Movie Nation

It can sometimes seem that all the “let’s throw some money at” productions that Netflix streamed as feature films over the past year are just one interminable and awful movie. Maybe you figured that out on your own. Me? I had to restart my Netflix account for the holidays (about to shut this pipeline off for a few months again) and cram scores of them into a short period of time to have this epiphany.

Queen Latifah is the producer and star of “End of the Road,” and thus the figure Netflix “threw a lot of money at” in this case. She and her team — director Millicent Shelton, who has directed a lot of episodic TV, including one “Equalizer” outing — cooked up the most generic family-hunted-by-drug-lord odyssey ever.

Every piece of road, every location, every character in it — villain or heroine or just unpleasant bystander — is as generic and over-familiar as the plot of this dog. It’s barely 90 minutes long and feels “Blonde/Bardo” length.

It doesn’t sprint, run or even walk out of the gate. It crawls. And it crawls and crawls until we hit a couple of decent action beats on our way to a laugh-out-loud-bad finale.

I think co-star Ludacris had the right idea for all this. He’s barely awake, first scene to last. His line readings couldn’t have been sleepier unless we actually saw him stifle the yawn that plainly preceded every “Aaaaaannd ACTION” command from behind the camera. It’ was never going to be a very good movie. Ludacris gives away how bad it will get by his lack of commitment and somnambulant stoner energy.

Latifah plays a widow who has gone broke trying to keep the family intact after her husband’s death. We meet Brenda as she finishes packing the house and rousts her lovesick teen daughter (Mychala Lee) and grieving son (Shaun Dixon) up and into the car.

Her brother Reggie (Ludacris) is coming along for the three day drive to Houston. He has to be reminded “no drugs and no weed for the entire trip.” It’s like that.

Wouldn’t you know it, they’re dust-deep in Arizona when they have their first rednecks in a pickup encounter. That’s merely a prelude to the murder they overhear at the dive motel they stay in that night.

These scenes establish that Mom and Reggie understand the rural racism they’re driving through. But Mom is willing to “apologize” and walk away from white male provocations, something she learned from her late Army Col. father. Short-tempered Reggie never learned that lesson, although the weed has definitely mellowed him out, if impaired his decision making. We also hear how Dad taught her and Reggie how to hunt, because foreshadowing should always be this obvious.

That foreshadowing will come in handy when they find themselves hunted by the drug gang of Mr. Cross, “the boss” who had a hand in the motel room murder next door. They’re questioned by the police, and then hounded across country as this Cross gang tries to track down some missing drug money.

The best selling point of “Happy FKN Sunshine,” a “let’s start a metal band” dramedy, is that the title makes it sound British, or better yet Irish.

But no. It’s Canadian, set and shot in Ontario. They swear up there in the Land of Nice, too. So no going on aboot spilt milk, eh?

It’s a scruffy little dramedy that borrows from its better predecessors. There’s more than a little of Alan Parker’s rollicking film of Roddy Doyle’s “The Commitments” in it. But the tropes of this genre are so well-worn it’s pointless dwelling on those connections.

What matters more is that it’s dark and funny, but not quite funny enough. It’s musical, but not so musical that you think “God I hope they make it,” based on the tunes and performances we see here.

And it should be touching, even though it never is.

An Ontario mill town (North Bay was the filming location) hits the wall when its local mill goes on strike. Maybe that’s not the best time for a bunch of high school kids to upgrade their instruments and try to make it as a band.

But all it takes is hearing sensitive Will (Matt Close) turned down by their on-strike dad (Lewis Hodgson) and fretful mom (Carrie Schiffler) for big sister Ronnie (Mattea Brotherton) to buy her sibling a Flying Vee knockoff from the local music and pawn shop.

Ronnie has means of her own. She can tell her parents she works at a landscaping business, and maybe they believe it. Ronnie’s dealing drugs, and Will can do her “a favor” or two, and she’ll get to be the band’s manager on the bargain.

You can guess what the “favor” will entail. But the band name ever-rebelling Ronnie puts out there?

“Happy FKN Sunshine,” only without the “FKN” abbreviation.

With hotheaded lead singer Vince (Connor Rueter) and cute drummer River (Maxime Lauzon), they’re ready for stardom. But as the film’s “Chapter One” tips us, they’re still one brick shy of a load.

“Chapter One: Who the f— Plays Bass in Town?”

That’s how how they end up with local loudmouth and BS artist “Artie,” an annoying pathological liar who is always regaling anyone stupid enough to pause and listen about who he “jammed” with this weekend, or which infamous auto-part-named rocker gave him a BJ last weekend.

Will is as shocked as we are when Artie (Dana Hodgson) turned out to be “unfortunately REALLY good at bass.”

Throw in Artie’s aged Irish-accented music industry vet “Fast Eddie” (Ted Dykstra), the one who sold most of them their instruments, and they’ve got a ticket to ride, or at least rehearse until they’re ready to push their social media numbers up with a live gig.

The child actor stars of “Nightbooks” really “sell” the frights in this Goosebumpy tale of terror. There’s quite a bit of screaming and frantic, gasping weeping at their plight and fear that they won’t survive this predicament or that ordeal.

The effects are decent, the frame for the plot an “Arabian Nights” sort of “Tell me a scar story or die” construction, and the entire enterprise takes on a bookish quality. Books are where the stories are preserved. Books are where the clues lie. Books are how knowledge is passed from one generation of imprisoned kids to the next.

But “Nightbooks” never manages anything that would frighten anyone over the age of 10. It never sheds its “terror with training wheels on” veneer, and simply isn’t entertaining enough to overcome that, the way “Goosebumps” did, on the page and sometimes on the screen.

Considering they had the good sense to cast Krysten Ritter (Marvel TV’s “Jessica Jones”) as the villainous witch, that’s a letdown that’s not just disappointing, it’s surprisingly so.

A “horror obsessed” tween (Winslow Fegley, featured in “Come Play”) storms out of his family’s apartment on his dark and stormy birthday night. He is bound for the basement, determined to toss all his hand-written tales of terror into the furnace. “GARBAGE!” But the elevator leaves him on the wrong floor, in which every empty apartment has its door open and “The Lost Boys” playing on TV. Alex stops, peeks at his favorite scene, takes a bite of pumpkin pie, and wakes up imprisoned by a witch.

Natacha (Ritter) is a demanding she-devil whose hair changes color and whose temper does not improve with every appearance. She orders him to tell her a scary story every night. He will stay in this prison-apartment, subsisting on peanut butter, kept on task and watched-over by her hairless cat, Lenore, who turns invisible at will.

Natacha listens to each tale and sneers, corrects, critiques and — very rarely — encourages his efforts.

We nod our heads in agreement as Natacha blurts out “Stupid!” and “Amateur” and “ODIOUS, a good word.”

The stories are related to us in Alex-narrated voice-over, seen by us as performed by actors in horror makeup on stylized, simple (digital) cut-out sets suitable more for children’s theater than a major motion picture.

Yes, that’s by design, a childish and clever aesthetic choice. But no, the stories — titled “The Playground,” “The Bindweed,” “The Cuckoo Clock,” etc. — aren’t scary or even interesting.

If Alex is to be held here until he becomes the next Stephen King, he’d better learn to shave. It’s going to be a while.

“Every good story hints at truth,” Natacha offers, constructively.

But with his fellow hostage, the smart and cynical Ethiopian-American tween Yasmin (Lidya Jewett of TV’s “Good Girls”) sentenced to cook for the witch (?), Alex schemes and dreams of escape from the vast apartment with no front door. She’s been there longer, and between them, and hints they find in the dust-encrusted library, they might develop a plan.

I enjoyed the film that the new Tom Hanks cranky old man comedy is based on, “A Man Called Ove.” It came out in 2015, and my review of it is linked here.

My only concern is that sweet ol’ Ton Hanks won’t be surely enough. Remember, he was the sweetest hitman in cinema history in “Road to Perdition.”

“Ove” became “Otto” and opens in most of the country Jan. 6, this coming Friday.

If you’re a film buff, you should have seen it already.

Let’s face it, film going is devolving into spectacles aimed only at comic book fanatics or horror aficionados.

Movies about cinema are a high profile gasp at providing an alternative this awards season. Babylon,” ” Fabelmans” and “Empire of Light” are shots in the dark at keeping a broader audience engaged and connected to higher minded cinematic storytelling.

And nobody is going to see them.

Can you believe “Maverick” and “Avatar” have Oscar buzz?

Love it or hate it, “Babylon” has real intellectual ambition.

New Year’s resolution number, go see it if you haven’t, while we still have a choice.

Tyler Perry turns his melodramatic eye on the recent past for his latest, a jazz-and-blues in 1940s Georgia tale titled “A Jazzman’s Blues.”

It’s about race relations under Jim Crow, when miscegenation was a multi-syllable word even the trashiest rednecks could pronounce, when “passing” for white had its perils and when jazz got serious about integration, at least in the cities of the north and west.

Perry’s cooked-up a soapy, sad story of a love-that-could-never-be framed within a little old lady’s efforts to get justice for a murder that happened 40 years before the story’s fictive present — 1987. It’s a musically, dramatically and cinematically flat affair, as Perry leans on the hoary device of having old, exposition-filled love letters read in voice-over, makes little effort hide the fate of our murder victim, whose death isn’t “investigated” at all, and tries to pass off a middling singer as an emerging big band star.

Elderly Hattie Mae (Amirah Vann) picks the right time to hit up lawyer Johnathan Dupree (Kario Marcel) to dig into this case, she figures. He’s running for Congress, and he’s a white candidate trying to prove he’s “not a racist” in rural Hopewell County, where enough Black votes could be the difference come November of 1988.

Her “evidence” about this murder is what she remembers, but more importantly, the letters of the dead man, her son.

Bayou (Joshua Boone) was a sensitive sort, growing up in the Mississippi Delta, dismissed as useless and stupid by his bluesman Dad (J. Roger Mitchell), bullied by his taller, more manly trumpet-playing brother Willie Earl (Austin Scott).

But in those letters, the once-illiterate Bayou lets us hear how he met and fell in love with a fellow outcast, the fair-skinned Leanne (Solea Pfeiffer), nicknamed “Bucket” because her mother dumped her there to be raised by her cantankerous father.

Leanne taught him to read, shared his feelings and was yanked away — as a teen — when the mother who didn’t want to raise her (Lana Young) — showed up to intervene and prevent her Leanne from limiting her life with some poor country boy.

Bayou never lost faith, never stopped writing, even though his letters were intercepted by Leanne’s mother. He and his mother moved to Georgia. He did his time in the Army, came home and started singing in his mother’s juke joint, and pined for his lost love until the day she returned — married to a white man (Brent Antonello), brother to the racist sheriff (Brad Benedict), passing for white herself.

When Bayou’s prodigal brother returns, he has a Jewish emigre and would-be agent (Ryan Eggold) with him. That means Bayou might graduate from singing “Let the Good Times Roll” at his mama’s place, if he can just get discovered.

Yes, the tropes and cliches line up at the door for this pokey, corny and old-fashioned potboiler.

The cast, made up of lesser-knowns and unknowns, doesn’t manage to make most of the characters interesting or the situations that engaging.

The music’s OK, but all over the place in terms of quality. Our “new star waiting to be discovered” couldn’t have won a talent show in any town big enough to be worth mentioning, much less succeeded at a major Chicago club’s showcase.

The entire affair plays out like a middling TV movie, with the “murder” not ever investigated, simply explained via a two hour back story that is the film’s “plot.” Perry barely wrestles with the terror of trying to pass for white in the rural Deep South and brushes by other can’t-miss sources for drama just to keep this drifting movie moving.

There’s no suspense, little that’s thrilling or that justifies any investment in this dawdling melodrama with music. At least Netflix’s accountants are happy. This didn’t cost “White Noise” or “Slumberland” money. But expect them to ask “Madea” to make an appearance next time, if they’re staying in the Tyler Perry business.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Joshua Boone, Amirah Vann, Solea Pfeiffer. Austin Scott, Ryan Eggold and Brad Benedict.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tyler Perry. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:07

Here’s a featurette for the killer doll movie that emphasizes the technology “that’s already here” that could make this “Twilight Zone” nightmare

Jan 6, “M3GAN” becomes the first major release of the new year, and I’m guessing…the first hit.

Late March, a more modestly–budgeted musical bio-pic comes our way.

We recognize the ’70s disco and glam rock era icons Casablanca Records signed and rode to glory. The cast of the picture? Aside from Michelle Monaghan and Dan Fogler? Maybe no (Jason Isaacs is also in it).

How cool is it that Sir Anthony Hopkins is “47 years” sober, that he’s 85, and that he shares his New Year’s Eve birthday (TODAY) with Sir Ben Kingsley?

This message reminds us that the Great Drunks of British Acting could have claimed another Burton, O’Toole, Oliver Reed and Richard Harris in Hopkins among their ranks — all, even the longest-lived among them, dead too soon.

And he got sober and lived long enough to win Oscars, become a legend and wish you all a happy new year.

Well, if it took a Henry Selick stop-motion animated horror comedy to put Key and Peele tother again on the screen, we’ll take it.

Netflix wrote the checks and the director of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Coraline,” co-adapting a novel with horror hot property Jordan Peele conjures up an animated laugher that is at its funniest when the former team of Peele and Keegan-Michael Key are swapping funny lines in funny voices as the title characters, “Wendell & Wild,” hapless demons who aren’t really the center of the story.

That’s a bit of a letdown in this properly dark, occasionally daft and visually-arresting tween-to-young-adult comedy about death and letting go of the deceased. Oh yeah, it goes there. It’s just not as hilarious or as twisted as you might hope, given the clever folks involved.

A little girl leaves a carnival in Rust Bank, only to distract her Dad on the drive home, causing their station wagon to plunge off a bridge. Mom (Gabrielle Dennis) makes sure Kat (Lyric Ross) doesn’t panic and gets her out of the flooding car. But the child’s last image of Mom and Dad (Gary Gatewood) is of them sinking into the watery abyss.

Years later, we catch up with Kat as she’s headed towards her “do-over,” her second chance. She’s a troubled orphaned teen who can’t stay out of jail. But a new state program gets her enrolled at Rust Bank Catholic School, a once-prestigious institution in a city that’s in its own death spiral.

Father Bests (the legendary character actor James Hong) and Sister Helley (Angela Bassett) would love to keep the doors open. But Rust Bank is in the sites of the Klaxon Korp, whose entitled owners (David Harewood and Maxine Peake) see it as prime real estate for their next for-profit prison.

That’s where “Wendell & Wild” come in. They’re lower-level functionaries in the underworld run but their father, the demonic giant Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames). His Satanic pride and joy is his carnival of lost souls, Scream Faire. The sons would love to redesign it into a Dream Faire. And failing that, they get the notion of leaving Hell and setting up their operation in the world of the living.

It’s while they’re tending to the business of restoring their gigantic father’s hair (a follicle seed-drill and hair growing cream operation) that they stumble into their ticket out. That cream brings even the dead and squished ticks in their father’s enormous scalp back to life.

“I bet folks would pay a LOT to come back from the dead!”

Kat, trying like hell to avoid making friends at her new school, where even the rich girls are nice enough to suggest “Prison chic is the next big thing” as encouragement, gets caught up in the prison-building schemes and underworld intrigues thanks to “The Mark” she bears, the dead parents burden she carries, the counsel of her favorite nun and helpful hints from the transgender kid (Sam Zelaya) still stuck at a girls’ school even though he identifies otherwise.

“Wendell & Wild” is based on a story that Selick and horror writer Clay McLeod Chapman came up with and turned into a novel, and it makes for a cluttered, dead end-littered narrative. The title characters want to be and demand to be center stage, but the movie’s far more interested in its “Coraline with Color” teen girl and her story.

That’s how we get into a whole “chosen one” “hell maiden” story, the murderous politics of unscrupulous developers and Kat’s desire to atone for her role in her parents’ demise…by bringing them back to life.

There’s nothing here that couldn’t have worked, all stuffed into the same film. But the dark, dry and whimsical touches of Selick’s best work have their best outlet in the Wendell & Wild scenes, with Key and Peele trotting out their peerless timing to make even bland lines zing to life.

They want to finance their carnival dreams via bringing-corpses-back-to-life?

“We can’t raise the dead!”

“Well, we DO know how to lie!”

“Oooo, I LIKE that plan!”

Rhames is also funny, and Hong can be hilarious.

But the film keeps getting bogged down in teen angst and school and developer intrigues, and that sidelines its funniest voices and funniest characters. The script may score political points, having a transgender character who doesn’t make a big deal out of that transition, nor do his classmates, and commenting on the scammy, corrupt, pro-mass-incarceration for-profit-prison industry.

“You make a pile of money for every prisoner you take. So you pack them in like sardines, provide crap food, crap medical, dangerous conditions, and zero rehabilitation.”

But too little of that plays as comical, or even seems all that promising as fodder for funny.

The arresting, nightmarish visuals and sight gags pay off. It’s just the scanty supply of them that keep a clever idea or three and a novel setting from ever jelling into a movie destined to become an evergreen, a seasonal classic.

So here’s some more unsolicited advice, Netflix. Try again with these guys. They’re onto something, and given another shot, they might just deliver something special.

Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material, violence, substance use and brief strong language

Cast: The voices of Lyric Ross, Angela Bassett, Keegan-Micheal Key, Jordan Peele, David Harewood, Maxine Peake, James Hong and Ving Rhames.

Credits: Directed by Henry Selick, scripted by Jordan Peele, based on the novel by Clay McLeod Chapman and Henry Selick. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45