Movie Nation

Robert Mitchum didn’t play a lot of villains. But boy, when he did it was a wonder to behold.

“Cape Fear” is a iconic thriller that parked Mitchum opposite stoic Gregory Peck in what turned out to be a classic, and a rare one that was almost as good when it was remade with Robert DeNiro, Nick Nolte, Martin Scorsese behind the camera and Grand Old Man Mitchum in a pivotal supporting role.

But “The Night of the Hunter” is so singular a cinematic landmark that you’d think no one would dare remake it. It’s shown in film classes, at film festivals and in film societies. It’s quoted, borrowed from and paid homage to in films as diverse as “Do the Right Thing” and “What Lies Beneath.” Yet somehow the Davis Grubb novel was remade as a disastrous TV movie in the ’90s with Richard Chamberlain. And in 2020, Universal announced it was plotting a new big screen version of this 1955 black and white classic.

As it’s been three years since that was reported, let’s hope they’ve had time to reconsider. The series of great decisions and happy accidents that made the original a masterpiece would seem impossible to replicate.

Novelist Grubb’s gritty, Depression Era West Virginia parable of good and evil, greed and righteousness, of a murderer in the middle of idyllic, riverfront slice of Americana, was his first book. It overshadowed his half-a-dozen-novel career, because when Hollywood grabbed the screen rights, it was James Agee, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, poet, critic and screenwriter from just south of West Virginia — a fellow Appalachian from Knoxville, Tennessee — who would sympathetically adapt it.

Agee only wrote one other screenplay. You might have heard of it — “The African Queen.”

Director Charles Laughton is best remembered as a larger-than-life British character lead who played Henry VIII, Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and a Captain Bligh for the ages in “Munity on the Bounty.” Laughton only partially directed one other film, and that’s barely worth recalling (“The Man on the Eiffel Tower”).

And even though the tall, dark and handsome baritone Mitchum only played two heavies, this psychopathic “preacher” almost pushes his Max Cady from “Cape Fear” into the sinister shadows.

Mitchum’s Harry Powell charms. He judges. He preaches, and Mitchum even sings in a career-peak-period (1955) role that was so far removed from his stoic, man’s man heroic persona that it may be the best argument for “The Oscars rarely recognize the greatest” ever.

Whatever the cost of playing the murderous, grudge-toting ex-con Max Cady, it took guts for a leading man of Mitchum’s stature to play a “Bluebeard,” a perverse, widow-murdering, child-hunting monster hellbent on finding stolen loot hidden by the children of a condemned cellmate.

The film, in immaculately-captured sound-stage and West Virginia locations, looks and plays like a grimmer-than-Grimm fairytale, with a monster-sized villain often-filmed in the shadows, a plucky heroine bathed in angelic light and two kids on the run on the river fleeing a killer who took their mother away from them in a time when it wasn’t nearly as hard to get away, and get away with murder.

Stanley Cortez, the director of photography who made Orson Welles look like a genius, yet-again, via “The Magnificent Ambersons,” frames every shot like a glossy art print and fills frame after frame with innocence menaced by malevolence. Cortez would go on to have a band in “Chinatown.”

It wasn’t just writers, actors and the directors who made those films masterpieces. This was a cinematographer/artist who painted with light, shadow and fog in forced-perspective shots that are some of the most perfect ever conceived.

In the middle of the 1930s Depression, a father (Peter Graves) dashes home and stuffs the cash from a bank heist into his little girl’s (Sally Jane Bruce) doll. He’s killed people in the robbery, but before the cops grab him, he makes his boy (Billy Chapin) “swear” to look after his sister, “guard her with your life,” and keep the secret of the $10,000, even from his mother.

“You’ve got common sense. She ain’t.”

As she’s played by rising star Shelley Winters, we get it.

Dad is arrested, bringing his little boy to tears. He’ll be tried and hanged, and their cruel, small town classmates torment young John and little Pearl so that they have to stop going to school.

But they have bigger problems on the way. We’ve alreasdy met booming, smiling, Bible-quoting Harry Powell, the sort of psycho who inveighs against sin and hates himself for hitting the strip clubs, who talks to God in sicker-than-sick prayers.

“Lord, send me a widow!”

A car-theft bust — we’ve seen one of his dead widows, but the police haven’t — throws Harry into Moundsville Prison and in the same cell as convicted killer Ben Harper (Graves). Powell’s tricks and preacherly nagging don’t get him any closer to that hidden cash. But the gallows might,

“Lord, you sure knew what you were doin’ when you brung me to this very cell at this very time. A man with ten thousand dollars hid somewhere, and a widder in the makin’.”

Harry gets out and sets out to find the riverside village where the Harpers live, to meet and win over the widow Willa (Winters) and arm-twist the children into giving up the loot.

Thanks to peer pressure from the village busybody (Evelyn Varden) and her “You need a man” to raise two kids” insistence, Willa does the “respectable” and practical thing and pairs up with the preacher with “Love” and “Hate” tattooed on his knuckles.

Winters plays Willa as shocked and martryed, a jaw-dropping choice that makes her death all the more memorable.

Mitchum lets us sense the psychosis of this fatally-flawed fanatic. He lets us see how Harry narrows his search down to John and the cunning verbal traps he sets for the boy and his much younger sister. He isn’t shy about underscoring Harry’s bullying, woman-hating perversion and creepy association with sex. And Mitchum never had a problem with the good looks and manly charisma it takes to sweep a woman off her feet.

Willa is a goner. Little John? He’s going to be a more formidable foe.

The Southern savvy script backhands small town cruelty and naivete, that unwillingness to see anyone wearing “the cloth” as a threat. And it lets us see how quickly those fooled are to pretend that never happened and bay for blood when this “Bluebeard” is outed, the hypocrites.

Harry’s worse, but Icey and the hate-filled mob are no prizes.

The money is meant to weigh on John, so much so that sees it as a destructive force. It killed his father and his mother and may get him and Pearl killed, and it so possesses his instant-stepfather that it won’t be good for Harry’s health, either.

The children only escape the darkness when a blunt, bluff and righteous woman takes them in. Rachel tells the cast-away-children she’s raising tales from The Bible as life lessons, good vs. evil homilies about “that sneaking, ornery no-count King Herod and (baby) King Jesus.”

Lillian Gish plays Miss Rachel as a speaking version of the idealized Southern woman D.W. Griffith made her out to be in their silent film collaboartions. She is defender of the right, protector of children and embodiment of the Woman Who Passes on Western (Christian) Civilization to her young charges.

Yes, this character seems to connect her to Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” and its racist ideal, but Gish’s warmth and steel inform the character’s unimpeachable piety and tolerance. A young teen in Rachel’s care swoons over the handsome murderer who shows up in clergical garb, croons “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and Rachel forgives her, even if the hormonal teen has put them all in peril.

“The Night of the Hunter” is the kind of classic that reveals more of itself in repeated viewings, the stark beauty of the the soundstage forced-perspective shots that show critters in the foreground, John and Pearl paddling downstream in the background, or them in their dad’s skiff in the lower front of the frame, a killer preacher on horseback in silhouette, singing that hymn as he hunts his tiny prey.

The innuendo Laughton and Agee got in this script about marriages and sex — “When you’ve been married to a man for forty years you know all that don’t amount to a hill of beans. I’ve been married to Walt that long and I swear in all that time I just lie there thinkin’ about my canning.” — the lusty way young teen Ruby (Gloria Castillo) gulps in Mitchum, the matter-of-fact way Gish’s Rachel acknowledges it and forgives her, is eyebrow raising even today.

The film’s Southern Gothic folktale feel comes from Grubbs, Ages and Cortez. Laughton seems to be the font of its wicked weirdness and fun. There was a time when he would have grabbed the Mitchum role and played it with relish.

But could be sing?

The lovely duet that Gish and Mitchum produce as they’re in that third-act standoff still raises the hair on the back of my neck. But the ending is just treacly enough that there’s room for doing something fresh and twisted with this story, should it be remade.

The best argument for Universal getting another film out of this title might be how this film still plays to a crowd, and how rarely classic films are seen in that context which they were intended. I’ve seen viewers hoot and gasp and talk back to the screen, even film buffs at film festival showings of “The Night of the Hunter.”

This picture still delivers suspense, shocks, laughs and heart-touching sentiment.

And 70 years after its release, we still feel the sting intended by the Appalachian author, the mountain-born screenwriter, the manly movie actor and gay British director who dared make a film that acknowledged that the “Americana” depicted here wasn’t whitewashed The Disney Version.

Evil wrapped in religion, the twisted sexuality of the supposedly pious, the helpless gullibility of conservative rural folks for any wolf in sheep’s clothing, it’s a tale both timeless as it ever was, and shockingly timely even today.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, James Gleeson, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce, Evelyn Varden and Peter Graves.

Credits: Directed by Charles Laughton, scripted by James Agee, based on the novel by Davis Grubb. A United Artists (MGM) release on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:32

I interviewed Tobin Bell once, some years back, when it seemed like his “Saw” legacy was finally winding to a close.

As a lifelong lover of character actors, I’ve celebrated his non-“Saw” outings, his chances to show us he’s more than the inscrutable, moralizing investigator, judge, jury, torturer and executioner of the Jigsaw saga.

Safe to say I couldn’t love the guy more if I was on his will. But come on now.

Bell’s back on screen with a new “Saw” revival.

I know Lionsgate has other Intellectual Properties (IP). But here we go again, Sept. 29.

All hail Seth Rogen for making the first big screen version of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” that doesn’t suck. Yeah, the “Sausage Party/Superbad/Pineapple Express” dude.

The “Turtles” have always been the most juvenile among comic book adaptations, one of things working against any adult’s appreciation of the endless TV and movie incarnations of the franchise. But Mr. “Adult Language/Stoner Sensibility” and his partner in co-writing crime, Evan Golberg, preserve that innocence with an adaptation that is jaunty, juvenile, frenetic and fun.

Their brand is “rude,” and they somehow manage to get a PG-rated kids’ cartoon comedy to fit that aesthetic.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” is also a down-and-almost-dirty, impressionistically gritty and aurally and visually rambunctious picture thanks to the artistry of “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” co-directors Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears.

They achieve this by using a dazzling clash of animation styles reminiscent of the “Spider-Verse” films, but here more aesthetically-coherent and logical. A teen turtle visualizes something in a flashback? Of course he’d dream it in crayon.

And the entire team — Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit are co-writers — cast this for maximum laughs and comical shock-and-awe value.

Jackie Chan lands every-one liner as Splinter, “Dad” to the turtles, and sensei. Ice Cube comically fumes, berates, insults and intimidates as the mutant villain Superfly. Giancarlo Esposito impresses as the lonely -to-the-point-of-“mad” scientist who created the “ooze” that created the turtles, and mutant wild boar (Rogen) and rhino (John Cena) and gator (Rose Byrne), with Post Malone, Hannibal Burress, Natasia Demetriou and Paul Rudd thrown in for mutant-good-measure. Maya Rudolph dons Eastern European accent, dollink, to vamp through the mad corporate scientist who wants to “milk” the mutants.

The story is comic book childish in its simplicity — the underground, outcast “mutant” turtles raised in ninjutsu by a wizened rat (who uses old martial arts films and youtube tutorials to learn it himself) are forced to face other mutant vermin — fly and bat and gecko, etc. — who want to end the human race. But the execution is dazzling and kid-friendly.

Scene after scene has the “teens” bickering and bantering all at once, showing off and acting impulsively. But the “personalities” pop through. There’s the would-be leader turtle named after the Italian master (painter) Leonardo (voiced by Nicolas Cantu), rash, comical “go LOUD” hothead Raphael (Brady Noon), the bespectacled “brains” of the quartet Donatello (Micah Abbey) and the would-be stand-up comic Michelangelo (Shamon Brown, Jr.).

Ayo Edebiri of TV’s “The Bear” plays the aspiring journalist teen April who befriends the “brothers.”

They’re all cast young because the production team remembers these are supposed to be sheltered kids, with childish problem-solving skills but mad ninja “skillz.” They have childish tastes — pizza — childish habits, like sneaking out and sneaking around on human-hating/human-fearing “Dad,” hiding on a roof to watch a New York park screening of Matthew Broderick leading Chicago in “Danke Shoen” in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

And they have the aspirations of outcast children, to “fit in,” be “accepted” in our world, and often-unfriendly New York.

“Maybe one day everybody’ll love us like Ferris Bueller!”

“TMNT: Mutant Mayhem” is, like most comic book/’80s TV kids’ show adaptations, aimed largely at adults who grew up with them. You hear this in the history of hip hop soundtrack, the Gen X casting (40-to-50somethings) and “Family Guy” references. But with the teens chattering about Adele, BTS and the like, they’re reaching out to a younger generation or two as well.

The film’s visual aesthetic — New York as the 1920s impressionists/expressionists/surrealists imagined it, only with mutants — kind of crosses generational lines, too. It has some of the same virtues, with more jokes, and some of the same drawbacks of the “Spider-Verse” animations. It can be visually-wearing, thanks to whirl of images and action the darkness of it all.

But the CGI-processed stop-motion (clay models animation,) briskly sketched-in backdrops, neon-lurid street scenes and action that passes in an animatcan be expressionistically lovely.

And yes, we see segments animated from crayon drawings, which captures the playfulness of this adaptation. That comes through in the characters, the “vomit” and “ooze” and icky-stuff jokes, and in the film’s funniest running gag, aged, human-mistrusting Splinter’s fear that humans will “milk” them if they’re ever caught.

“Milk us? We don’t even have nipples!”

Rating: PG, mild profanity, animated mayhem

Cast: The voices of Jackie Chan, Maya Rudolph and Ice Cube, with Nicolas Cantu, Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown, Jr. and Brady Noon as the Turtles, Ayo Edebiri, and featuring Rose Byrne, Seth Rogen, Natasia Charlotte Demetriou, Giancarlo Esposito, Hannibal Burress, John Cena and “introducing” Paul Rudd.

Credits: Directed by Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears, scripted by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, based on the comic book characters of Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman.
Ayo Edebiri A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:39

Or are they and we out of “Cowabungas” to give?

Let’s find out.

That warhorse genre “the police procedural” earns a fresh look with the French drama “The Night of the 12th,” an uncommonly sensitive inside-view of a grim case and its toll on the friends and family of the victim and the increasingly frustrated detectives working it.

The crime is extraordinarily awful. A young woman (Lula Cotton-Frapier) leaves a party in a resort town outside of Grenoble and sends an affectionate good night video to her best friend as she walks home. A man in a hoodie approaches, calls her by name, and when he gets close enough, douses her with gasoline.

It was the night of October 12th, off-season. But the nature of the crime is such that detectives from the city are called in, with forensics, the works, when the body is discovered.

Yohan (Bastien Bouillon), their young, solitary captain, and his crew had celebrated the retirement of a colleague the night before. Now he, his senior man Marceau (Bouli Lanners), a rookie and others with plenty of years pile into two cars, drive over and go to work.

They’re all men, mostly in their 40s, seasoned veterans who can tease the new guy but put on their game faces when they see the body, the-contamation-concious forensics teams going over it the crime scene and the ugliness of the crime.

Their work is by-the-book, but it starts with a phone call — on the victim’s phone. Nobody in town save for the gendarmes and themselves know this happened. Answering that phone is the first evidence they gather.

Some will start the work of going door to door. Yohan and Marceau, the most experienced, must tell her family. Yohan confesses to being traumatized by this part of the job and when her mother (Charline Paul) loses it and must be restrained — a perfectly human response — we see why. The 21 year-old victim’s father must be summoned home from work.

The sadness of the early scenes — and as shocking as seeing the crime is, that’s the reaction filmmaker Dominik Moll evokes — is replaced by the painstaking gathering of names, Clara’s circle of friends, acquaintances and lovers. Interrogations are aimed at tripping up this boyfriend who says “We weren’t that close,” that snickering young punk who describes them as “sex friends,” and the slightly-older rapper who rapped an angry break-up song when she discarded him.

None of her exes and beaus seems all that put out that this terible thing happened to Clara Every guy they question seems somehow capable of this. Every chat with her shattered best friend (Pauline Serieys) pulls up details the young woman has left out, and tears.

The cops talk about the case in the field, at lunch and in the office, ruling out this or that motive. We start to pick up on the insular monoculture of that unit and this job, of how they narrow field of experience hampers the case, of the routine that drives them nuts when a case turns up few solid leads.

“We fight evil by filing reports.”

One has a marriage about to break up. Another is planning a wedding. The captain clears his head by cycling endless laps in the local velodrome.

And when they’re not otherwise distracted, little moments of insensitivity creep into their treatment of the victim and handling of the case. Only Yohan’s frequent updates and re-interviews with Nanie, the best friend, keep him centered.

Clara was “joyful,” “loved fun.” She “fell in love easily.” She “fell in love recently.” But asking about her “double dating,” while seemingly fair game, is judging her, blaming her for a psychopath’s actions. Young Nanie sees it. Yohan is the only cop evolved enough to understand that.

Moll’s film, co-written with Pauline Guéna and Gilles Marchand, is structured to frustrate the cops and baffle the viewer. Some of that comes from the strange workings of French justice, the way a new judge — a woman (Camille Rutherford) — can come in, see how the case has moved to the back-burner, and order it re-opened.

Differences in wiretap laws and slight deviations in the standard cop operating procedure in interrogations — busting in and handcuffing one suspect and interrogating him like that in front of his girlfriend — isn’t very “C.S.I.” or “Law & Order.”

Moll, director of “The French Fargo,” “Only the Animals,” teases out details and tells this tale through the wearing way it eats at the increasingly impatient and frustrated cops, who get testy with each other and pushy with assorted suspects the longer this goes on.”La Nuit du 12,” in French with English subtitles, tests one’s patience the way the case weighs on and tests the detectives.

Bouillon gives a sympathetic edge to Yohan, our on-the-scene observer. Nobody would want to tell a mother her beautiful 21 year-old has been murdered, especially like that. Taking a moment to step back and put yourself in others’ shoes can’t be taught at police academies, and more’s the pity.

But as the police chase longer and longer shots, Serieys’ Nanie brings Yohan and us back to the tragedy of it all, the shocking loss and the grieving that won’t end even if they all find “closure.”

We and Yohan don’t need a new judge to come in to realize Clara “deserved better” than this crime, and this perfunctory, judgmental treattment of it by the folks who are supposed to figure out who did it.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Bastien Bouillon, Bouli Lanners, Pauline Serieys, Charline Paul, Camille Rutherford and Lula Cotton-Frapier

Credits: Directed by Dominik Moll, scripted by Pauline Guéna, Gilles Marchand and Dominik Moll. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:55

Yes, “Barbie” spoiled everbody, with its blowout “previews,” blockbuster Friday and Saturday, $162 million opening and dash to $250 million+ on its opening week.

So when “Haunted Mansion” opened Wed. and Thursday to…$3.1 million. A modest but healthy $30 million weekend prediction went by the boards. Maybe $25 million, says Deadline.com.

Bad reviews aren’t helping. Fans of the Disney World/Disneyland/EuroDisney et al attraction may come, but nobody else.

The weekend belongs to “Barbie,” another $91 million, a $350 million or so take by midnight Sunday, $700 MILLION WORLDWIDE.

Wow.

A $14 million second Friday means “Oppenheimer” is skipping right past that three hour run time and thinking Christopher Nolan and “Event Picture” and a $46 million second weekend. Not “Barbie,” but a blockbuster by any measure. Add that to a $127.8 million from its first week, $200 million by the end of next week.

“Sound of Freedom” is heading for $13.8 million, better than “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning,” which is shedding screens. Lot of discussion in the internet about that Jim Caviezel plea for “Freedom” fans to “buy more tickets” in the closing credits and the movie apparently playing to empty houses, “astro-turfing” this fringe film’s popularity, several twitter accusers (with photo proof) called it.

Money is money. But that’s pathetic. Reminds me of the way various Trumps have bought their way onto the best seller lists. This time, it’s the easily-conned who are trying to game the system and make this movie appear more popular than it is.

The theater chains will probably indulge them, because they could use the cash. But you’re not fooling anybody, and there are better movies to actually buy tickets and see.

A24’s sharp edged horror tale “Talk to Me” is managing a decent $10 million first weekend.

The weekend’s all-in take/all-films — is nearly $220 million, pre-pandemic numbers and built on the back of two non-comic book/franchise pictures.

Jason Statham told me a few times in interviews over the years that he used to chose roles based on who the fight choreographer was. Whatever the quality of the film, if the fights made him look cool, that was an investment in his future.

Anybody working with stuntman and fight choreographer turned director Kensuke Sonomura would almost certainly second that bit of career advice. The guy knows what he’s doing in staging thrilling, alarming and gritty hand-to-hand combat.

He turned to directing with “Hydra,” a gangster thriller more notable for its epic throw-downs than the plot or (decent enough) acting between fights. His second feature, “Bad City” has a better script, a charismatic cast and some of the most blood-pumping/fist-bumping brawls I’ve ever seen.

It’s a star vehicle for wizened on-screen heavy and sometime director Hitoshi Ozawa, who scripted and stars in this story of Yakuza, the Korean mob and how their tentacles reach into most every corner of Kaito City.

White-haired and 60something Ozawa kicks ass and settles scores as a jailed cop released to help bring-down a mob-connected developer (Lily Franky of “Shoplifting”) who escapes justice in court one more time (Sound familiar, Amerikahitos?) and announces he’s running for mayor of this “Bad City.”

A prosecutor sets up a “team” to help disgraced Capt. Toroda mete out rough justice.

“Beating up a good guy is violence,” the captain remembers. “Beating up a bad guy is justice.”

Katsuya and Masanori Mimoto play two seasoned “violent crimes unit” cops assigned to Toroda. And inexplicably, “newby” Nohara (Akane Sakanoue), a petite slip of a thing who vomited at her first taste of Yakuza violence, is thrown in as well.

“Messages” are being sent around town, Yakuza fashion. A major gang has been decimated by the Koreans, led by Madame (Rino Kataste), who still seethes over the murder of her son and heir, overseen by a top lieutenant but carried out by the seemingly unkillable Han (Tak Sakaguchi, a big deal in action cinema and a towering presence here).

Madame “hates” the Japanese, even though she lives and makes her dirty living there. Hey, she’s Korean. They have their reasons.

How all this ties in to the mob-connected developer is never all that clear. But from the opening moments, when Han dons a disposable rain slicker so that he can slice and stab two mob guards so fast they never know what hits them, to the captain’s brassy march into a mob stronghold, weilding only a bullhorn — which he uses to berate and then beat the hell out of youthful, armed and DIY-armored (thick catalogs duct-taped to their chests) Yakuza wearing baseball uniforms, the action here is pulse-pounding and personal.

Yes, that’s kind of an homage to “The Warriors.”

The fights are savage but can feel survivable, as guns are often eschewed. If you know what you’re doing with a blade, your feet and fists and body positioning, you could do all right — even if you’re “too old for this s–t,” or a Japanese Junior Miss.

The struggles feel desperate, improvised and furious and they are a jaw-dropping marvel.

Pulpy as the plot is, with an ending that adds an anti-climax or two, “Bad City” is a definite step up from “Hydra.”

If there are aspiring Jason Stathams out there from Britain, Hollywood, Hong Kong, Hokaido, Jakarta or Mumbai, this Sonomura fellow is the Man of Action you want to find an excuse to work with. And if that means a paid vacay in Japan, battling tattoo-covered gangsters by the dozen. so much the better.

Rating: unrated, violent as all get-out

Cast: Hitoshi Ozawa, Akane Sakanoue, Katsuya, Masanori Mimoto, Lily Franky, Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi, Tak Sakaguchi and Rino Katase.

Credits: Directed by Kensuke Sonomura, scripted by Hitoshi Ozawa. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:57

Filmmakers want to get their foot in the door to a career, and actors? They’ve got to book work to eat, right?

That explains a lot of dismally dull and just “off” B, C and D-grade thrillers, especially “The Lurking Fear.”

Filmmakers Darren Dalton and Robert Gillings thought another monstrous tale set in a long-abandoned asylum was exactly what the world needed (I think I’ve seen two this week, maybe three). And they sold their finished film to the streamer Tubi, so good on them.

Granted, they had to shovel more porta-john droppings on the careers of veteran character actors Robert Davi and Michael Madsen to achieve this. But you what you’ve gotta.

The film is apparently inspired by an H.P. Lovecraft short story. But the resemblence is thin. It’s a picture whose narrative is so jumbled you wonder what they whacked out to get it down to 81 lean, semi-nonsensical minutes.

When Davi’s character, a mysterious “expert” in the long-abandoned Martense Mental Institute, mutters “I don’t know what’s going on here,” we can wonder A) if his character is lying and B) if Davi is actually delivering a line from the script.

The disheveled movie mess concerns what Crystal (Elisabetta Fantone) finds when she frantically searches for her missing-for-a-day fiance (Jonathan Camp), the host of an unpleasant places to visit reality TV program called “Inside History.”

Mike and his crew were led into the tunnels beneath this large mental hospital ruin underneath an interstate fly-over by Andrew Seville (Davi). We saw them start the shoot, there.

Whatever happened in Martense, way back when — suggestions of weird science, pedophilia and sadistic treatment of patients — Mike’s TV chat-grammar “You can’t begin to imagine” doesn’t do it justice.

Madsen plays another dyed, unkempt, gone-to-seed cop in yet another no-budget horror tale, using the same wardrobe he wore in “The Wraith Within.” Maybe even the same sunglasses. The photo I posted is from that film, because there’s not much difference between the characters or the quality of the movies.

Davi vamps around declaring “It’s time to pay the piper. Somebody has to pay the piper” before launching into a little Anthony Quinn in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

“I am a RIVER to my people!”

I hope he had fun. I hope the check cleared.

But “The Lurking Fear” isn’t particularly fearful, and often makes little to no sense at all. The “history” is all over the place, with dates as early as 1801, as late as the turn of the 20th century and flashbacks showing a 1920s car.

The less experienced actors have trouble with line-readings, the filmmakers jump around to try and accomodate their “big names” by introducing Madsen in a scene that has little to do with the rest of the story.

There are many cinematic sins on view here. Worst of all, it’s not bad enough to merit inventing a drinking game for watching it.

Still, at the end of the day, they got “Lurking” thing on Tubi. Boy, I hope those writers and actors strikes end soon.

Rating: unrated, graphic, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Elisabetta Fantone, Robert Davi, Jonathan Camp, Laticia Rolle and Michael Madsen.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Darren Dalton and Robert Gillings. A Tubi original.

Running time: 1:22

“Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, the Movie,” also titled “Ladybug & Cat Noir: Awakening,” is an animated film film kids that falls on the wrong side of the “catering to/pandering to” line, in terms of children’s entertainment.

That should be no shock to anyone, considering that the movie is based on “Zag Heroez” branded French TV series dubbed for showing on The Disney Channel, with doll sales and all manner of merchandising is built into this exercise in entertainment “world building.”

The CGI animated characters and action sequences are sharp enough. The cutesy dialogue is cute-ish.

“Don’t be bemused. It’s just the news!”

The tunes our heroine, hero and villain sing are innocuous and pleasantly forgettable.

The messaging — “Stop worrying about what others think. You just have to believe in yourself” and “Who saves a life saves the world” (borrowed from Jewish and Islamic scriptures) — is generally positive.

But the prefabricated nature of it all feels focus-grouped, cut-and-paste “borrowed” from comic book and other “universes.”

Kids may find it a passable time-killer, but grownups should smell the cynicism of it all, despite the French settings, “bourgeois” jokes and baguette references.

There are these “Miraculous” gemstones, we’re told, which can be used or misused, and as one of them contains “the ultimate power,” guess which one falls into the hands of our villain, Gabriel (voiced by Keith Silverstein)?

“Chaos will REIGN today!”

Yes, he’s from that most evil tribe, most villainous profession among professions. He’s a fashion designer. Oh, and he’s mourning his dead wife, so all this evil is carried-out to bring her back.

Two of the other “miraculous” stones must fall into the hands of “heroez” fit to “work together” and save the world from this new menace.

That’s how Marinette, the baker’s daughter (Cristina Valenzuela) comes into possession of “Ladybug” earrings which transform her into a “water melon” suited (red, black polka dots like the bug, but you can see how people would make a mistake) super heroine, complete with “genie” advisor and a magical yo-yo that makes her into more of a Spider-Girl than Ladybug.

And that’s how the blond hunk from her school, Adrien (Bryce Papenbrook) puts on a cat gem ring and becomes Cat Noir, “the new hero in town.”

“All you have to do is follow my lead, sidekick!”

Sidekick? Who’re you calling SIDEkick?

Can two bickering teens foil the machinations of Hawkmoth, who just happens to be Adrien’s obsessed, grieving, neglecting-his-son Dad?

Jeremy Zag of “Zag Heroez, Inc” directed, composed the songs and co-wrote this, which is aimed both at fans of the TV series and at introducing new fans to the franchise.

Because that’s what “Ladybug & Cat Noir” and their movie really are, a franchise, just “content” conceived by marketers and executed by decent animators, voice-actors and crew.

Limp one-liners, derivitive characters and action set pieces remind us every minute or so just how little originality ever figured into it.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: The voices of Cristina Valenzuela, Bryce Papenbrook, Carrie Keranen and Keith Silverstein.

Credits: Directed by Jeremy Zag, scripted by Bettina Lopez Mendoza and Jeremy Zag. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

“Hidden Strike” is a bad movie that’s easy to endorse. A buddy comedy co-starring the master of the genre, Jackie Chan, here paired with that jock joker John Cena, it’s action for those who like their cheese paired with some fine…whines.

“Fasten your SEAT belt!”

“You let go!” “No, YOU let go!”

Yeah, it’s like that. But it doesn’t start out even that entertaining. This Chinese-financed XYZ Films actioner fills its first act with straight People’s Republic agitprop.

In the “oil wars” of the future, a Chinese refinery in the Middle East is under siege. “Volunteer” security forces led by Feng “Dragon” Luo (Chan) are efficiently dispatched, load a dozen buses with Chinese employees, their children and the refinery’s scientist/director, Professor Cheng (Jiang Wenli) for a dash down the Highway of Death to a “Green Zone” of safety.

But an American mercenary who lives among the locals (Cena) is persuaded to hit that convoy by a merc who turns out to be his brother (Amadeus Serafini, and much respect if that’s the stage name you came up with, my dude.). Chris wants revenge on some malefactor in that convoy. That might have something to with his dead dad.

“Quit,” the punk kid brother hisses. “Just like you did on our old man.”

Dragon promises to “protect” the young woman (Ma Chunrui) who rides in the front of his bus with him.

“You are here to be a hero,” she fumes, in Chinese with subtitles. “But not for me. For THEM.”

Yup. She’s his estranged daughter.

For over half an hour, we’re caught up in that bit of soap opera amidst a “Mad Max” raid on the convoy, mid-sandstorm — bloody shoot-outs between helicopters and desert warcraft. And then the leading couple finally has its “meet cute.”

Things really pick-up after that, with bro-to-bro throwdowns as one guy shouts “You killed my people!” and the other protesting “It wasn’t ME.”

Yes, they must work together to take down the real villain. I”ll pull the pin, YOU throw the grenade. And yes, they make a LOT of wisecracks as they do.

“You keep a MACHINE GUN under your seat?”

“I’m American…guns everywhere.”

Chan gets in a soap bubble brawl. Cena leads Arab kids in “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” Chan interrupts to correct his impersonation of a monkey.

Cena’s Chris speaks just enough Chinese to flirt with the old Chinese man’s daughter and sound like an idiot to a native Mandarin speaker. Chan lands his one-liners like a pro.

Movies about fighting over future oil in the first “Global Broiling” summer of 2023 seem seriously passe.

Jackie Chan is using stunt doubles these days, along with CGI. Some funny stuff, some outrageous stuff, little of it believable — especially the amusing bits — results.

But his ability to generate rapport with any buddy pic co-star, Chris Tucker to Owen Wilson to Cena, is undiminished. He still plays the “safety first” straight arrow to whatever joker’s sharing the frame with him.

And for all this film’s failings, something this international star has stressed in interviews with me and others over the years about East and West “getting along” eventually underscores this big budget Chinese-made B-movie and makes it at least tolerable.

Sure, the U.S. and China cooperate to shoot up a big part of the Middle East and a lot of Arabs in this movie. But the villain (Pilou Asbæk) is a Dane playing an amoral, pan-national Brit, who hires bad guys from all over the world.

So maybe we’ll “get along,” as many Chinese stars and filmmakers I have interviewed have stressed, as if repeating some national or at least show-biz career-preservation talking point. And maybe we’ll do that before the “real” shooting starts.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Jackie Chan, John Cena, Ma Chunrui, Pilou Asbæk, Chunrui Ma, Tim Ma and Jian Wenli,

Credits: Directed by Scott Waugh, scripted by Aresh Amel. An XYZ release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:43