Movie Nation

There are scenarios where one could see “Christmas Bloody Christmas” appreciated for what it is — a cheesy, gory, dumber-than-dumb C-movie about an animatronic Santa going on a snowy Xmas Eve rampage.

Such situations might be limited to drunken, half-stoned gatherings of C-movie cognoscenti, midnight movies at your multiplex or last-showing-of-the-day horror film fan conventions.

It begins badly and turns progressively worse before rallying, “Terminator” style, in a test of human against machine that will-not-die in a movie that does not want to end.

But hey, I’ve seen worse.

Writer-director Joe Begos did the geezer veterans vs. crazed, killer-druggies thriller “VFW,” so he’s used to this “Shaun of the Dead” formula. Eventually, survivors are going to be holed up against some monstrous menace which has slaughtered or is slaughtering one and all outside the bar, house, office or precinct that this movie uses as its “last stand” fortress.

The biggest problem with “Christmas Bloody Christmas” is the many offhand, almost-improvised, unfunny and tedious scenes that set up this inevitable eventuality.

Riley Dandy plays the randy and bawdy record store owner Tori, whose establishment is a statement in neon and Goth. Sam Delich is her mulleted minimum-wage helpmate Robbie, whose sexualized banter suggests he’d like to be another kind of “mate.”

The film’s first act is their running flirtation, metal music and horror cinema debate, pick-up-lines at closing time the Night Before Christmas.

A Metallica with hair vs. Metallica without, Chris Cornell and “Van Hagar” riffs — none of them funny — are worked into the argument over which “original” “Pet Sematary” as better, “I” or “II.”

Fred Gwynne was in “I,” kids. No debate necessary.

This low-life/low-laughs “High Fidelity” back and forth continues as they bar-hop and make their way towards the evening’s climax.

But “the news” has shown that this “military grade” animatronic Santa Claus gadget that all your lesser malls have installed to save themselves the trouble of hiring bearded and/or boozy locals, has been recalled worldwide. Let’s not give a thought to the fact that a local store had one, that it’s gone missing, and that it’s grabbed a fire ax off the wall as a weapon.

Let the holiday festivities start. Eventually.

The satanic laser-eyed Santa is created with a couple of lights, a dude in a suit and a metallic gears and servos whirring sound effects. We see many of “his” attacks through those piercing green luminescent eyes, a killer-cam eye view.

The slaughter is gruesome and perfunctory, sparing neither the unsavory nor the innocent, law enforcement or stoner, adult or child. The acting is nothing special, though our heroine works up a fine lather of panic and frenzy in fighting back, or trying to get the cops to help.

Got to love commitment from a horror movie heroine.

Begos bathes this picture in a closing-time bar or retail establishment with holiday lights gloom. And once it gets on its feet and starts chasing down victims, it’s marginally better than the dull opening scenes or the amateurish TV channel-surfing (analog era) through “local TV” commercials opening credits.

But again, in a group setting, with the right level of appreciation for C-movie cheese and/or the proper degree of inebriation, “Christmas Bloody Christmas” could go over.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Riley Dandy, Sam Delich, Elliot Gilbert, Joe Begos and Kansas Bowling

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joe Begos. An RLJE/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:26

As a film lover, you’re going to set aside part of your Christmas to New Years vacation to catch Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” the three hour epic set during Hollywood — and America’s — most debauched epoch (until now), the silent cinema/Jazz Age 1920s.

That’s an era when Greater Los Angeles was lesser Los Angeles, and part of the fun of an entire entertainment industry’s fleeing (motion picture patent policing) to the undeveloped, orange-groves empty real estate of the Wild West Coast was the ethos that “anything goes” wasn’t just a future Cole Porter pop hit.

Under-policed and uninhibited, Hollywoodland hadn’t become Hollywood, but the myth-making for the dream factory was well underway. The machinery to publicize and sanitize “the system” and tidy it up for American consumption was yet to come. In the interim, the orgiastic excesses of an unregulated industry made a lot of people who’d never had money obscenely rich, omnipotently powerful and desperate to shake off the endless frenetic sunrise to sundown days of film production with hairier and wilder indulgences.

Prohibition Era? You’d never know it. Moral Policing? It wasn’t invented in Iran, you know.

But in LaLaLand, things were different. Depraved? Debauched? Ancient Rome had nothing on these hard-partying, orgy-crazed, accident-prone, life-is-short hedonists. Neither did ancient Babylon.

Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon” appears to be the inspiration for the film’s title. Read it. Scandals that studios and entertainment empires got so very good at covering up were laid bare in this seminal piece of Tinseltown scandal-mongering. Under-sourced and unfiltered, first-published in France and then — in 1965, the US — it dug deep into the gossip of the era, the Hollywood lore of “deviant” behavior, drugs, sex and covered-up deaths dating from that pre-Golden Age age of gilded excess and golden showers.

When I was a kid the book itself was so salacious and shocking that you couldn’t get your hands on it until you got to university. Which I did.

It will help the viewer of Chazelle’s film get a taste for the tasteless, the tacky and the titillating of the “Pre Code” era.

If you’ve never read Neal Gabler’s “An Empire of their Own,” it’s another early Hollywood history — a “How the Jews Invented Hollywood” that captures the flavor of that era and the touchy Eastern European Jews who colonized and to a large degree took over the film business, and became more American than Americans in their later efforts to keep its image wholesome.

They had their work cut out for them with this mob.

You’ll want to know something about Fatty Arbuckle, what he did (or didn’t) do, what destroyed him and why the motion picture industry felt a need to tidy up its image, when everybody who was anybody seemed like a role model for the Madonnas, Kardashians, Weinsteins and Armie Hammers of the future.

Brush up on Louise Brooks and other icons of the “flapper” era film business. Clara Bow is another figure to be familiar with, especially the most infamous story attached to her life and career.

If there’s a movie about “The Wild Child” of the cinematic 1920s, you’re going to want to know who might have been the inspiration for that “Babylon” character.

Read a little something about Anna May Wong, an early era Asian actress, hemmed in by what Hollywood would let her do. Chinese-American and LGBTQ filmmaker Esther Eng might be a helpful figure to have on your gaydar/raydar.

Women directed in early Hollywood. Some of them were lesbians. Shocked? Read up on that and be amazed.

Learning something about Garbo and Dietrich and their sexuality will add to your appreciation of the “Babylon” milieu.

The life and career of silent screen superstar John Gilbert and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst and his paramour Marian Davies, depicted in “Mank,” are also worth knowing about as prep for “Babylon.”

Watch “Mank,” if you haven’t. And if you’ve never seen “Singing in the Rain,” it’s long past time. It is Hollywood’s affectionate, sanitized and lightly-self-mocking look back at the panic, chaos and industry-technology-career-and-life shattering change that hit the movies, all at once, when the cinema learned to “talk.”

A more frenetic and fraught version of that abrupt transition is part of the timeline of “Babylon.”

Every heard of Louella Parsons? America’s first and perhaps most infamous celebrity gossip? There’s a “Designing Woman” who could be her prototype in the picture.

Did you see Ryan Murphy’s salacious “Hollywood,” the TV miniseries that takes “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood” as its starting point? It waded into a later era (1940s and 50s) and underlined it with all the gay goings on in the last days when the studio system could cover up that sort of shocking-to-the-rest-of-America sexuality.

It’ll be helpful to have seen “Hollywoodland,” set in the same era as “Hollywood ” and about a much-later scandal — the death of the first TV “Superman,” George Reeves.

And if you’ve not seen Apple TV’s “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” dive in. There’s a composite figure in “Babylon” who is reminiscent of Louis — a Hollywood mainstay, back in the day — and other Black jazzmen who made it onto the screen in that era.

That’s one of the fascinating subtexts of “Babylon.” It’s another “new” history — quite ahistorical, with most every name changed — that sets out to return events that have been scrubbed-out and major figures and indeed whole corners of the population who have been “erased” from Hollywood and American history to their proper place within the story of early Hollywood at its craziest, most Bacchanalian and a lot more diverse than we’ve been allowed to remember.

The Irish do the gloom thing quite well. Poets and painters, novelists and filmmakers, they get their greys right and the grim earth tones of fall and can all but consume any notion of cheer and the Irish spring long past, or the one you hope is coming.

“Mandrake” is a moody little Northern Irish tale of spooky goings on out in th’bog, children disappearing and the “witch” the locals are convinced is behind it all, seeing as how she just moved back after serving time for killing her abusive husband.

“Bloody Mary” they call her. Not terribly original, and it’d confuse viewers if they’d titled the film this.

Deirdre Mullins plays Cathy, a divorced and dedicated probation officer who tries to keep her charges on the straight and narrow, and can fight them off when they aren’t. But this Mary Laidlaw (Derbhle Crotty) woman she’s taken on would give Freddy Krueger the creeps.

She’s blowsy and bluff and sexual, 50something and walking with a cane. When Cathy attaches an ankle monitor on her after she’s returned to the half-ruined home where she nearly died, and where she killed the man who almost killed her, the probation officer can’t help but notice scars.

Mary acts as if she knows Cathy, talks about her ex-husband, the cop Jason (Paul Kennedy), mentions their marriages troubles and even a possible cause of them. She knows.

Mary’s all about herbs and the roots of the forest, teas and potions and whatnot. And don’t get her started about mandrake.

When a couple of local kids, smart-alecks who “want to see the witch,” disappear from the woods near Mary’s place, the locals want to lynch her. Cathy and Jason intervene.

“This town thinks she’s the f—–g devil!”

But is she?

Lynne Davison’s debut feature is properly creepy and mysterious, with folk horror stick figures and even a shrubby looking beast glimpsed in the shadows, wandering the forest. That’s true all through the first act and into the second.

It’s when things head into hostage-taking/rituals and the like that the spell is broken. The best mysteries are the ones left only half-explained.

But there are kids and a woman imperiled, primitive goings on in the woods and lots of fiddling about with roots that seem kind of human when you wash and cut into them.

And a lynch mob delayed can be justice denied. Or murderous conclusions leapt to by groupthink. It’s the gloom that gets in their Irish souls and won’t let go.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, nudity, profanity, inuendo

Cast: Deirdre Mullins, Derbhle Crotty, Paul Kennedy, Seamus O’Hara and Jude Hill

Credits: Directed by Lynne Davison, scripted by Matt Harvey. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:25

The new Sight and Sound magazine “Greatest Films of All Time” list has gotten its once-a-decade updating.

It’s the list that first enshrined “Citizen Kane,” that later critics/voters replaced with “Vertigo,” and so on, down the decades since 1952.

And they picked a film that has long been held in esteem, a 1975 Belgian drama that runs for three hours and 20 minutes, with the pithy title “Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”

Say what now?

“An epic of experimental cinema” following a widow (Delphine Seyrig) through her daily routine of housekeeping, cooking and caring for her son. Oh, and she’s a Belgian prostitute, a sex worker “turning the occasional trick.”

It was on the last version of the S&S poll at #36, but magically jumped all the way to the top when the polling sample size was greatly increased, almost certainly to diversify the demographics of those being polled.

The British Film Institute will offer it for free on its onsite player starting Thursday, since most of the world, and probably a lot of those folks casting ballots this time around in the S&S poll, have never seen it.

Filmmaker, screenwriter and critic Paul Schrader (“Taxi Driver” script, “First Reformed” writer-director) has questioned this abrupt shift, using the term “woke” in describing the sudden ascent of a film that has been well-regarded, but not deemed the cinema’s finest film in any circles until now.

Is it an anchor movie in Women in Film courses and film societies the world over? No idea. I’ve never seen it, but I plan to.

But if you don’t think “Sight & Sound” and its polling population have been patrician and hidebound for most its history, you’re almost certainly guessing wrong. Just read the polls over the decades and guess how they’re more male and Anglo-Centric than they’d like to admit, as certainly mostly European and North American voters have been predominant in the tastes reflected in what they’ve published up to now.

Did they get it wrong? Was this a grade-on-the-curve, jump an under-represented populace to the front of the line thing? Probably. Pity they couldn’t have picked a better known film and female filmmaker.

“My Name is Vendetta (Il mio nome è vendetta) ” is a properly blood-spattered Italian hitman thriller with a few loopy touches — and blunders — that mark it as a B-movie.

Generic as it generally is, it’s worth a look for some fine action beats and its Italian mob sense of what pitiless violence looks like.

It’s about a father and daughter who have to go on the lam when the Sicilian mafia family he once hit IDs him in the remote timber country of — Austria, I guess?

Santo (Alessandro Gassman) always told teen Sofia (Ginerva Francesconi) that he left Calabria (the toe of the Italian boot) “for love.” He fell for her German speaking mother, and that was that.

But working in a sawmill and cheering her on at her hockey games is very much a “new” life. Santo wasn’t always “Santo.” And when Sofia snaps and posts a shot of her dad against his oft-expressed “no photos” wishes, she brings the wrath of the Lo Biancos down on them.

Mom and an uncle are beaten to death. But Sofia — a bit of a jock and an impulsive hothead on the ice — makes her escape. Dad has to rescue her, take them off the grid and um, start explaining.

“I wasn’t a good person” (in Italian, or dubbed into English) should about cover it.

The rich, vengeful old man Lo Bianco (Remo Girone) will have his pounds of Santo’s flesh. His more corrupt than murderous son (Alessio Praticò) and all his minions will just have to go along with it.

A pseudo-clever touch of the screenplay is to tie this “Kill or be killed” tale to father Santo’s favorite book, “The Call of the Wild.” He was a beast in a previous life, and he’s got to return to his savage state — and to teach Sofia — if they’re going to survive.

After a LOT of bratty blowback in which the kid who got her mother and uncle killed by not accepting Dad’s “no photos” dictum, mid GETAWAY tantrums and the like, Sofia buys in. A lesson in knife fighting, where to cut to get the advantage, where to stab to kill, what to puncture if you want your foe to live long enough to have the sight of his killer be his last thoughts, because “no revenge is crueler,” is taken to heart.

Hot-wiring a car? That’s something she picks up just by observing.

There are a lot of unexplained/little-explained stashes, bits of ordnance acquisition, novice-driver in a car chase and gearing up and getting the drop on the bad guys details here. The plotting is sloppy, never more so than when we hear a hostage calling out “Please PLEASE” from a distance, only to have his captor walk up and…tear off the duct tape that covers his mouth so that he can take a drink.

Yeah.

And a lot more could have been made of “the wild” that this “Call of the Wild” riff rides on. The only connection with the book, which is quoted from in a few voice-overs, is the savagery of all involved.

Still, as it never aims to be more than a film de genere, “Il mio nome è vendetta” isn’t all bad.

Rating: TV: MA, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Alessandro Gassman, Ginerva Francesconi, Alessio Praticò, Francesco Villano and Remo Girone

Credits: Directed by Cosimo Gomez, scripted by Cosimo Gomez, Sandrone Dazieri and Andrea Nobile. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

Israel’s bid for Best International Feature Oscar glory this year is a charming but slight drama about a group of women who take a filmmaking course in a community center in the Israeli city of Hadera.

Eight women join a class pitched by a Palestinian course planner at the center, taught by a young Israeli filmmaker, Rona (Dana Ivgy).

Right away, there’s a tiff over how it will be instructed — in Hebrew. It’s a concession the Palestinians taking the class don’t want to grant, but must as “we all understand Hebrew anyway,” the 73 year-old keeper-of-the-peace Awatef (Marlene Bajali) shrugs. All of the paperwork, and most of the class discussions will be in Hebrew, with some Arabic (all of it subtitled in English) peppering the chatter.

It’s unavoidable. Forced to live together, of course each has at least a little understanding of “the other.”

But that word the Palestinians use to greet each other, “Sabaya?” The somewhat tactless Israeli HR director Eti (Orit Samuel doesn’t know it.

“It means ‘prisoner of war.‘”

That’s an apt title that might be more so if there was more conflict here. As you might guess, the idea is that these women — Palestinian and Israeli, married, divorced, young-and-single or gay — will learn just how much they have in common as they study the basics of camera shots, edits, writing and cinema storytelling.

Rona keeps a smile on her face as she encourages women all across the spectrum, conservative Muslim to outspoken and more agnostic Israeli, to “open up” simply by taking the assigned video cameras home and showing their classmates, and us, their lives.

Their baby steps in filmmaking are often revealing. A simple walking and talking “scene” showing us a living room, a cat and a slightly-amused but churlish husband ends with his veiled criticism.

“How about filming the kitchen?”

Carmela (Liora Levi) lives with her dog on a sailboat. Souad (Joanna Said) is 35 and is overwhelmed by six kids and a husband who won’t let her get a driver’s license. Nasrin (Amal Markus) sees this as her last shot — she’s 50ish — at a singing career. Yelena (Yulia Tagil) is newly divorced, an embittered single mom forced to live with her parents.

They get a look into each other’s lives, chide and nag one another to take action to improve those lives and share more than a few frank assessments of their marriages, mental states and “dreams.”

A background noise awareness exercise even has one capture audio of a domestic abuse situation involving her neighbors.

The acting is uniformly fine, with many characters too guarded to let their true natures show, others pasting smiles over their real feelings about the others.

Some will be timid, others brought out of their shells and prejudices aired — by Israelis who “avoid” contact with people they’re sure want to kill them, by a Muslim who declares “You’d be dead to me” if this or that member of their circle turns out to be gay.

“You think murdering children and babies is right?”

“And you have the world’s most ‘humane’ army?”

It’s another one of the many Israeli films over the years that emphasizes connection, accidental or forced, in the close-quarters of Palestine — Israel, the Occupied Territories, lands under the Palestinian Authority.

And like most of these films, it offers a glimmer of hope, even if it’s too much to expect Orit Fouks Rotem’s film to play out as wholly neutral. They really are “Sabaya” trapped in the same sunbaked camp, with shared history and shared antagonisms, with or without a class on making movies that show much they have in common.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Joanna Said, Liora Levi, Dana Ivy, Marlene Bajali, Aseel Farhat, Yulia Tagil, Ruth Landau, Amal Markus, and Orit Samuel.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Orit Fouks Rotem. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:31

I’m getting a “Toy Story 3” vibe from this one. You?

Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva and Tobey Maguire, a Bowie riff backs a good on early Hollywood.

“Goddamned Asura” is a somewhat accessible but frustrating Taiwanese drama about disaffected young lives brought together in a random act of violence — a mass shooting at a night market filled with street vendors, street food and customers.

Director and co-writer Yi-an Lou (“A Place of One’s Own”) tells this story in the time-honored “strangers linked by tragedy” fashion. Only they’re not strangers. They’re all connected in a variety of ways before a miserable incel (Joseph Huang) celebrates his birthday with a social media post — “Eighteen, and already fed up.” — and a deadly, walking and shooting spree that kills one and wounds many.

It’s a hard film in which to find your moorings, as the script takes its sweet time naming characters, for starters. And after the second act climaxes with a mystery, a mystery’s solution and more violence, the third act promptly undoes all that with a “What might have been” alternate storyline, which is fitting, because our central figures have created an online comic, inspired by a third character, and “Raging Zero” impacts the lives of everyone else in this story.

One can appreciate the ambition and the tinkering with formula, while grinding your teeth at the filmmaker’s obscurant gimmicks. Which I did.

Jan Wen is the shooter, sullen and stereotypically sociopathic, even when he’s dealing with is pal, classmate and artist Xu Axing (Devin Pan). They collaborate on the comic “Raging Zero,” building it out of people and settings they know, taking it into the dark corners of Wen’s psyche as they do. He stops at the same shop every day to video a beautiful dog he names “Oreo,” an animal going stir crazy in a tiny cage.

One day, he finally does something about it and frees the dog. Yes, that’ll make the comic. But given all that we’ve seen happen in the film’s first scene — the shootings — we fret over the fate of Oreo and everyone else.

Xu Axing is Wen’s sounding board, the one guy who hears out his lost-child-of-rich-divorce’s darkest thoughts and turns them into art. Xu Axing is also gay, hitting the Taiwanese version of Grindr for hook-ups with his fellow skinny gay teens. There’s a hint of homoerotic attraction between the leads, as well.

Linlin (Yu-Xuan Wang) is a math savant and a bit of a punk, working at odd jobs and street level drug-dealing to keep a roof over her head, and that of her alcoholic ex-mobster-moll mom.

Vita (Peijia Huang) is a video game ad exec weary of her life of abusive clients and the clingy, civil servant/game-addict fiance Hu-Sheng (Hao-Zhe Lai) who pesters her day and night, and is only truly himself as Shine, a gaming/vlogging kingpin of King’s Realm, a popular game in his corner of the metaverse.

And Morning Tzu-Yi Mo is “Mold,” an apt nickname for a chain-smoking young badass of local online journalism, a guy who not only pieces together the accounts of the various people who were present or otherwise involved in this mass shooting, he was there and actively involved.

The film is about the culture and the parenting that goes into creating a Jan Wen — living with his rich, aloof and never-home father, kept at arm’s length by his mother — and the other unhappy lives spinning into collision with him on that fateful night.

Yi-an Lou gives us a peek at the sometimes supportive/often toxic online environment in gaming circles, class boundaries and all the ways people can disconnect and take their eyes off of larger goals — life, financial liberty and the pursuit of romantic and creative happiness.

He explores this world mostly through co-dependent, dysfunctional couples — Jan Wen and Xu Axing, Jan Wen and each parent, in turn, LinLin and her mother, Vita and Hu Sheng.

The comic book tie-in to the storytelling isn’t likely to delight any viewer, even if Jan Wen’s father seems out-of-step and foolish as he ridicules the form’s lack of value as “literature” and the film all but suggests comic vengeance tales as being the manifestation of what Jan Wen ends up doing.

That third act flip-the-script business serves little purpose aside from suggesting the randomness of life and the ways any of us could be the victim or a perpetrator, given the right circumstances. Yes, and?

But “Goddamned Asura” — the title comes from a game character and online gamer’s handle — taps into the same sort of existential angst we’re seeing in a lot of films these days, especially those from Asia. The rise of various economies there has led to a leap from Third World to G-20 status, and left a new generation grasping for meaning and connection and ways to tell its own stories other than social media “attention” posting.

This isn’t my favorite among the Best International Feature submitted titles I’ve seen this year. But it’s always interesting to immerse yourself in a culture we only skim the surface of in news stories and travel programs, to poke at the friction beneath the surface and see that, as the wiser among us always say, “Everybody’s going through something.”

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Joseph Huang, Devin Pan, Yu-Xuan Wang, Hao-Zhe Lai, Morning Tzu-Yi Mo and Peijia Huang

Credits: Directed by Yi-an Lou, scripted by Singing Chen and Yi-an Lou. Distribution TBD

Running time: 1:54