Movie Nation

Before you write a script or even a plot, you have a “conceit,” and before you can make your movie, you have a “pitch.” And it’d better be a killer.

That’s all “It’s a Wonderful Knife” is — a conceit and a pitch without much of a movie as a result.

It a slasher thriller re-imagining of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a clever-enough conceit. Let’s see what life would be like if the girl who saved her family and her town from a Nut with a Knife “had never been born.”

That idea was enough to attract two “names” to the cast — Justin Long and Joel McHale. And that pitch, with them attached, got this half-baked project before the cameras and before it was fully baked into something that might be worth watching.

Jane Widdup of “Yellowjackets” plays winsome Winnie, perky Angel Falls High School junior with a boyfriend, a passion for photography, loving parents (McHale and Erin Boyes) and a gay star quarterback brother, Jimmy (Aiden Howard).

Dad works for the local rich guy/mayor (Long) who is gambling it all on a big development he just HAS to pull off. That’s how an old homeowner and holdout winds up dead, along with his granddaughter, Winnie’s bestie Carol (Hanna Huggins).

But plucky Winnie saves herself, her brother and the city from the white masked and cowled angel dolled up like the ornament on the top of the downtown Christmas tree. She kills and unmasks the mayor himself, a guy willing to murder to save his business.

One year later, everybody’s “moved on,” and that’s a tad maddening. Nobody, especially Winnie’s FAMILY, remembers and appreciates her Jamie Lee acts that saved the place? As she stares out into the Northern Lights, she wishes she’d never been born.

Just like that, she gets her wish. I love the “explanation” for this bit of supernaturalism. The lights are “a spirit of someone who died violently.”

They didn’t cover that in my Welcome to Alaska, Thanks for Moving to North Dakota brochures.

The Hell that Angel Falls has turned into is more surreal than realistic. That “Angel” is still going around knifing people, something the mayor’s dopey brother (Sean Depner), now the police chief, seems unconcerned about.

The mayor’s development went forward. And that alternate-timeline party Winnie shows up for is drugged-up and out of control. Nobody recognizes her, not even the town teen “weirdo” Bernie (Jess McLeod) she rashly dissed at the same sort of party one year ago.

But friendless Bernie might believe her, might buy in to her fantastical story, and could have some ideas about how to set this all right.

Director Tyler MacIntyre makes decent use of some wintry Vancouver locations and the script works in a bit of old downtown cinema into the action — a place to girl-bond and battle the bad guy.

But the narrative’s bend from reality to surreal is abrupt and head-scratching, a great leap beyond other “It’s a Wonderful Life” parodies, like the one in “Back to the Future II.”

Treating the entire enterprise as a blood-spattered goof doesn’t pay off, with only Long reading the screenplay that way. His choice to play this mayor as a gladhanding fraud with fake teeth and Dustin Hoffman’s affected voice from “Tootsie” is more curious than amusing.

The slashings are reasonably alarming even as the deaths are perfunctory. The murderers seem more or less properly motivated by the switches in the plot from one “life” to the next. But Winnie’s timeline-to-timeline “change” has an abrupt and weird lifestyle leap in it. The picture never shakes the feeling that this is all a hallucination or dream, one that looks like a made-for-TV movie.

“Yellowjackets” fanatics and horror devotees will excuse a lot, but “It’s a Wonderful Knife” doesn’t just slash through our expectations about what we’re going to see. It stumbles in managing the basics, starting with “Must make some kind of sense, surreal or otherwise.

Rating: bloody violence, drug use and profanity

Cast: Jane Widdup, Jess McLeod, Aiden Howard, Hanna Huggins, Erin Boyes, Katharine Isabelle, Justin Long and Joel McHale.

Credits: Directed by Tyler MacIntyre, scripted by Michael Kennedy. An RLJE/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:27

So he needs the guy’s ex wife to ID…the rest of the body so’s he can get paid?

A hitman that long in the tooth is going to forget things.

Not sure if and when this will see the light of day.

Is it just me, or

are all these CGI animated kids’ films starting to look alike?

The style, the color palette, the look of the characters, it’s a lot harder to tell Disney from Dreamworks from Illumination from Sony from Netflix, etc.

“Classic” traditional animation, done well, would stand out like an emerald in a sea of shiny zirconia right about now.

But this looks decent enough — Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine and Alan Tudyck voice the leads.

“Wish” opens next Wednesday, right before Thanksgiving.

No contest, right?

An Iron Man (ish?) competition involving a hyper-competitive guy and his team picks up a stray along the way.

Hankies come out all over. Bear Grylls cameo to follow.

There’s a corner of America that likes its murder mysteries convoluted and its detectives gathering all the suspects in a drawing room to go through them, one by one, in unmasking “The Real Killer.” But they probably wouldn’t appreciate the idea that a thriller titled “Hayseed” was tailor-made for them.

I mean, it climaxes with a tedious, “process of elimination” gathering of the suspects in a sanctuary, not a drawing room, doggone it.

This indie whodunit is about a dead pastor, lazy local police rushing to an “accident” conclusion, an ex-cop insurance investigator and the one person in town who wants this guy to not rush to judgement because she’s sure the pastor was murdered.

She’s the one who stands to inherit his fortune, for Pete’s sake.

“Hayseed” is an amiable but fatally low-energy and over-complicated mystery that benefits from a droll, laid-back turn by veteran character actor (“American Psycho”) and occasional lead (“Evenhand”) Bill Sage, who dons a trench coat and endures digs about dressing the stereotypical “part” as he lazes through sleepy Emmaus, Michigan, where Rev. Dowding (Peter Carey) turned up bled-out and drowned in the Emmaus Holy Church baptismal.

“It’s a slip-and-fall, a tragedy,” the boyish State Policeman Kyle (Kyle Jurassic) intones.

But ex-detective Leo Hobbins has bosses, and they want to make certain it wasn’t a suicide because being an insurance company, they’d rather not pay out.

First time feature writer-director Travis Burgess treat us to an endless “meet all (not really) the suspects” series of interviews with church staff, congregants and business associates, a “formality” Hobbins insists on, but an annoyance to some of those folks and a deathly drag on a movie’s opening act, even if it is another “whodunit” convention, even if it is edited down into a sort of montage.

It is the pastor’s go-to assistant Darlene (Ismenia Mendes) who stands to inherit the reverand’s home and who called the insurance company in. She’s sure somebody killed him.

Who? Maybe a parishioner (Kathryn Morris of TV’s “Cold Case”) jealous of the pastor’s trust in Darlene. Perhaps her dizzy waitress daughter (Marta Piekarz) knows something? The banker/real estate couple (Amy Hargreaves, Nolan North)?

Young and sketchy groundskeeper “Duck” (Jack Falahee) seems a likelier suspect than the aged, deaf organist (David Luther Glover).

Secret relationships, mysterious “meetings” the night before and the Reverand’s unsavory “secret” figure into all this.

Hobbins thinks the cops got it right until he realizes how easy it would be for these small-towners to get it wrong. So he settles in at the diner and with Darlene egging him on, starts asking questions.

“Humor me,” he says.

There’s enough here that a 75-80 minute version of this pokey picture might have worked, played or simply come off.

The picture’s title is a bit of a misnomer. We expect more examples of “hayseeds,” and while a few folks are quirky eccentrics, nobody adds up to a laugh-out-loud clueless clown or a “sage” in small town sheep’s clothing. That’s kind of a promise that this title makes. “Local color” is sorely lacking.

Sage is a steady presence at the heart of it. But Burgess switches points of view to throw us off, glibly overdoes the few flashes of violence, entangles characters in unexpected romances and withholds details that would allow the viewer to keep up, come to our own conclusion or, you know, stay interested.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Bill Sage, Ismenia Mendes, Kathryn Morris, Marta Piekarz, Peter Carey, Caitlin Carver, Kyle Jurassic and Jack Falahee

Credits: Scripted and directed by Traviss Burgess. A Good Deeds Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:45

This stylish looking British psychological thriller looks to have been filmed in the Med, and stars Natalia Cordova-BuckleyR, yan Kwanten and Virginia Madsen.

Dec. 8, “The Portrait” is unveiled.

Eli Roth’s back to take more perverse pleasure in pain — his movies’ “victims,” and that of viewers laughing at the gore but grimacing at the cruelty — with a holiday treat titled “Thanksgiving.”

At least with “Thanksgiving,” a splatter comedy that brings “Halloween” to Turkey Day, he’s moved on from “torture porn.” More or less.

Originally pitched as a gag trailer in “Grindhouse” many years back, the laughs here come from the horror movie archetypal characters, from the unsubtle politics and from the WAY over the top means that our “Carver” dispatches his victims over the holiday in Plymouth, Massachusetts, home of America’s second Thanksgiving.

Not going to lie, I laughed a lot until I stopped. The first act is funny, the second somewhat less and the third a dull, mostly humorless let-down of the first order. And really, how many times can we see a beheading, disemboweling or baking to death before the “joke” gets old?

Thanksgiving meals hosted by RightMart manager Mitch (Ty Olsson) and his wife (Gina Gershon) and by the RightMart owner (Rick Hoffman) and new wife Kathleen (Karen Cliche) are interrupted by the fact that “Black Friday starts on Thursday” now, and there’s already a mob down at the discount warehouse store.

Maybe Sheriff Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) should stop by, too. The store owner’s daughter Jess (Nell Verlaque) and her crew can get in early. But the crowd outside is ugly and getting uglier as “the store will open in ten minutes” announcement s plainly a lie. We hear for it repeated for twelve minutes.

And then all hell breaks loose as Eli Roth pays “tribute” to the January 6 assault and attempted coup in Washington. People are crushed and trampled in a bloody “Waffle House” brawl that Jess’s piggish jock pal Evan (Tomaso Sanelli) streams on his cell phone.

Her star baseballer boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks) has his arm busted. And he got off easy. People died.

“One year later,” the store is enduring protests for daring to open for another “Black Friday.” The lawsuits died down thanks to CCTV footage that mysteriously disappeared. The holiday, the parade, the meals and the shopping are back on schedule because “I thought we moved on from that.”

And then somebody dressed in a mask of the Pilgrim town’s founding father “John Carver” starts carving, chopping, running-over and beheading people whose behavior was less than civilized in that riot the year before.

The creative killings are packed with jokes — a woman, disfigured by the madman, can’t unlock her phone to call for help because the phone doesn’t “recognize” her face, a victim stuffed in an oven with turkey thermometer as a punchline.

The traditional horror idea of “they had it coming” is underscored by the victims’ connection that “Black Friday” massacre that happened a year ago Thursday.

Jess and her pals (Addison Rae, Gabriel Davenport and Jenna Warren) are targeted in videos showing a murderous dinner’s place settings with their names on it. As the police seem indifferent or at least slow-footed considering the rising body count (events aren’t canceled), as her new boyfriend Ryan (Milo Manheim) is nobody’s idea of “protection,” where can they go for safe refuge?

Maybe the party thrown by the creepier-than-creepy son of the owner of the Plymouth Rocks gun store?

“It’s the only place in town where you won’t get killed,” is McCarty’s (Joe Deflin, funny) invitation.

The performances are rarely pitched at a level of panic, suggesting pretty much everybody’s here for the laughs.

But the audience that loves eyes-averting gore in their horror will have a “Thanksgiving” feast with this one. Eardrum puncturing to axe beheadings, many of them involving struggles, are served up for your viewing pleasure.

I’m not sure noting that the script is seemingly intentionally bad is an endorsement.

That really plays into how stupidly easy it is to figure out “whodunit.” The misdirections and false leads are barely attempted. And the film’s utterly deflating finale isn’t amusingly awful. It’s just awful, and in the most half-assed ways.

The Cult of Roth will almost certainly eat this holiday horror feast up. But this turkey is never more than a mixed bag, and as the laughs peter out and the “clues” are contrived to fit the finale, “Thanksgiving” takes that tryptophan turn towards nodding off, the curse of Turkey Day since that first Thanksgiving — in Virginia.

Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, pervasive language and some sexual material.

Cast: Nell Verlaque, Gina Gershon, Addison Rae, Gabriel Davenport, Milo Manheim, Karen Cliche, Tomaso Sanelli, Jenna Warren, Joe Deflin and Patrick Dempsey.

Credits: Directed by Eli Roth, scripted by Jeff Rendell. A Sony/Tristar release.

Running time:

The world of “The Hunger Games” comes rushing back to you — well, sauntering back to you — not that long into “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”

It’s been eight years since the “original trilogy” wrapped up with its fourth film, so we need that tre-immersion in all things Panem, the song of the Mockingjay and what not.

Let’s have a prequel that sets up the earlier film adaptations of Suzanne Collins’ violent, sexless Young Adult Fiction sci-fi allegories. Jennifer Lawrence is long gone, riding on to Oscar-winning glory. Josh Hutcherson’s just renewed his blockbuster license with “Five Nights at Freddy’s.”

But “Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” has beautiful new leads, big and broad replacements for the villains and the master of ceremonies, and all those Hogwarts-nonsensical names, fanciful critters, pages of endless clumsy exposition and movies that never ever ever come close to a graceful end.

Still beloved by the fans? We’ll see.

No tolerable climax is complete without a clock-watching anti-climax that so stretches things out that you start to discount the fabulous production design, the pointed parable about America’s rural vs. urban schism and how much fun Jason Schwartzman, in the Elizabeth Banks role, is having with all this.

At least the singing takes a giant leap forward. Casting “West Side Story’s” Rachel Zegler as heroine Lucy Gray Baird, a sort of Appalachian blues chanteuse with fire in her eyes and resistance in her heart, pays dividends as her performance and her character remind us of the role “protest songs” have played in our culture and its many labor, civil rights and anti-war movements before, during and after the American Century.

But this prequel franchise isn’t really about Lucy. It’s about the young idealist city boy who’d grow up to be Donald Sutherland as his most sinister. Young Brit Tom Blyth makes the maturing Coriolanus Snow hard to snuggle up to from the start, even as we’re supposed to see him journey from empathetic child of war and genteel poverty into a version of Shakespeare’s Roman Coriolanus, a man of achievement whose cruel, classist prejudices do him no favors in his quest for power.

A post-apocalyptic war prologue briefly establishes the struggle the very young Coriolanus, son of a military insider, and his older cousin Tigris went through to survive. Years later, he’s in The Academy, she (Hunter Schafer) and their Grandma’am (grande dame Fionnula Flanagan) live in urban poverty, hoping against hope that he’ll win the big cash prize for the best student there.

But the parameters of the prize have been changed to try and juice the sagging ratings of The State’s ten-year TV “Hunger Games” experiment. If Coriolanus wants that cash, that prize and his family to transition back to inside-the-halls-of-power status, he’ll have to mentor a Hunger Games contestant to victory.

As the “tribute” players seized from the assorted “districts” are assigned randomly, and he’s in an Academy class packed with strivers just as cunning as him, with a few compassionate exceptions, that’s going to be a long shot.

Giving him the dainty singing spitfire Lucy Gray to mentor into surviving the dog-eat-dog bloodsport of The Arena makes that seem impossible. There are cutthroats, born murderers and guys big enough to get drafted into the NFL, if that “Hunger Game” was still around. How’s this over-dressed (an embroidered corset over a layered chiffon skirt), perfectly made-up singer/songwriter stand a chance?

Coriolanus will have to manipulate the game — overseen by its creator, Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, looking thrilled to be here) — and the TV audience, making them fall for this rebel Vanessa Hudgens from the Districts, to stand a chance.

Collins and the screenwriters adapting her stick to formula with this book and this film. As in the original “Games,” there’s one main villain and one distinct heavy for this installment. The MC, “Lucky Flickerman,” a “weather man, reporter and host of these Hunger Games,” played by Jason Schwartzman, is the hilarious comic relief.

He always introduces himself as “a man who needs no introduction.” Ahem.

The annual “Games” in these films are always bloody, pitilessly violent and often render the MPAA’s PG-13 rating laughable. This version is even bloodier

Viola Davis is positively venmous as Dr. Volumnia Gaul, the defense dept. chief and inventor of biological terror weapons (snakes, etc) to keep the provincial “districts” in line.

“What are the Hunger Games for,” Dr. Gaul growls at promising young Coriolanus? That’s as close to “What’s this all about” as the franchise gets.

Blyth’s playing of Coriolanus seemingly sees into the future. The way this “works” is that we watch his “saveable” character’s corruption by life, love and the world he’s growing up in. That’s how story arcs work. But even in his softer moments, Blyth’s playing of this guy seems mercenary.

Whatever sparks we’re supposed to pick up on between the leads must have been saved for the sequels. But the reason “Hunger” author Collins isn’t facing book-banning is the loveless/sexless nature of her books, her penchant for violence and her apparent sympathy for rural grievance against “city” sophistication.

Everybody here is hired to wear the costumes, put on the makeup, look menacing and service “the games.” But for most of the players, their chief task is conveying mountains of exposition — explaining this world, its rules, history, hierarchy, etc. That was terribly tedious all the way through the original films, and it can be maddening here.

Whatever the virtues of the books, a stupid amount of time wasted on the arcana of the ever-evolving “rules” and shape of the games, too much of it delivered by poor Peter D.’s character. Dean Highbottom (cough cough) keeps telling Coriolanus that his father “was my best friend,” even as he does all he can to subvert Coriolanus, his efforts to save his fetching “tribute” mentee, “win” the Plinth Prize and ascend in status and power.

For all the explaining this movie does, why the son of his “best friend” does that never made it to the screen.

The violence is often shocking, and usually meted out to characters we’ve only just met and barely had a time to hear their silly multi-syllabic names more than once.

Lysistrata Vickers, Vipsania Sickle and Hilarius Heavensbee, we hardly knew ye.

Director Francis Lawrence, who ushered the Jennifer Lawrence “Games” off the stage, keeps the trains running and the depictions of the fascist designed city and sometimes impoverished, often Edenic countryside measured out.

But keeping track of all the characters, making us empathize for anybody who dies and root against anyone who deserves it becomes a challenge as the movie seems both dawdling and rushed, and never develops — for more than a scene or two — narrative momentum.

Some of that’s attributable to the fact that we keep pausing for a plaintive and moving bit of protest singer-songwriting from Zegler’s Lucy Gray.

Yes, those are the emotional and politically pointed highlights of “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” But they stop an already lumbering, over “explaining” narrative in its tracks every time she tunes up.

Rating: PG-13 (Strong Violent Content|Disturbing Material)

Cast: Tom Blythe, Rachel Zegler, Jason Schwartzman, Josh Andrés Rivera, Hunter Schafer, Peter Dinklage and Viola Davis.

Credits: Directed by Francis Lawrence, scripted by  Michael Arndt and Michael Lesslie, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:37

Orlandoans– some of us anyway — avoid “The Parks” for their traffic, the crowds, the long trips from parking deck to “park,” the prices and, as a local DJ’s hit single described, “God—-d Tourists.”

But it’s rainy and gloomy. There’s a break in the crowds if not the hellish traffic, and Disney Springs and an AMC theater here are as good a place as any for a preview for a new Eli Roth horror pic –“There will BE no leftovers” — and a Katniss free “Hunger Games” prequel.

Don’t wait up!

Yes, this coming Turkey Day we’ll have a spree killing to be thankful for, one that stars Patrick Dempsey.

“Thanksgiving” is next week, literally and cinematically. And that’s the trailer I’ve included below.

“Hunger Games?” This prequel is starting in a hole because of that clunky title. Where’s the wit?

“Hunger Games: First Pangs.” “Hunger Games: Still Have an Appetite?” Etc.

Fingers crossed for both, but we’ll see what we see when we see them.