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Amelia had a pretty good time on her 18th birthday. Popular and beautiful, with a whiff of lazy mean girl about her, she drank and danced and shunned those nerdy “drama kids” like everybody else.

But something happens on 40th birthday that causes her to revisit her 18th, over and over again.

Yes, “One More Time” is a Swedish “Groundhog Day,” watchable in English or in the Muppet Show chef’s mother tongue. But that moment when it admits as much as over-and-over-again Amelia (Hedda Stiernstedt) tries to get answers is just one way this charming variation-on-a-theme wins you over.

Amelia has gone through her version of Kubler-Ross’s “stages,” adding “confusion” to the list that includes “denial” and “anger” and combining “depression” and “acceptance” as she works through that 18th birthday, beginning to end, repeatedly.

Finally, she’s turned to her former friend, that “drama kid” (Miriam Ingrid) who grew up to be a famous singer-songwriter (Tove Edfelt). Fiona showed up at Amelia’s 18th birthday party — they share a birthday — uninvited. She showed up despite the fact that she’d already tried to play a song she wrote at the school talent show, and Amelia walked out, just like everybody else in their class.

And even though this kid’s been hurt by the end of their friendship, she hears Amelia’s “crazy” story out, and serves up the answer — “Groundhog Day.”

Amelia’s “never seen it.” But as Fiona’s Mom runs this 2002 town’s video store, Amelia arm-twists Fiona into fetching that DVD, passing up “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Back to the Future” to get to it. That’s how Amelia figures out what we’ve spotted the moment she wakes up, 18, a second time.

Amelia’s got to learn to be “nicer” if she ever wants to break this “time loop.”

With “Groundhog Day” being one of my all time favorites, and probably one of yours, the only hope “One More Time” has of pulling us in is seeing what the filmmakers do with that too-similar-plot.

There’s a bit of “Before I Fall” fatalism in this version, as screenwriters Sofie and Tove Forsman hint at dire consequences, moonshine poisoning, shattered friendships and relationships that demand to be broken with every attempt Amelia makes to change her fate.

Even as she struggles through possible solutions to her trap and complains “Nothing I do matters” and turns reckless when nothing she tries works, we sense consequences to every action Amelia takes.

“You’ll regret this the rest of your life,” she warns her bestie (Elinor Silfversparre), who craves a hookup with a guy she crushes on. A drunken “tell all of you your future” speech at a later incarnation of that party climaxes with a heartfelt hug of someone the script doesn’t need to tell us will die in those intervening 20 years.

The third act has heart-tugging moments and a few twists that I didn’t see coming as I guessed “What possible directions can they take from here?” all the way through it.

“Groundhog Day” variations are always about life’s second chances, “fixing” something that’s gone wrong and digging the trapped character, in Punxsutawney or “Palm Springs,” out of the bitter rut their life has tumbled into. That’s a universal longing, which is why this plot keeps coming back, again and again, going back to “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

What if I hadn’t done this or that and life had turned out differently?

This isn’t the best “version” of this “do over” story ever. But it pushes a lot of the right buttons and is just different enough to be worth revisiting “Groundhog Day” “One More Time,” here in the company of cute young Swedes.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual references, binge-drinking teens

Cast: Hedda Stiernstedt, Elinor Silfversparre, Miriam Ingrid, Tove Edfelt, Maxwell Cunningham, David Tainton

Credits: Directed by Jonatan Zetzler, scripted by Sofie Forsman and Tove Forsman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

What else is there to say about “Say Anything,” the era-defining, hopelessly-romantic teen rom-dramedy that launched Cameron Crowe as a Grand Romantic Gesture filmmaker and John Cusack as a leading man?

Sitting through it the other night for perhaps the first time since it came out, certainly the first time in decades, I was bowled over by how smart, sweet and funny it still plays. The teen romances of that era, by and large, haven’t aged well, and not just because of the hair and the fashion sense.

I started my career as a critic during this “golden age” of teen rom-coms, and it was never as rosy as we tend to pretend to remember. “Say Anything…” (as it was originally titled) is aging better than any of its high school rom-com classmates. It’s the true classic of the era and of the genre.

I dial-hopped by a young Patrick Dempsey star vehicle from the era last night and was instantly bored and filled with near revulsion. Even the exceptions to the rule, the John Hughes films, have a cringey quality today, partly due to the affluence and attitudes and the bizarre version of suburban Chicago high school life that almost never showed a black face.

“Say Anything” was a Reagan-era, post-“Ferris Bueller” portrait that was just as monochromatic, but as others have pointed out, was more adult, kinder and gentler and just a bit more lived-in and real.

Like the rich, bullying brat Ferris, Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler is popular at school for no obvious reason. He’s not quite a loner, working class, not much of a dater. But he’s a kid who was out of the country for a bit and came back, a student slightly-older-than-average and thus a novelty.

I could never figure out why anybody would confuse Ferris Bueller with anyone you’d call “a righteous dude.” But Lloyd’s the guy everybody at a post-graduation pre-rave teen binge-drinking party surrenders their keys to. The party’s 20something host (Eric Stoltz) gives “key” duty to him because Lloyd’s responsible, compassionate. He’s not letting anybody drive home as drunk as his gonzo, blitzed jock classmate Mark (Jeremy Piven, of course).

Lloyd has few prospects in life but is utterly up front and blunt about what he sees his immediate future holding.

“What I really want to do with my life – what I want to do for a living – is I want to be with your daughter. I’m good at it.”

Maybe we don’t get the attraction, the “kick-boxing is the sport of the future” Lloyd pursuing and connecting with beautiful but insular and all-academics Diane (Ione Skye). But his posse of girlfriends, led by outspoken and intense Corey (Lili Taylor, just dazzling) and including Rebecca (Pamela Adlon, decades away from “Better Things”) do.

And Diane, noting Lloyd’s attentiveness, chivalry and genuine delight in introducing her to the classmates she spent four years not knowing, sees it too. She “gets it” at about the time the audience does, and long before Diane’s clingy, “stay focused” father (John Mahoney) hears that “I’m good at it” speech. Dad will never get it.

Think of all the high school parties depicted in rom-coms in the ’80s, and then watch Crowe raise the bar for all the teen comedies to follow. This party scene is brimming with life and fun, riotous but not out of control, engaging in all the subcultures it touches on. Everything before it imitated the gonzo “Animal House.” Everything after it was imitation Cameron Crowe. Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” would further codify how such fetes were filmed, after first being scripted and cast to perfection.

Cusack’s manic-patter in this picture was made for home video — “closed captioning.” He burns through the lines so fast that it’s no surprise that he grew up on Preston Sturges “screwball comedies,” where “faster, FASTER” was always funnier. Even when he’s heartbroken, even after he’s written a letter confessing his love and devotion and he’s sure he’s blown it, even when all he can do is leave a message on an answering machine he’s riffing run-on-sentences at top speed.

“Maybe I didn’t really know you maybe you were just a mirage maybe the world is full of food and sex and spectacle and we’re all just hurling towards an apocalypse, in which case it’s not your fault. I’ve been thinking about all these things and… you’re probably standing there monitoring. And one more thing – about the letter. Nuke it. Flame it. Destroy it. – It hurts me to know it’s out there. Later.”

Cusack was rarely this rat-a-tat-tat in his line-readings in the decades to follow, but we always knew it was there and it informed every character, every moment he let us see the wheels spinning, even if that spinning wasn’t spewing from his mouth.

Others were considered for Skye’s role as Diane, but the British-born “River’s Edge” actress brings a wholesome, smart but naive shading to this beauty-who-never-fit-in.

Crowe packed this Seattle production with Cusack cronies, most famously his unbilled sister Joan, who gives us working class reality in just a couple of scenes as his single-mom older sister. Lloyd’s emotional intelligence is on full display in how he plays the “fun uncle” to her little boy and still manages to understand her plight and her sensitivities.

Philip Baker Hall took another step on his road to no-nonsense immortality as the IRS agent who has to tell Diane just what her nursing-home-operator Dad was “guilty” of. Lois Chiles (also unbilled) plays Diane’s remarried mother, just a few years past her “Bond Babe” duties.

And then there’s the movie’s lone, loud false note. Bebe Neuwirth, already famous for “Cheers,” shows up at that post-graduation party as a too-sexy guidance counselor just “worried” about Lloyd, and anybody who ever went to high school can tick off the ways this is BS. She’s a wonderful actress, but that character should have never made the final cut. A little too “Bueller.”

The soundtrack, including that iconic Peter Gabriel moment on a boombox, was first-rate as you’d expect from the ex-“Rolling Stone” writer Crowe. And the milieu he set this in and the production design that realized it was as lived-in as you can get — from Lloyd’s beat-up late model Malibu to the crowded apartment he shares with his sister and her adoring, adorable moppet (Glen Harris).

But a lot of those elements “date” a movie. What makes “Say Anything” timeless isn’t the cast so much as it is the characters, and isn’t the story as much as the way it is told. The dialogue, crisp and (relatively) clean by modern, coarse and cliched standards, is its own “grand romantic gesture,” teen angst, teen curiosity and the teen dilemma incarnate.

We don’t know, at that age, what we’ll want for the rest of our lives. But we’re starting to get an idea of what we don’t want. And that’s what Crowe and Cusack & Co. hit right on the nailhead.

“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”

Rating: PG-13, teen sex, teen drinking.

Cast: John Cusack, Ione Skye, John Mahoney, Joan Cusack, Lili Taylor, Eric Stoltz, Jeremy Piven, Pamela Adlon, Bebe Neuwirth, Lois Chiles and Philip Baker Hall.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Cameron Crowe. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:40

The filmmaker behind that holiday splatter Santa favorite, “Rare Exports” is back, serving up a Finnish revenge Western set during the last year of World War II in “Sisu,” a tale of gold, Nazis and the guy who kills them for taking his diggings from him.

This Jalmari Helander film is, as Thomas Hobbes’ might have described life in Lapland during wartime, “nasty, brutish and short.” It’s also folkloric, flesh-tearing “fun, for those in on the “gorier the better” splatter film joke.

Finland remember was invaded by the Poland-carving-up Soviet Russians at the start of World War II, with the so-called “Winter War” becoming their Ukrainian invasion of that era — a debacle that only huge losses and sheer numbers could salvage. When the Germans invaded Soviet Russia, “the enemy of my enemy” became Finland’s friend, and thus ally.

“Sisu” is set in 1944, when that alliance has ended and the German “scorched earth” retreat from the northern reaches of Finland has taken over.

Aatami Korpi (“Rare Exports” veteran Jorma Tommila) has removed himself from all that, he thinks. He’s a silent, solitary gold prospector, living out his days panning and digging with only a dog and a horse for company.

Let the fleeing German bombers shriek overhead, he’s got his rifle, his pickaxe, his tent and hermit’s life.

But discovering the Mother Lode changes that. A retreating, depleted SS tank company led by its very own SS Obersturmführer (Aksel Hennie) crosses paths with him. And before we know it, it’s on like Kittilä Kong as the Nazis figure out they’re not dealing with a man, but a “legend,” a trained and experienced killer with “Sisu,” a killer with a dogged determination to persevere, prevail and “refuse to die.”

Helander cannily shot this film in English and tips his hand early by being sure to show Aatami Korpi’s “Lavvu” tent, a traditional teepee by any other name.

You cross Korpi, you face his Old West vengeance. You may have a couple dozen disciplined veterans of The Eastern Front and a tank under your command. Something tells us it’s not going to be enough.

“Sisu” is sort of a “1917” odyssey of crossing a vast, unforgiving battlefield, with an Old West ethos and splatter picture vibe. Finnish women hostages, seized as sex slaves by the monstrous Nazis, are here not so much as a goal to be saved, but as the brutalized eyewitnesses and prophetic seers (Mimosa Willamo) who let the villains know what they’re in for.

The Nazis have “effed around,” in modern parlance. Now, they’re about to find out.

The various obstacles and dispatchings of bad guys standing between this Finnish-stiltskin and his gold become more and more over-the-top as this tale unfolds. Our hero repeatedly, gruesomely survives the unsurvivable, not via supernatural means but by simple Bugs Bunny Physics. And the things he does with that pickaxe.

It’s all a bit much, but all in good, gory fun even if this genre mashup never quite transcends any genre it borrows from.

And Tommila, like Stellan Skarsgard’s anti-hero father of “In Order of Disappearance,” proves a colorful, heroic and brutally efficient and creative avenger, a furious Finn expert in filleting fascists.

Reviewed at its Florida Film Festival North American premiere.

Rating: As “R” as it gets, “for strong bloody violence, gore and language”

Cast: Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan and Mimosa Willamo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jalmari Helander. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

The Lee Cronin-directed/Sam Raimi-produced reboot of his “Evil Dead” franchise has a brisk Thursday night and Friday and looks to be the biggest horror hit of the spring, outperforming “Renfield,” “The Pope’s Exorcist” and most other comers with a $20 million+ opening weekend.

“Evil Dead Rise” indeed, as $23.5 million is what Deadline.com is saying it’ll earn.

That won’t be enough to chase “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” off the top spot. Deadline.com figures it’ll earn another $55-60 million this weekend, based on another big Friday.

Guy Ritchie’s combat drama “The Covenant” didn’t gain traction having “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant” as its title. It’ll do a respectable $6 million and change.

“John Wick” will add another $5, as will “Air” (It will clear the $40 million mark by weekend’s end — not bad).

“Pope’s Exorcist” took a dive, Nic Cage’s “Renfield” pic will take in another $3.5.

And A24’s hyped “Beau is Afraid,” which opened in very limited release last weekend, will manage $3.3 on 900 or so screens this weekend. It’s buzzed about, even if mixed reviews like mine didn’t help.

Searchlight’s “Chevalier” is the hidden gem in this lot. It’s expected to not clear $1.5 million, and it’s a shame. Check it out.

The final weekend estimates Sunday afternoon provided below by @boxofficepro.

A fun, adoring crowd throwing a few sharp questions his way and a lot of that good old John Cusack charm made last night’s “An Evening with John Cusack” at The 32nd Florida Film Festival a real treat.

Like many in the audience, I hadn’t seen the Film That Made Him — “Say Anything” — in years and years. And that bad boy plays and plays hard. Still funny, still charming, the kind of smart teen rom-dramedy that Hollywood’s given up on and even Netflix has trouble replicating. His antic, “cool” and trenchcoated turn in that role set the tone for a career that’s had him turn up in the full gamut of screen “types” — romantic leads, creepy villains, soldiers, con artists, convicts, hitmen and born romantic music buffs.

J.C. had kind words about working with sister Joan, about the impacts Rob Reiner (“The Sure Thing”) and then Cameron Crowe’s (“Say Anything” was his first feature) had on his career. He recalled thinking the iconic “boombox” moment was “cheesy” and wouldn’t work.

“I was…wrong.”

I think he said Crowe had The Plasmatics playing out of the box when shooting the scene, but Peter Gabriel’s “Your Eyes” is what made the final cut…because the pulses on the VU meter of the boom box matched the earlier song.

He remembered arguing with producer James Brooks over his level of participation in the creation of the character and answered questions about his tastes in music (“The Replacements”) and his favorites among his films. “Grosse Pointe Blank” and the Brian Wilson biopic “Love & Mercy” topped that list.

Cusack remembered Wilson “showing up on set one day” at the “very record store” where he had his breakdown, and Cusack realizing that he had the character down when he noticed they were wearing “identical Hawaian shirts.”

He told his agents he’d fire them if “Being John Malkovich” ever got financing to be filmed and they didn’t get him in it, and Malkovich himself closed the deal with a call describing this movie as depicting him as “a total a–hole,” which J. Malk embraced, as did J. Cusack.

He tried to option the Jim Thompson novel “The Grifters” in his callow youth, and got lucky when Stephen Frears got hold of it and made the call that paired Cusack up with Anjelica Huston at her finest.

An observation — the men in the audience asked mostly questions about “Grosse Pointe” and music. The women? They all made sure to say their NAME first, gushy question or more serious one, it didn’t matter.

A couple of audience members were curious about his politics, something on ready display on Twitter, which has earned him a little extra notoriety over the years. I hadn’t known about the family connection to the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip, whose Vietnam protests made them household names in the early ’70s.

Cusack has an interesting take on the “Hollywood that I knew” not existing anymore. Screenplays, which he writes and pitches, are put through “algorithms” to see if they’re worth Netflix or whoever’s trouble.

That doesn’t explain “Roma,” but I guess Scorsese’s “The Irishman” and other indulgent, big budget Netflix fare does tick off a lot of audience boxes. When you’re a leading man consigned to TV series support work and occasionally fun B and C movies that allow you to wear that trademark black baseball cap, they may be looking for other boxes to check.

I got him to talk about his Irish Western, “Never Grow Old,” which I enthused about when it was released. This being a savvy crowd of serious Cusiacs, a LOT of people there had seen that gem.

Cusack is doing a “Greatest Hits Tour” of evenings just like this. If you’re a fan, go online and find a stop near you. But remember, he’s the only one allowed in the theater in a black baseball cap.

Thanks to my friend and SERIOUS Cusack fan, studio publicist Linda George-Eure, for the photos. I’m the guy who left his black baseball cap in my black car.

A tale of tolerance and “kindness” in the face of fascism and hate, “in dark times.”

Ari Aster’s “Beau is Afraid” is an inscrutable thriller scripted and directed with the confidence of a filmmaker whose “Hereditary” and “Midsommer” upped the intellectual ante on modern horror, but edited with the audacity of a Next Big Thing who’s been reading his own glowing reviews.

It’s a cumbersome, ungainly journey through phobias and mommy issues — sprinting out of the gate in the first act, struggling to come to a conclusion in the fourth — a movie whose “Truman Show” ending has a whiff of “Defending Your Life,” with Patti Lupone in the Faye Dunaway/”Mommy Dearest” role.

That makes it a film everybody is going to be talking about, many will try to dissect and few will want to sit through a second time. It’s stress-inducing and patience-testing, an intimate story told in epic scale and at epic length.

But no, you don’t need to see it in IMAX, no matter what the A24 “event” hype.

The brilliant first act throws us into a paranoid’s vision of The Big City, a Heironymous Bosch hellscape straight out of Fox News depictions of New York, Chicago and D.C., depictions meant for rural folks who would never go there anyway.

Joaquin Phoenix is the title character, a quivering mass of insecurities, on medication and in therapy (Stephen McKinley Henderson is his quick-with-a-“script” shrink). And when we see the world the way Beau does, we get it.

He sprints past murderous, tattooed crazies to get to the store or his psychotherapy appointments, and dashes past a street market where assault rifles are sold and surgeons, still in their bloody scrubs, sip espressos and cops draw on any citizen fearful enough to seek their help.

Soul-sucking anxiety is the only sane response to this Kafkaesque nightmare, and that’s how Beau lives — secluded in his beseiged apartment building, looking for some way, any way, to get out.

Maybe that planned trip to visit his rich CEO mother will do the trick, his therapist hopes. But even the “realistic expectations” that his shrink wants him to embrace include a killer caveat about the woman who gave birth to and raised him.

“Do you ever wish that she was dead?”

To make that visit, Beau must contend with increasingly insane notes slid under his apartment door about the “noise” he’s making (he isn’t), notes that lead to the unseen threatener cranking up CONCERT level music that pounds Beau awake through one more miserable night.

He oversleeps. A loony confluence of events conspire to prevent that trip, but that’s nothing compared to the guilt trip his mother gives him on the phone before hanging up.

That missed visit drives the narrative, as something happens to Mom and Beau’s efforts to be there for her are thwarted by an accident, other violence, the reluctant-to-release-him religious couple who take him in (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane) and other detours.

Flashbacks are how Beau shows us how he turned out like this, assorted childhood clashes with his single Mom (Zoe Lister-Jones), nightmares about things he might have witnessed back then and a cruise with her where he meets the first and only girl ever to take an interest in him. Elaine’s tween-aged “Wait for me” also circumscribed his life.

Beau’s odyssey to be by his mother’s side has him chased and shot at, tumble into a traveling theater troupe’s forest-idyll production of a play that seems to be about his life, has assorted testy calls with his mother’s lawyer (Richard Kind) and features fresh injuries, physical and psychological, which are the last things this 50ish sack of insecurities needs.

Phoenix is absolutely perfect in the part, and the casting — up and down the line — is deliciously on-the-nose. Ryan is nurturing until the moment calls for her to snap, Lane is at his most unctuous. Parker Posey plays childhood crush Elaine as a libidinous adult. Bill Hader pops up as a delivery man with bad news and Lupone is as imperious and delusionally martyred as you’d expect, playing the older version of Beau’s archetypal Jewish mother

But the forest idyll manages to be inventive (animation, and amateur theatrics) and a tiny bit revealing and stunningly boring at the same time. Aster gives few sequences much urgency, despite Phoenix breaking into panicked sprints here and there. The “recovery” with the still-grieving parents of a fallen soldier (Ryan and Lane) includes an over-the-top rebellious teen (Kylie Rogers) and one of their son’s deranged comrades, named Jeeves (Denis Ménochet).

The violence, an Aster trademark, shocks and repels in between interludes where we think Beau is getting help, getting answers and might even get better.

I’m guessing the average viewer can appreciate much of what’s going on and maybe even take some pleasure in figuring out what Aster is going for here. But “Beau is Afraid” has an indulgent, opaque air that combined with scenes that go on past their payoff makes it an unpleasant, almost assaultive experience in its violent moments, repetitive and dense in others.

Darren Aronofsky’s equally ambitious “Mother!” was an hour shorter, after all.

Performances aside, there just aren’t enough “Mommy Issues” here to justify the tedium of a movie that challenges you and wears you out but doesn’t deliver a payoff satisfying enough to make it worth this much of your time.

Rating: R for strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language.

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zoe Lister-Jones, Richard Kind, Parker Posey and Patti Lupone.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ari Aster. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:59

There are some genuine frights amid the gruesome, gory, eyes-averting horror of “Evil Dead Rise,” a reboot of/homage to the franchise that made Sam Raimi and his muse, Bruce Campbell, famous.

Writer-director Lee Cronin pays tribute to that franchise with a chainsaw here, a Campbell catch-phrase there — “Come GET some!”

But I found it a pitiless version of a story that was amusingly cheesy in its original incarnation. Throwing a lot more eye-gouges, impalings, shotgunning and skin-shredding at us seems like overkill designed to make us ignore how heartless and humorless this all is.

A grisly prologue set in a lakeside A-frame in the woods by a lake make us wonder if we’re headed into a variation of Raimi’s “cabin in the woods” narrative. But a few bodies there are but a tease for what came “one day earlier.”

That’s when rock tour guitar tech Beth (Lily Sullivan) peed on a stick and decided the result was a reason to catch up with her much-neglected LA sister Ellie (Alysa Sutherland) and her family.

That’s when an earthquake hits and opens up a hole in the basement of their condemned used-to-house-a-bank high-rise, exposing the old bank’s buried vault. It’s not cash that aspiring DJ-son Danny (Morgan Davies) uncovers. It’s old shellac records, and this creepy old book.

Do we remember our Latin? Or our Raimi?

That would be “Naturan Demento,” “The Book of the Dead,” its pages made “from human skin,” its binding from human bone. And as we all know, all it takes is a simple injury and a drop or two of blood for the book to open, its horrific images to be exposed and Danny’s activist sister Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) to be wholly creeped-out.

Playing the incantations captured on those 1923 discs is what lets all hell break loose.

If only Danny had guessed why a long-sealed bank vault was decorated with crucifixes. If only he’d taken heed of the seal on the crypt where he found the book. If only this story’s theme and morality were more complex than “curiousity killed the cat.”

The creepy, Flatiron-shaped building features flickering lights and soon, an elevator with a demonic mind all its own. Neighbors may be introduced and a family dynamic suggested — Ellie’s husband moved out, her youngest (Nell Fisher) traumatized by the hope that Daddy will come back.

But we know where this is going and who is but fodder for slaughter, even if we can’t suspect how merciless the director of “The Hole in the Ground” will be in taking us there. Tattoo’d punk rock Mommy is who the demon comes for first.

And there’s no talking with “her.”

“Mommy’s with the maggots now.”

Others can make the case that horror shouldn’t let the viewer off the hook, that relentlessness is one way to go to jolt, shock and revulse horror fans.

But “Evil Dead” in the title gives us the right to expect more than just gore.

There’s little that’s realistic outside of this “universe’s” established tropes — the book, the demonic possession, the fact that shotguns and knives and cudgels won’t stop it, but a good wooden door or “Fargo” farm implement will.

Still, the players are good at registering shock, even if their characters are slow to react to threats to loved ones. Perhaps the kids liked Daddy best.

Cronin gives the picture a period piece flavor, cell phones and digital mixing boards, with all the cars coming from the ’80s or early ’90s. Raimi’s famous ’73 Olds Delta 88 becomes a ’90s Buick Roadmaster wagon here.

The only things I found amusing are goofy, perhaps intentional mistakes — a veteran rock roadie calling the ancient recordings “vinyl,” and suggesting she can fix the DJ’s set-up to work after a power outage… by using her AC-powered soldering iron to rig up batteries that mysteriously manifest themselves.

By the time the picture goes “Army of Darkness,” it’s way too late and entirely too much blood has been spilled for any lighter touch to work.

I recognize the effects, the makeup, the murderous efficency and the bottom-line/it’s sometimes scary values of this visit to “The Evil Dead,” a film that was originally going straight to HBO Max. But the lack of fun marks this big screen abattoir squarely in “not my ‘Evil Dead'” and “not really my thing.”

Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, and some language

Cast: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher and Morgan Davies.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lee Cronin. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:36

All things considered, Ray Romano’s “Somewhere in Queens” is a pretty watchable dramedy despite all the “lows” that hang over it.

It’s low-heat and downbeat, with low stakes and low ambition. The situations are low on originality and the jokes are strictly low-hanging fruit.

“Queens” is about a sensitive New York teen his gregarious extended Italian-American family calls “Harpo Marx,” because the “kid hasn’t made a sound since his baptism.”

But “Sticks” (Jacob Ward), so named because he’s been tall (ish) and skinny most of his life, is a pretty good passing and shooting point guard at his local high school. That’s where he comes out of his shell, just a bit, and the attention of his supportive dad (Romano) has made the family popular at school. Dad Leo may be just another laborer at his father’s constriction business, but this attention’s made him the most “famous” he’s ever been.

Amazingly, nobody ever thought that Matthew, aka “Sticks,” could take his talents to college. “Somewhere in Queens” is about that possibility coming up, a chance to go to Drexel U. in Philly.

Yeah, “one of the recruits got Lyme Disease,” is how Leo puts it. “We got lucky.”

Ba-DUM-bum.

“Somewhere in Queens” a big extended family has built its life around home ownership, a family business that takes in all of the menfolk, big Sunday dinners that are a staple of movie and TV Italian-American families, and events at the local hall for hire, Versailles Palace, because “Italians gotta celebrate every f—in’ thing.”

That’s another characteristic of this tale. Stand-up and belovedly hapless TV dad/son Romano has everybody and anybody unload a lifetime of f-bombs in his starring, co-writing and screen directing debut.

Because Italians and “Queens,” amIright?

And there are secrets. Sticks has a bubbly, take-the-intiative girlfriend (Sadie Stanley) that he hasn’t told the folks about. She’s invited to Sunday dinner, impresses and raises eyebrows. And Mom (Laurie Metcalf, terrific as always) takes an instant dislike to this secret and this girl who must have pursued her anxiety-ridden, super shy son.

Angela has her own issues, hinted at by people who remark about how “your hair grew back, just as curly” and her testy reactions to anything that alludes to what she’s been through.

And Leo? He may be the perpetually-tardy lump at Russo Construction, having to take a back seat to younger brother/foreman Frank (Frank Russo) in Dad’s (Tony Lo Bianco, classing up the joint) home improvement business. But he’s the one their latest hot widow client (Jennifer Esposito) hits on.

There is little here that we haven’t seen before in decades of movies set in this milieu. One new wrinkle has Dad interfering in the kid’s love life. But other than that…

Romano cast within his comfort zone — lots of TV actors (“Cosby Show” alum Geoffrey Owens among them), and wrote what he knows — Italian American shtick.

My recent gold or at least silver standard for this sort of indie (ish) family movie is “Feast of the Seven Fishes,” an even more formulaic Italian American coming-of-age tale with the same sorts of “first in the family to go to college” subtext, but wrapped in a more believable period piece set in the much more interesting and original coal country of Pennsylvania/West Va.

But there’s comfort food value in movies that don’t surprise us much, and that’s what Romano was reaching for here. After all, he’s made a pretty good living finding the funny in low-hanging fruit.

Rating: R for (profanity) and some sexual material

Cast: Ray Romano, Laurie Metcalf, Sadie Stanley, Jacob Ward, Jennifer Esposito, Frank Russo and Tony Lo Bianco.

Credits: Directed by Ray Romano, scripted by Ray Romano and Mark Stegeman. A Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:44

They blow the “meet cute.” But that’s never the actors’ fault, and since the leads are Ana de Armas and Chris Evans and they ARE cute, and we all know they’ve already met with their “Knives Out,” that’s no biggie.

Our story takes over a half hour to set up, which is right on the cusp of unforgivable. And it drifts on after the climax, and actor turned director (“Rocketman”) Dexter Fletcher (he also plays a scruffy “contact”) ought to know when to drop the mike by now.

But that’s quibbling when your product is a big and noisy, scenic and messy action comedy that delivers laugh-out-loud sight gags, punch lines and star cameos — most of whom play characters with all the screen life span of Tom Cruise’s character in “Edge of Tomorow.”

You can’t and probably shouldn’t say this about many movies, but the bad guy deaths in “Ghosted” are often slapstick hilarity incarnate — machine-gunning motorcycling mugs staring in shocked slo-mo as they hurtle past the window of the Pakistani jitney bus de Armas has just used to run them right off a cliff.

But how does a college-educated organic farmer serving the street markets of D.C. meet a C.I.A. agent masquerading as an “art consultant?” At a street market, where she’s trying to buy a houseplant even though she “travels” a lot and can’t offer anything like “love” to it, or anything.

That’s just Cole Turner being instantly judgy. “Cactus,” he figures, suits the beautiful woman whose phone number he would love to get. Something prickly and that can live through her neglect is all she deserves.

Yes, there’s a succulent used as a metaphor, and eventually a running gag.

Sadie sizes-up this good-looking Gomer as a provincial who’s never even traveled outside of the country.

But something makes her serve up that phone number, and then suggest coffee as a first date becomes an afternoon, an evening and even a following morning in our lovely nation’s capital.

He sends her a text or two…or more, the next day or so. His mom (Amy Sedaris) is comforting, his dad (Tate Donovan) thinks he needed to mention he “wrestled in high school.”

Kid sister (Lizze Broadway) is the one who figures he’s blown it, and that he’s been “Ghosted.”

But in the strangest “stalker” via technology turn ever, Cole figures out where she’s gone and figures she’ll be up for his “grand (romantic) gesture” of just showing up in London and tracking her down.

Nope. Following her around just gets him nabbed by bad guys. They think he’s “The Tax Man,” a notorious assassin who must be paid and must have “the pass code.”

The first villain he meets is a Russian who purrs “It truly eees an honor to torrrrture you today” and slaps him because that “hurts me, a leetle,” and “I’m all about sharing the exPERience!”

Borislov is played by that walking, talking “Buster Scruggs” drawl, Tim Blake Nelson, the only cameo I’m going to give away here. And with his amusing arrival, and Sadie’s abupt rescue attempt, “Ghosted” gets up and gets going.

We dash from the Khyber Pass and bazaars of Pakistan to The Arabian Sea, having already been treated to the most scenic spots in Washington (a romantic walk along the Patowmack Canal, a sprint up “The Exorcist” steps) and a spot of London.

The shootouts are staged in an epic, effects-heavy jitney bus vs. pickups and motorcycles chase through that famous pass, in a villain’s lair, on a private jet and in a very distinct sky-high restaurant.

The bad guy in pursuit of the MacGuffin of the tale is played with a venomous French-accented edge by Oscar winner Adrien Brody. His badass/bad jokes henchman (Mike Moh) is the first guy to sing a bit of The Beatle’s tune, “Taxman.”

But of course we hear that again, of course there are romantic montages and action beats set to pop music and of course we never ever really fear for our heroes, because Hitchcock only killed his leading lady once. And that’s the tone here — jokey, on the move, sometimes surprising, violent with a big ol’body count and still not all that serious.

Because no movie which serves up a sea of “bounty hunters” with names like “The Serpent” and “The Grandson of Sam” and played by a lot of people you know is going to be anything but a bloody lark.

Evans, playing a Chris Pine role — a guy repeatedly saved by a more heroic woman — is light on his feet and quick with a quip. And let’s just say that as furious as the fights get, every time “high school wrestler” foreshadowing is made good, that’s a big laugh.

Ana de Armas puts herself in Gal Gadot, Angelina/Halle/Chastain territory as a perfectly credible, adorably pouty action heroine.

And as messy as all this is — it’s more “Bullet Train” than “Extraction,” as far as streaming action epics go — it plays. The laughs land and the crooked corpses pile up and the leads, despite every bit of artifice and clumsiness showing in the “relationship” side of the script (they used Chris McKenna, Rhett Reese and Erik Sommers, but probably needed a good female scripter to take a pass), the leads have chemistry.

“Ghosted” manifests itself as a pleasantly amusing piece of cheese, embraceable for the breezy time-killer it is. But if they dare decide to franchise it, they’ll need a writing upgrade for that to come off.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence/action, brief strong language and some sexual content

Cast: Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Mike Moh, Amy Sedaris, Lizze Broadway, Mustafa Shakir, Tate Donavan and lots of cameos

Credits: Directed by Dexter Fletcher, scripted by Chris McKenna, Rhett Reese and Erik Sommers. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:56