Movie Nation

With “Possessed,” Malay-language cinema takes tenative, lurching steps into the world of the “Living Dead,” “Walking Dead” and “Evil Dead.”

The zombies in this attack-on-a-remote-single-sex-college-campus tale start out zombie-walking and turn into “World War Z” sprinters by the third act. They dread the coming of the light, like um, vampires. For anyone to survive, one of their number reasons, “we just have to make it til dawn!”

But even if the Malaysian undead don’t have the rules of “Zombieland” down pat, the effects are decent and the makeup is outstanding even if the plot is canned/store-brand generic and the frights not all that frightening.

The acting? It’s a zombie movie.

When one of a group of five college guys, with two female relatives/friends in tow, suggest they all “pray before we get back to” campus, we have our first hint that this was filmed in an Islamic country, and our first spoiler. No way the devout Muslim kid gets it, right?

An injured teacher (Alif Satar) is summoned back to campus during semester break and told “Allah is testing you” (in Malay with English subtitles). That’s why he’s been called back right after the car crash that killed his wife and kids. That, and there’s no such thing as a teacher’s union at this school.

A school matron (Alicia Amin) drops off food for the kids, and mentions “the Silat boys” at a local village got themselves “possessed” as casually as she might pass on a football score.

When one of the vacationing students opens a mysterious bottle, something gets out and infects him and “the Silat boys” won’t be the only ones craving human flesh.

I’ve watched several Malay films over the years in my travels “Around the World with Netflix,” and one other thing I picked up on from “Rasuk (Possesssed),” an otherwise tame affair, was how this James Lee (“Kill First”) thriller it treats the principal female characters. They have the agency and identities that make them stand out from much Malay cinema.

Elisya Sandha is Alia, introduced as another stereotypically demure maiden who came along for the pink VW Microbus ride to take her kid brother (Ikmal Amry) back to school. But when the chips are down and brother Adli has only one bar on his cell phone on the zombie-infested campus, who does he call to come rescue them?

Luckily for the lads, Alia’s VW driver/mechanic pal Kak Yam (Bella Rahim) is a tad tougher than the college boys. Her fondness for engines and butch haircut and pink bus would make her a simple stereotype in your average Western film. Is she gay? Because that’s downright tolerant for the Islamic world and Malay cinema.

But when zombies are feeding and converting those they bite and you figure light is the one thing you can fight them off with, you need a gal who knows her way around a diesel generator, no matter what pronouns are used.

Rating: TV-14, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Alif Satar, Ikmal Amri, Elisya Sandha, Abbas Mahmood, Alicia Amin, Bella Rahim, Ayie Elham, Syazwan Razak and Atiq Azman

Credits: Directed by James Lee, scripted by Adib Zaini. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

A $17.5 million Thursday tipped us that the latest “Ant-Man and The Wasp” movie was going to have a better than fine, considerably less than overwhelming opening weekend at the box office.

Fold that in to what added up to a $44 million Friday, and it looks like Marvel’s latest is on track for a $100 million opening weekend. Projections were as high as $115-120, so Disney lowballing its expected take was the smart bet. They know what they had on their hands.

That’s better than “Ant-Man and The Wasp,” better than the feeble “Eternals” and middling “Black Widow,” if nowhere near a Top Ten or Fifteen Marvel opening.

Inflated ticket prices and February release date played their role in this as well.

Reviews have been weak to almost hostile. “Quantumania” has a derivative plot and settings, tepid jokes, middling villain, etc.

It should still hit $115 with President’s Day tossed in, so call it a win and expect the bottom to fall out the second weekend. It’ll keep the theaters busy until March.

“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” finally cat-bounced past “Avatar: The Shape of Water” for second place. A $6.5 million three-day and $8.5 million four day weekend pushes it to $170 million or so as parents and kids give this winner an Oscar nominated bounce. Could it reach $200 million by Oscar night?

Eddie Murphy made some noise after his Golden Globes speech about how “Donkey” from the “Shrek” movies should get a sequel. That seems like smart money. He said “Donkey’s a whole lot funnier than ‘Puss-in-Boots.” Dead wrong about that, Axel. Banderas made the kitty’s every purr a hoot. His acting, the exaggerated Castilian formality and bravado, made every “Puss” even funnier than the film around him. Donkey, like Murphy himself, needs scripted jokes. And by the end of Shrek, those were long exhausted.

“Avatar” will add another $6 and change and maybe clear $8 by midnight Monday — over $650 million, US, edging towards $700.

“Magic Mike’s Last Dance” didn’t plunge after its weak opening weekend, a 43% drop off might be the most respectable thing about that dog, which will be lucky to reach $25 million before losing its screens.

And expect “80 for Brady,” tailing off after a generally middling run ($33 million by Monday, thanks to a $4 million three-day/$4.4 four day) to prompt Tom Brady to “shockingly” announce one more unretirement. Maybe he’s figured out that’s his great gift, even as his skills fade, and that broadcasters, like actors even “playing” themselves in a movie, have to have a personality. He barely registers on the screen, big screen or small.

Mystery hangs over the images of Natives that Helmut Dosantos captures in his debut feature doc, “Gods of Mexico.” These are ancient people doing ancient jobs in the most traditional way imaginable, and Dosantos set out to document entirely with images.

He only tells us which tribal and geographical corner of Mexico this sequence is set in — “Quetzalcoatl: The West,” “Huitzilopochtl: The South.”

He graces us with two simple category labels: “White” for “Mixtec: The South” to denote the salt pans we see men laboriously working, drying salt in and bagging, and then loading onto donkeys, and “Black” for “The North: Sierra de Catorce” where timeworn men crawl into a (Silver? Perhaps?) mine, chiseling and blowing up ore, playing crap games by headlamp light on their breaks.

Nothing is explained, image is all. We see color and black and white silhouettes, iconic full “Flaherty” face shots and poses struck and held — by miners, laborers, men on horseback, men leading donkeys, a naked couple considering sex and staring at the camera.

Traditional masks of some sort decorate as many images as majestic Saguaro Cacti. We consider a meteorite crater, a village, a cockfight, a mysterious well-deep hole that is dug as part of the “White” chapter, where a fire is set and tended for hours as…some part of the salt-making process?

The sound is natural, the music “diegetic” — organic and captured as it is performed by old men on this bowed percussion instrument of that stringed jaw-harp.

We know which region and which Native people we’re seeing. Everything else you figure out on your own, or pause while streaming to look up on your phone.

The nude scene — a static pose — summons up memories of the beginning of documentary filmmaking, the Urtext films of Robert Flaherty, motion picture images of an anthropological/ethnographic nature.

I prefer my documentaries to be more informative than “Gods of Mexico.” But that prehistoric cinema connection renders this mesmerizing film as magical as it is historical, reminding us that a no-longer Third World country still has traditional people doing things much as they have for millennia, that ancient Dodge 3/4 ton truck that salt workers load with their sacks notwithstanding.

Rating: unrated, nudity, cockfighting

Credits: Scripted and directed by Helmut Dosantos. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:37

From a press release I got today, datelined NYC, “now in pre-production.”

“Uwe Boll, the prolific director and producer, is coming back after a 5 year hiatus, entering with his feature film ‘FIRST SHIFT.’ The crime drama follows an NYC police officer and his rookie partner Angela as they experience a 12-hour shift on the streets of New York City. Tapped to star in lead roles are Gino Anthony Pesi (Shades of Blue, Ambitions) as Deo Russo and Kristen Renton (Sons of Anarchy, Days of Our Lives) as Officer Angela Dutton. Additional cast includes Onye Eme-Akwari (Outer Banks), Willie C. Carpenter (Men in Black), Garry Pastore (THE IRISHMAN), and Cate Bottiglione (Law & Order: Organized Crime). FIRST SHIFT is currently in pre-production, with filming beginning this Spring in New York. 

FIRST SHIFT is a gripping tale that captures the essence of life as a cop in one of America’s busiest cities. From the mundane to the dangerous, viewers will experience an intense day in the life of law enforcement officers”

Knowing Uwe Boll, having reviewed many an atrocity with his name on it, having taken his name in vain MANY times since her mercifully disappeared from the scene, and noting the “pre-production” stage of this project, I responded the only way a sentient cinephile should.

“Does that mean it’s not too late to stop this?”

The meaner response would be “Are you taking stock of your life and career, and wondering how you wound up plugging the disasters of the Ed Wood of Our Age?”

This sweet little romance, from director Kyra Sedgewick, was picked up by Samuel Goldwyn and comes out March 31.

Is Screen Gems frantically trying to grab the remake rights to the Korean stolen cell-phone thriller “Unlocked?”

If they aren’t, the Hollywood distributor of “Searching” and its somewhat lesser follow-up “Missing” is missing the boat.

“Unlocked” is a crackling, nervy and above all sinister parable that will make any viewer think twice and thrice about letting one’s cell phone out of your sight. And it’ll make ALL of us blush when we recognize the degree to which we’ve folded so much of our lives, our livelihoods, our identity and our fortunes into these pocket-sized modern marvels.

Writer-director Kim Tae-joon — the post-zombie-apocalypse “Peninsula” was his” — pokes at our paranoia, and justifies it in this tight tale that shows just how easy it might be for someone to destroy your life if he has a mind to, and gets hold of your cell phone.

First act montages show us how much plucky Na Mi (Chun Woo-hee) runs her life via her cell.

She’s buying drinks and photographing food, not just by publishing her location via (sometimes drunken) photos on social media. She’s using map applications, doing her banking, making lunch dates, buying baseball tickets, listening to music, running a “hidden” social media identity to help with her marketing job and using her fingerprint to access the damned phone.

And all around her, distractedly zombie-walking down the streets or packed into buses, everybody else is doing the same.

All it takes is one tipsy trip home, one phone left behind on a bus, and one bad actor to blow up her world.

He uses a phrase-reading app to give him a woman’s voice when Ni Ma and a pal call to retrieve her phone. He lies that the phone has been dropped, and has been left with an ace phone repairman, Mr. “Digital Sheriff,” which is this bespectacled nerd’s (Yim Si-wan) alleged business.

Once she’s in his sketchy “shop,” he gets her password from her, copies all the data from her phone and installs spyware that will allow him to hear her calls, see her searches, read her texts and follow her anywhere she goes.

And he starts keeping a long list of her friends, family, “likes” and passions and meticulously writes down ways to use that against her and disrupt her life. She’s cute, so he’ll throw “stalking” into the mix.

But this veteran cop (Kim Hee-won) is on a case where bodies are turning up, usually near plum trees. Det. Ji-man recognizes that M.O. There’s a serial killer on the loose, and we can only assume that he has a thing for cell phones as well as plums.

Kim, adapting a book by Japanese novelist Akira Shiga, serves up three points of view — Ni Ma’s unraveling friendships and ignored warnings from her father (Park Ho-san), the not-frantic-enough police hunt, and the villainous Jun Yeong’s meticulous scheming, contriving ways to meet Ni Ma and meet her “needs” (tickets, buying a CD she advertises online) and even giving himself a makeover when she criticizes his haircut and glasses to a friend while her ever-listening/ever-watching phone is nearby.

“Unlocked” takes a few maddening turns that might prompt a shout or two at the screen and the police, who let one cop dictate that no nationwide “BOLO” be issued for this plum-sucking killer they’ve identified as their one and only suspect.

The film is a bit overly patient in setting up the menace and the obstacles to the mystery being solved and that menace being thwarted before our unsuspecting 20something is snatched and buried “in the mountains” near another plum tree.

But when the third act kicks in, the ticking clock starts and every one of the final minutes on this cell-plan story can be savored for the well-engineered and well-acted thriller it is.

If Netflix isn’t planning a North American/English language remake (it’s in undubbed Korean), Screen Gems certainly should.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Chun Woo-hee, Yim Si-wan, Kim Hee-won, Park Ho-san

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kim Tae-joon, based on a novel by Akira Shiga. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

Guy Ritchie’s (“Snatch”) and Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting”) made it all look so easy that Matthew Vaughn (“Layer Cake”) thought he’d have a go.

But that slice of British working class/underclass/criminal class life ensemble dramedy thing is easy to imitate, harder to get right.

“Three Day Millionaire,” scripted by Paul Stephenson and directed by Jack Spring (“Destination: Dewsbury”), is a Ritchie-lite movie that gets many of the basics right even as a misses a couple of the most obvious.

It’s a tale of “trawlermen” from the historic fishing port of Grimsby, a Lincolnshire landmark whose glory days ended as the Cod Wars were settled in the 1970s. A group of sons-of-sons-of-sons-of-sons of trawlermen stare at “The End Times” and find themselves lured into a heist, just as the working port is about to make the inevitable transition to “prime seaside real estate.”

Curly Dean (James Burrows) heads our colorful cast of characters, goateed and tattooed, narrating from his trawler bunk, straight at the camera, telling us the place’s history and introducing his motley mates.

There’s pudgy, short-attention-span Budgie (Sam Glen), the former shipmate Codge (Michael Kinsey), whose drug abuse made him a liability no skipper would take on, and reliably discrete cabbie Weezy (Robbie Gee).

Jonas Armstrong is Charlie Graham, the fuming ex-fisherman who went to work for The Big Boss (Colm Meaney, of course) who contracts the fleet of boats and owns the fishpacking plants, where Queenie (Grace Long) and Demi, aka “Pitbull” (Melissa Batchelor) make an honest wage.

Graham is the one who realizes what Barr the Big Boss is about to do, sell out to Devine Residential Group, which will turn the “greatest fishing docks in the world” into flats, condos and Starbucks. Gilly (Lauren Foster), Curly Dean’s girl-in-port, also knows, but isn’t letting on. Graham is the one who pitches the caper.

“Fishermen we are,” Codge grouses. “‘Oceans F—–g FOUR’ we definitely are NOT!”

Nevertheless, a scheme involving Budgie’s mum (Catherine Adams), who is Barr’s paramour, and a safe full of cash destined for the crypto market is casually cooked up as the trawlermen finish up their latest booze and big-spending binge as “Three Day Millionaires,” the trawler crew ethos that most of what you earn had better be spent before taking on that next voyage, because it’s “bad luck” not to.

This is a good-natured action comedy that could seriously do with a bit of subtitling. It’s not like anyone outside of Limeyland is going to pick up on the thick, salty slang without it.

Stephenson’s script is fine at capturing the flavor of the place, where every fisherman, from the youngest to codgers like Curly Dean’s alcoholic Dad “Teapot” believes “It’ll come back,” that the decades-long downturn in fishing work is “just a lull.”

But a city’s slow death is a lot harder to instill desperation into than a story with more imminent peril. The stakes seem low, the caper under-planned and a lot less inventive than you’d like. Realistic? Sure. Kind of.

“This is nothing compared to the risks we take at sea!”

Maybe it was too expensive to show us that risk, as the boat scenes seem filmed in a painted up, docked and long-unused trawler rather than something we see in the “wine dark sea.”

The overlong opening act takes pains to give a Ritchie-esque freeze-frame introduction to every character, and suggests the women who love these seafaring men will have agency and a role in the caper. But they’re barely in this.

For Anglophiles like me, a “Three Day Millionaire” is always going to be worth a look, especially on a streaming platform that subtitles. But as even Guy Ritchie isn’t really making “Guy Ritchie movies” any more — God help us, “Aladdin 2” is on the way, and “Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre” is finally getting a U.S. release in March — maybe mimicking the master, even somewhat clumsily, isn’t the smartest play these days.

Rating: unrated, moderate violence, drug abuse, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: James Burrows, Michael Kinsey, Sam Glen, Robbie Gee, Lauren Foster, Jonas Armstrong, Melissa Batchelor, Grace Long, Catherine Adams and Colm Meaney

Credits: Directed by Jack Spring, scripted by Paul Stephenson. An Entertainment Squad release.

Running time: 1:35

Finally, a video game movie we can all get behind.

March 31, this bizarre tale of how “the perfect game” escaped from the Soviet Union and made Gameboy the toy of the decade, comes to Apple TV+.

March 24, the gangs all back — Keanu, Lance, Laurence and Ian, with a Skarsgård, a “Warriors” reference and a Donnie Yen.

What the trailer doesn’t tell you? This beast is two hours and 49 minutes long.

A Syrian refugee child finds comfort in the poetry, philosophy and biography of Jalaluddin Rumi in “Lamya’s Poem,” an engaging animated drama that compares its title character’s life and fate with that of her fellow refugee, a 13th century Persian mystic.

Scripted and directed by “cross cultural understanding” speaker, pundit and documentary filmmaker Alex Kronemer and animated by Pip Animation under the direction of Brandon Lloyd of public TV’s “Cyberchase,” it’s a dark but lightly-instructive fantasy about children of conflict zones, Islam and a poet and teacher little known in the Occidental world.

Lamya, voiced by Millie Davis, is 12 years old and home-schooled because she has to be. She’s in Aleppo, Syria, a city under siege, where she and her mother (Aya Bryn Zakarya) avoid windows because of frequent artillery barrages and air raids directed by Syria’s dictator, nepo-baby Bashar-al Assad. It’s 2016, and he’s clinging to his dad’s old dictatorship by bombing (and gassing) his own people.

Lamya’s elderly, bookish teacher (Raoul Bhaneja) walks from apartment to apartment, checking on his students, giving assignments and picking up homework. He sees a future teacher in Lamya. She’s absorbed his “What is the the first word of the Revelation?” lesson.

“Read!”

He gives her a treasured collection of Rumi, “Poet of Love.” And from reading that, Lamya’s nightmares about war and displacement become dreams of meeting a teenaged Rumi (Mena Massoud), who struggles with the same fears Lamya does, added to a adolescent rage at the oppressors of his day — the Mongols who invaded Samarkand.

Rumi plays his flute and tries to plant it in the barren ground, shows Lamya the wonders of his fantastical steampunk home city and lets her see his struggles to tamp down the fury he feels at the rapacious Mongols.

“Hate can never defeat hate,” his scholarly father (Faran Tahir) lectures him.

As Lamya faces displacement, a sea journey to escape Syria, separation from her mother and a Europe that’s turned hostile to refugees, she learns from Rumi’s experiences and his writings, which soften the blows of her life.

This kid-friendly English language drama features polished 2D animation and just enough drama, strife and excitement to keep a younger viewer engaged.

The oppressor of Lamya’s dreams is a cavalry of demonic dog-beasts riding other beasts, not unlike how the Mongol horde was viewed by those it preyed upon. “Hatred” is visualized as an insidious street vendor, or a tentacle-limbed plant that swallows people, machines and human hearts.

Lamya reads from and quotes Rumi’s poetry to others as she throws in with an illiterate little street thief (Nissae Isen) also forced to flee Aleppo.

The film is more high-minded and well-intentioned than entertaining, but that doesn’t blunt its impact or render it less watchable. There’s a bit here for adults, but if you’re trying to raise enlightened, curious kids they’re the best audience for this child’s odyssey of understanding a hostile world through a great poet.

Rating: unrated, war zone subject matter

Cast: The voices of Millie Davis, Mena Massoud, Faran Tahir, Raoul Bhaneja, Nissae Isen and Aya Bryn Zakarya

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Kronemer, animation directed by Brandon Lloyd, inspired by the poetry of  Jalaluddin Rumi. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:28