Movie Nation

Whatever the highs and lows of his earlier and later career, the years 1962-64 stand out as the most ambitious of legendary screen comic Peter Sellers. He made a string of films, just as he was blowing up as a screen star, that stand out for their sophistication and feature many of his greatest performances.

From “Lolita” and “Waltz of the Toreadors” through “Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” to “The Pink Panther,” “A Shot in the Dark” and “The World of Henry Orient,” we catch Sellers as an actor on the rise and on the make — taking every prestigious role he was offered, putting in the work, climbing the ladder of stardom, just starting to be demanding and “difficult” and throw his weight around, on his way to iconic status and the truly huge paychecks to come.

And then he had that first heart attack, and a lot of that wind left his sails, pretty much forever.

“Only Two Can Play” of 1962, is a droll sex satire and send-up of Welsh pride that if not one of his very funniest films, stands out as among Sellers’ most sophisticated. Based on a Kingsley Amis novel, as a film it is classic Sellers, built on a sometimes amusingly antic but often buttoned-down performance.

Sellers plays John Lewis, a Welsh librarian with a wife, two small children, and a bit of ambition. He’d like that big promotion at work, and his wife (Virginia Maskell) would dearly love the “extra 150 a year” that would offer.

Lewis may not be the best candidate for the job, as he is “not sufficiently up on Welsh literature.” But he can turn on the posh accent when needed and affect enough snobbish authority to be the theatre critic at the Aberdarcy Chronicle, their Welsh town’s local newspaper.

It’s his wandering eye that could be his undoing, or his “doing.” Lewis notices, checks-out and leers at every lovely lady in a skirt he spies — on the streets, in their apartment building, on the tennis courts or at work, and many seem to give him the eye back. A pretty woman looking for a book he can’t lay hands out — something just off “the banned list” — gives him her number, and temptation becomes opportunity.

As he notes in voice-over, he’s constantly facing this choice of “doing something and regretting it,” or not.

Mai Zetterling, the first Scandinavian beauty paired-up with Sellers, on or off camera, becomes his ultimate temptation. She’s a Norwegian war immigrant who married well — she drives an imported Mercury convertible — and is helping out a local theatre company find reference books for costuming its next production. Lewis flirts, and she flirts right back.

“I’ll try anything, once.”

And she is connected, someone with the ear of the chair of the search committee for that library promotion. She’s married to him. She could be Lewis’ edge over his competition for the job, his nervous, tic-ridden and very Welsh colleague, the Welsh lit expert Ieuan Islewyn Owen Dafydd ap Jenkins (Kenneth Griffith).

And you thought Ioan Gruffudd was a mouthful.

The role stands out for the scenes of domesticity Sellers plays with Maskell, a husband nagged into pursuing the promotion by his wife, a dad indulging his children and tormenting that one shrewish neighbor. He’s a threadbare posh, a librarian with a tux, a worn suit and enough of a literary-air to have that critic job as a side hustle.

Sellers does a few of the “voices” the actor put on that made him him famous. And Sellers as Lewis scrambles madly to extract himself from Mrs. Liz Gruffydd-Williams’ (Zetterling) many-roomed house when her husband and “the council” come home, abruptly.

There’s a sly innocence to the ways Lewis tries to put his wife at ease, or throw her off the scent as he’s trying to make time with this never-quite-consummated fling. Wife Jean lets us know she’s not falling for it in all sorts of ways.

Maskell and Zetterling head a sparkling supporting cast that includes a hilarious Richard Attenborough as a preening, diminutive, goateed local hipster/poet/playwright and lifelong rival of Lewis, Griffith’s twitchy turn as a librarian, a single-scene Welsh lampoon by Graham Stark, Sellers’ future subordinate in years of “Pink Panther” movies and no less than “Q” himself, Desmond Llewelyn, future Bond movie gadget guru, shows up playing a priest.

Mayhill, Swansea in Wales beautifully subs for the fictional city of Aberdarcy, just high-faluting enough to be pretentious about Welsh culture, have a literary and theatrical scene and require the services of a theatre critic, just rural enough to have cattle, who interfere with an attempted assignation in the back of Mrs.Gruffydd-Williams’ amusingly-complicated convertible.

Sellers effortlessly casts off lines like “People invite me (to society parties) just to get the name of my tailor,” fitting in with “that crowd” with witty observations such as deconstructing the working methods of much-lauded painter of the day.

“What he does, you see, he puts the canvas on the floor, chucks some whopping great dollops of paint on it and drags a naked woman across it. Yes. Yes. Sort of job I’d like, that. I’d enjoy cleaning the brushes anyway.”

Amis’s novel “That Uncertain Feeling,” written about his own experiences moving to Wales, a writer exasperated by the pretention of the Welsh locals, provided Sellers with a role that demanded he tone down the “Goon Show” business, the love of donning disguises, silly voices and playing broad characters and just be a lightly-funny, somewhat unsympathetic leading man.

Sellers didn’t do it often, and this film may not be remembered with the same affection as “The Ladykillers,” “Lolita,” “Dr. Strangelove,” his many turns as Clouseau or his last gasp of glory in “Being There.” But “Only Two Can Play” shows us a broader career that might have happened had the ever-growing paychecks not limited him to farces and his first heart attack turned him cautious.

Rating: “approved”

Cast: Peter Sellers, Mai Zetterling, Virginia Maskell, Kenneth Griffith, Raymond Huntley, Graham Stark, Desmond Llewelyn and Richard Attenborough

Credits: Directed by Sidney Gilliat, scripted by Bryan Forbes, based on a novel by Kingsley Amis. A British Lion release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:44

“Don’t Look Away” is a textbook film for anybody hoping to learn how to make a scary, fun and attention-worthy thriller with next-to-no-money.

Need something to “stalk” victims, a variation on The Many Faces of Chucky that’s fresh and a novel bit of scriptural problem solving? What could be scarier than a murderous mannequin?

“It moves without moving,” one alarmed would-be victim mutters in a less-experienced actor’s version of shock.

“It’s everywhere, and nowhere at the same time,” another gasps.

That’s how you solve the problem of “animating” an inanimate object, a mysterious and murderous “mannequin, like they have in Bloomingdale’s” who in shadows and silhouette looks like Gort from “The Day the Earth Stood Still” went on the Slenderman Fast diet.

He doesn’t really “move.” He’s edited, quite clevery, into this spot, that shadow and right into your face.

It’s creepy as hell, and it has the young people it’s chasing shouting “Don’t LOOK AWAY” because that’s when it sneaks up on you. “Run! GET OUT!”

Well, they’re young Canadians, so it’s “Get OOOOT!” But you get the idea.

Kelly Bastard (okaaay) stars as Frankie, the young woman who accidentally stumbles into a truck-hijacking where the hijackers are slaughtered when they open the lone box in that trailer. She “sees” what did this. She is rendered speechless.

Phd candidate beau Steve (Colm Hill) has a hard time getting a word out of his LSAT-studying girlfriend, or taking her fear seriously.

But her friends drag her to the club. A little molly from her pal Molly (Vanessa Nostbakken) and Frankie isn’t just seeing things in the shadows, she’s struggling to explain to cops how she’s covered in another person’s blood, seeing as how it’s not the first time in the past two days.

Her friends don’t believe her, until they see “it.” Steve may never buy in, but old beau Jonah (co-writer Michael Mitton) does. He sees this plastic “SlenderMan.”

Mitton and director Michael Bafaro, billed as “The Michaels, shared writing credits in this hit-or-miss indie. They might have leaned a little more into how darkly funny this all is. Horror references abound in the dialogue, the editing (“Signs”), and we “hear” friends watching “The Shining.”

There’s a too-slowly rising threat level that should ratchet up suspense and fear, but doesn’t. Only a couple of the players seem very good at conveying “terror” anyway.

A brisk, bravura opening with mostly off-camera violence (slaughter and gunshots heard, not seen) and the viewer getting just a fraction of a glimpse of this scary prop in the shadows out of Frankie’s field of vision eventually sags into a duller talky, relationshippy middle act. And the “explainer” finale leaves a lot fo be desired.

But blocking, shot compositions, cinematography and editing energize it, and a chilling electronic score by Phil Western brings to mind John Carpenter’s musical gifts, which is the whole idea.

Shortcomings aside, by all means take that title seriously. “Don’t Look Away,” you might miss something scary, funny and pretty good.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Kelly Bastard, Michael Mitton, Colm Hill, Abu Dukuly, Jason Haney, Sophie Thom and Rene Lai

Credis: Directed by Michael Bafaro, scripted by Micheal Bafaro and Michael Mitton. A Level 33 Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:23

An opera he can’t finish because he’s “blocked,” gorgeous arm candy/shrink Anne Hathaway isn’t…helping.

Marisa Tomei is a sexy…tug boat captain?

Laughing already?

Sept. 29, two Oscar winners and the estimable Mr. D. deliver the goods.

In the name of all that’s holy and sane, don’t try watching “10 Days of a Bad Man” without first watching “10 Days of a Good Man.” I’ve seen the earlier film, part of a planned trilogy of adaptations of novels by Turkish author Mehmet Eroğlu, and I was still pretty much lost through the middle acts of this Asia Minor whodunit.

No, the director and screenwriters — one of whom was unhelpfully Eroğlu himself — haven’t learned to “kill your darlings” and thin this Byzantine tale of the further misadventures of 50ish ex-con, disbarred lawyer and pill-popping private eye Sadik down to something coherent.

The meandering script is a tsunami of names, characters both on camera and off. Here’s what it sounds like.

“Jale?” “Gul?” “Who’s Timurlenk?” “Find Ferhat!” “Who’s Yasemin?”

Scores of names are hurled at Sadik, now going by “Adil” but still a figure of weary, literary charisma thanks to the performance of Nejat Isler.

This time out, he’s summoned by the mob boss from the first film who’d now love to just be addressed as “Sir” (Erdal Yildiz) to find this guy, Ferhat. As you might remember from the first film, Sadik-now-Adil ran up quite a “debt” of favors to “Sir.” A bad car wreck in the opening scene of “Bad Man” just adds to his bill.

A gorgeous doctor (Hazal Filiz Küçükköse) of confusing ties to Adil also wants our Istanbul gumshoe to find out who killed her uncle.

And to manage these two cases, in between pain pills, in “10 days,” our injured Adil will need his niece-not-his-niece Pinar (Ilayda Akdoga) to run social media searches and get him into clubs and whatnot, all the while coming on to a guy almost three times her age.

“You’re in love with me,” skin-baring Pinar purrs in Turkish, or dubbed into English. “You just don’t know it yet.

Her constant come-ons remind us that male wish fulfillment fantasies know no borders.

In the first film, our PI narrated his story and was obsessed with classic fictional private eye Philip Marlowe. Here, he’s just read ‘Hamlet’ and can quote “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,” and trots out “You know I read ‘Hamlet.’ Don’t underestimate me.”

But the older woman who keeps calling him “Columbo” is the one who’s onto something. Sadik-now-Adil reads people, sifts clues and uncovers motives. And he’s a little slow and annoying as he does it.

The clutter of characters, seen and unseen, of agendas, settings and off-camera complications render this film as much of a lumbering muddle as the first installment in the trilogy. But then you remember all the unseen faces we hear Marlowe prattle on about in “The Big Sleep” or Sam Spade sputter through in “The Maltese Falcon,” so maybe it’s just a Turkish version of that, albeit a duller and slower one.

And there’s a fine, action-packed finish that does a bit to tidy things up, even though one of Adil’s cases is solved perfunctorily and the other with guns.

I’ve kind of given up hope that these thrillers will travel better and improve with each outing. You’ve still got the author co-writing the script and refusing to cut it, and a TV-trained director who can’t talk him into that as he shoves 22 episodes worth of complications into a 124 minute movie.

At least Isler makes an agreeable tour guide through these intrigues, getting his man or getting his woman, even if we can’t help but cringe if and when he “gets the girl.”

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, pill popping, smoking, profanity

Cast: Nejat Isler, Ilayda Akdogan, Riza Kocaoglu, Hazal Filiz Küçükköse, Ilayda Alisan, Kadir Çermik and Erdal Yildiz

Credits: Directed by Uluç Bayraktar, scripted by Damla Serim and Mehmet Eroğlu, based on the novel by Mehmet Eroğlu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:04

This does look a tad “killer doll” creepy, I must say.

Sept. 1.

That weary thriller trope “It was just a dream” gets utterly beaten to death in the moody, obscure and somewhat convoluted horror tale “Deliver Us.”

It’s a graphically violent a story set in Russia where a nun, claiming Catholic mythology’s second “immaculate conception,” is set to give birth to twin boys — one a “conduit for the light,” a Christ, the other “a conduit for The Beast,” the AntiChrist.

Co-writer, co-director and star Lee Roy Kunz (the less famous “Delirium”) bathes his movie in gloom, gore, and lots of “It was just a dream” fake-outs in this thoughtful but frustrating variation on a “Damien/The Omen” theme.

Yes, it’s a “Good v. Evil” “prophecy. And this time, that prophecy was written in tattoos on the backs of people ritualistically slaughtered and skinned in the film’s opening images.

Cardinal Russo ( Alexander Siddig of “Deep Space Nine,” “Gotham” and “Game of Thrones”) doesn’t tell the young priest, Father Fox (Kunz) what medium these images he’s so excited about were preserved on. But as he leads the fallen-but-not-“fallen” priest through the Medieval-looking picture glyphs, he enthuses “The prophecy might be real!”

Fox was summoned to a remote Russian convent to treat, minister to or exorcise a pregnant nun, Sister Yulia (Maria Vera Ratti of the recent “Leonardo” series), who swears she was impregnated by God and is about to birth two very special boys.

She tells him it was she who summoned the priest/exorcist from St. Petersburg, a man trying to “stop being a bad priest” and start being a “better man,” because “you are the only one who can keep the bad thing from happening.”

Father Fox has his own pregnancy issues. He’s in love, his industrialist-heiress girlfriend (Jaune Kimmel) is pregnant. And this is brushed over in the script as though the Vatican and the Russian Catholic hierarchy wouldn’t care or the viewer wouldn’t wonder, “OK, how the hell did that happen?”

But Father Fox is here, skeptical of anything he’s told is “divine” or “demonic” and maybe still wondering what those picture glyphs were written on which the cardinal didn’t want to discuss.

A sinister one-eyed priest (Thomas Kretschmann of “The Pianist,” just seen in “Gran Turismo”) is also on hand, not-so-secretly participating in rites that tell us he’s hellbent on keeping this birth from happening.

So of course the fallen priest, the pregnant nun and the cardinal go on the lam.

The moodiness of “Deliver Us” is undeniable, but I am hard-pressed to recall a thriller with less forward motion, pace or mounting suspense.

Ambling from the flat-footed getaway to an Estonian forest hide-out, with encounters with strangers who seem to go into shock at this sight of this new “Virgin Mother” and even try to kill themselves in her presence (dreams it seems), “Deliver Us” is in no rush to deliver anybody or anything.

We get a hint that the world is spinning into pre-ordained chaos outside of this “family” on the run bubbble, but only a hint.

Kunz more or less holds his own as an actor, and gives himself nude scenes because he’d rather we not be thinking about the holes in theology, Church doctrine, logic and common sense on display.

And almost every time something truly horrific or alarming happens, somebody wakes up as “dreams” here are how it/they/He”talks to us,” true-believer Yulia insists.

Between the many seriously underlit scenes and the rambling, somber and self-serious dialogue, I was at a loss, not about the point of this — to kill one or both of the babies and foil evil or stop a “Second Coming” and “End Times” — but about how this contrived, clunky narrative is going to get us there.

As Catholic horror tales goe, “Deliver Us” is more of a good-looking failure than a scary, thrilling or entertaining dive into Church arcana.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Lee Roy Kunz, Maria Vera Ratti, Alexander Siddig, Jaune Kimmel and Thomas Kretschmann

Credits: Directed by Lee Roy Kunz and  Cru Ennis, scripted by Lee Roy Kunz and Kane Kunz. A Magnet (Sept. 29) release.

Running time: 1:43

The projections I was reading for Warners’ low-risk/limited star power superhero movie “Blue Beetle” pointed to a $30 million opening, not great for a comic book adaptation but not terrible for the movie dumping ground month of August.

Middling Thursday night previews and a decent Friday –$9-10– put the film on track to earn $25 million, at this point, according to Deadline.com. TheNumbers (@movienumbers) posts that it will hit the $25.4 million mark by midnight Sunday.

Franchise starter? Maybe. Not a sure thing, though, opening well below the studio’s already low projections. Not a great movie, pretty cheesy as it services its comic book fan and Latino demos. Weak reviews overall. But the Warners marketing was weak — perhaps over-targeted, perhaps cut-rate — and big crowds did not show up.

An even more middling take might have dropped this one behind the movie of the summer, “Barbie.” It’s on track to add another $21.5. Box Office Mojo says it’ll clear the $565 million mark, just in North America, by Sunday .

“Oppenheimer” managed $10.6 million, climbing up the charts listing past Christopher Nolan blockbusters. It will have tallied $718 million worldwide by midnight Sunday.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” aka “Mutant Mayhem” is set to pull in $8.4.

“Strays” is a bad movie with a lot of laughs, but a true “dog” of the dog days of summer. It is straining at the leash to make it to $8.3 million. according to @movienumbers. Those digital effects — getting dogs to talk — are costly, meaning this won’t break even before it limps off into the sunset.

The last word on the top five comes from @boxofficepro.

“My dad spends every day looking at climate change,” Regina Thompson says of her father, the paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson, in the new documentary “Canary.” Her dad drills ice-core samples on the world’s glaciers, archiving a record of climate history going back thousands of years. And while doing that, he couldn’t help but notice all the glaciers were in retreat, melting away.

Her father wonders, she says, “Why the disbelief? What do you (climate-change deniers) not understand?”

Lonnie Thompson, who appeared in the Oscar-winning and Nobel Prize-linked documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” figured this out in the late 1970s and began publishing and sounding the alarm not long after. Now in his ’70s, he speaks in “Canary” of his “failure” to help turn the world’s thinking around on burning carbon for energy, despite the seeming consensus on this issue in the early 2000s.

“If I’d been successful,” he says, “we’d have changed the trends.”

As filmmakers Danny O’Malley and Alex Rivest make clear in “Canary,” it’s not Thompson’s efforts that fell short. It was an engineered campaign of climate denial by Big Coal, Big Oil and those shortsighted and cynical enough to underwrite politicizing “the biggest challenge we face as a civilization, human-caused climate-change.”

But their film is about a scientist who was almost a lone voice in the wilderness when he took notice of something long predicted-and-speculated upon, that human activity was warming the climate. Peers, journalists and authors refer to him as a “real-life Indiana Jones,” a pioneer in getting ancient climate data for researching climate trends through history, and their impact, by climbing the most remote glaciers on Earth — Peru to Papau, Indonesia — to drill core samples.

Lonnie Thompson was a farm lad growing up in Gassaway, West Virginia, when he discovered a love of science and a knack for predicting the weather. He went to college, and studied geology as an undergrad, and started graduate school at Ohio State as a “coal/geology” student, befitting a young man from “Coal is King” country.

When he was turned down for a chance to join a team led by an Arctic and Antarctic pioneer in this field of using ice cores to see what the weather was like throughout history, he found his place on the “in-between” ice caps in the Peruvian Andes, on a mountain in the middle of a rainforest island north of Australia, “impossible” to reach places where natives were often in conflict with outsiders coming to do research.

Thompson and his glaciologist/climatologist wife Ellen Mosley-Thompson were doing the early research that became the basis for international consensus on sounding the alarm over climate change.

“Canary” — it takes its title from the old “Canary in the coal mine” signal that the air had turned bad — is mostly a straightforward biography of a modest, sober-minded man of science struggling to get his life’s work (core sampling everywhere that’s possible) completed and getting that work to mean something in the face of advancing years, failing health and “the biggest challenge we face as a civilization — human-caused climate change.”

“Canary” is a fairly dry film, narrow in focus, but it can be inspiring. And in that one montage, where conservative American politicians from Gingrich and Palin to Romneybabdt others abruptly flip-flop their stances on the “inconvenient truth” staring everybody in the face by the mid-2000s, it’s just dismaying.

A lot of America adopted its anti-science, anti-climate change politics from that era and has dogmatically failed to be shaken by any and all evidence that they were being lied to by energy lobbyists and their political hirelings.

And here we are, looking at a film about a scientist who devoted his life to gathering data and facts and making the case that what he was learning was a call for urgent action, action that it seems impossible to take thanks to people who refuse to see and grasp the obvious.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Lonnie Thompson, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, J. Madeleine Nash, Frances Thompson, many others

Credits: Directed by Danny O’Malley and Alex Rivest. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:44

That oft-filmed and televised mythic Chinese folk hero “The Monkey King” earns a slick, slapshticky animated treatment for Netflix in his latest incarnation.

He’s a classic flawed “hero,” a manic brawler and antic egomaniac, on a quest to join the “immortals” in Buddha’s heaven. And the film, produced by Hong Kong legend Stephen Chow, is an amusing and most-kid-friendly “musical” variation of the tale.

All of the movies I’ve seen — live action and this — find different settings and foes to battle in their assorted quests. But the general idea is the same. He’s a fury in fights with his magic “stick” (staff), and he loves to make everything about him, his wants and his immediate needs.

He needs to learn Buddhism.

A monkey with laser beams for eyes and a few other supernatural survival skills pops out of a rock and grows up to have the wisecracking voice of Jimmy O. Yang and save a tribe of forest monkeys who will never take him in, because he’s doomed to be an “outsider.”

He defeated a baby-monkey-kidnapping Tiger Demon thanks to an “ultimate weapon” staff he swiped from the Dragon King under the sea. The Dragon King hates the “air breathers” on land, travels by means of a tub toted by his minions and REALLY wants that “column” (“stick”) back.

As he is voiced by “Saturday Night Live” breakout Bowen Yang, we know he’ll be entirely too bitchy to let this theft go unpunished. And that he’ll have his own production number “under the sea” somewhere in the second act.

“So watch me rise up, open the skies up and take the world by STORM,” he croons.

But that’s later. The newly-self-crowned Monkey King first figures the way to joining the immortals in heaven is by vanquishing 100 demons. But when he’s done that, he realizes he’s never going to be more than an annoyance to the Emperor (Hoon Lee), who lets Buddha (BD Wong) convince him to leave this “monkey” to “find his own way,” ddiscover his “destiny” and grow into someone worthy of hero-worship and even immortality.

The Monkey ventures under the sea and into hell and up to heaven along the way. The tone of the various quests is just jokey enough, with some laugh-out-loud one-liners and exchanges scattered throughout.

“Hey RED girl,” the Monkey snaps at the Red Demon attacking a remote village. “Levave these poor, unattractive people alone!”

“But the kids are RIPEST this time of year,” she complains.

The “King” takes on an over-eager “assistant,” Lin (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport), who acts as hype-girl and aide who doesn’t think she belongs in the shadows. She paid no heed to the wise old ape who warned his people of this hot-headed attention-hog.

“He doesn’t LOVE you. He only wants you to love him!”

That’s a personality flaw no leader should have, especially not an immortal one.

The animation is sharp, the animated action beats fluid and fun. There are a few songs by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss of the musical “Six,” pleasantly-silly in a “Who’s the simian you’ll find shimmyin’ to to the TOP” sort of way. One metal number mimics Metallica, probably a first for kids’ animation.

Bowen Yang is the vocal and character highlight, a Dragon King preening and scheming with his minions, providing “sides” (pages of script) for his not-Broadway-ready fake garden/poisoned “magical” peach play meant to trick the monkey into giving up his “stick.”

“Boxtrolls” and “Open Season” director Anthony Stacchi’s film feels Westernized and modernized and yet generally faithful to the source character. There’s even a reference about him taking a “Journey to the West,” the epic novel Monkey King was introduced in, which has also spawned film adaptations.

Netflix has made several animated films that can bear comparison to the very best of Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks and others, even if it has yet to produce one that deserves a place among the true classics on the animated pantheon. The antic-energy attached to slack pacing of this saga’s “quests” suggests Netflix isn’t quite up to producing an animated classic. But “Monkey King” is still as good as anything the major animation studios have released in this “down” year for animation. .

Rating: PG, violence, a urination gag

Cast: The voices of Jimmy O. Yang. Bowen Yang, Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Hoon Lee and BD Wong as Buddha.

Credits: Directed by Anthony Stacchi, scripted by Steve Bencich, Ron J. Friedman and Rita Hsiao. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

“Bad Things” is an intimate thriller about the haunting power of trauma and four women whose messy interpersonal relationships and “history” aren’t done any favors by being in this spooky place.

The place is an empty suburban hotel Ruthie (Gayle Rankin of “The Greatest Showan” and TV’s “GLOW”) just inherited. The messiness is packaged in the fact that she’s here with her lover Cal (Hari Nef of “Barbie”), whom she’s cheated on with Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones of “Succession”).

But Maddie (Rad Pereira of HBO’s “Betty”) brought Fran with her. Maddie crushes on Cal, and Fran, who just survived a cancer scare, still has a thing for Ruthie.

Ruthie’s here to “sell this place,” but Cal is all atwitter over “the life” she can imagine here, running the Comley Suites with Ruthie, whom she’s pretty sure “is going to propose this weekend!” To that end, Ruthie is watching Youtube tutorials on running such a business, “Methods in Hospitality,” which we gather Cal has already viewed.

The tutorials on how hotels are “not just a space, but an experience,” are delivered by an expert in the field (Molly Ringwald).

What nobody seems to want to hear, especially the dizzy/bubbly Cal, is that Ruthie didn’t want to come, doesn’t want to hang onto the hotel and only recently reconnected with her (unseen) mother, who only wants a share of the cash. And the random deaths associated with this hotel (most motels/hotels have a few) aren’t the only trauma Ruthie remembers there.

“I don’t feel right here. I never have.”

What ensues is a waking “Shining” Overlook Hotel nightmare of visions of the dead and figures from the past, more cheating, hysteria and violence as this place brings back “Bad Things” and only a couple of these characters are conscious of the threat.

The love quadrangle is barely interesting by itself, despite the lived-in performances and the presence of transgender actress Nef. The visions — of joggers who were murdered, a child, a full dining room for the continental breakfast when no one is staying there — are more promising.

The place is an empty suburban hotel Ruthie (Gayle Rankin of “The Greatest Showan” and TV’s “GLOW”) has just inherited. The messiness is packaged in the fact that she’s here with her lover Cal (Hari Nef of “Barbie”), whom she’s cheated on with Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones of “Succession”).

But Maddie (Rad Pereira of HBO’s “Betty”) brought Fran with her. Maddie crushes on Cal, and Fran, who just survived a cancer scare, still has a thing for Ruthie.

“Messy.”

Ruthie’s here to “sell this place,” but Cal is all atwitter over “the life” she can imagine there, running the Comley Suites with Ruthie, whom she’s pretty sure “is going to propose this weekend!” To that end, Ruthie is watching Youtube tutorials on running such a business, “Methods in Hospitality,” which we gather Cal has already viewed.

The tutorials on how hotels are “not just a space, but an experience,” are delivered by an expert in the field (Molly Ringwald).

What nobody seems to want to hear, especially the dizzy/bubbly Cal, is that Ruthie didn’t want to come, doesn’t want to hang onto the Suites and only recently reconnected with her (unseen) mother, who only wants a share of the cash. And the random deaths associated with this hotel aren’t the only trauma Ruthie remembers there.

“I don’t feel right here. I never have.”

What ensues is a waking “Shining” Overlook Hotel nightmare of visions of the dead and figures from the past, more cheating, rising hysteria and violence as this place brings back “Bad Things” and only some of them are conscious of the threat.

The love quadrangle is barely interesting by itself, despite the lived-in performances. The characters have a distance that suggests each is in her own world with her own agenda that makes the quartet unsympathatic.

Was Fran “really sick?” Is Ruthie really as bad as all that? Is Cal deaf to Ruthie’s constant “I don’t want to be here” complaints? Is Maddie just an opportunist?

The visions — of joggers who were murdered, a child, a full dining room for the continental breakfast when no one is staying there — are more promising. But there’s little in the way of building suspense or a rising sense of dread.

Actress-turned-writer-director Stewart Thorndike puts more effort into keeping this elusive and obscure than in making the almost pre-ordained path the “horror” takes anything wholly satisfying or understandable.

Whatever the dynamics of this troubled, narcissistic same-sex quartet, “Bad Things” feels creepier than it is and promises frights or shocks and explanations it never quite pulls off.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Gayle Rankin, Hari Nef, Rad Pereira, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Jared Abramson and Molly Ringwald.

Credits: Scripted and directed by A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:27