Movie Nation

You “Scream,” I “Scream,” R. L. Stine screams that he wishes he’d written “Scream.” But his “Fear Street” books are close enough.

“Fear Street: 1994,” the first film in an eras-spanning Netflix trilogy directed by Leigh Janiak (“Honeymoon””), is an affectionate homage to Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s “Scream” films, and an amusing pastiche of other horror titles from that era (“Heathers” to “Nightmare on Elm Street” to “The Blair Witch Project”) and this one (“Stranger Things.”).

It’s a teen slaughterhouse — slaughter school, slaughter hospital, slaughter mall — thriller in which the deaths have a pathos and grim realism, the character “types” resonate and the music and slang of the ’90s delivers all sorts of warm fuzzies.

“Yo-semite! Cash me!”

It opens with a mass murder at the closed Shadyside Mall, and sets up a whole class warfare dynamic between endlessly violent Shadyside, where sleepovers and summer camps are habitually the source of local bloodletting, and its wealthy, violence-free antithesis, sunny Sunnyvale.

As one snotty, letter-sweatered jock observes, “It’s not a tragedy when it happens every week. It’s a joke.”

The mall killer “dude was wearing a Halloween skull mask,” Shadysider Simon (Fred Hechinger) smirks. “How’s that not FUN?”

“People DIED!” his pal Deena (Canadian actress Kiana Madeira) reminds him. And us.

Hewing to formula, “Fear Street” takes us through a nightmarish couple of days, in which social classes clash, romantic drama plays out, and Deena and her younger brother, Internet/video game “nerd” Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.), stoner Simon, their mutual smart-girl pal Kate (Julia Rehwald) and former Shadysider/current Sunnyvalist Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) try to piece together just what is going on, and how to fight it.

Because as always, the sheriff (Ashley Zuckerman) is skeptically useless.

Clue number one? Shadyside’s athletic teams are called The Witches. Clue number two, the origin story of those witches. And clue number three, the urban legend nursery rhyme all the kids grew up knowing.

“She’ll take your blood, she’ll take your head, she’ll follow you until you’re dead.”

The film is R-rated R.L. Stine — simple, catchy, punchy and playfully derivative. While it’ll be interesting to see what the upcoming (in very short order) Netflix sequels (“1978” and “1666”) will serve up, you don’t come to Stine adaptations for blasts of originality.

And even the character/pplot twists here have a sort of pre-ordained reach for “inclusion,” which is both refreshing but overly-obvious, as if Stine and then the filmmakers adapting him are advertising. “See what we did?”

The best thing representation in film, streaming and TV is the flood of new talent getting a deserved shot. Hechinger, Flores and Zukerman are the only truly familiar faces here, and everybody’s good.

That goes for Janiak’s “big break” movie, as well. It’s a promising start and one that could make “Fear Street” another touchstone in modern horror filmmaking, a “Scream” for the “Stranger Things” era.

MPA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, drug content, language and some sexual content

Cast: Kiana Madeira, Benjamin Flores Jr., Julia Rehwald, Fred Hechinger, Olivia Scott Welch and Ashley Zukerman

Credits: Directed by Leigh Janiak, script by Phil Graziadei and Leigh Janiak, based on the books by R.L. Stine. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

They’re all alone out there, tending their desert farm, feeding their pigs, making their own entertainment.

Dad (Jonny Lee Miller) distracts little Remy (Brooklyn Prince) with joke-threat contests, stories and star-gazing. Mom (Sofia Boutella) handles the home-schooling, and sometimes sings and plays the guitar.

But there’s something they’re not telling their tween, something beyond “Earth isn’t what it once was.” There’s a reason Remy and her dad have a running gag about her running away.

“You gonna stay?” He always wants to know. And smiles or not, he’s never sure of the answer. She’s restless and lonely. And she’s a smart, curious kid.

In “Settlers” their dry, desert frontier is on Mars, a modular habitat farm that is weathered and breaking down. They can’t be all alone, but when their daughter remarks about “strangers nearby,” they assure her that can’t be true.

Her waking up to the sounds of pig squeals and a bloody “LEAVE” painted on their window reveals the Big Lie. They aren’t alone, and the two adults’ quick reaction — he grabs a rifle, she’s palms a knife — show they recognize a familiar threat.

Whatever they have on this barren but oxygenated piece of Mars, they’re prepared to defend. Whatever they have they might not have come by via the usual means. And whatever it takes, when interlopers come for their kid, blood will be spilled.

“Settlers” is what happens after that fight, when Dad dies and somebody else (Ismael Cruz Cordova) comes in, armed and expecting to take his place.

Writer-director Wyatt Rockefeller’s debut feature is kind of the anti-“Martian,” a downbeat and almost forlorn “Twilight Zone” parable of sci-fi tropes running up against basic human nature.

It has a “Silent Running” vibe, with a hint of “Planet of the Apes.” Remy will discover things that have been kept from her, things that the viewer might figure out before her. She might long to learn more, rebel against her circumstances. But how much knowledge is too much? And no matter how far you travel, your humanity and the base corners of human nature travel with you.

Boutella (“The Mummy”) is properly protective and panicked, when the character’s need arises. Prince (“The Florida Project”) is as impressively moody and mercurial as Remy (Nell Tiger Free plays her as an older teen). Miller’s father figure walks a line between amused and manic.

And Cordova (TV’s “Berlin Station”) brings a wary weariness to Jerry, a man who has all the information, has his doubts and yet somehow clings to hope.

The terrain (South African desert is this version of “Mars”) may be as sci-fi familiar as the story Rockefeller tells upon it. The violence, when it comes, can be jarring and depressing, even off camera.

But with “Settlers,” the filmmaker takes us on a journey as much internal as extra-terrestrial. It’s an intimate, sober and downbeat sci-fi Western, one with an inevitability that reminds us of what Buckeroo Banzi was warning us about all those years and dimensions ago.

“No matter where you go, there you are.”

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Sofia Boutella, Brooklyn Prince, Ismael Cruz Cordova and Jonny Lee Miller

Credits: Scripted and directed by Wyatt Rockefeller. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:43

The fights get steadily better, the longer you stick with “Silat Warriors: Deed of Death,” a “steal my land, get your ass kicked” martial arts movie from Malaysia.

The walk-through choreography, sometimes disguised through slow motion, sometimes sped-up, is abandoned and the throw-downs grow more violent and more impressive. Sure, you can still see stunt-villains jumping into the “blow” so that they land in the right (not paralyzing) spot, and even at full speed, we can make out the moves, the delicate dance that stars and their fight partners pirouette through.

Your level of enjoyment of Areel Abu Bakar’s film is predetermined by how much you enjoy little snippets of exotic scenery (and plenty of ugly rice paddy ditches, back alleys, etc) and your tolerance for the tedium that precedes the “Brawl in the Bus,” “Melee in the Market,” “Duel on the Docks” and “Fight to the (not quite) Death in the Factory.”

Mat Arip (Fad Anuar) is the Profligate-not-Prodigal son of his family, a compulsive gambler who has wagered the deed to the family home and paddies on some off-the-books MMA match. And now the moneylender Haji Daud’s minions (most not mentioned by name) have come to collect.

Fatima (Feiyna Tajudin), his sister, is furious at the indulgence their father (Namron) shows this wastrel. Brother Ali (Khoharullah Majid) isn’t keen on it, either. When the first collectors show up, they say they “come in peace.” Then they start something.

Outspoken Fatima, the life spark of the movie, isn’t having it. “Come in peace, ,my ASS!” (in Malay with English subtitles). She proceeds to beat their asses and, like the demure unmarried Muslim woman she is, taunt them about “beating your ass.”

The movie then proceeds to lose track of Fatima, and delay Ali introduction to the fisticuffs. Both Majid and Tajudin are professional martial artists, and the movie is less interesting in their absence.

Instead, we pick up on how Mat Arip is pretty fast with his fists, too. He and his mouthy lump of a friend Mi (Salehuddin Abu Bakar) get into more and more trouble, laughing and fighting their way out. But there’s no getting around the fact that Haji Daud is fixing the fights they bet on, and his family is cheating in the tuner-Toyota races he gets into.

There’s a “We lose, get lost” and “We win, PAY up” bad-guy dynamic here. Mat Arip is too compulsive to resist even the rigged contests.

Meanwhile, Ali is getting counseled by family friends and his Imam about leaving it all “up to Allah,” and learning that “people do not know that which is not seen.”

OK.

If you stream this, the real action — after Fatima’s first butt-whupping — starts 70 minutes in, a classic set piece in which the three siblings are assaulted in different locales to ensure that the deed changes hands. That’s the high point of the picture.

Everything that comes before, and some of what sputters in afterward plays like filler.

Cast: Khoharullah Majid, Feiyna Tajudin, Fad Anuar, Salehuddin Abu Bakar and Namron

Credits: Directed by Areel Abu Bakar, script by Hafiz Derani. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:41

“No Sudden Move” could’ve been THE movie of the summer, had screenwriter Ed “Men in Black” Solomon figured out an exit strategy.

A damned clever neo-noir with a top-drawer cast, genuine suspense, dark humor and a plot that keeps you guessing for a very long time, this Steven Soderbergh thriller has everything a good heist picture needs to get over. The spare, flinty dialogue rings in the ears, the compact performances engage you, the unfussy design and direction stay out of everybody’s way.

“It’s the stuff dreams are made of.” Well, pretty much. Close enough.

Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro and Kieran Culkin are “the usual suspects,” three hard guys hired by a connected guy (Brendan Fraser, sketchy and subtly menacing) to “baby sit” for three hours — for $5,000.

That was a lot of money in 1954 Detroit. So you can bet there’s more to it than baby sitting. They’re to barge in on this accountant (David Harbour at his most impressive) and hold his family hostage while he goes to his office to fetch “a document.” He’ll know which document it is.

As he works at GM, the car-savvy viewer can piece together what that document might detail.

The guy’s frantic, his kids are panicked but his wife (Amy Seimetz) might be more bent than panicked. No, Matt insists he doesn’t have the combination to his boss’s safe. But his captors crack that he’s got “the combination to the secretary,” who does.

Naturally, things don’t go according to plan. The near-strangers have to improvise, scheme, strategize and “trust” each other to reason a way out of it. Because really, everybody in that house is pretty much marked for death.

There’s another “document” that one of the mugs keeps, for insurance sake. All of them have secrets, complications that could make things…complicated. These are guys who know a guy who can help them lay low, bring in muscle as backup, help them piece together a plan B on the fly.

But whatever you do, stay away from Frank. Keep him out of it.

“Everybody has a problem with Frank these days,” one guy admits. “I know why Frank wants ME dead,” another offers. What about you?

Frank is played by Ray Liotta, which is all the explanation any viewer needs.

The dialogue just drips with bourbon and betrayal and gangland savvy. Why’s Mom (Seimetz) so calm, relatively speaking?

“They don’t want to hurt us. That’s why they’re wearing masks.”

Supporting players show up and hit this or that scene out of the park — Jon Hamm is an organized crime cop, the great Bill Duke is…organized crime.

But a line from the first act echoes entirely too loudly in the third.

“Sometimes when people lie, they over-explain.”

Thus it is with this script, which introduces a villain who wants to explain the movie to us (unnecessary), and which then staggers from one anti-climax to another, tidying up more than one needs to tidy up. The “lie” is that it’s not true to the first two acts. The mystery is a big part of the allure of “No Sudden Move,” and Solomon writes through every corner of it, every damned character.

You find yourself wishing this was vaudeville and you held the hook. That’s enough. Leave’em laughing, begging for more, thinking over what they’ve seen. Dude doesn’t know when to drop the mike.

But so many performers just pop off the screen, so many scenes hang us on tenterhooks, so many lines just land.

“I think you have ulterior motives. But I find that sexy.”

“It’s fine. I’m FINE. Everything’s FINE. It’s fine.”

That’s right. Solomon mimics David Mamet here and there. Pity he didn’t copy the way the master wraps things up. Mamet never blows an exit.

MPA Rating: Rated R for language throughout, some violence and sexual references

Cast: Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Jon Hamm, Amy Seimetz, Julia Fox, David Harbour, Brendan Fraser, Frankie Shaw and Ray Liotta

Credits: Directed by Steven Soderbergh, scripted by Ed Solomon. An HBO Max release.

Running time: 1:53

Aw man. I might’ve cut “The Tomorrow War” a little more slack had screenwriter Zach Dean not conjured up the crappiest, sappiest most over-extended finale in living sci-fi movie memory.

And before you make a crack about my memory not being what it once was, let me just note I haven’t forgotten the long list of earlier films Dean (“24 Hours to Live,” “Deadfall”) “borrowed” from for this cut-and-paste job. There’s “Edge of Tomorrow” and “Terminator,” “Starship Troopers” and “World War Z” for starters. I dare say every review has a list like that in it, the cribbing is that algorithmically obvious.

But it’s got Chris Pratt and Sam Richardson (“Werewolves Within”), cracking wise and fighting aliens. Granted, the tentacled “white spikes” are the most derivative space monsters imaginable. The reason they’re kept from view for much of the first act is that they’re hilariously familiar looking.

“Somebody get a harpoon on that tentacle!”

The plot — commandos from 30 years in the future travel back through a manmade wormhole to beg the present day for help. Aliens are treating humanity like an all-you-can-eat buffet. The human race is doomed to a quick and gastronomical extinction if we don’t pitch in and save our kids’ generation.

But when the supply of soldiers runs out, a draft of ordinary citizens worldwide is enforced. Training? Equipping? Not really and “barely.” This is end-game lost-cause desperation, like the Confederacy in 1865 or Japan and Germany in 1945, throwing cannon fodder into the gaping wound, hoping to forestall the inevitable.

That’s how Dan Forester (Pratt), an Iraq War vet now a frustrated high school science teacher, is conscripted. This is what you get for whining “I am meant to do something special in my life,” as if teaching kids isn’t.

His wife (Betty Gilpin) barely has time to suggest “We should run,” his little girl barely gets off a “Goodbye,” and his cranky, estranged ex-military Dad (J.K. Simmons) is no help.

Dan’s tested for “the jump,” and there he is, with science professor Charlie (Richardson), a three-tour vet Darius (Edwin Hodge) and comic actress Mary Lynn Rajskub not quite playing herself, but almost.

What’s striking about these early scenes is all the odd ways facing this terror are being handled. There’s a global lockdown on pictures or video of what they’ll be fighting or the depopulated landscape they’ll be thrown into. Protecting “morale?” Trying to keep people from giving up? We’ll soon find out.

There’s literally no training. And the “jump” resembles nothing so much as a kamikaze mission — technology that hasn’t quite been perfected, orders given by frantic bunglers in charge, a botched “landing” in embattled and empty Miami Beach (What, it’s not under water yet?) that leaves Dan in charge.

Forget that Darius, the only one with LOTS of experience fighting these aliens, is standing right there next to him. Maybe his “attitude” is what’s holding him back.

“Nothing we do here matters.”

The spikes the white spikes grow are hurled, like darts, at the hapless humans. Their teeth aren’t just in their mouths.

And the humans fighting them — just half a million left, in a script detail that causes more harm than good (not enough to support the infrastructure they possess) — are scrambling through their shellshock, trying to find a weapon that will wipe out this plague.

Because arming everybody with assault rifles isn’t really doing the trick.

There’s a scattering of humor, funny lines — bug-eyed Charlie freaking out as he shoots and is chased by these monsters he’s seeing for the first time — “Oh s–t, oh s–t, oh s–t, oh s–t,” repeated maybe 70 times.

Our heroes have to contend with uncomfortable truths about their future — limited or not — and that of their offspring.

Pratt plays another watered-down version of his “Guardian of the Galaxy” guise, Richardson gets most of the funny lines and “Handmaid’s Tale” veteran Yvonne Strahovski, as a future commander, does a decent job of suggesting the stakes and the need for cold, rational in-combat decision making.

It’s never that great, but rarely that bad either. Until that godawful finale. I dare say screenwriter Dean and “Robot Chicken” veteran director Chris McKay will be passing the blame back and forth on that to infinity and beyond.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, language and some suggestive references.

Cast: Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, Sam Richardson, Betty Gilpin, J.K. Simmons, Jasmine Matthews, Edwin Hodge and Mary Lynn Rajskub

Credits: Directed by Chris McKay, script by Zach Dean. A Paramount/Amazon Studios release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 2:19

A fictional Buddhist legend separating the two eyes of The Evil One so that they can’t reunite and “turn the world into Hell” is the centerpiece of “The 8th Day,” a Korean horror thriller in which the hope of the world rests in the hands of (naturally) Korean monks and a Virgin Shaman.

The red eye got buried in the West, in the desert on the Indian/Pakistani border, so the story goes. The black eye was tucked away for safe keeping, inside a capped stone urn inside a Sarira basket in the East. Guess which country that would be?

Kimchi and Hite lager for everyone!

The inciting incident in Tae-Hyung Kim’s film involves an archaeologist who tracks down the Western basket, and takes being called a “fraud” so poorly that he must have his revenge on the world. Just like a guy, ending civilization just to “prove I’m RIGHT.”

The legend, repeated to a couple of characters so that the audience will eventually remember it, says that these eyes will use “seven stepping stones over seven nights” to make their way back to each other.

“They reunite on ‘The 8th Day!'”

Elderly Master Haejong gets wind of the new danger, summons an aspiring monk who hasn’t finished his vow of silence yet. Cheongeok (Dong-yeong Kim), of all people, is who he entrusts the Eastern Eye with, and who he sends to “find Seonhwa!”

That would be a grumpy, haunted, solitary man (Sung-min Lee) who finds his visitor annoying, even more so after the high-maintenance young monk (He can’t touch meat, so buying him a burger means you have to remove the patty yourself.) accidentally breaks his vow of silence.

He’s stuck with a chatterbox and he undertakes the mission to take away a “stepping stone,” the only one the monks know by legend. “Stepping stones” are the people whose body the demon takes over. All are random, save for the Virgin Shaman, Ae-ran (Kim Yoo-Jeong). Find her and you break the “bridge” to creating Hell on Earth.

There’s also a dogged police detective (Rich Ting) unwittingly tracking a demon thanks to the bodies the beast leaves behind. The cop is also saddled with a clumsy sidekick (Nam-Da-reum).

The toothy, crazy-eyed grin their quarry wears should give them away. If not, when the “eye” pokes itself out of their cheek, the game’s up.

The movie’s a plodding, semi-methodical search for the black eye demon, which Cheongeok clumsily lost and let loose, with Seonhwa starting to look more and more like a suspect, the more often he turns up in places where desiccated corpses are found.

The finale, involving more incantations and an elaborate “trap,” is pretty good. And the effects can be chilling in that neck-cracking, beady-eyed grin sort of way. Lee makes a properly grizzled anti-hero for this question.

But the exposition-heavy plot and long leaving many of the monstrous attacks off-camera rob “The 8th Night” of suspense or anything else of interest. For something that we can label “K-horror,” this is tedious going.

And if you’re not going to do anything more with a character you’ve named “The Virgin Shaman” than this, why bother?

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Sung-min Lee, Kim Yoo-Jeong, Rich Ting, Dong-yeong Kim, Nam Da-Reum

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tae-Hyung Kim. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

“I Carry You With Me” is an innovative take on the classic “coming to America” immigrant saga.

It’s not just about Mexicans longing to travel north for opportunity and freedom. The couple here are gay, so their hopes are to be more open about their relationship in a culture more tolerant than Catholic, machismo-addicted Mexico.

Their story is told as a docudrama. The film lives in three timelines. In their childhood, little Ivan quickly learned “to pass,” to keep his sexuality hidden, but wealthier Gerardo didn’t, and they both picked up on the dangerous intolerance that faced them as adults, occasionally in the cruelest ways. We spend much of the movie in their young adult years, where the aspiring chef Ivan (Armando Espitia, terrific) meets graduate student Gerardo (Christian Vazquez), both of them far from home, in the city of Puebla. They talk of their dreams, and one decides he simply must “cross over” into America.

And decades later, we spend time with the real Ivan and Gerardo, living in New York, successful but trapped, unable to leave or travel by plane because of they both crossed-over illegally.

Family members age and die, and Ivan feels the tug of the son he fathered but didn’t raise and hasn’t seen for decades, a boy and then young man repeatedly denied a VISA because US Immigration officials have an idea of what he’ll do if he “crosses over.”

Director and co-writer Heidi Ewing presents this story in the sad tones of an elegy to all you give up and what you’re driven to do to make this struggle and separation “worth it.”

Cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramirez paints his picture in muted blues, underlit interiors, early mornings and mid-twilight to match the soft conversations, the tender courtship.

It’s a familiar narrative that leans toward melodrama, and even the dramatic moments avoid loud confrontations.

One child is slower experiencing what is “wrong” about his gender dysphoria. Why CAN’T he have a quinceañera? A boy is dragged into the desert by a father furious at him and himself for “not teaching you to be a MAN,” (in Spanish with English subtitles). “Do you know what happens to people like you? They get killed, and then dumped in the mountains!”

The coyote-assisted “crossing over” is both a classic rite of passage and a trope of such narratives, fraught in familiar but entirely believable ways. The threat of deportation is an unseen helicopter at night, an unsympathetic border agent, nothing more overt.

The film doesn’t judge the characters for the fateful choices they make, but it does have them rationalize them to each other in the debates about something that will separate the couple, perhaps forever. The wealthier, more educated Gerardo laments about “What will you DO in California?” should that be where Ivan ends up. Pick fruit?

“We’re gays. We don’t PICK avocadoes!”

The triumph of Ewing’s film is that it packages the American Dream for those who long to come here as rewarding and justified, but sometimes selfish and ill-considered with trade-offs that make the migrants and the viewer wonder if it all was worth it.

Telling a loved one “I carry you with me” is never enough.

MPA Rating: R for brief nudity and profanity

Cast: Armando Espitia, Christian Vazquez

Credits: Directed by Heidi Ewing, script by Heidi Ewing and Alan Page. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:52

On a night in February of 1983, Carlos DeLuna ran away from the scene of a murder, a Corpus Christi, Texas convenience store.

The 911 dispatcher, and later a courtroom, heard the 911 tape of Wanda Lopez confirming that a Hispanic male was robbing her store, and heard him kill her.

There were eyewitnesses. And when after a “chaotic” 45 minute manhunt, the police dragged DeLuna, a man with a long rap sheet, out from under a van and stuck him in a police car, those eyewitnesses identified him as the killer they’d seen.

DeLuna assured cops that he didn’t do it, but that he knew who did. He gave the police a name. He trotted out an alibi. And then he clammed up.

But at trial, that alibi was proven a lie. Prosecutor Steve Schiwetz was “very compelling,” recall reporters who were present there, as he said that other person named, “Carlos Hernandez,” as a “phantom,” no one they’d ever heard of.

As even his defense attorney lost faith, DeLuna was convicted. irregularities in the case, things the prosecution either didn’t know or failed to reveal, turned up. But “nobody wanted to rock the boat,” one attorney remembers. “The case was closed.” And six years later, Texas put Carlos DeLuna to death.

Using recreations, TV coverage, police, attorney and eyewitness testimomy, filmmaker Patrick Forbes leads us through this case in a way it must have unfolded back in the ’80s. In “The Phantom” he allows us to believe what witnesses, lawyers, police, the media and a jury did way back then. We’re kind of implicated, in that way. It seems “open and shut.”

But then we hear an attorney not directly linked to the case, Rene Rodriguez, speak about how Corpus Christi justice worked back then. “If it involves somebody of color,” he says, to the locals that just meant “one less Mexican.” Rodriguez, and later James Liebman, professor at Columbia University, point out the gaping holes in the case, with the fact that a crime scene covered in blood and bloody footprints, there wasn’t a drop on DeLuna.

We learn that there were conflicting descriptions of the suspect. We hear that police “recorded over” taped accounts of the manhunt, and hear a version they didn’t erase. And we see that the “phantom” was real, that cops and prosecutors knew all about this knife-wielding sociopath, who left a trail of violence leading up to that murder, with more violence to come as he walked the streets, a free man.

We start to wonder and then we lose all doubt. Once again, rush-to-judgement Texas has executed the wrong man.

Forbes — “The Widowmaker” heart attack documentary was his — basically recreates the crime and the research on it done by Liebman and his student team and published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. He skillfully takes from a shocking crime to the almost as shocking miscarriage of justice that follows. And he lets us see how it might have happened.

That’s what sets “The Phantom” apart from other “Innocence Project” cases and the like. We can see why people were convinced they had the right guy, only noticing the discrepancies when they’re pointed out to us.

The elderly, thoroughly professional coroner wonders why there was no blood on the man arrested, and explains how there should be. Prosecutor Schiwetz feigns ignorance about not “finding” Carlos Hernandez, when he’d been arrested for convenience store knife robberies, with identical looking weapons, several times. Defense attorney James Lawrence bristles and says he’s heard the “bad lawyer” complaint before.

It’s pretty damn damning, to be honest.

And we wonder why we’re still letting an easily-corrupted system kill people on our behalf, and if anything will ever change, especially in Texas.

MPA Rating: unrated, a graphic 911 tape, crime scene photos

Cast: Manuel DeLuna, Mary Conejo, Steve Schiwetz, George Aguirre, Julie Arsuaga, Karen Boudrie, Linda Carrico, James Liebman,

Credits: Directed by Patrick Forbes. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:23

Claustrophobic, minimalist and deliciously macabre, “Rock, Paper, Scissors” is an Argentine variation on the paranoid excesses of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” or “Misery.”

Well-acted and properly gloomy, if a tad predictable, it starts off dark and turns pitch-black in an instant as an often harrowing tale of sibling rivalry and old grudges plays out.

The door is buzzing incessantly, but siblings María José (Valeria Giocelli) and Jesús (Pablo Sigal) can’t tear themselves away from “The Wizard of Oz” (dubbed into Spanish) on TV. They have to “Piedra, Papel, Tijera” (rock, paper, scissors) to decide who finally gets the door.

It’s their half-sister from Spain, Magdalena (Agustina Cerviño)! “You should have called,” they chirp (in Spanish with English subtitles). But she did. The phone’s unplugged.

“People mean to help, but they can be a nuisance.”

She doesn’t want to put anybody out so she’s made a reservation at a hotel. There’s been a death. Their shared father left “No will?” Well, we’ll settle everything up, take care of paperwork. Probably need to sell the house and split the proceeds, OK?

That’s when Magdalena falls down the stairs. When she wakes up to the sound of devout María José’s fervent prayers, she’s in a hospital bed that their Dad used to use, she’s bandaged up and in a neck brace. And she’s sure one of them pushed her, and accuses the “psycho” sister the first time she and Jesús are alone.

Will he help? Was he in on it? How can she know? She should call for help, but her phone won’t charge. Screams blast out into void, not clearing the walls of the house.

“Sometimes we need to scream for God to hear us,” her sister coos.

Not to worry, the family doctor is checking in on her tomorrow. Well, maybe the day after tomorrow. Actually, he’s been held up…

The script unravels little pieces of their shared past and little clues about what’s been going on there since actress Magdalena left for Spain to pursue a different life. Her sister may be psycho, but her brother? He’s an aspiring filmmaker, aka also a little “off.” We see snippets of his dream movie, which confirms it.

Will Magdalena put together the pieces, and will knowing this give her a means of escape?

All we know is that this wasn’t the only time those two have watched “The Wizard of Oz,” and that Dad didn’t die by suicide. But he’d tried it.

Co-directors Martín Blousson and Macarena García Lenzi, making their debut feature, manage some suspense but forget to use the traditional Gothic horror camera angles that tends to heighten it. They rely on revelations, character “tells” and a shifting power and guilt dynamic to pull the viewer in and keep us engaged.

And the occasional shock doesn’t hurt, either.

Cerviño, a dead ringer for a North American actress with whose fame stems from “Argentina” (Patti Lupone, the greatest “Evita”), makes Magdalena an empathetic yet cunning victim. Giorcelli and Sigal have to alternately suggest guilelessness and guilt, and almost manage that.

Maybe you figure it all out more quickly than the filmmakers would have liked, but maybe that doesn’t matter as much as you’d fear. Thanks to all involved, “Misery” has company.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Agustina Cerviño, Valeria Giorcelli and Pablo Sigal.

Credits: Directed by Martín Blousson, Macarena García Lenzi, script by Martín Blousson, Macarena García Lenzi, Julieta García Lenzi and Valentín Javier Diment. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:23

Mike’s the kind of guy everybody walks over and everybody talks over. Like that manic driveway car salesman Dennis, who tries to sell him a ’65 Chrysler New Yorker when the kid came over to buy a practical, cheap Toyota.

“This things runs like a scalded dog! Two and a half tons…Baby you hit something in this? You don’t need an air bag, because THEY’RE gonna know it and you’re NOT.”

Mike needs the car because he has a “First Date,” and his self-absorbed parents wouldn’t think of changing their Vegas plans so that he can use the family van. “Condoms are in Dad’s night-stand,” and they’re off.

He got the date because motor-mouthed pal Brett barked “Can you just stop being YOU for TWO seconds?” and dialed Kelsey up and put Mike on the phone with her. He got the date because Kelsey took charge of the chat that shy, put-upon Mike wasn’t holding up his end on.

“How have we not talked since eight grade?” she wants to know.

But that car will keep hapless Mike (Tyson Brown) from Kelsey (Shelby Duclos) for much of the mayhem of an epic, not-quite-manic Southern California night. A lot of people want that New Yorker, and not just the older couple that spy it on the road and were previous owners.

“I redid the rear seat cover,” Thelma (Shari Schweigler) gushes. “The blood wouldn’t come out.”

The combo gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight/book club led by The Captain (Jesse Janzen) crave it.

Dennis the “salesman” is missing, so his trigger-happy wife (Leah Finity) figures if she finds it, she’ll find him.

And there are deadpan sheriff’s deputies (Nicole Berry, Samuel Ademola) Mike keeps stumbling into, saying “I know everybody says this but…It’s NOT how it looks!”

“First Date” is a beautifully-engineered farce that runs a lot like that dieseling, sputtering ’65 New Yorker. All the plot elements click, the performances have a nice snap and the dialogue can crackle. But the pacing is way off. A simple trim to 90-95 minutes would make it fly by like “a scalded dog.

What’s here gets laughs out of car crashes and shootouts, an errant Roomba and a lot of people who don’t know the difference between a “short story” and a “novella,” and which one Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” is.

It’s a Tarantino-twisted tale of drugs, gangs, deputies and dead people, and poor Mike is just there to react to it all. Dennis? He’ll chatter through every scene unless somebody tapes his mouth shut or puts a bullet in him.

“If I’m gonna die, I’d at least like it to be at the hands of somebody who knows how to pour piss out of a boot without READING the INSTRUCTIONS on the f—–g HEEL!”

Kelsey? Well, maybe Mike crushes on her because he’s seen her work the heavy bag, boxing in her garage. Kelsey’s a lot of things Mike isn’t, starting with “badass.” That could come in handy.

All things considered, kids, you could do a lot worse than “First Date” as a first date movie.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Tyson Brown, Shelby Duclos, Jesse Janzen, Nicole Berry, Scott E. Noble, Samuel Ademola, Angela Barber

Credits: Scripted and directed by Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:44