Movie Nation

In a summer marked by “outrageous” women-driven comedies of the “Oh no they DIDN’T” variety, Jennifer Lawrence‘s “No Hard Feelings” stands out as the most outrageous of them all.

If your jaw doesn’t drop at the sight of a two-time Oscar winner, buck naked, raging and pummeling prank-prone young tourists “summering” in Montauk — rich drunken d-bags who thought it’d be cute to steal the clothes of a couple of skinny-dippers — well, maybe duck back into the “Spider-Verse” because this isn’t the movie for you.

But as “The Blackening” and the upcoming “Joy Ride” and earlier summers’ “Girls Trip” and “Bridesmaids” taught us, “outrageous” is hard to sustain, if you try to top your peak moments. And “outrageous” alone is never enough.

Lawrence takes the Cameron Diaz/Aubrey Plaza role in this raunchy farce from the writer of “Bad Teacher” and director of “Good Boys.” And while she’s game for anything, whatever it takes to pound a laugh out of a moment, it’s not enough in a comedy that sprints out of the gate, buries us under zingers and turns all sensitive and sentimental as it pulls its punches in the second and third acts.

Lawrence plays Maddie, a “local” year-round resident on the toniest end of the tony “East of the Hamptons” Long Island. Like townies in all tourist towns, from Aspen and Jackson Hole to Key West and Haleiwa, she’s got to hustle to be able to afford to live “in paradise.”

That makes her bitter, resentful of the rich who drive up property values, which drive up taxes and put her in danger of losing the bungalow on a coveted acre of land that her mother left her.

Maddie’s underwater, depending on summer to “make my nut,” collect enough in bartending tips and rideshare customers to cover that and all the other bills piling up.

Having her Toyota reposessed isn’t part of the plan. The fact that it’s repo’d by her “ghosted” ex (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) might give her wriggle room, or would if her latest Italian hook-up didn’t banana-hammock his way into her pleading.

Thirtysomething Maddie’s cut a wide swath through Montauk. The locals guys know better than to fall for her charms, her curves or her act.

Roller-blading to her one remaining job (funny) only hardens her determination. Is she desperate enough to “date” the son of some richies who offer a used Buick Regal for that service in a classified ad, just to bring their teen “out of his shell?”

“Date him or ‘DATE’ him?” she wants to know.

“Yes,” designer mansion/helicopter Mom (Laura Benanti) offers, helpfully.

“Date him HARD,” doting dad (Matthew Broderick, Ferris Bueller privilege all grown up) says. “Date his BRAINS out.”

Her pregnant friends (Natalie Morales and Scott MacArthur) make sure she understands she’s a “sex worker” if she does this. Hard-headed, hard-hearted Maggie is “just a girl who needs a car.” She’s sexed up plenty of guys and “never gotten a Buick” out of it. What’s the big deal?

But this Princeton-bound kid (Andrew Barth Feldman, terrific) is sullen, shy, and so deep into his shell and naive to the ways of the world that he may be a lost cause.

Blame his parents, who monitor his every move and “protect” him from most everything. Blame them for naming him “Percy.”

The fact that he volunteers at the animal shelter may give Maddie access. But throwing herself at the kid, working harder at “working it” than a shapely, sexy Montauk barmaid should ever have to work, doesn’t help.

“You seem like the sort of person we take dogs FROM, not send dogs home with.”

There’s a bracing, balls-out quality to Lawrence’s Mean Girl/Bad (sex) Teacher turn here, and she leans into it like a lady who could use a hit. Maddie bullies Percy, her exes, customers and little kids at the laser tag emporium that’s Percy’s idea of a fun-time.

Feldman, an alumnus of the “High School Musical” TV-reboot, becomes a poster boy for “putzy nebbish” or “nebbishy putz” as Percy, misreading seduction signals, so spoiled and clueless he thinks nothing of spitting out — literally — his first-ever Long Island Iced Tea in front of his flirty neo-dominatrix hot date, who will put up with anything just to get that damned car.

Not that he knows about that.

But the script’s efforts to soften the comedy with sentiment — her taking pity on the kid, him psychoanalyzing her — turn “No Hard Feelings” soft in short order.

Bang-up set-pieces still pop up here and there. Lawrence, as we’ve seen on chat-show appearances, can be wicked fierce with a comeback. An ex has a ring on his finger?

“Is her vag ‘dishwasher safe?”

“No Hard Feelings” lives when impulsive, not-that-bright Maddie furiously focuses on her next immediate need — that car — and what she has to do next to “close the deal.”

It makes too little out of her class resentment, which fuels her fury. A generation too phone-obsessed to copulate is only dealt a glancing blow.

The picture shows signs of some re-cutting, as bits seen in the trailers didn’t make the final edit and some players (Kyle Mooney, Hasan Minhaj) come in for a sight gag or punchline, and get either built up or cut-down, depending on how they played to test-audiences.

But for all her efforts, Lawrence never quite hits that comic sweet spot. She can’t pull off that bowling-ball-of-brazen thing that Plaza, Schumer and Tiffany Haddish made their brassy brands. There’s a reason nobody tried to soften up the “Bad Teacher,” and that nobody thought a sensitive Sandra Bullock “type” would work in that role.

But when she’s manipulative and mean, working the hair, the legs and the cleavage like they’ve never let her down so far, Lawrence’s mean and mouthy “Man-Eater” is something to behold — outrageous, “out there” and literally letting it all hang out because who in their right mind going complain about that?

Aside from guys named “Percy?

Rating:  R for sexual content, language, some graphic nudity and brief drug use

Cast:Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti, Natalie Morales, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Scott MacArthur, Hasan Minhaj, Kyle Mooney and Matthew Broderick.

Credits: Directed by Gene Stupnitsky scripted by Gene Stupnitsky and John Phillips. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:43

Every baseball fan knows about the Negro Leagues, that parallel baseball universe that competed and thrived in the decades before “baseball apartheid” ended and America’s Pastime brought Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and others into the Major Leagues.

Ken Burns had a hand in popularizing the Negro Leagues and placing them within the context of the segregated game in his PBS series “Baseball.” He turned Kansas City Monarchs veteran Buck O’Neil into a star, and O’Neil revived the memories of Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and others.

O’Neil is “back” in the new Sam Pollard documentary backed by Roots star, “Tonight Show Band” leader and film producer Questlove. “The League” is an entertaining survey of Negro Leagues history with special attention paid to their place within the African American life of their day.

O’Neil, like Henry Aaron, Maya Angelou, Bob Feller and many others who appear in “The League,” has passed away. But the decades of interviews they and many others left behind flesh out a film that features historians, sportswriters, scholars and museum curators who tell this story through the colorful characters who put on a show, and those ran the show behind the scenes.

It is the poet, actress and memoirist Angelou who gives the film its title, noting that after the “official” birth of the Negro Leagues in 1920, anybody in any Black community in America knew what you were talking about “when you said ‘The League.'”

The great teams of that era, roughly 1920 to 1951, were The Philadelphia Crawfords and the Homestead Grays, the Newark Eagles and those Monarchs of Kansas City.

Entirely too many teams were called “Giants” — Chicago American Giants, Washington Elite Giants, Nashville Standard Giants, Cuban X-Giants, Miami Giants, Brooklyn Royal Giants and Bacharach Giants and so on. And that’s one way, along with ever shifting lineups, allignments and the like, that the film struggles a bit with literal Negro Leagues history.

But even Major League Baseball has had problems wrestling with that tiger, trying to decide who was “major” and who was more of a minor league or barnstorming operation and when this or that team or league became “official.”

Pollard, who produced episodes of the PBS Civil Rights doc series “Eyes on the Prize” and directed “MLK/FBI,” gives us a history of segregated baseball, which began that day in 1887 when legendary baseball pioneer Cap Anson refused to let his team take the field against a Major League team fielding a Black player, and didn’t end until Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in April of 1947.

Forgotten figures like player, manager, owner and league founder Andrew “Rube” Foster, “one of the greatest baseball minds” ever, are given their due. Foster helped make the Negro Leagues a faster, “more aggressive” and more theatrical version of a game that turned slow and stodgy as soon as Babe Ruth started hitting home runs in the “live ball” era.

Foster picked the motto of the “separate” Negro National League, which came to life just after the “red summer” of race riots that followed World War I. He borrowed a phrase from Frederick Douglass to describe what Black players and Black businesspeople starting teams would be facing.

“We are the Ship, All Else the Sea”

The film punches holes in the hallowed myth of Branch Rickey, the Dodgers GM who took that bold step of integrating the majors. Rickey set a precedent that Major League teams didn’t need to compensate Negro Leagues teams for players they signed to contracts.

Negro Leagues teams were owned by African Americans, and Rickey found ways to delegitimize them.

In introducing Newark Eagles co-owner Effa Manley, via oral history interviews, we learn how the Negro Leagues pushed for integration of the game for years, but had every reason to expect to be paid for players they developed and introduced to white baseball and whom they had under contract. The regal Manley didn’t care for Rickey. She much preferred colorful Cleveland franchise owner Bill Veeck, who called her to tell her he wanted her player Larry Doby to be the first Black American League player, and paid her for his rights.

It wasn’t a market value price, we’re told. But it was the principle and the cash that mattered.

Where “The League” sparkles is in its retrieving interviews with the great pitcher Paige, Monte Irvin and other Negro Leagues stars who lived long enough for the country to start interviewing Black baseball players about those years.

Also invaluable is the memory of Negro Leagues umpire Bob Motley, who recalled everything from idolizing the players and angling for a shot at umpiring to the nature of the bus rides between towns and the segregated hotel and restaurant situation for anybody traveling while Black back then, even star ball players.

They lived on “peanut butter and bread,” Negro Leagues player turned baseball home run king Henry Aaron remembered.

Pollard’s expert witnesses note the role “The League” played in the African American business community as the largest Black-owned enterprise of its day. Early on, “context” tends to overwhelm everything else, as we grapple with The Great Migration and the role the World Wars played in mobilizing African American leaders and followers to demand equal rights.

But at every turn, the context comes back to the game, which players could play in the Caribbean Winter Leagues each off season, where “color” didn’t matter and they were reminded of what America might someday embrace.

Books and a visit to the Negro League Baseball Museum are still the best place top get a chapter-and-verse history of African American baseball, pre-Cap Anson and on through to Jackie Robinson. But “The League” does much of what you’d want a documentary on the subject to do — highlight colorful figures, let them speak, where possible, and park it all within the context of an America that drifted from “Plessy v. Ferguson” to “Brown vs Board of Education,” with baseball leading the way into segregation, but also leading (along with activists and World War II) the way out.

Rating: PG

Cast: Monte Irvin, Junius “Red” Gaten, Maya Angelou, Henry Aaron, Amiri Baraka, Buck O’Neil. Bob Motley, Satchel Paige, Bob Feller, Gerald Early, Effa Manley and Bob Kendrick.

Credits: Directed by Sam Pollard. A Magnolia (July 14) release.

Running time: 1:44

Shudder has this “No one knows we’re out here” thriller, set in Colombia.

July 14.

“The Wildflower” is an infuriating melodrama about victims of abuse in Nigeria, oddly presented as a “dramedy” to the domestic market, as some of what’s being shown is alleged to have a comic intent.

We’re meant to be infuriated by the brutal, sexist patriarchy, a “ociety that “has raised women to mute their voices.” Most every women in the film is harassed, imposed-upon, bullied, beaten and worse.

But the picture is infuriating in other, unintended ways. A pieced-together-script loses track of injustices and story threads, piles characters on in the third act and generally blows what is pretty close to a solid Lifetime Original Movie about sexism and how it enables sexual assault.

How is any of this funny? At one point, we even see a character “breaking” in the midst of a manic, loud shouting match with his character’s wife. As the man later kills the wife he’s been beating regularly, one can wonder about a country where spousal abuse is still considered an object of fun, and where rape isn’t taken as seriously as it has been in the West — at least since the 1970s.

But that’s kind of the point of director Biodun Stephen’s sometimes-moving but often messy movie. IT’s time for Nigeria to take this seriously.

We’re shown three different women, Lagos neighbors, who face abuse. Rolake or “Rolly” (Damilare Kuku) has a masters in architecture and a new job with a handsome, go-getter builder (Deyemi Okanlawon). Her “hero worship” of Gowon Williams doesn’t wholly blind her to the red flags that go up.

He comments on her appearance, suggestively, and seems eager enough to bring his new personal assistant along on business trips. Her boyfriend may be leery, but Rolly isn’t.

Her young friend and neighbor Ada (Sandra Okunzuwa) is a teen forced to navigate the lecherous remarks and bullying of a local womanizer (Zubby Michael). She is warned to steer clear of him, and he isn’t having it.

And Ada’s mother (Toyin Abraham) runs a little spice stall that brings in little money, which means her overdressed, womanizing lout of a husband blows his top whenever he comes home demanding “my food” and there is none there. He beats her and insists it’s his fault.

The only “comic” bit to this relationship might be his attempts at makeup sex and her insults about the experience.

All of these women will be assaulted. One will die, with her killer forgotten in the messiness of this script. One will be arrested for defending herself. And one will be sued for going public about her attack.

Kiki Omeili plays the doctor who treats the sexual assault victims and begs them to go public, involving NGOs and activist groups to start a conversation that could change the culture.

The “good” kind of infuriating here — how angry we get and are meant to get over the ill-treatment facing these women, the cultural biases and police disinterest and ways some women perpetuate these injustices by accepting them, blaming themselves or other women for sexual assault or merely staying silent — never quite outweights the “bad” infuriations in the film.

“Why are you letting a man treat you so carelessly?”

Minimizing a murder, drifting off to include a preacher and his once-raped wife’s debates on speaking out, suggesting Rolly’s boyfriend might become a court case spy for the rapist but not making that clear, court scenes that misunderstand legalese, those are as vexing as some of the arch dialogue, characters that border on caricatures and plot contrivances.

But all that said, strip away the attempts at comedy and “The Wildflower” would play and cleanly make its points in most any culture, not just a Nigerian market that perhaps prefers their social justice stories leavened with abuse jokes and boys-will-be-boys tolerance for the sexism that enables abusers.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, rape

Cast: Damilare Kuku, Deyemi Okanlawon, Sandra Okunzuwa, Toyin Abraham, Zubby Michael and Kiki Omeili

Credits: Directed by Biodun Stephen, scripted by Niyi Akinmolayan and Mannie Oiseomaye. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

Four white guys in glasses, jeans or khakis, “They looked more like nerds than punks.”

But “punks” don’t come from Kansas, even Wichita, Kansas. “Art punks,” maybe?

The Embarrassment were a band in a bubble, almost the only kids their age in their town to latch onto Alice Cooper, move on to the Velvet Underground, The Sex Pistols, Jonathan Richman and Bowie and take their place among the “art punk” nerds like Talking Heads.

They came out of Wichita and toured the country on bills with The Ramones, The Del Fuegos, The Replacements, hitting CBGBs and all the hot spots of the early ’80s too-cool-to-be-New-Wave scene.

With guitar-bass-drums driven “blister pop” tunes like “Elizabeth Montgomery’s Face,” “Jazz Face,” “Dino in the Jungle” and “Sex Drive,” they sound as representative of their era as any of their contemporaries, “So much better than R.E.M., Hüsker Dü,” enthuses Freedy Johnson.

But as the title of a documentary about them reminds us, “We Were Famous, You Don’t Remember: The Embarrassment.” They were (almost) famous, earning the attention accolades and assistance of musicians like John Cale and music-loving filmmaker Jonathan Demme (“Silence of the Lambs”), who committedTalking Heads to film in “Stop Making Sense” and knew The Next Big Thing when he saw and heard it.

As filmmakers Daniel Fetherston and Danny Szlauderbach’s interviews and history makes clear, The Embarrassment was never quite were that “next big thing.” But Evan Dando of The Lemonheads, Grant Hart of their midwestern contemporaries, Hüsker Dü and others, including best-selling political historian (“What’s the Matter with Kansas?”) Thomas Frank come in to sing their praises.

And they, the band’s manager, three original band members (Brent Giessmann,John Nichols, Bill Goffrier), journalists and fans speculate on how a band that came from “a part of the country not at all culturally significant” could emerge, make some noise (especially in the hipper college town of Lawrence, Kansas), take their shot and gracefully if dispiritedly give up when it didn’t happen despite four years of touring and recording.

The film can’t make high drama out of a story that’s been echoed hundreds of times with scores of white boy/guitar rock bands over the decades. Maybe they could have been the “next R.E.M,” in a sort of “make it big” best-case-scenario. Or they could have labored on, respected, with a devoted following, and endured on a lower tier of fame and financial reward like The Replacements, as another devotee suggests.

Four guys “determined to play music and make art,” they never really left Wichita, setting up shop in a railroad-side Flatiron Building there between station-wagon-with-a-UHaul-trailer tours.

But as other docs about bands that didn’t quite get over make plain, that’s a wearing, limiting and deflating way to live. It’s no wonder most DIY/be-their-own-road-crew ensembles, even with the help of famous and influential fans, throw in the towel.

The “how we got together” interviews are conventional “met in the the sandbox in my backyard.” Of course aspiring “art punks” were bullied in a shitkicker “cowboy town” like Wichita. Nothing unique about their getting into music, “learning while we played,” forming a band under this name or that one, finally finding their tribe, (50 hipster” kids in Wichita) then catching on in Lawrence story arc either.

The film never gets past the superficial. The most “personal” bit concerns a rental house that they threw a “house wrecking party” concert in and trashed, making their local newspaper as they did.

The musical education of the first two guys to meet, drummer Brett and guitarist Bill, was augmented when Brent’s older brother shot himself and Brent inherited a vast record collection. Wait, what?

Original bassist Ronnie Klaus “disappeared,” and while the reasons for the band breakup — exhaustion, futility — are mentioned, no discussion of efforts to find Klaus for their reunions are gotten into. Where’d he go and why did they not talk about trying to track him down? Is he still on the lam for wrecking his rental house?

Most band-that-didn’t-make-it histories aren’t as romantic or melodramatic as “Almost Famous.” You’ve got to work with what you’ve got, but make the most of the drama that’s here.

Still, it’s always nice when musicians who mattered to their fans are memorialized in movies like this. As most of us mark the waypoints of our early lives with songs, the attachments are real and last a lifetime.

They weren’t “famous. But thanks to this film, we will “remember” The Embarrassment, maybe even dig for a tune or two on Youtube, like this one.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Brent Giessmann, John Nichols, Bill Goffrier, Ron Klaus (archival footage), Evan Dando, Grant Hart, Freedy Johnson, Thomas Frank

Credits: Directed by Daniel Fetherston and Danny Szlauderbach. A Factory25 release.

Running time: 1:36

A fight club for girls, pushed around and bullied and reaching that point where yeah, “Let’s go f—up some football players!”

Bad girl Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Marshawn Lynch, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber, Dagmara Dominczyk and Ruby Cruz are the stars.

From MGM this August, a Back to School romp.

I think it took me maybe 10 minutes — OK possibly 15 –– before I figured out that “Bodega,” a film about an Instagram-obsessed/Instagram-famous bodega-owner and drug dealer, is a mockumentary and not a DOCumentary.

There’s nothing all that far-fetched about a Dominican immigrant running a bodega in the South Bronx. Yeah, J.R.’s lost his accent and yes, he’s a bit blinged-out to be a simple shop owner in a rough neighborhood. But looking at some of the folks who’re Instagram “stars” in our attention economy/performative culture, it’s not a stretch to believe some DJ Khalid-styled attention whore could break out.

Even if he’s really just using the shop as a front for drug dealing, even if it’s more of a money-laundering operation than a place the locals duck into buy soda, canned tuna, condoms and plantains — “platanos,” as they say down in the D.R.

Because that’s how J.R. (Andrew Mojica) sells his cocaine, “best product in the five boroughs,” baggies stuffed inside electrical-tape re-sealed plantains. That, and inside boxes of Quaker Oats and such.

Clever.

“Bodega” is a dopey, druggy and funny midnight movie about one young guy’s need for social media affirmation to go along with the drug money that supports his modest New York lifestyle.

His Insta-live posts have gotten the attention of a documentary crew who want to hear all about the “three times” he got shot — once by a friend, once by a brother, and once by a cop.

J.R. is chasing that “American Dream” until he grabs it and can afford a place for his sister…and her “15 kids.”

He “supports the neighborhood by providing local gangs with guns.” He works for an unseen drug lord named “Manuelito,” and basically runs the Los Nietos (The Grandsons) bodega for his absentee ex-con Uncle Concho (Richard Velzaquez) who lives in LA.

Every time the film crew catches up with Tio Concho, he’s shopping on Rodeo drive, for himself and his lady love. Should he get her something from Yves St. Laurent, he wonders, stopping at the store window?

“That’s anal,” he tells the filmmakers. “You want anal? YSL.”

“Bodega” begins with a vintage PSA starring the late Danny Aiello from the “just say no” era of the drug trade, the “Moonstruck” and “Do the Right Thing” star standing in his old neighborhood, “Fort Apache: The Bronx,” and telling kids about friends he lost to drugs.

But the mockery doesn’t turn serious until we meet J.R.’s supplier and “best friend,” “Puerto Rico” (Pedro Montoya). P.R. is not happy that J.R. has a film crew with him. He makes threats, and doesn’t even know about the Instagram thing.

A competing shop-owner/dealer-on-the-side, “African King” (Prince Sunny) is furious about the Instagram buffonery, and about losing customers to the “popular” dealer and social media star. He’s all about the voudou and “give you Ebola” or “COVID” threats.

When he finds out, Tio Concho won’t be happy either.

“Have you ever seen a successful drug dealer who ADVERTISES?”

The joke here is how shallow, needy and clueless J.R. is. Money from drugs he cuts with powdered grits using two women named Ebony and Ivory to do the cutting IN HIS APARTMENT means nothing next to his goal of reaching 100K Instagram followers.

It’s a comical Portrait of a Pendejo, a dunce whose camera crew captures him committing crime after crime, and cops (Stacey Griffin) trying to shake him down — “Would you guys describe yourselves as ‘dirty cops?'”

“It’s all relative.”

J.R. is so stupid he can’t see the Dominican Sophia (Jennifer Figuereo) for the cash-and-Green-Card coveting golddigger that she is. He’s got no notion of what will happen when African King’s COVID curse hits, or what might become of him if and when his Big Boss finds out about his “social.”

Hey, it’s all about the Insta, baby.

And “Bodega” is funny enough that in the right setting — midnight showings — this scruffy, dopey, pendejo-packed farce could find its audience and deliver some campy culture and generation-skewering laughs.

Rating: unrated, violence, drugs, profanity

Cast: Andrew Mojica, Jennifer Figuereo, Richard Velazquez, Pedro Montoya, Stacey Griffin, Prince Sunny and Danny Aiello.

Credits: Directed by Joseph Ruzer, scripted by Andrew Mojica, Joseph Ruzer and Sean Slater. A Ruzerpictures release.

Running time: 1:21

We know she can be flip and funny and make sex and sexuality amusing, just from her chat show appearances and little radio stunts for YouTube.

Playing a woman willing to do anything to get out of debt? Well, almost anything? Hired by Matthew Broderick to romance and educate and seduce his kid? The trailers have looked hilarious.

“No Hard Feelings” opens Thursday night.

L

A demon makes mischief in an Indonesian village and the result is a bloodbath, with feuding locals under that demon’s influence and a little cannibalism thrown in for um, flavor.

That’s “Para Betina Pengikut Iblis,” whose title appears to translate to “Devil’s Disciples” in English, if Google is to be believed.

Say this for Rako Prijanto’s demented slaughterhouse of a movie. It’s out there.

Mawar Eva de Johgh stars as Sumi, a downtrodden daughter of a sickly, sole-breadwinner father (Derry Oktami). When that infected leg of his has to come off, Sumi is unduly interested in assisting the Catholic Dr. Freedman (Hans de Kraker).

She’s also fascinating by goat gutting that’s going on at the home of the richest boss of their village. But no, he won’t “lend” her a goat to butcher and sell in her father’s gulai stall. Whatever her cooking skills, boss Mimin (Agus Mahesa) more lecherous things on his mind.

She’s missed her window to flee this place with boyfriend Saber (Ravil Prasetya). So she’ll probably never get to the city to look for her mother and brother, who fled years before.

Trapped with a one-legged man who is sure their family/house is cursed and insists she bury his sawn-off leg, unable to feed him with no money coming in, Sumi is in despair and ripe for believing in hallucinations.

A pale demon (Adipati Dolken) appears, with long fingernails and answers. “The only way out of your troubles,” he assures her (in Indonesian, with subtitles), is to listen to her new “friend.”

Let’s start with “Feed your father his LEG,” and let the carnage begin.

But she’s not the only one with the Devil in her ear. Witchy Aish (Sara Fajira) and just-lost-her-sister-and-furious Sari (Hanggini) also seem to have blood in their eyes and demonic intent. And considering the recent deaths, they may have other rivals.

Saber realizes, too late, that “too many strange things happen in this village.” They can’t escape what’s coming.

Ms. de Jongh works up a fine lather as a bitter, bloody-minded young woman who doesn’t take much of a push to turn cannibal, grave-robber and murderer. Hanggini and Fajira are similarly convincingly demented.

The slaughter scenes are as bloody as I’ve ever seen in an Indonesian film — not “House of a Thousand Corpses” gory, but gruesome enough.

The simple plot takes some ugly, semi-interesting third act turns, which explain the high bodycount and perhaps this village’s eagerness to listen to demons.

It’s not really my genre, not a thrill-a-minute thriller, and there’s a disappointing “To Be Continued” finale, just when things have turned towards inescapably dire.

But for those who like their blood rare and their red meat flesh, this dance with the “Iblis” might fill the bill.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, lots of blood and body parts.

Cast: Adipati Dolken, Mawar Eva de Jongh, Hanggini, Hans de Kraker,
Sara Fajira, Ravil Presetya and Derry Oktami.

Credits: Directed by Rako Prijanto, scripted by Anggoro Saronto and Rako Prijanto. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

I have never seen a “last party” teen romp as violent at “The Crusades,” a would-be coming-of-age comedy that drowns in a hot tub of toxic testosterone.

It opens with a teen-planned/teen-featured cage fight and climaxes wtih a gang brawl that should have put victims in the hospital. And that’s after the parade of punchouts that preceded it.

Hard to get happy watching this one. The throwback “Catholic schoolboys fighting rival Catholic schoolboys” story feels like a how-gangsters-are-made drama from an earlier era.

The lusting for the “hot teacher” and clumsy scheming to seduce the all-girls-school coeds are straight out of “Porky’s” and its “Lampoon” era contemporaries.

The amusingly bluff adults — veteran tough guy Mike Starr as a poop-bag-fire on the porch prank victim and Nicholas Turturro as the macho dope of a coach — get most of the few funny lines.

“I just got my PERIOD hearing that!”

But even though the action is well-handled, the Big Party chaotic and cut with brio, “The Crusades” is a singularly joyless affair where the guys fight their way to “manhood” and the girls can’t bully them out of their myopia.

Our Lady of the Crusades is one of two Catholic boys’ schools in town. St. Matthew’s is the other. They are blood rivals, not just in sports.

Pals Leo (Rudy Pankow of “Outer Banks”), Sean (Khalil Everage of “Cobra Kai”) and “extreme senior” Jack (Ryan Ashton of TV’s “School for Boys”) aren’t the toughest, smartest or most popular lads in their “Lord of the Flies” high. They’re just bonded for life to survive.

If the two-fisted nonsense and more mature but bullying Mean Girls from the local Catholic girls school aren’t enough to contend with, encounters with the most savage kids of St. Matthews never end well.

Jack, nicknamed “the Bull,” is a lunkhead always on the verge of getting kicked-out, egged on into violent tests that he delusionally figures he can win. Because of his “bull” headedness.

Leo takes Italian tutoring from the hottest teacher (Anna Maiche) in “The Crusades.” He crushes on her, and on the almost-as-unattainable Ryan (Ashley Nicole Williams of TV’s “Motherland”).

Sean has a serious girlfriend (Indiana Massara), who is seriously peaved at his immature “bros before ‘hos” attitudes. He’s always hanging with the boys, hopeful about “that first time” with Jess, just as long as his bros don’t have something planned instead.

Our Lady of the Crusades is financially strapped, so they” have to merge with the equally hard-up St. Matthews. More competition for dates, more violence, and Jack’s probably facing expulsion over that cage fight that opened the movie.

There’s nothing for it but to put everything they have into this weekend’s school “social” dance with the girls from their sister academy, and then in the drinking and hooking-up makeout “last party” afterwards.

Blaine May makes a perfect “psycho ex boyfriend” looking to bust up Leo over what he imagines is happening with Ryan. Vince doesn’t travel alone. He’s got his own “wrecking crew.”

Over the course of that long night into next day, “The drink will flow and blood will spill,” as the song goes, as The Wrecking Crew keeps pursuing Leo and his mates.

The acting isn’t bad. But no, nobody here is the most convincing “high schooler.” The direction is solid, punchy. Yet the picture isn’t so much plotted as given a time frame to squeeze a lot of fistfights into. The pranks are ancient, the girl characters barely given a function and the laughs few and far between.

It’s as if “The Crusades,” directed by one guy and scripted by him and two other guys, suffers from the same affliction as its characters — “testosterone poisoning.” There was nobody involved in the production to tell them how uninteresting this “story” is and that a “comedy” this angry and violent, and not in a funny way, was never going to play.

Rating: unrated, very violent, teen drinking, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Rudy Pankow, Khalil Everage, Ryan Ashton, Indiana Massara, Blaine May, Ashley Nicole Williams, Anna Maiche, Nicholas Turturro and Mike Starr.

Credits: Directed by Leo Milano, scripted by Shawn Early, Jack Hussar and Leo Milano. A VMI Release.

Running time: 1:41