Movie Nation

There were a couple of instances during his storied career as director, producer and “brand” that Roger Corman might have moved beyond B-movies and taken his shot at being an A-picture filmmaker. “The Secret Invasion,” a 1964 WWII combat picture, was always planned as a B-movie. But with a “name” cast and United Artists distribution, it settled in that grey area between major studio productions and Corman’s “action cinema on the cheap” ethos.

It’s a post-“Guns of Navarone” pre “Dirty Dozen” convicts-as-commandos thriller built around just-past-his-peak Stewart Granger, Mickey Rooney settling into supporting roles, Henry Silva on his way to iconic villainy, Italian star Raf Vallone just starting his long association with Hollywood and rapidly-fading TV “fad” Edd Byrnes.

Set in occupied Yugoslavia, inspired by a magazine article on Dubrovnik, Croatia that Corman read at the dentist’s office (Where else?), it is, hands down, the most scenic film Corman ever made.

Twenty years after the end of World War II and little had changed in Tito’s Yugoslavia. The Croatian War of Independence was decades in the future. Little had marred Dobrovnik’s old city and its citadel. Condos didn’t cover its rocky seaside hills and their tumbledown stone walls and stone houses.

The story was straight-up WWII pulp fiction. Convicts from Britain, the U.S. and the Mediterranean are assembled in 1943 Cairo for a mission to distract the Germans from the coming Allied assault on Italy. They’ll stir things up by convincing an Italian general who hates the Germans to lead his troops into an uprising with Yugoslav partisans.

Things get all Rogered up (i.e. “silly”) straight away, as this squad of experts called in by the Major (Granger) are a coldblooded assassin (Silva), an Italian thief and contraband smuggler (Vallone), an IRA demolitions man (Rooney, aye. Rooney.), a forger (Byrnes) and a master impersonator (William Campbell, probably best remembered for his TV spots on “Star Trek,” etc.).

Not a lot of commandoes, and overall a pretty goofy skill-set to fake-start a “new front” in the Balkans.

There are a couple of twists that still work and the combat sequences, which grow in scope as the Yugoslav Army is dressed up as scores of Germans and Italians, aren’t terrible.

The screenplay sets up the players as “types” and serves up a meaty line or two. One character doesn’t like the smell of digging from a tomb into the fortress where their Italian general/quarry has been imprisoned.

“Get used to it,” the morbid, pervy Durrell (Silva) hisses. “It’s the smell of eternity!“

But whatever tropes are trotted out for “the mission,” however it turns out, whoever earns the most beautiful death scene, the fun in many a Corman movie is in our grudging appreciation for how he managed all this on the (relative) cheap.

There’s no sense relying on “the vain one” (Campbell) to master impersonating Granger (for an escape attempt in the middle of their training) or their German captor. Just loop in the other actor’s voices when he “imitates” them.

Genius!

Similarly, Rooney’s character’s “big scene,” taking on a pillbox machine gun nest by himself, has him singing, in an Irish brogue that comes and goes, about the “big surprise” he’s got for Gerry.

Watch his lips. He added the wee tune in post production. Funny, that’s the only scene from this I remember from watching “The Secret Invasion” on TV as a kid. I didn’t remember his co-stars or the title, just the Mick singing and tossing potato smashers (German grenades).

The best “big moments” belong to Silva and Vallone, stirring and surprising, even today. Corman spent most of his money on actors, and it really paid off here.

As far as cutting corners, a fog machine is a great help when you’re trying to stage a trawler-vs-German gunboat fight at night, and you can’t go to sea and there is no water filming tank to rent. It’s masterfully minimal.

Sound effects cover up the ordnance budget. A few smoky blanks per firefight, a lot of machine gun noise, a well placed squid or two for some of the victims and pyrotechnics on the walls and rocks, skilled editing and it’s “close enough for government work,” as the boys used to say.

That said, the film took on an Adriatic vacation pacing, probably in mid-production, something that spills over onto the screen. The stakes never seem that high, the urgency of the mission is basically an afterthought, everybody’s relaxed and kind of enjoying their working vacation, and it shows.

No, it’s not the beefier, longer all-star cast A-picture “The Dirty Dozen,” or even “The Devil’s Brigade,” which came years later. But it is a great reminder at why Corman remains an inspiration to indie filmmakers, generations removed from his years of mentoring Ron Howard and Coppola, Scorsese, Dante and James Cameron into the business of directing movies, and doing it without wasting one thin dime along the way.

Rating: violence

Cast: Stewart Granger, Mickey Rooney, Raf Vallone, William Campbell, Spela Rozin, Edd Byrnes and Henry Silva

Credits: Directed by Roger Corman, scripted by R. Wright Campbell. A United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:38

Those who haven’t gotten the message won’t turn to Apple TV+ to get a clue, but here’s another star-studded attempt at punching through.

A thriller series about the coming calamity.

March 17.

Pity they changed the title from the more poetic “Song of the Assassins,” which is what it was called in China.

Wirework and wilder than wild fights? Mark me “present.”

This bad boy comes out March 3.

Was this what Netflix was thinking in serving up its overlong supernatural action comedy, “We Have a Ghost?”

They won’t need to keep the streaming rights to “Ghost,” “Ghostbusters” or “Monster House.” They don’t have to wish they had Disney’s “Haunted Mansion,” not if they mash up all of those films into one two-hour-plus PG-13 title.

A thriller that isn’t thrilling, a horror comedy that rarely produces more than a chuckle or three, a sentimental tale that can’t quite wring a tear out of death and loss, “We Have a Ghost” dishonors pretty much every hit film it steals from.

We have reason to expect better from the writer-director of “Freaky” and director of the “Happy Death Day” films. But given that Netflix blank check and lack of editorial supervision business model, a dud was almost pre-ordained.

An opening tease tells us there’s something weird about this 19th century Greater Chicagoland two-story fixer-upper. The previous family fled in the dark of night.

The new folks roll up in their ancient Jeep Cherokee, ask the real estate agent “Nothing like, bad happened here, right?”

The family’s sketchy years are barely sketched in, but father Frank (Anthony Mackie) and mom Mel (Erica Ash) are ready for another “fresh start.” Older son Fulton (Niles Fitch) rolls with it. But sensitive guitarist and classic-rock-loving Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) does not.

“How many ‘fresh starts’ are we at now, Dad?”

Naturally, he’s the one who first sees the ghost, a shrieking mute in a bowling shirt with “Ernest” stitched over the pocket.

Kevin is unafraid and unmoved in that modern teen way. All he sees is something cool he can video-record on his phone. As the ghost (David Harbour) manifests himself as Kevin’s singing, he can only assume they share a love of Credence Clearwater Revival.

Kevin barely has time to learn a few of this unspeaking ghost’s “rules” — “We can’t touch you, but you can touch us, kind of like a stripper!” — before big brother grabs his phone and finds out, followed by Dad, followed shortly thereafter by Mom. She’s the only one to act like she’s seen a ghost.

Dad? He’s always got an eye on the next get-rich-quick scheme. It’s time to monetize this calamity via social media dominance.

Kevin tries to solve the mystery of who the dead man is, helped by Joy, the mouthy, stereotype-riffing and ripping Japanese-American classmate (Isabella Russo) who happens to be his trombone-playing neighbor.

The funniest sequence in the film is the tried-and-true life-cycle of an online phenomenon montage, with the ghost video going viral, then self-promoting online leeches videoing their commentary on it, “I See Dead People” memes and fans videoing “The Ernest Challenge,” even though nobody but a real ghost could actually run through a wall.

Jennifer Coolidge plays the “West Bay Medium,” a “basic cable” paranormal show hostess who is sure this is fakery and is totally fine with that — until Kevin eggs Ernest into “attacking” her. Tig Notaro plays an academic researcher turned author, one with a “secret government project” past.

And all of this stands between Kevin and his new friend Joy getting to the bottom of “Ernest’s” trauma, the event that has him haunting this particular fixer-upper.

Car chases, military “ghost buster” activities, channel-surfing by “Ghost” on TV, Dad’s endless hustles to cash in on this gift from beyond the grave, “We Have a Ghost” at least references all the elements that could have been developed into something funnier.

Writer-director Christopher Landon, despite the generously provided screen time allotted, doesn’t serve up anything anyone over the age of ten might giggle over.

Coolidge leans on her oversexed and over 50 shtick for a laugh, but the reliably funny Notaro is just hung out to dry.

Mackie might have made something out of his barely-outlined con artist father figure, had he given the guy a manic edge. Harbour seems ill-used here as well.

That adds up to a mash-up action comedy that teases you with everything it might have been, every amusing possibility not followed through on, and then defiantly refuses to on those possibilities.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, some sexual/suggestive references and and profanity

Cast: Jahi Di’Allo Winston, Anthony Mackie, David Harbour, Isabella Russo, Erica Ash, Jennifer Coolidge and Tig Notaro.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Landon, based on a short story by Geoff Manaugh. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:07

Michael B. Jordan makes his directing debut in “Creed III,” his third acting outing in the never-ending “Rocky” saga, the first without founding father Sylvester Stallone on screen.

And the movie he gives us is quiet, almost stately, a real actor’s picture and something of a redemption for Jonathan Majors, so good in “Devotion,” so disengaged as the heavy in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”

Majors finds the vulnerable, resentful core of his character, an ex-con who did time thanks to young Adonis Creed’s Biggest Mistake. Damien “Dame” Anderson gets out of jail and eases his way into the orbit of the now-retired champ before hitting him with the “Try spending half your life in a cell…watching somebody else live your life” guilt trip turned threat.

Jordan takes a solid swing at showing us something fresh in the fight sequences, boxers whose focus and intensity literally leaves them as the only two men in the rink and the darkened stadium where they’re fighting, a sell-out crowd blocked utterly out of their minds and erased from the visuals.

He also takes pains to show us something we’ve seen after real life prize-fights — even if rarely — two pugilists recognizing that they’re the only two people in the world who know what they just went through, and the bond that creates.

But that story. Ugh. “Recycled” does the word a disservice. This is a humorless, dry retread of the lesser, later “Rocky” movies, a molehill of a tale for our boxing titans to climb.

It’s a movie about being at the top, rich, fat and happy. But whatever laughs or eyerolls Rocky Balboa was able to generate about sudden affluence, whatever guts he could summon up to battle a Clubber Lang (Mister T, a loose parallel to Majors’ Damien Anderson) — pride or principal or revenge now that he no longer has the desperation of a nobody getting a title shot — it’s just not here.

The script, like Adonis Creed in the story, has good intentions but no fire and no heart.

Adonis a Ralph Lauren billboard model and a guy who drives to work in his Rolls Royce, running his own stable of fighters from his marquee gym when we meet him. Dame comes back into his life, a figure from flashbacks of their big brother/kid brother relationship past. Creed takes him on and makes him a sparring partner for his current champ.

But a humble, grateful Dame starts acting out, his punches too pointed, his swings too dirty for mere sparring. “My clock is ticking” he says. “Too old” or not, the former Golden Glove winner wants his shot 18 years after he went to prison.

Adonis tells his Mama (Phylicia Rashad), singer-turned-producer wife (Tessa Thompson) and his trainer Little Duke (Wood Harris) that “I can make it right.” But he’s not seeing what they see.

“He’s telling you who he is,” Duke counsels. “BELIEVE him!”

You know how these pictures work. Events align and people conspire to put these two men who used to be “like brothers” into the ring together for a grudge match, where broken noses, broken ribs, broken hands and concussions are the possible payoff.

Jordan sets up the over-the-top spectacle of a championship and delivers an impressive fight or two.

But rarely have the stakes felt so low in one of these movies, seldom have the plot contrivances felt so contrived, with our first-time director rubbing the edge off the picture in an effort to step away from the “two Black men beating each other’s brains out” symbolism here.

He softens the movie without stripping the violence, and it goes adrift, characters groping about in a story that doesn’t have a real purpose or reason to exist. .

And if the Creeds insist on Rolls Roycing their deaf pre-tween daughter (Mila Davis-Kent) to ringside to watch this brutal beating her dad takes, you have to wonder if the better fight might be the one with Child Protective Services.

Rating: PG-13 (Violence|Some Strong Language|Intense Sports Action).

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson, Jonathan Majors, Wood Harris and Florian Munteanu.

Credits: Directed by Michael B. Jordan, scripted by Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin. An MGM/UA release.

Running time: 1:56

Vietnam War literature is where we first heard the combat infantry expression “thousand yard stare.” It’s entered the war lit/war film lexicon as shorthand for the soldier whose eyes reflect the exhausted wariness of anybody too long “in country.”

But it wasn’t until I saw Jesse Gavin wear it as a Afghan combat vet who will never get over what he lost in “Northern Shade” that I got a sense of what it must look like.

Gavin, a career bit-player turned leading man, gives a breakout performance as an infantryman who saw a close friend die overseas, and comes home to his old man’s boat — a weathered sport fishing trawler which he lives on — a strained relationship with his mother, a long-estranged younger brother, and a bottle.

If you saw, smoked with and chatted up the ghost of your fallen comrade Noel (Alejandro Bravo) on a regular basis, you’d drink, too.

When a private eye (Titania Galliher) visits The Gasshole — perfect name for a boat with no sails, BTW — and asks questions about a now-burned-out vehicle Justin gave his little brother Charlie, Noel chides Justin about his responsibilities.

“Go up there and find him.”

“Up there” is Connecticut’s rural border country with New York. Charlie’s joined some guys holed up in the woods. Yeah, it’s what you think. Yes, another guy “in the woods” is someone the private detective is looking for. And no, the cops — even the ones not sympathetic to camo-wearing secessionist militia goons — are not interested.

Writer-director Christopher Rucinski doesn’t stretch the genres he’s mashing up for this classic “find my missing partner/relative/lover/old-comrade” quest. His background is visual effects, but he’s made his writing and directing debut a film that doesn’t call for any, just really good actors.

What he gets absolutely right, in every role, is casting. Bravo makes a “careless” and somewhat naive Noel in the field, a weary best friend/nagging conscience as a ghost. Galliher is believable as an ex-military/ex-cop with a conscience. And Rose Marie Guess gives Noel’s war widow and single mom a pandemic-strained loneliness that’s easy to buy into.

The militia members we meet are belligerent, secretive and intellectually weak enough to fall under the spell of Billy (Romano Orzari), a strutting, conspiracy-minded blowhard and Wit and Wisdom of Joe Rogan philosopher.

“When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers. Somebody’s got stand up for the grass.”

And Gavin gives a John Hawke in “Winter’s Bone” eye-opener of a performance — haunted, twitchy, weary and guilt-ridden, a man who must lose that “thousand yard stare” before he can be of any use to anybody.

The plot points aren’t the most surprising or even rationally defensible. But Gavin & Co. make this an intimate thriller with personal agendas, limited people making rash, limiting decisions with life or death consequences, with no one there to talk them out of any of it.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Jesse Gavin, Titania Galliher, Rose Marie Guess, Alejandro Bravo, Joseph Poliquin and Romano Orzari

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Rucinski. A Bayview release.

Running time: 1:36

My stars and garters, I lost COUNT of the number of times I muttered “They did NOT just go THERE” while watching “Cocaine Bear.”

I haven’t seen this many cocaine jokes since “Saturday Night Live” in the ’80s. And the gore. The GORE. Entrance and exit wounds, a disemboweling, maulings and clawings — early Eli Roth bloody.

It’s “Snakes on a Plane” with a bear. No Samuel L. Jackson, alas. And lots and lots of cocaine.

A hyper, just-addicted short-attention-span mama bear, bear cubs caked in “booger sugar,” children taking big, fat heaping spoonfuls? Heavens!

Comic actress turned comic director (“Pitch Perfect 2,” “Charlie’s Angels”) Elizabeth Banks and the screenwriter serve up a wildly fictionalized splatter comedy based on a real-life Tennessee tale from the mid-80s. And say what you want about the piddling dialogue and middling script, if the horror and coke joke audience was bigger, this bear would mop the bloodstained floor with that Ant-Man. Whatever its actual merits, this beast fills the cheap seats

A jaunty, jokey, life-is-cheap tone is set up in the opening, a montage of TV news coverage of the day (Tom Brokaw‘s finest hour) and the sight of a lummox drug trafficker (Matthew Rhys) dancing and snorting and tossing duffel after duffel stuffed with coke-cakes out of an auto-pilot prop plane, then clumsily killing himself when he bails out over The Smokeys in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Ray Liotta, in what won’t turn out to have been his final film (pity), plays a Missouri drug dealer who wants to get his ditched cargo back. O’Shea Jackson, Jr. and “Solo” exiled Alden Ehrenreich are the subordinates he sends into the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area to retrieve it.

Isiah Whitlock Jr. is a Tennessee cop out to catch the elusive Syd (Liotta) and his minions.

But others, from local snatch-and-grab hoodlums, to kids playing hooky from school (Brooklynn Prince of “The Florida Project,” and Christian Convery) stumble across the duffels, the wrapped coke cakes or the bear that got to at least some of the cocaine first.

“It’s demented…or something!” Or something it is!

Hapless hikers, embittered park ranger (Margo Martindale), wildlife and biodiversity expert (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) or single mom (Keri Russell) hunting for her kid all find themselves chased by, contending with and/or ripped-up by this Ursa Americanus with a newfound taste for Erythoxylon coca.

“Cocaine Bear” summons up memories of the “cocaine” comedies of the ’80s — not films about the drug or drug dealing per se, but instantly-forgettable high concept comedies made under the influence kind of aimed at those under the influence.

The digital bear is…animated. For the most part.

The biggest running gag here is the title, especially the first word in it. Coke is a joke. F-bombs tart up other lines meant to be funnier. And then there’s the comic gore — stabbings, fingers shot off, teeth and claws tearing at flesh and intestines.

Attention is paid to the syrupy synth-pop music of the era, and the goofy, period-specific (often synthetic) clothing. That’s worth a grin or two.

But the Jimmy Warden screenplay needed script doctoring, a heaping helping of joke-juicing. Sight gags and gore may sell tickets. The wacky news story, covered-to-death by TV in its day, may ensure that the picture jumps right out of the gate in the opening act. There’s just not enough funny business here to keep this from flatlining pretty much from the halfway point onward.

Banks is one of the great screen comediennes of her era. As a director? Did you see “Pitch Perfect 2” or the last and least “Charlies Angels” ever? She gets the easiest laughs, manages a fright or two as we fear for children and other innocent victims of the bear. And that’s it.

The movie loses its buzz too early and drifts into a hangover of a third act thanks to blown opportunities, trite situations, weak set-ups and tame punch-lines.

It isn’t quite “Snakes on a Plane,” a high concept comedy in which ALL of the fun is in the title and the billing. But it’s too close.

Rating: R for bloody violence and gore, drug content and language throughout

Cast: Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Brooklynn Prince, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Alden Ehrenreich, Christian Convery, Margo Martindale and Ray Liotta

Credits: Directed by Elizabeth Banks, scripted by Jimmy Warden. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:35

A daughter comes home to be at her aged, ailing father’s side to hear his lasdtbrewuesr. That she help him end his life

Look for this one in mid April.

It’s worth applying the Hippocratic Oath when considering the quality, veracity and messaging of any “faith based film.”

“First, do no harm,” Hippocrates preached.

The angry, divisive tone of “God’s Not Dead,” “Left Behind” and too many films that ride on the backs of Kevin Sorbo and/or Kirk Cameron are just for the fanatics, folks who politicize faith and bend Christianity into what is widely considered “Christian Nationalism” and recognized as dangerous to a pluralistic, secular democracy.

Films like “Miracles from Heaven,” “Noble,” “Same Kind of Different as Me” and “Soul Surfer” succeed by personalizing faith, playing up the real world problems and real world relief people take from faith, downplaying supernaturalism and avoiding angry, absolutist Falwellian politics.

There is no “harm” in “corny.” Sentimental and idealized? Why not? And if the story is real-world based, a little “edge” is a welcome ingredient.

“Jesus Revolution” keeps that oath and passes muster in a lot of regards. It’s a generally uplifting account of the hippies and spiritual searchers who turned away from LSD and drug experimenting and turned towards faith, without giving up their tie-dye or VW Microbuses.

It was a brief moment in time — and a Time Magazine cover (in 1971) — as this film, based on Pastor Greg Laurie’s memoir, makes clear in the closing minutes. But Laurie, a big deal in California Protestantism and (documentary) film producing, feels it’s worth remembering and celebrating, and not just for self-promotional reasons.

In the movie’s 1967-68 opening, we meet Pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer), presiding over a dying California congregation at Calvary Chapel, tuned out of debates with his college age daughter (Ally Ioannides) at home.

The TV news is filled with Vietnam War coverage, Vietnam War protests and middle-aged reporters talking about kids who live by “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

Pastor Chuck preaches that “this generation is lost, aimless…a generation without restraint.”

But daughter Janette figures what Dad needs is to meet a real hippie. Lonnie Frisbee, played by Jonathan Roumie of the popular series “The Chosen” (He plays Jesus) is just a Jesus look-alike she picks up hitchhiking. But Pastor Chuck hears him out and takes his suggestion that “kids are searching for the real thing,” “sheep without a shepherd.”

That transforms Pastor Chuck and Calvary Chapel. Overnight, Lonnie’s friends and future followers flock to this Woodstock-by-the-Sea, barefoot and unwashed, looking for meaning and wanting to be baptized in nearby Pirate’s Cove.

Meanwhile, military school teen Greg (Joel Courtney of Netflix’s “The Kissing Booth”) is so drawn to hippie chick Cathe (Anna Grace Barlow of TV’s “The Big Leap”) that he finds himself at “happenings,” where Janis sings and LSD guru Timothy Leary speaks, praising the young people for their “relentless search for the truth.”

By the way, MAJOR “edge” and style points for including Leary and taking him seriously here.

Greg follows Cathe and her crowd into a Microbus, into mind-expanding drugs, into flashbacks to his troubled life and childhood with his single mom (Kimberly Williams-Paisley). It takes an overdose and a car crash to wake SOME of them up.

When Greg meets Lonnie, he is ripe for recruitment and definitely in need of something new. But he sees what others were saying then and still say about this movement and its moment, a generation swapping one “addiction” for another.

“What if it’s just another high, another drug?”

Co-directors Jon Erwin (“I Can Only Imagine”) and Brent McCorkle (“Unconditional”) add a reporter with the Biblical name Josiah (DeVon Franklin) to give their story a framing device, the questioning and writing of that Time Magazine cover story, and add a little diversity to the cast.

They capture the birth of the first big faith-based “Jesus Music” group, Love Song, serve up contemporary pop by America, Fleetwood Mac, The Doobie Brothers and Edwin Starr and try to weave the threads of the story into an era-appropriate hippy poncho.

But their movie experiences its 40 minutes in the wilderness as it loses track of Pastor Chuck’s story arc and epiphany, and leans on future Pastor Greg’s journey, which isn’t remotely as interesting. But he wrote the book and produced the movie, so…

The money moment here might be when the 60something preacher listens to the complaints of the church’s elders about bare feet and dirty carpets, and they show up Sunday to see him washing his new flock’s feet as they walk in.

Out of context, that’s a little weird and could be played for comedy. Grammer, bless him, plays it straight and it is simple and moving and Biblical.

Lulls aside, “Jesus Revolution” works in that classic upbeat California vibe way. It’s not any sort of breakthrough as a movie or a “movement” moment. But it makes a nice contrast to the religious rhetoric of today, the pricey Super-Bowl-on-Fox ads funded by shadowy figures who preach tolerance while funding hate groups.

Laurie and the filmmakers have the good sense to step away from that. They know that the Hippocratic Oath isn’t just for doctors, and their movie is richer for that.

Rating: PG-13 for strong drug content involving teens and some thematic elements

Cast: Jonathan Roumie, Joel Courtney, Anna Grace Bellow, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, DeVon Franklin, Julia Campbell and Kelsey Grammer.

Credits: Directed by Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle, scripted by Jon Erwin and Jon Gunn, based on the memoir by Greg Laurie. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:59