-fi comedy from 1984, has long been the exception to that rule.

Loopy to the point of gonzo, scruffy in every important way, filmmaker Alex Cox conjured up punk rock sci-fi, a film that was Reagan-backlash political, more energetic than polished, more mouthy and goofy than smart.

And everybody in it, from star-on-the-rise Emilio Estevez to veteran character actor Tracey Walter and Blaxploitation alumna Vonetta McGee, gives every indication that they’re having a blast in a movie that feels “We’re-making-it-up-as-we-go” rash.

That was the year Harry Dean Stanton became a cult “star” in his own right, graduating from small, Southern working class bit parts in decades of TV episodes and films, from “Cool Hand Luke” and “Straight Time” to “Alien,” to leading man in “Paris, Texas” and as the sketchy LA “repo man” Bud, who insists that even he lives by a “code.”

“I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof, nor through inaction let the personal contents thereof come to harm!”

Cox, a Brit not long out of film school, got the richest and “hippest” member of The Monkees (Mike Nesmith) to produce his low-budget script, rounded-up the seediest LA locations he could find (with the obligatory trek to the highway through Joshua Tree) and a low-cost but “cool” cast and he was off.

Because who wouldn’t want to be in an action comedy about a nutty scientist (Fox Harris) on the lam from Roswell in a ’64 Chevy Malibu with something strange and deadly in the trunk, a car that becomes the target of every Repo Man — car repossessors working for loan companies — in greater L.A.?

As competitors snatch and grab that Malibu, the movie becomes an amusingly deadly game of “Who’ll look in the trunk?” and “Who do we HOPE looks in the trunk?”

Estevez plays Otto, an earringed “punk” and stocker at a local supermarket, a rebel without a cause. He quits on a profane whim, and that leaves him vulnerable to a hustle from a guy who needs his “help” getting his car to the hospital because his wife is having a baby.

Bud (Stanton) tells the stupidest lies imaginable to convince gullible Otto to get this car and follow him in while stranger Bud drives “my wife’s car.” Otto’s spent too much time in the mosh pit to think much of anything through.

Otto “ain’t gonna be no repo man,” when he learns what he’s just done. But he’s taken cash and swiped a car on behalf of the Helping Hands Acceptance Corp.

“It’s too late. You already are.”

Walter, a character “type” who’d been in “Goin’ South” and “Raggedy Man,” is the repo lot mechanic and resident conspiracy nut Mitchell.

“You know how everybody’s into weirdness right now?”

McGee is the two-fisted office manager, with repo men Bud (Stanton) and Lite (Sy Richardson) serving as Otto’s mentors. Bud Lite will not lead him astray.

Otto picks up a fleeing young woman (Olivia Barash) who turns out to be a free spirit. Sex in a repossessed Caddy Eldorado? Don’t mind if I DO. But she’s on the run because “they” are after her, men in suits who want to know what she knows. Because the United Fruitcake Outlet (UFO) where she works is deep into UFOlogy and hip to the scientist, the Malibu and what might be in the trunk.

Otto keeps crossing paths with punk pals Archie (Miguel Sandoval), Debbi (Jennifer Balgobin) and Duke (Dick Rude) who are in the midst of a smalltime robbery/car-jacking spree.

“Let’s do some crimes!” “Yeah, let’s go get sushi and not pay!”

Forty years after its release, “Repo Man” plays like a snapshot of its era, from the punk nihilism that rose to the fore with Reaganism to the still-seen-on-punks haircuts and fashions and a fleet of aging-poorly hot-wireable cars from America’s “Malaise Motors” era.

Of course Otto is homophobic and not shy about slinging slurs. Of course the bad guys are “Men and Women) in Black” before “Men in Black” were a thing. Of course it’s more cinematic to not show us what’s actually in that Malibu trunk. Saved money, too.

Like many a cult film, “Repo Man” is meant to be watched with an audience of fellow cultists. Soberly seen outside of that cinema drafthouse environment, many of the jokes and gags still land, and some do not. When you’ve been imitated by many films and performers over the years, the “fresh” in your humor sours.

There are stretches when the only thing propelling this forward and giving it any pace is the Tito Larriva and The Plugz Latino punk/surf rock score, which sounds like Dick Dale went Tex Mex.

But that sense of the fun that the cast must have been having pops up in the odd improvised line or scene, and in moments that have a hint of “giddy” about them as various players pile into or out of this car or that one.

The best running gag isn’t about aliens, it’s about the guys this movie is built around — repo men facing off with the rival Rodriguez Brothers (Del Zamora and Eddie Velez). If Zander Schloss’s nerdy turn as a fellow grocery store stocker looks and sounds like the template for “Napoleon Dynamite,” Zamora and Velez prefigure “The Jesus” in “Big Lebowski.”

Cox was definitely onto something here, making a movie about an unsavory, careless and adrenalin-fueled profession which he’d worked in briefly to make ends meet. He’d go on to try his hand at something almost “mainstream” (“Sid & Nancy”) before settling into a succession of hit-or-mostly-miss cult films, more than one a pale imitation of this one.

Estevez would go on to lead “The Mighty Ducks” and start directing himself.

And Harry Dean Stanton? He’d roll down that dusty road towards “legend,” collecting a devoted worldwide following — including cool filmmakers — who’d ensure he’d always work, he’d get his share of big parts, and that fans would go hunting for him in everything he made before he donned a wrinkled suit, took a deep toot off some banned substance, and got to work.

“I don’t want no commies in my car! No Christians either!”

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity, homophobic slurs

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash, Sy Richardson, Fox Harris, Del Zamora, Eddie Velez, Jennifer Balgobin, Fox Harris and Vonetta McGee

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Cox. A Universal release now on Netflix, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:32

A Mother-Child coming-of-age drama about coming of age depressed, and a mother led out of depression by, perhaps, her little girl?

It’s a period piece set in 1991 and therefor a “personal” tale by actress, turned writer and now first-time feature writer-director Annie Baker, who is married to Noah Baumbach’s actor brother Nico.

You’d think Dev Patel’s Indian outing as a Subcontinental “John Wick” would be the fanboy film of the month, with epic action, bloody brawls and a wicked, droll humor levening it’s almost non stop beat downs.

Good reviews, great word of mouth, a popular Anglo Indian star and director, you’d think “Monkey Man” would blow up the box office. But I guess fanboys are as afraid of a few subtitles as everybody else.

“Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire” proves  they’ll show up with anything that has “Empire” in the title. Its digital monster mashing its way to a $31.7 million second weekend and an easy win at the box office.

Based on a so so Thursday night and a half decent  Friday and middling Sat. and Sunday, “Monkey Man” will manage only $10.1 or so.

What the hell? Get online, order your tickets and change that outcome, kids. It’s good and there aren’t that many subtitles, you big babies.

This “Ghostbusters” sequel has “Empire” in the title which means the lemmings are still showing up. Another $9 million or so this weekend.

“The First Omen” earned more generous reviews than mine, by and large. It’s considered and quasi-arty and not awful — very good cast and a top drawer performance by Nell Tiger Free from “Game of Thrones.” But it’s frightfully dull, and yet that “Omen” franchise tag means it is opening at twice what Neon’s bomb of a nun in horror peril thriller “Immaculate” managed –$8.3 million. “Omen” took away “Immaculate” screens. Sorry Sydney.

“Kung Fu Panda 4” is still fishing and serving to the tune of $7.85 million, although it has  limited release animated competition (“Epic Tails?”) this weekend. Title I’ve never heard of.

These figures reflect Sunday afternoon reporting from @TheNumbers or if you prefer the.numbers.com.

I’m not sure of the reaction “across the pond” to the journalism-in-action drama “Scoop,” an account of how the BBC landed its monarchy-rocking intervew that proved the utter undoing of then-Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.

On this side of the Atlantic, it seems well cast and well-acted, but fundmentally misguided, dry and heartless.

The analogies one can see here make it a lightweight “Frost/Nixon,” an emotionally adrift “The Queen” and a “Spencer” with performances but no punch. None.

Rufus Sewell‘s uncanny interpretation/impersonation of the 60ish (when he was interviewed) Andrew, friend of Jeffrey Epstein even AFTER his first conviction of crimes connected to connected to procuring underage girls for prostitution, is the chief recommendation of this bland drama from the director of TV’s “The Crown” and “Catherine the Great.”

Sewell makes the guy a charming, jokey creep, whose worst sin on camera might have been his aloof dismissal of the most pointed accusations, and his blithe disregard of the gravity of it all.

“I really don’t understand why everyone’s obsessed with my friendship with Jeffrey Epstein,” he cracks in the meeting made to set up the interview. “I knew Jimmy Savile so much better.”

Nothing like laughing off your association with an American pedophile by mentioning your connection with an infamous British one.

The film is based on a book by the show-booker for the BBC’s “News Night,” whose producer (Romola Garai) likes referring to their in-depth interviews, conducted by seasoned and self-serious Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), as “forensic.”

They’re that serious. It’s their brand.

The film’s fundamental flaw may be in its point of view, as it’s mostly told through the eyes of that booker-author, Sam McAlister/ She’s played by Billie Piper as a single mom who isn’t really fitting in at the stodgy, posh but budget-strapped and layoff-prone BBC.

“She’d very ‘Daily Mail,'” aka downmarket, argumentative and gossipy, a segment producer says of her. But Sam is the one with the contacts with the first “pap” (paparazzo) to stalk Andrew on “the last” of his New York visits to the brothel Epstein was running out of his East 71st townhouse. She’s the one with the contact “inside the palace,” the scandalized Duke’s press liaison (Keeley Hawes).

And she’s the palace contacts when the scandal, that simmers for a decade of “no comment,” seems to overwhelm the Duke’s “good works” and makes him want to tidy up his image. That’s exactly the moment that the authorities finally swoop in on the sex trafficker Epstein and Prince Andrew’s “problem that won’t go away” becomes a crisis.

The film shows Sam’s recognition that the teens on her double-decker bus-ride home are the same age as Epsteins “nubiles,” “warehoused” in Manhattan and on his “sex island. That’s supposed to raise the stakes of the crime, humanize the tragedy and generate revulsion. It falls flat.

The most exciting sequence opens the picture as that pap (Connor Swindells) stalks and struggles to get that one damning shot of Andrew and Epstein together in 2010, nine years before events lead to that infamous interview.

Anderson adds another fine real-life Brit characterization to her resume, capturing the privilege, ego and performative journalism of a quietly relentless interviewer who knows she has to get the questions right, and in the right order, to make this weakest of the Windsors hang himself with his words on camera.

But an American watching this is entitled to puzzle over why the “scoop” matters more than the allegations, and the press coverage — almost limited here to Britain’s state TV — minimizes the victims as it gins up outrage at that moment’s most infamous royal.

Sewell is the best reason to see this, if not the only one. He allows us to watch this interview as it unfolds and Andrew thinks he’s doing fine, even when he starts making denials based on claims that he hasn’t “perspired” since the Falklands War (valor shaming) and admitting nothing more than “bad judgment” in making and keeping friends.

Sewell’s Andrew isn’t an idiot. But he elevates tone-deafness to a cardinal sin, and gives us the impression that he might blame his beloved mother for the diffident creeper he turned out to be, no matter how good a “judge of character” his “mummy” always claimed to be, especially when it came to her “favorite.”

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Gillian Anderson, Billie Piper, Keeley Hawes, Romala Garai and Rufus Sewell

Credits: Directed by Philip Martin, scripted by Geoff Bussetil and Peter Moffat, based on a book by Sam McAllister. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

They gather, boarded for a week at college campuses in all 50 states — smart, bright competitive teenage girls selected to participate in one of America’s oldest mock-government institutions.

The young women of each state’s “Girls State” debate issues, campaign for their version of statewide elected offices and state supreme court seats in a microcosm of American democracy, one sponsored for both boys (Boys State) and girls by the conservative veteran’s organization The American Legion since before World War II.

The filmmakers behind the 2020 documentary about a new generation (of Texas boys) embracing America’s political divide, “Boys State,” found another flashpoint political moment at their feet when they rolled camera in Saint Charles, Missouri, where Missouri’s boys gathered for their Boy’s State and the girls of Missouri’s “Girls State” convened.

Because on the cusp of summer, 2022, America was roiled over the “leaked” upcoming Supreme Court ruling that took overturned the Roe vs. Wade decision and stripped women of a hard-won privacy/bodily-autonomy right they’d enjoyed for 50 years.

Filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss were on campus — at Lindenwood University — and in a position to document a “Big Change a’Coming” moment. Girls State, with its matching t-shirt teens, group cheers, “Girls State Song” and “fake” campaigns that amount to contests about “good public speaking” and a relatability popularity contest, would be a deep Red State test of just what the next generation of voters would be talking about and how they’d react.

We meet Emily Worthmore, a hyper-focused go-getter with three goals — “President of the United States in 2040,” “broadcast journalist” or rock stardom — on her agenda. The willowy blonde comes off as pleasant, confident, smart and calculating.

Maybe this isn’t the best year to run for Girls State governor as a “conservative” who talks up her “Christian” upbringing and values. So Emily soft sells that.

Tochi Ihekona, the daughter of Nigerian immgrants, acknowedges that she might be “the first Black person” many of these mostly small-town white girls “have any interaction with,” but hopes for the best.

Faith Glasgow talks about her political conversion and passion. Big city (St. Louis) teen Cecilia Bartin seems even more outspoken about the Big Issue, and relishing the chance to talk about it with similarly-engaged peers.

Nisha Murali longs to land a supreme court seat because whatever legislators and governors cannot manage to do, “They (justices) make the decisions” that impact everyone.

McBaine and Moss interview their chosen subjects (out of 500 girls) and still manage to come close to “fly on the wall” cinema verite documentary filmmaking as they work the convention and track the interactions of seven girls there.

They overhear one argument that ends with “I’m not going to dislike you for your political beliefs.” We hear the just-met you “I’m gay” — “I’m bi, but I have a boyfriend” chatter that has tested a generation of parents, especially in conservative states like Missouri.

And they see a learning curve. Boys State is assembled on the same campus at the same time. The girls can’t help but note that the boys don’t have to have a “buddy” to walk around campus with, that the governor swears in the Boys State winner, and “THEY have no dress code.”

“Last time I checked,” firebrand Cecilia thunders, “women knew how to dress themselves!“

The girls have been kept in “traditional” stereotypical roles, with “public health” and other non-controversial “issues” as the source of their debates, thanks to supervision by an ever-shrinking, ever-more-reactionary veteran’s organization. And even the conservative Emily notices it.

With Roe about to go down, bubbles of outrage and passionately-held opinions will be expressed. And just wait until they find out the budgetary difference between the two separate and unequal “states.”

The worst thing about keeping a cinephile’s bucket list is that you never know what you’ve been missing until you hunt for something you know you’ve missed.

“Brute Force” might be the greatest prison break movie from the film noir era.

It stars Burt Lancaster and a near Who’s Who of the great character actors of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

It was scripted by Richard Brooks, who had launched star Lancaster’s career by adapting Hemingway for “The Killing,” and who went on to script “In Cold Blood,” “Elmer Gantry, “Blackboard Jungle,” $Dollars,” “The Professionals” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”

Director Jules Dassin first showed his flash and flair with this film, and would go on to make “Topkapi,” “The Naked City,” “Rififi,””Night and the City” and “Never on Sunday.” Dassin ensured “Brute Force” would both live-up to its title, with inmate rough justice for “stool pigeons” and sadistic guard rubber-hosing and wanton mass shooting. But Dassin and Brooks tuck that brutality into a film of poetic dialogue and lovely grace notes.

“Everything’s OK? What’s OK? NOTHING’S OK. It never was and never will be until we’re out. GET that? OUT!”

The flawless compositions, with Garbo’s favorite cinematographer William H. Daniels’ camera work that takes us into an inmate-administered “execution” and hurls us into a riot in the yard make this film the epitome of “genre picture” as art.

My favorite touch? Casting singer and actor Sir Lancelot as a calypso singing Greek chorus, fleshing out character introductions and situations by tossing out this inmate’s (scripted) DIY verse explaining many a moment.

Lancaster’s Joe Collins comes out of solitary, and “Calypso” hints at what’s to come, and happen to the stoolie who put him there.

“My ol’friend Joe was in de hole, it was worse from where dey diggin’ coal. He comes out holdin’ very high his head, and the man to blame, soon be very dead!”

The athletic Lancaster’s Joe is one of the toughest and most powerful inmates at overcrowded Westgate Penitentiary. He doesn’t have to lift a finger, once he’s out of solitary. His five adoring cellmates — played by character acting legends John Hoyt, Jeff Corey and Whit Bissell, including the short-lived character mug Jack Overman as an ex-boxer and “introducing” Howard Duff, who’d make his mark as well — tell him “We’ve made arrangements.”

The prison is, as most prisons always are, a political football, packed and roiled with violence with an ineffectual warden (Roman Bohnen) at a loss and a higher-up telling him to “keep it under control” because “We don’t want to be bothered any more.”

Sadistic Capt. Munsey (Hume Cronyn, pint-sized evil) has his own way of doing things. Cross him and you end up digging “the drain pipe,” a tunneling job that’s basically a death sentence. Inmates have “accidents” around Munsey.

Joe wants out. Joe’s always wanted out. But things have to turn a tad more dire before his whole cell and the white-haired senior man in the yard (Charles Bickford) will buy into a scheme that starts to half-form in his and others’ heads.

I’ve watched quite a few Korean films over the years, and since cinema is an international language working with most of the same dramatic tropes, genres, conventions and plots, I’ve never had much trouble categorizing what I was watching or keeping up with the plot.

Kim Bong-han’s “The Wild,” a gangster film of old allegiances, old grudges, guilt and double crosses, tests that universal “coherence” belief.

It’s a violent revenge thriller with a whiff of “atonement” for one’s sins woven in. Easy enough to understand. But it’s absurdly chatty (in Korean with subtitles) and thin on explanation for who the various characters are and their relationship to each other, or at at the very least, slow to deliver that information.

A character or characters go by different names, always a problem for viewers dropping in from another culture on your Korean crime drama. Then there’s the many MANY spellings of character names and actor names on various websites (IMDb), which differ from how they appear on the subtitles.

Just watching it, from its prison release opening to the flashbacks to the crime that put our anti-hero behind bars, to various schemes and alliances set in motion to the bloody finale, would challenge any non-Korean, and perhaps a few folks from or on the Peninsula, too. But try taking notes so that you can keep it and “them” straight, as a critic must do.

The fights are furious, there’s a heartbreaking rape scene, and something just short of a wholly satisfactory finale delivers its message of redemption. But man, tying it all together is never more than an afterthought.

Park Sung-woong of “Hunt”stars as Woo-cheol, an ex-boxer we meet on the day he gets out of prison. His old running mates are there to greet him, backslap him for doing the time, ply him with drinks and make plans, plans which he smiles and seems to dismiss.

Woo-cheol once worked with gangsters, and had a hand in helping his childhood friend Jang Do Shik (Oh Dae-hwan) get rich through fixed fights. Do Shik is now “President Jang,” running gambling, prostitution and drug smuggling operations with the help of Kang (Jung Soo-Kyo) and the fishing boat smuggling gang led by Gak-su (Oh Dal-su).

President Jang accomplishes all this because he has inside help. But the Det. Cho (“Jo” on IMDb), played by Joo Suk-tae (“The Hard Day,” “The Great Battle”) is a drug addict and a sadist who loves beating prostitutes half-to-death. He’s a “problem” that Jang must contend with.

And when Woo-cheol rescues sex-worker Bom (Seo Ji-Hye), whom he’s met as a getting-out-of-prison “present” from Jang, and beats the hell out of the stoned detective, that “problem” gets even more complicated.

With lots of moving parts, many figures pursuing their own agendas and mutual mistrust all around, there’s little chance that smiling, quiet, remorseful Woo-cheol will get his wish of just living “a quiet life,” maybe signing on to a ship for a long work-voyage.

It would have been helpful to know this druggy-brute, shooting-up and torturing hookers, was a cop before well into the movie’s middle acts. Relationships are seriously under-explained early on, leaving me a bit unmoored as Woo-cheol is coered back in for muscle and negotiating help with the untrusting smuggler gang.

We can understand why the filmmaker would hide the fact that hooker-Bom isn’t who she seems.

But the betrayals and back-stabbing seems to come out of nowhere, the shifting allegiances hard to follow and the cluster of characters tossed into the opening scenes only truly understood by late in the second or early in the third act, make everything that’s going on in the interim something of a muddle.

Writer-director Kim stages some epic beat-downs and brawls, with knives and cleavers the weapon of choice among many. A lot of characters test the ex-boxer, and learn the error of their ways.

Through it all, leading man Park maintains a quiet stoicism that holds it all together. More or less. But that turns out to be a pretty tall order for a simple-enough-genre thriller whose director is hellbent on sowing confusion and creating narrative chaos for a huge portion of his picture.

Rating: unrated, rape, bloody violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Park Sung-woong, Joo Suk-tae, Seo Ji-Hye, Jung Soo-Kyo, Oh Dal-su and Oh Dae-hwan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kim Bong-han. A Well Go USA/Hi-Yah! release.

Running time: 1:50

Giancarlo Esposito…my FAVORITE, and Kathryn Newton and Dan “Downton was a LOoooong Time Ago” Stevens co-star in the bloody-minded comic thriller.

The second trailer teases more of the action. The plot? All we need to know is why these nice folks (Kevin Durand, Matthew Goode, Melissa Barrera, Angus Cloud) ended up having this ballerina-vampire to contend with.

April 19.

In cinephile shorthand, “The First Omen” comes off as an homage to the gory cinema of Dario Argento as imagined by someone who’s only heard descriptions of the famous/infamous Caravaggio of motion picture horror.

For a cynical, “Let’s milk this intellectual property for all its worth” exercise, this fifth film in the “Omen” franchise is self-consciously artistic, gruesomely grisly, and almost wrestling with big issues — abortion, the collapse of Catholicism and a plot to “bring people back to the Church” by scaring them via the Antichrist.

And it’s built around a riveting performance by”Game of Thrones” alumna Nell Tiger Free, as a nun new to a Roman orphanage and hospital where Satan’s spawn might be born.

The film is a prequel to the iconic 1976 Gregory Peck/Lee Remick thriller about a couple raising a little boy named Damien, whom they don’t realize is the Antichrist.

Set in 1971, this “”First Omen” meanders between the cheap-jolts filmmaker Arhasha Stevenson must have been contractually-obligated to provide. The plot is Byzantine, but can’t avoid predictable tropes and situations and “twists” of the genre.

Yet with Bill Nighy as an Archbishop, Charles Dance and Ralph Ineson as priests on opposite “sides” of whatever is going on, with Sonia Braga as a stern and sary nun in charge of the orphanage, you can’t write the film’s ambitions off.

An investigating priest (Ineson) finds his way to an aged cleric (Dance) with the message, “Hiding won’t absolve your sins.” The old priest was mixed-up in a conspiracy that the younger one is trying to unravel.

In Rome, the once-orphaned American Margaret (Free) has arrived to the warm embrace of the Archbishop (Nighy) who sponsored her to be a novitiate at the convent that runs Roman Catholic orphanage and hospital.

She is “taking the veil” in 1971 Rome, where unrest has workers on the streets, as it was in many European capitals. Youth are protesting the Vietnam War and out-of-touch governments everywhere. People “are turning away from the church in droves,” in part because of its ancient rituals, but also thanks to its historical/institutional connection to money, power, dictatorships and authoritarian politics.

And weird things are going on in that hospital. A disturbed teen who draws nightmarish visions of how she sees the world is kept isolated from the others. Treatments and punishments are done behind closed doors.

When now-defrocked Father Brennan (Ineson) gets Margaret’s attention, he tries to enlist her help in finding “proof” of his suspicions, that the Church is manufacturing a crisis to save itself from an indifferent world.

Director Stevenson, tapped to make his feature filmmaking debut with an episode of TV’s “Legion” his most significant credit, treats us to faintly-chilling settings, to shadows and extreme closeups, and a riveting meltdown turn by Free, as Margaret cannot believe what she’s discovering and lives in terror at what her role in it all might be.

The few effects are grisly and old-school shocking, and the period detail — novice nuns enjoying a bit of Roman nightclubbing before they “hide this body (theirs) forever,” getting caught up in marches and riots — is spot on.

But this “Omen” lurches between “dull” and “soul-sucking boredom” more often than any edit or re-edit could fix. The tedium sets in as the pacing slacks, and as the pacing slackens off the stakes are lowered.

There’s little of the “Future of Humanity” urgency of the 1976 Richard Donner film, released after “The Exorcist” and “Rosemary’s Baby” got an increasingly secular world all worked-up over the Devil and what he might do to get our attention.

This script gets so wrapped up in the back-engineering of the story, the nuts and bolts of “There is a beast they’re making,” that it loses track of just how shocking that might have seemed, then and now.

And the shocks themselves are less shocking than you’d hope, and far too few in number.

But to her credit, the cast, especially Nell Tiger Free, never lets on that the terror isn’t real. She never loses her commitment to the character’s reality, even when the picture is serving up the trite, tried and true pro forma epilogue of many an “historic” horror saga.

If only the film around these players had been more worthy of their efforts.

Rating: R, violent content, grisly/disturbing images, and brief graphic nudity.

Cast: Nell Tiger Free, Ralph Ineson, Sonia Braga, Maria Caballero, Charles Dance and Bill Nighy.

Credits: Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, scripted by Tim Smith, Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 2:00

A “YA” best-seller drowns in the lazy screenwriter’s worst enemy, endless “VO” of the lead character, constantly telling us her innermost thoughts, in “The Tearsmith,” a tale of orphans who reach puberty bonded by more than just shared trauma.

The constant eye contact and personal space violations just tease out what we know is coming. His protests to “Keep her away from me” (in Italian, or dubbed into English) can’t hide his hunger.And her professed loathing doesn’t disguise her longing.

It’s a pity they’ve been adopted out as brother and sister.

Some clever young adult novelist taking the nom de plume Erin Doom wrote this turgid melodrama, which has been translated into 26 languages so far. But director and co-writer Alessandro Genovesi (“My Big Gay Italian Wedding,” “When Mom is Away”) treats the novelist’s every word like Old Testament Truths. The film is voice-over narrated to death.

“I wanted to wash away his sadness.” “So many times I was unable to feel the raw detachment that I wish I could.”

Voice-over narration takes the film out of the hands of the actors, who could SHOW us literally every emotion, reaction and consideration the author presents as interior monologue on the written page. It’s the crutch Genovesi and co-screenwriter Eleanora Fiorini use to beat this slight but forbidden fruit-edgy teen romance to death.

We meet tween Nica on the day her parents are killed in a crash on a road trip. Her mother had just told her “The wolf is just the villain (in fairy tales) because somebody said so.”

The words will haunt her, and turn up in that voice-over once or twice, as Nica — named for a butterfly — is sent to a Gothic orphanage where cruel Miss Margaret reigns.

It takes years for this damaged child (played by Caterina Ferioli) to be adopted out, time enough for her to make friends among her fellow orphans, and make one enemy for life.

Rigel (Simone Baldassari) is a piano prodigy, a brooding, pale, mop-topped hunk with voluptuous lips and faraway eyes. All Nica can think of when he’s around is her mother’s necklace, which he snatched off her neck on Miss Margaret’s orders the day she arrived.

Then a family takes her in, and just as they’re leaving on the day they pick her up, they stop — transfixed by the soulful piano stylings of the boy named for a star.

Next thing she knows, Nica’s escape from this institution whose inmates nicknamed it “Grave” is ruined because she’s to finish her teens in the company of her tormentor.

“Moth,” Rigel calls the butterfly-named Nica.

Rigel has a scary intensity, and that shows itself in violence at school, where he busts up a school bully and tries to intimidate the boys who are drawn to Nica like you-know-whats to a flame.

As she makes friends and gets the attention of even more boys, Nica starts to ponder just why she hates Rigel, how that started, and if it was ever fair. And he’s easy on the eyes. As their “parents” are formalizing the adoption process, her love/lust timing could not be worse.

“The Tearsmith,” taking its title from a nightmarish fairytale figure whom Nica accuses Rigel of being, with Rigel returning the accusation, draws out this long mating ritual, giving us clues about just what went on in that orphange and how everybody who spent too much time there is “broken” — most too broken to cry.

Like a lot of Italian teen romances and sex-comedies made for Netflix, “Tearsmith” is a little titillating, but never terribly interesting. The characters are bland archetypes, right down to their haircuts.

One curious thing about it is how the story’s timeframe is handled. The fashions and the 1970s Jeep Wagoneer that Nica’s parents are driving when they crash suggests she’s a tween 50 or so years ago. The later teen scenes show us 1980s cars, and older ’70s models, in the background. That works.

And then somebody pulls out a cell phone. For all the YAs out there unaware of this, there were no “smart phones” in the ’80s or even the ’90s.

It’s not enough to make you write off the entire enterprise. But it does add to the unreality of it all, with all that voice-over, all that torpid dialogue — “I beg of you.” “This path is nothing but thorns!” The chest heaving performances are sort of “Twilight Lite.”

The lack of surprises, the contrived nature of the conflicts that turn into love connections and the cumbersome voiced-over-to-death technique and the abandonment of the whole “tearsmith” metaphor render this potential teen tearjerker nothing to cry over.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Caterina Ferioli, Simone Baldassari, Alessandro Bedetti and Nicky Passsarella

Credits: Directed by Alessandro Genovesi, scripted by Eleanora Fiorini and Alessandro Genovesi, based on the novel by Erin Doom. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46