Movie Nation

As the world girds itself for the next-level immersive experience cooked up by “Avatar” impresario James Cameron, now would be a good time to remember “how we got here.”

In this digital effects world, Cameron may be the reigning king. But the people who put him there are less heralded visionaries, the people who really fought for this revolution.

One guy in particular might be the DaVinci of computer-animated special effects. Canadian-born animator and computer effects guru Steven “Spaz” Williams is the quirky, brawny, biker/blacksmith who got water to form face shapes in Cameron’s “The Abyss,” the fellow who let the mercury-in-motion T-1000 Terminator walk through fire and take human form, who let us believe that dinosaurs were again roaming the Earth.

Call him the “Jurassic Punk,” because no other nickname fits.

Director Scott Leberecht’s eye-opening and memory-jogging documentary is a Spaz Williams — an ironic geeky nickname, because “Look at me. I’m Popeye!” — appreciation and in many ways a rehabilitation project.

Williams was a key figure in changing how movies are made, a resident genius at the Oscar-winning Industrial Light and Magic effects house that George Lucas launched to bring movie making into the computer-assisted 21st century.

But clips of assorted Oscar-winning special effects speeches reveal that others, old school “film” (analog, hand-made, in-camera) effects supervisors, often his computer-naive bosses, got the credit for his innovations and “kept the little statues” for his stunning, hands-on/computer-assisted creations.

Still photos and home movies from his working years on films like “The Abyss,” “The Mask,” “Terminator 2,” “Jurassic Park” and the like show why that might have been. Williams is seen as a rebel in permanent arrested adolescence. He flips the bird at whoever was filming him scores of times in this brisk and entertaining trip through modern effects history.

“I’m not a diplomat,” Williams, now in his late ’50s admits. “Never have been.” Not that we haven’t figured that out. “I’m not political. No good at it.”

Old school stop-motion modeler Phil Tippett, a guy working in the Ray Harryhausen puppet effects style that dates back to the birth of cinema and the original “King Kong,” appears here. He’s someone whose craft Williams helped render obsolete during the making of “Jurassic Park.” Tippett was among those who shared Oscars for “Jurassic Park,” even though Steven Spielberg — upon seeing Williams’ spare-time renderings of how he could animate dinosaurs into more natural motion via computers — made “Jurassic” an all-digital effects shoot, never using Tippett’s planned models.

Williams’ ILM nemesis, the oft-honored Dennis Muren, who won many Oscars despite not knowing much at all about computer effects, is only seen in old interviews. It’s hard not to see Muren, who seemed to go out of his way not to “thank” Williams in his “boss man gets the statue” speeches, as the villain of “Jurassic Punk.”

It’s also easy to see Williams himself as a villain, his own worst enem. He’s a self-defeating maverick who drank to excess, chasing away the mother of his child, wrecking a later marriage, threw wild parties in the ILM effects “pit” (room where animators work together), crashed into Lucas’s office at Skywalker Ranch during a celebratory dinner, and generally flipped-off authority at every turn. Obviously being brilliant and a good “team player” and colleague to his peers, even if never quite fit in with them, wasn’t enough.

“Art is about always questioning established systems,” he lectures digital art students. “Authority” makes him bristle, even today, because “When you think differently, you’re seen as a ‘heretic.'”

The film has Williams lamenting the way this reliance on big effects houses has “destroyed filmmaking,” with movies like “Scooby-doo” and “Casper” and others (Marvel’s many CGI-heavy outings are ignored, as are the “Transformers” movies) abusing the new “magic,” and running up costs so much that film is no longer an artist, actor’s, creator’s or “director’s” medium, but a corporate one.

True enough. But “Jurassic Punk” is great when it recaptures the days when Spaz Williams, his fellow computer effects “punk” (and “Spawn” director and collaborator) Mark Dippe’ and others were showing up to work at ILM and asking “How’re we gonna do THAT?” When nobody else had the answer, they came up with one, and then others.

Williams notes how many months it took to film “75 frames” of this piece of “Jurassic Park,” and we see the gridwork drawn on actor Robert Patrick so that they could do what had never been done before in “Terminator 2,” “building a human in data” via motion capture cameras that would pick up on every muscle movement that needed to be replicated to make molten metal walk like a human being in a police uniform before that uniform ever forms on screen.

Spielberg, speaking in a 2013 interview about the history of the “Jurassic” shoot, remembers saying of Williams’ test-animation of a T-rex skeleton walking and nibbling through “Jurassic Park,” “That’s the future…That’s the way it’s gonna be from now on.”

He was right. And now we have a documentary to tell who we have to thank for all the wonders that the movies have shown us since.

Rating: unrated, smoking, profanity

Cast: Steven “Spaz” Williams, Mark Dippe’, Phil Tippet, Adrienne Biggs, Hannah Williams, Jody Duncan, archival interviews with James Cameron, Dennis Muren and Steven Spielberg

Credits: Directed by Scott Leberecht. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:21

I’m all for everyone working as long as they’d like, doing whatever they love so long as they can still get the job done. But Nick Nolte as a DEA field agent, fighting the drug wars along the border? The highest mileage 81 year-old on the face of the Earth? That’s a bit of a reach. I mean, it’s obvious why they wanted him, and not just the Nolte “name” to help get “Blackout” financed and filmed. Sure, his voice is shot and has a bit of a quavering shake to it. But if you’re looking for a character who gets good and irked when an undercover agent played by Josh Duhamel has had a car crash and lost his memory and is trapped in some sort of clinic with armed goons coming at him from every side, not everybody can bark these lines to a subordinate with the comical gravitas of Ol’Man Nolte.”How many 6’3″ Ken dolls just SHOW up, with bumps on their heads, within a 100 mile radius of Tucson, north OR south of the border? C’MON! What do I PAY you for?”

He plays John Cain, who somehow survives a point blank range machine gunning of his car, which then rolls in what appears to be the very definition of an “unsurviveable” wreck. That’s the “Ken doll” who wakes up not remembering who he is.

But he’s not buying that. And those orderlies. They look like extras from a drug wars movie. And so they are. John has to fight off that next injection and punch, choke, stab and shoot his way out of this Sonora clinic because somebody — maybe several somebodies — want him. And not all of them want him alive.

Eddie likes his shirts dark and his overcoats slung over his shoulders, like a Bond villain, Deutsche banker or ballet artistic director.Cliches abound in this nicely claustrophobic and mercifully brief slug-fest. Basically, all John does is try to get out of that clinic and reach out to people who might have known him, including the dogged DEA man hellbent on tracking him down.The stunts — Alex Krimm was the LA stunt coordinator, with Julian Bucio in charge south of the border — are good enough to make 50 year-old Duhamel a credible action star and make us believe Cornish is not to be trifled with either. But the long list of effects credits point to the trickery it takes to have a guy who allegedly just groggily staggered out of a hospital bed run up a wall or plunge into a little parkour.

Don’t expect much out of the story. And cherish Nolte while we’ve got him. Neither he nor Keith Richard is going to live forever, no matter how things look.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Josh Duhamel, Abbie Cornish, Omar Chaparro and Nick Nolte.

Credits: Directed by Sam Macaroni, scripted by Van B. Nguyen. An XYZ film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:22

The Ukrainian Olga Kurylenko is in on the joke in “High Heat,” a glib, action-packed and surprisingly-amusing riff on the time-honored “I am NOT a person you’re gonna want to f— with!” thriller.

It’s a straight-up B-movie, and like a lot of them it tries too hard to be jokey. But all involved have a little fun with it, which pays dividends in the damnedest places.

Kurylenko wears her long Bond Babe locks loose in the kitchen as executive chef at EToile Rouge, micromanaging and somehow avoiding getting hair in the food. She barks orders, as a Russian chef in a high end French eatery should.

“I speak four languages and you’re telling me about MISCOMMUNICATION?”

Her husband Ray (Don Johnson) and co-owner is the glad-hander, a bourbon sipping charmer who runs the front of house, making every diner feel special.

“‘WALK-ins?’ NO. I’d rather be in the red than take ‘walk-ins!'”

It’s opening night and he’s got a framed four-star review in The New York Times to give her, which should tell us something, and not just that the screenwriter doesn’t know how restaurant reviewing works.

Because Ray’s got these “serious” guys who want to be seated. Actually, Mickey (Ivan Martin, going for a Vince Vaughn with glasses thing) needs Ray to come see Dom, his dad. And Ray is brushing him off.

Not good. And when the goons show up at closing time and Ray sees his maître d gunned down, he’s a little rattled. Not a lot, because this murder is never spoken of again. But things just got ugly.

It’s just that Dom’s son and Dom (Dallas Page) himself must not speak French. The name of the restaurant translates as “Red Star,” mon amis.

One testy telephone exchange of “I am NOT a person you wannas” later, and it’s go-time. How many made men does it take to take down on ex-KGB cook?

The lithe, athletic Kurylenko has long looked at home with fight choreography, and the right editing makes her a credible kick-ass here. Granted, she is playing a chef and a kitchen is filled to the ventilator fans with lethal weapons.

Director Zach Golden, whose other big screen credit is the Ron Perlman Western “The Escape of Prisoner 614,” keeps this more or less on its feet, if never entirely at a sprint. And everybody, including the “specialists” the mobsters summon when the chips are down, is in on the joke.

We’re talking “overtime rules” here, Dom.

But we need to take a little time to get to know the reinforcements Chef Anna (Anya) calls in. Things didn’t end well the last time she saw her old pal (Lover? Maybe?) Mimi. And now her fellow ex-spy is racing in from the suburbs, testing her in-counseling marriage and dragging along their teenage twins because “We don’t TRUST you!” alone in the house.

This whole story thread, with shades of “The Americans” and “RED,” in an unalloyed hoot. Whatever first-produced-screenplay writer James Pedersen put on the page, the casting of this flip and funny sidebar makes barely routine action picture just a smidge better than routine.

They cast real, snide and “Shining” scary twins (Chiara D’Ambrosio, Bianca D’Ambrosio) to play the girls annoyed at mom’s latest “bring your daughters to work” night. Chris Diamantopoulos of TV’s “Silicon Valley”) plays the patient sniper who takes his sweet time cleaning his rifle, riffing on the couples therapy speak their “on her THIRD marriage” marriage counselor fed to them on their many visits.

“I won’t let your stress disrupt my peace!”

But it is Kaitlin Doubleday of TV’s “Empire” and “Nashville” who really brings the funny to “High Heat.” Her face is a mask of intensity as she’s racing her family to the shootout in her sport maternity vehicle. Watch her “after school pick-up” face when she’s stopped by a “construction worker” who won’t let them through.

Listen to her the way she plays her reaction when Mimi’s loving husband suggests she cut someone they’ve captured “some slack” when the lady NEEDS some information.

“I wouldn’t exactly be a TORTURER if I ‘cut him some SLACK, Tom!”

“High Heat” isn’t remotely as gonzo as the funniest films of this genre. It’s limited, a B-movie with no prayer of ever having the resources, cast or comic rewrites of a “RED” or “Free Fire.”

But it is what it is, and it knows what it is — not a particularly novel or life changing experience, but not all bad either.

Rating: R, graphic violence

Cast: Olga Kurylenko, Ivan Martin, Dallas Page, Kaitlin Doubleday Chris Diamantopoulos, Chiara D’Ambrosio, Bianca D’Ambrosio and Don Johnson.

Credits: Directed by Zach Golden, scripted by James Pedersen. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:24

Billy Eichner came close to killing the gay rom-com back in September with “Bros.” Which was at least funny, even if nobody saw it. Now, here’s Jim Parsons driving a stake through the doomed gay romance.

Quite the fall. Pun intended.

“Spoiler Alert” is a weeper without tears, a dramedy with the dramatic edges rubbed off and nothing particularly funny about its “Disease of the Week” tragedy. It’s based on a memoir by a former TV Guide writer, and structured for the screen as a flaccid, endlessly voiced-over stunt in which our melodramatic memoirist remembers his childhood as the unhappiest sitcom this side of “The Conners.”

The great love of his life has died, but this is all about “me.”

And Parsons, lacking the “ba-DOOM-boom” rhythms of sitcom writing, is outclassed by “Fleabag” alumnus Ben Aldridge most of the time, even as he holds his own opposite Sally Field, who is off her game playing the mother of is character’s love interest.

It tells the story of a tepidly romantic thirteen-year love affair from the starting point of the our narrator’s other half dying. And here’s the spoiler alert about “Spoiler Alert.” It just doesn’t work.

Parsons plays Michael Ausiello, a TV Guide writer immersed in his craft — pitching “Every ‘Gilmore Girls’ character” in reverse order of obnoxiousness stories, “listicles” we call those in the trade.

Oddly, for a guy with a USC degree (we learn) he’s constantly having to have words like “chattel” and “atelier” explained to him by the hunky, “confident” ad man Kit (Aldridge) whom he meets at a gay club.

Lucky for Michael he’s “totally “Kit’s type,” a pale skinny dweeb.

They hook up and then date, and eventually Michael cannot put off inviting Kit to see his Jersey City apartment. It’s stuffed with Smurf collectibles.

“Oh God, it’s not a fetish,” is just what a guy who collects this stuff would say.

This relationship’s second biggest test will be Kit finally coming out to his parents — played by Bill Irwin and Sally Field. He’s pushing 30 and he’s never told them.

That’s another big moment of drama that isn’t in a movie that isn’t dramatic, a serious failing in a film in which we’re meant to invest in a relationship, see it tested and go “Terms of Endearment” tearful when cancer enters the picture. It doesn’t get us there.

Periodic flashbacks which can’t have worked all that well on the page take us back to Michael’s FFK (formerly fat kid) and gay childhood, sit-com scenes with a laugh track because nothing sentient would find so much as a chuckle in them.

And don’t get me started on the interminable fiasco of a third act.

Parsons was better in the sharper if dated “Boys in the Band” remake of a while back, but here he’s exposed as a classic TV “waist-up” actor, not knowing how to give us something in a close-up, but not bad at playing ungainly, seeing as how many years he had to master that via “The Big Bang Theory.” There is a romantic sparkle in his eyes you never picked up on the sitcom, and he sells his character’s attraction to the pin-up gym rat that Aldridge is typecast to play.

I’d be inclined to cut this picture some slack, as I enjoyed Parson’s run with “Big Bang,” and if anybody can make a mainstream, PG-13 gay romance palatable to the public at large, it’d have to be him.

But with every “No Longer Young Sheldon” dollop of voice-over, every moment that summons up memory’s of Cher’s greatest and most narcissistic “performance” — at Sonny Bono’s funeral — every place conflict was called for (Kit has a wandering eye, the parents potential disapproval)”Spoiler Alert” fails.

By the time the interminable finale reaches, over-reaches and gracelessly makes its exit, we’ve lost track of anything we found sweet, funny, charming or touching that came before it. Which is why I take notes, which in this case didn’t help.

Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, drug use and thematic elements

Cast: Jim Parsons, Ben Aldridge, Bill Irwin and Sally Field

Credits: Directed by Michael Showalter, scripted by David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage, based on a memoir by Michael Ausiello. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:52

“Jumping from High Places” is a sugary sweet, lightweight take on living with anxiety, a movie that gets credit for tackling the subject and showing off pretty people in a very pretty place — Bari, in Apulia on the very heel of the boot of Italy.

But as its framed as a 25 year-old’s decision to check off a bucket list of phobias left to her by her best friend, we know better than to expect anything particularly deep or wrenching, whatever the gravitas of Alice Urciuolo’s source novel.

Federica Torchetti of “Mondocane” is sad and winsome Sole, a young woman whose life is wholly circumscribed by her anxieties. She dropped out of art school because she’s afraid of “water, boats, amusement parks, bicycles, flying on planes, dogs” and so on.

There are levels to anxiety, she informs us — speaking to the camera in Italian, or dubbed into the language of your choice. “And I am proud to report that I am at the very top!

She’s off her meds, in therapy and getting a little better. But the return of the hunky brother, Massimo (Lorenzo Richelmy) , of her the best friend who left her a couple of years before throws anxious Sole for a loop.

A wealthy classmate Miriam (Celeste Savino) who has just gotten her Phd and who barely gave her the time of day back in school takes an interest in her. But Sole can hang with the former cool girls now cool young women all she wants. She has to get drunk to be able to remain at a party, and can’t even watch the region’s famous cliff divers plunge into the azure blue Mediterranean without a mid-level freakout.

When Massimo passes on a note sister Emma left for Sole, she starts thinking. And when Miriam and her crew get hold of it, they have a mission. Help Sole conquer a few fears. Check off this phobias list.

Her shrink endorses the idea. So will she make it on a plane, travel to Rome for art school, show others her sketches and make a pass at her age-old crush, Massimo?

Sole turns to the camera for many deadpan or cutesie reactions to this or that situation or suggestion, not quite minimizing her fears that “everyone is in on a secret” and that secret is judging and mocking her in everything she says or does.

The cutest little neighbor dog sends her fleeing in the opposite direction.

There’s only one attempt to visualize with the camera what’s going on in Sole’s head, to let us see her world upended by being in a crowd, stepping on a boat or the merest frown from a stranger (she takes on a waitressing job…for one scene).

As I noted, the film gets credit for tackling the subject, but not much more than that. This is superficial in the extreme, more of a teen rom-com treatment than a suffering adult’s wrestling with the disease.

Still, the scenery’s swell, the cast is so very Italian — gorgeous and effortlessly stylish. The costumer could only go so far to give Sole a repressed nerdy look — dresses and blouses buttoned to the very top.

I didn’t find “Jumping from High Places” offensive, or particularly illuminating. But it does seem harmless enough for what it is, and that’s not exactly an endoresement.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Federica Torchetti, Celeste Savino, Cristiano Caccamo and Massimo Di Lorenzo

Credits: Directed by Andrea Jublin, scripted by Chiara Parenti, based on the novel by Alice Urciuolo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

“Twisted” is a lukewarm, slow-walking thriller built around a co-dependent relationship between a widowed mother and her troubled, introverted teen daughter.

It’s not helped along its merry way by clumsy plotting, slack direction and stiff performances, which seem more amateurish the further away from the leads that you get. But you can see the promising seeds that gave birth to it, even if they weren’t nurtured all the way to harvest.

Hannah (Madeleine Masson of “Karma”) is 18, trying to find direction, focus and love in a rural town in the timbered far west. Her mother Silvia (Karen Leigh Sharp), dotes on her to the point of clinging. She expects this devotion to be reciprocated. Mom wants a backrub after a hard day working as a doctor in the local clinic.

Is that Mom spying on Hannah as she meets her new beau for a little make-out session under the underpass? And Dr. Mom can get downright crude when questioning her daughter’s sex life.

“I don’t know how many snakes you’ve invited into your cave!”

Lonely Hannah’s making some sketchy friends at school. Raven (Lexy Ronning) and Victor (Joshua Malekos) are awfully keen on getting her to “come hunting” with them. That’ll entail sneaking out and making out, and a bit of drinking as they have fun with firearms and shoot mostly inedible wildlife, apparently for trophy mounting.

That “secret hunting society” means raccoon and pheasant gutting. Good times.

But when the guy Hannah claims she’s “not that close to” winds up dead, she finds herself questioned by law enforcement and having flashbacks to her childhood, which she turns into disturbing sketches for art class.

All that first act exposition and action points the viewer towards one conclusion, no matter how many other possible suspects are considered. The movie is about Hannah’s response to all this as she meanders through adolescence with questions about boys, conflicted loyalties and the seriously creepy vibe her hypodermic-happy mother (diabetes) puts out there.

There are night sequences in “Twisted” in which one can barely make out the action, and most every scene that’s meant to build tension and suspense just mopes by until the third act, where we get a taste of competently-handled action.

As I said, the leads are OK, but several supporting players don’t bring enough to the table to make their performances compelling or believable. But that may tie into pacing and filmmaking other issues which point straight at Danish writer-director Sofie Vibeke Muasya.

She did a little-seen kidnapping thriller, “Lost in Africa.” Was it better than this? Because the evidence from “Twisted” is that she’s not very good at the thriller basics, clear and concise storytelling or the craft of directing actors.

Rating: Unrated, graphic violence, sexual situations

Cast: Madeleine Masson, Karen Leigh Sharp, Joshua Malekos, Lexy Ronning

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sofie Vibeke Muasya. An Alarm Films release.

Running time: 1:25

A lot of charm and potential cuteness gets lost in the holiday shuffle and stumbling structure of “Delivery by Christmas,” a light and what could have been more amusing seasonal romantic comedy from Poland.

A lot of packages get delivered to the wrong addresses right before Christmas. And the plucky single-mom delivery lady (Monika Frajczyk) finds herself stuck with an irate customer as passenger (Piotr Pacek) as she scrambles to undo everything the mistaken deliveries have led to.

The gist of what goes wrong in Aleksandra Kulakowska and Maciej Prykowski’s farce is that word “scrambles.” The film has no pace because the script shifts us back and forth in time, “a few hours earlier” usually. Every time we see how this or that delivery mistake had consequences, the picture pauses as it struggles to find what’s funny in those situations.

And every time we step away from our mismatched co-drivers, our investment in them as a couple drops and the stakes get lower.

Marysia (Frajczyk) is so harried at this time of year that she has to drag her pre-schooler (Franciszek Krupowicz) along on deliveries. That’s how he stumbles into Krzysiek (Pacek), a legal exec trying to get some contracts finished before the holiday.

The movie’s “meet cute” is poor little Maks running off to a restroom and realizing he’s too short to manage the man-sized urinals in Krzysiek’s office building. So Krzysiek helps, and finds himself stuck and distracted by a child fascinated by the paper shredder in his office. When Mom finally retrieves him, he’s already made a mess, so she owes Krzysiek a favor.

That’s how she’s arm-twisted into picking up his grandmother’s ring from Krzysiek’s grumpy, practical-joker grandfather (Zdzislaw Wardejn), who sends him a prank gift instead. So much for Krzysiek proposing to his live-in girlfriend on Christmas Eve.

Marysia manages to accidentally offend her new boss, a hard-drinking, unhappy loner, who drunkenly sabotages all her deliveries as revenge. She’s got to make all those botched packages right on Christmas Eve as she A) tries to track down Maks’ present, in transit and B) has to cope with Krzysiek, who for some reason won’t go over and collect the damned ring in person and straighten out this business with his grandfather like an adult.

Over a long, harried day — with repeated pauses to either revisit the original delivery or show us what “really” was dropped off, and how that boo-boo shook up the various folks on the receiving end — the two of them will motor hither and yon in a diesel delivery van as most of Poland stays home and begins celebrating.

“Delivery,” titled “Jeszcze przed swietami” in its original Polish (watch with subtitles or dubbed into English), has a guy get a sonogram photo, learning he’s a dad-to-be, throwing his family into a tizzy and him into a tailspin. Another gets a sex statue intended for someone a woman is trying to come on to, and so on.

And every time the picture stops to tell us those detour stories — only one of which is truly funny — the main narrative thread is left dangling and the romance-to-be is paid short shrift.

Frajczyk (“Leave no Traces”) and Pacek (“Bridget Bardot Forever”) are decent enough performers. Their low energy turns here point to a screenplay and structure that never generates the friction that leads to heat in a romantic comedy.

If the filmmakers had told this story in order, they might have picked up on how the picture lacks the pacing it takes for comedy to work. The filmmakers might also have realized that some of their side trips should have wound up on the cutting room floor.

Some passages engage, and many more just stumble along, halting the film’s flow as they needlessly and charmlessly delay this “Delivery by Christmas.”

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations

Cast: Monika Frajczyk, Piotr Pacek, Franciszek Krupowicz

Credits: Directed by Aleksandra Kulakowska and Maciej Prykowski, scripted by Alexsandra Kulakowska, Maciej Prykowski and Maria PulawskaA Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

A trippy trip of a picture from Neon and directed by a Cronenberg, but not THAT Cronenberg. Check it out.

“Shook” is a half-hearted attempt at a moral parable wrapped in a standard-issue “She’s all alone” and “She has to complete all these tasks/puzzles/challenges” horror film.

It’s a gimmicky thriller hung on the “influencer” hook. Seems like every other film has that marketing fad tied into its story some how, and not just Hollywood.

A beauty vlogger (Genelle Seldon) is the curtain-raiser here, a vapid living doll who has an accident with her not-toilet-trained puppy as she’s being interviewed on yet another red carpet.

The most ingenious gag in director and co-writer Jennifer Harrington’s film might be having the camera pull back to show just how “fake” “red carpet” events are these days. This isn’t a movie premiere, an “exclusive” party or fundraiser. No, it’s just a backdrop, lighting and fake celebrities interviewed by a fake interviewer on a 20 foot swatch of carpeting, all of it ginned up for online consumption.

But cleaning herself up in the bathroom — down to her Spanx — is where this makeup influencer runs afoul of “The Southland dog killer.” Only the dog gets away this time, and influencer Genelle is the one who gets it.

That invites a whole lot of online tributes from her fellow red carpet mavens, with #MakeupByMia (Daisye Tutor of “Come as You Are” and “Funny Story”) winning the virtue signaling sweepstakes by skipping a live-streaming event to dog-sit for her sick sister Nicole.

Big sister (Emily Goss) cared for their mother while busy-busy Mia was “in school” and sharing her pretty girl life online for cash and Internet fame. Now, little sis is giving something back to her sickly sister.

But she can’t focus on her self-promoted good deed and the dog in peace because she’s constantly logged-on, badgered by her partying influencer pals Lani (Nicola Possner) and Jade (Stephanie Simbari), with Jade very much a threat to hook up with Mia’s “super-hot” beau, Santi (Octavius J. Johnson) if she does join in their promotional party.

That’s when the friend request and the text messages start to come in from the stalker next door. That’s when Nicole asks to see a photo of her beloved pug before bedtime, and Mia can’t instantly provide it. Because Chico has disappeared.

Mia finds herself juggling calls, getting a more and more creepy vibe from this neighbor and growing more and more concerned about the missing dog.

It isn’t long before the calls turn menacing, everybody in Mia’s world seems to be in peril, and no, she cannot call the cops, even if 911 picked up by the 25th ring.

“Why are you DOING this?” never gets an answer, but all will become clear as this villainy grows murderous and the inevitable “explanations” flood into the third act.

You know how these things are constructed — texted threats, “voice changer” apps, harder and grimmer “challenges” facing our “good girl” branded heroine.

Tutor isn’t bad, but the way the plot set-up is scripted and acted by her co-stars gives away too many secrets too early. Long review short — ok, LESS long — “Shook” is a gimmicky ticking clock horror thriller, some of whose gimmicks work, with that ticking clock never quite driving the action as fast as one would like.

A little urgency here and there, a heroine’s believable panic and terror over the grisly dilemmas she finds herself facing, lashed to some seriously lame payoffs to the assorted mysteries keep “Shook” on shaky, not scary ground.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Daisye Tutor, Emily Goss, Nicola Possner, Stephanie Simbari, Octavius J. Johnson and Genelle Seldon

Credits: Directed by Jennifer Harrington, scripted by Alesia Glidewell and Jennifer Harrington. An RLJE film released on Shudder.

Running time: 1:29

At some point the administrator in charge of a Sicilian witness protection program has to admit to the slushie vendor who witnessed a Mafia hit and was spirited off to the Swiss Italian alps that yes, the hitman our witness fingered turned state’s evidence. Yes, he had to be put into protection as well. And yes, they did send him to the same tiny village our slushie vendor will never be able to ply his trade in.

And yes, they uh, gave him the same last name.

“Are you SH—–g me?” is funny in English, or Italian with English subtitles.

Well, you know how Italians do things, the administrator shrugs, and we all have a chuckle at the oxymoron Amanda Knox remembers as “Italian justice.”

That’s the gist of “Paradise,” or “Paradise: Una nuova vita,” a deadpan Italian farce in the tradition of most every other “witness protection” comedy — from “Sister Act” and “My Blue Heaven” to “Lillehammer” and “The Family.” There’s a little “fish out of water,” a bit of made man “bull in a china shop” mayhem, and that fateful day when the mobsters figure out where our heroes are and come looking for them.

Vincenzo Nemolato plays Alfio, whose life running his pushcart business forever changed when a sicario (hitman) decided to carry out his latest contract right in front of him, barely noticing he was there.

The cops want Alfio’s testimony, but his gorgeous, pregnant Sicilian wife (Selene Caramazza) counsels “schtum.” Keep quiet. It is the way they do things in mafiosa-land. “Trust your family, not ‘them.'”

“NO,” he mans up. He will do this for themselves, for their unborn child, their non-mobster neighbors and their way of life. He will go into witness protection, and Lucia, you’ll join me. Right? Right?

Alfio is spirited off the some place alpine and moved into a disused apartment building called “Paradise.” Lucia remains behind. And the mob makes a big show, rolling around their small town in a pickup with loudspeakers on the roof, playing music to get everyone’s attention, tossing an empty coffin in front of their apartment.

Alfio’s earned a mob funeral. He’s just not dead yet.

Things aren’t going great up where the snowy season really cuts into slushie sales. Our witness, renamed Calogero (a nakedly Sicilian name, apparently) tries to fit in, joining the parish priest’s (Branko Zavrsan) folk dancing troupe, catching the eye of fetching blonde single mom barmaid Klaudia (Katarina Gas).

And then this grizzled, serious-looking fellow (Andrea Pennacchi) shows up. Could he be? No, surely not. Paranoid Calogero makes frantic calls to his contact, who brushes off his concerns. So our hidden witness must take matters into his own hands.

I mean, Mr. Menacing Stalker Vibe has ALSO moved into the Paradise, after all.

Maybe Alfio can get some shotgun lessons from Klaudia. Google “Ways to kill somebody without a gun” on the Italian Internet. Practice “Are you talkin’ to ME?” in front of the mirror.

Director Davide Del Degan and screenwriter Andrea Magnani manage plenty of amused chuckles, with a couple of decent belly laughs in this over-familiar laugher. Nemolato, who has a clown’s features, something played-up when Alfio dyes his curly hair reddish, has done his share of thrillers and plays it pretty straight, which makes his double-takes land.

Pennacchi looks and sounds like a seasoned, salt-and-peppered killer, which allows his “secrets” to pay off comically.

And the picture practically skips by, with a little scenery, a little local color, some goofy costumes and dancing and a hint of bloody menace hanging over it all.

“Paradise” doesn’t reinvent “witness protection” as a comic concept. But it get the basics just right, which is enough to recommend it.

Rating: unrated, a bit of shooting

Cast: Vincenzo Nemolato, Selene Caramazza, Andrea Pennacchi, Katarina Gas

Credits: Directed by Davide Del Degan, scripted by Andrea Magnani. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:25