Movie Nation

If you see just one Inuit kids fend off tentacled alien invaders thriller this year, make it “Slash/Back,” an above-the-Arctic Circle genre pic in the “Attack the Block” tradition.

It’s a more good-natured-than-good Canadian production about a village beset by beasties, and the ones who figure this out first and take defending Pangnirtung seriously are a bunch of 13 year-old girls.

Scary, right?

“They came here to hunt! But what they don’t know is, we’re the best hunters there is (sic)!”

There are funny lines and oodles of generic fight-the-aliens stand-offs. But the (mostly locally recruited) acting is pretty bad. None of the kids manages to summon up “fear” on cue, and the line-readings are so flat that they drain the blood out of almost every zinger in this Nyla Innuksuk sci-fi action comedy.

Maika (Tasiana Shirley) is the leader of the pack in this corner of the Cumberland Peninsula. She keeps Jesse and Leena (Alexis Wolfe, Chelsea Prusky) hoping that they have a shot with the “hottest boy in school,” because Maika’s not interested. And she keeps mouthy, hustling braggart Uki (Nalajoss Ellsworth) honest when she tries to con Aya (Frankie Vincent-Wolfe), Maika’s pesky tag-along kid sister out of her savings.

Maika is the most jaded about their lives and this insular world. Sure, they have cellphones and they’re as obsessed with how much fun and stuff other kids their age have, thanks to social media. But to Maika and her mates, “Pang” is “Craphole, population ‘Who cares?'” Maika dogs on the “drunk” adults and the limited horizons in the Land of the Midnight Sun, even on Inuit art.

She can’t wait to “move to Winnipeg.” Hey Maika, been there, done that, had the Chinese food, Molson’s and jelly donuts. Heard the Neil Young/Randy Bachman tribute bands. Aim higher, girl!

But in the opening scene, we’ve seen a white geologist grabbed and gutted. Arterial spray on snow, nothing like it. Something is out there. And when the girls take off on a jaunt in Maika’s dad’s boat, they get a load of that “something” first hand. A (digitally) possessed polar bear comes for them. But “It didn’t move right…and its blood was black!”

And those things coming out of its eyes? Tentacles.

Not that they see all of that. Not that they believe the one member of their quartet who did.

It’s only later that (still sunny) night that the rest of them get a clue, and have to take action lest the entire village, population 1481, is slaughtered. Every minute, the body count is rising.

This film has the potential to have a whiff of “Smoke Signals” and “Reservation Dogs” Native Deadpan about it thanks to the setting and the alien (ahem) culture it ventures into.

There’s a smattering of Inuit dialect and words — Ijiraq is one of the words for “shape shifter” in their mythology.

And Maika, the Inuit girl kid down on her culture — “Only dumb Inuit fall for that!” — has a righteous story arc to play out, from jaded cynic to someone who appreciates her people and what they know and how it could give them the edge against the aliens.

Just as in “Attack the Block,” or “Thirty Days of Night” or the August sleeper hit “Prey.”

The dialogue is tween-to-teen sassy in that “As if” sort of way. Lee Lee’s ex-boyfriend, for instance, gave her “the worst two days of my life.”

But every line is as flat as the one that preceded it, every joke is either swallowed in mumbled enunciation (not an accent thing, a “Let’s do another take so my joke lands, girls” problem).

These beasts, which they nickname “skins” because their tentacles are literally getting under human’s skin (a nice effect, better than the alien-possessed bears, etc), may want to “get us right in the Bs (breasts) and Vs (vaginas).”

But the line isn’t funny at all if you don’t hit it right. Why didn’t we get retakes? It’s not like “we’re losing daylight.” Because the sun doesn’t go down (my lived-in-Alaska expertise) in hte summer that far north, does it?

“I’m scared why because this is frickin’ scary” is funny when you don’t say it in a monotone.

The picture comes to a complete, exhausted halt for about 20 minutes before the third act’s Big Finish, which isn’t actually “big.”

Sorry to dog on the movie the way Maika dogs on Inuit “fish pictures,” but “Slash/Back” never overcomes its scene after scene, joke after joke “near miss” status. You might be rooting for it at the end as fervently as you were at the promising beginning. But by then, it’s already disappointed, with far too many punchless punchlines for its own good.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Tasiana Shirley, Alexis Wolfe, Nalajoss Ellsworth, Chelsea Prusky and Frankie Vincent-Wolfe

Credits: Directed by Nyla Innuksuk, scripted by Ryan Cavan and Nyla Innuksuk. An RLJE film on Shudder!

Running time: 1:27

Intimate in scale, narrow in focus, “Mars One” is a melodrama of the “kitchen sink drama” school. A Brazilian submission for the Best International Feature prize at the Oscars, it takes us into the lives of a family of four, brings them into conflict with one another giving each character her or his moment of crisis.

It’s quite simple in structure, simply sublime in execution.

Mother Tercia (Rejane Faria) is traditional, teaching domestic skills to her college coed daughter Eunice (Camilla Damião), letting her younger son Deivinho slide (Cicero Lucas) slide because father Wellington (Carlos Francisco) has dreams of soccer stardom for the kid.

One child in college, the other in braces and glasses, they still manage to get by on her salary as an in-home maid and cook for a same sex dwarf couple and his long service as a building maintenance/handyman at a posh high rise.

Bolsonaro has just been elected, but any partying over that takes a back seat to the fireworks that go off every time their Cruizero soccer club scores and wins. Still, a subtext of the film is the economic inequality of the country and its notoriously lax standards, laws and basic protections for anyone who isn’t rich.

Wellington probably doesn’t need his new assistant to point out “This salary is a joke,” or his wife to remind him how exploited he is at the hands of his rich tenants. He’s got a job. He’s in AA — four years sober. And they’re managing.

Then Tercia finds herself “pranked” in an unimaginably cruel stunt in which a TV crew fakes a bombing in the diner where she’s she’s eating. She is traumatized, suffers PTSD headaches, and being superstitious, starts seeing everything around her going wrong.

Eunice has met somebody. But as her never lover is a woman named Joanne (Ana Hilario), she’s got some explaining to do to her parents. Maybe “moving in together” (in Portuguese with English subtitles) will solve that problem. And you thought “U-Haul Lesbians” was strictly a northern hemisphere thing.

And middle schooler Deivnho, tight as he is with his big sister, won’t be any help here, even though he says exactly what Eunice needs to hear when she tells him about her girlfriend and asks him if he thinks “its wrong.”

“Why would I think that?”

Deivinho isn’t all about soccer and Ronaldinho. He’s into a cosmos that has nothing to do with Pele. He adores Neil DeGrasse-Tyson and longs to join the Mars One planned colonization of the red planet in 2030.

Writer-director Gabriel Martins (the horror film “O Nó do Diabo” was his) is unfussy in setting all this up, and in keeping the story simple and straightforward lets us focus on the performances. There’s an engaging naturalism here, even as “Mars One” drifts into melodrama in the ways each character’s world is upended and their crisis is introduced.

Mom brings Eunice’s “moving out” plans to a head with a blunt demand to meet the “roommate.”

“You aren’t uncared for,” she complains, explaining the obvious to her child. “You have a father, a mother and a brother.” And they’re entitled to meet this person you’re about to cohabitate with.

The “obstacles” to everyone’s happiness and the predicaments they find themselves in are somewhat contrived and even extreme, the very definition of melodrama. But Martins has conjured up a slice-of-life working class story that is sympathetic to its characters and representative of its times, a movie so wrapped-up in domesticity that we don’t need to see the kitchen sink to know it’s there, and that this molecular level of reality is entirely the point.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Cícero Lucas, Camilla Damião, Rejane Faria, Ana Hilario and Carlos Francisco

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gabriel Martins. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:55

This “true story” looks unusual and arresting and authentic in casting and details. I’m totally there.

Nov. 18.

Yes, the headline is a rhetorical question. Because if there’s one thing the 50+ years since “Bullitt” has proven, it’s that most every big screen cop thriller has been in many if not most ways a remake of this Steve McQueen/Peter Yates classic.

We’ve had half a century of the “renegade” “outsider,” “goes his own way” cops, hunting for justice in a broken and/or corrupt system. There have been hundreds of films in which the cop hero drove a “car with character,” and any car buff or film fan knows what you mean when you say “Bullitt Mustang.” The “GT” is understood, the image iconic.

But let’s take that headline literally, shall we? Watching the film again for the umpteenth time last night, I gave it a hard, unsentimental pass for the first time in years.

The story — Lt. Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is tasked by his boss (the redoubtable Simon Oakland) to protect a mob witness (Felice Orlandi) expected to testify at hearings being held by an ambitious, self-important peacocking Congressman (Robert Vaughn).

The Chicago “Outfit” (Vic Tayback plays a mobster) “gets to” the witness, almost killing him. Bullitt and a sympathetic doctor (Georg Stanford Brown) conspire to hide him — dead or alive — to lure the bad guys (John Aprea and Bill Hickman, later a cop in “The French Connection”) into trying again.

Bullitt is followed, and this being his town, he turns the tables on the Dodge Charger-driving heavies and a chase ensues. More wrinkles in the plot unravel, but Bullitt — with dogged determination, the love of a beautiful woman (Jacqueline Bissett) and a wardrobe that became the quintessence of cool because Steve McQueen wore it — won’t be denied.

Truth be told, it’s a thriller that peaks with the epic car chase, and fizzles out afterwards. There’s a nice buildup, some terrific tone-and-setting scenes that show us San Francisco as the “cool” was about to give way to the hippies, turtle-necked hipsters in jazz clubs transitioning towards tie-dyed Deadheads in ballrooms or parks. And then that chase, the crashes at its climax, and the movie winds down, the tempo changing from cool jazz to smooth jazz.

As much as many a police procedural owes to this Yates film — he also did “Breaking Away” — and this formulaic Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner screenplay (based on Robert L. Fish’s novel “Mute Witness”), there’s a LOT of room for improvement. It’s a 90 minute thriller in a 114 minute package.

Some of the performances pop — McQueen, Vaughn and Oakland stand out. Many seem performed in the shadows. Robert Duvall gives away none of the “finest actor of his generation” glory that was to come, here playing a cab driver who leads Bullitt around town, checking out stops their “witness” made before turning himself in.

As a car nut and McQueen buff, I treat this film as a period piece any time I watch it these days. It’s a lovely, gritty San Francisco time capsule from the Golden Age of Muscle Cars. It’s not just the Mustang and the Dodge Charger with the 34 falling off hubcaps (apparently) that draw the eye, or the green VW Beetle they keep passing, the white GTO and white Austin Healey (my pick of the lot) they weave around or pass by repeatedly.

That’s always an economy that filmmakers whose movies become classics live to regret — using the same rented (or crew members) vehicles several times in shots over the course of the film. You don’t notice unless the film hits and people end up watching it over and over again over the years. Check out the driving scenes of Walter Hill’s “48 Hours.” You see the vintage Porsche that figures into the plot in random early traffic “filler” scenes. Stuff like that happens a lot.

Even “Bullit’s” iconic hill-hurtling race through the Streets of San Francisco, gold standard that it is, has been bested by any number of (mostly) European car chases in the ensuing decades — “French Connection” to “The Transporter” movies, “Ronin” to a good moment here and there in this Bond or Tom Cruise film or that “Fast/Furious” effort. “Bullitt” won the Oscar for editing, but largely because it was such a quantum leap ahead of filmed car chases that came before it.

“The French Connection” was the first film whose chase bettered it, and that was five years later and William Friedkin is a madman. So they had that going for them.

But yes, you could remake “Bullitt,” make it tighter although perhaps not more tense, jazz up the chase a bit or a lot. You’d have to set it somewhere more exotic and unusual, I dare say. New Orleans, post Katrina? Half-abandoned Detroit? Somewhere abroad that hasn’t been filmed to death?

But you’d still run up against that roadblock presented by the film’s star. McQueen was a master of acting with his eyes, doing less with more in a way that Eastwood and Cruise emulated but never could quite match, that Denzel has dabbled in more recently with some success. Lean and blond, he cut an angular figure in the film frame. And yes, he did many of his own stunts, something only Cruise can boast of today.

It’s hard to think of a modern star under 40 who embodies “cool” the way McQueen did then.

One of the many definitions of a “film classic” is a movie that cannot or should not ever be remade. Nobody ever has remade “Bullitt.” There was never a “limited series,” never a reboot.

Fifty years later and the closest anyone has ever come to that is simply stealing plot points here, an action beat there, and wishing that their leading man was a tenth as cool as Steve McQueen.

Rating: PG (violence)

Cast: Steven McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bissett, Simon Oakland, Vic Tayback, Norman Fell, Felice Orlandi, Georg Stanford Brown and Robert Duvall.

Credits: Directed by Peter Yates, scripted by Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner, based on a novel by Robert L. Fish.

What a dreadful bore “The Sleep Experiment” turns out to be.

A period piece thriller about a sleep deprivation study in Britain’s Porton Down government science park, it’s old fashioned and corny, bloody and — like life itself in more primitive times — “nasty, brutish and short.”

Writer-director John Farrelly takes a bit of lore about the secretive location and cooks up a tale of inmates recruited to go 30 days without sleep for a study tailor-made for disaster. Years later, a couple of cops (Barry John Kinsella and Anthony Murphy) talk the scientist in charge (Tom Kerrisk) to come in for “an interview” that will be, of course, an interrogation.

Tricky coppers. But the good doctor is a pyschologist and his “motives” were good. “Unethical” or not, pointless (my first thought) or not, these five “human guinea pigs” are locked up in a cell with books, food, a single toilet and a solitary sink.

These “volunteers,” who stood to have their sentences suspended, are an odd mix of “types” — the bullying Sean (Brian Moore), the “fish out of water” Eric (Steven Jess), the snide, canny and secretive Luke (Will Murphy), harder-to-pin down Patrick (Sam McGovern) and most dutiful diary keeper, the hulking elder of their ranks, Edward (Robert James Capel).

The idea is that we watch them meet, size each other up and crack up over time as they’re given orders via PA system — “Exercise begins now!” — manipulated in other ways, gassed with something that keeps them awake and monitored through a two-way mirror.

Farrelly fails to build suspense and tension in this ready-made pressure cooker situation. He turns the interrogation of the scientist in charge into something that the occasional threat and bit of shouting does nothing to animate the film. A couple of the characters are almost interesting, made somewhat less so by the perfunctory back stories given them.

The “explain it all” finale plays like something out of a 1940s B-movie.

And on and on it drones, with bloody meltdowns, inane crackups and flashes of savagery that never engage the viewer or come close to having a point.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence profanity

Cast: Brian Moore, Robert James Capel, Steven Jess, Sam McGovern, Will Murphy, Tom Kerrisk, Anthony Murphy and Barry John Kinsella

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Farrelly. A Red Water Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:21

This indie sci fi comic thriller is now streaming. Looks worth reviewing.

Yes, if it’s a holiday musical we expect Mr Funny or Die and his Canadian labradoodle to do their own singing, dammit.

Wait for it. Wait. Waiiiit.

Nov 11, in theaters, shortly thereafter on Apple TV+, not on that “Net” thingy everybody is bailing out of.

Nov. 18, the movie about the guy who figured Enzo’s high maintenance automotive penile implants could be bettered opens.

Mira Sorvino also stars. Love Grillo’s Chico Marx Italian!

Atsa mi SPORTS car! Mama Mia!

Wow, I did not see THAT coming. Or that. Or this other thing.

Shinzô Katayama’s “Missing” is a serial killer thriller that trips you up, bounces you around and repels and entertains you all along the way.

The assistant director of “Mother” doesn’t exactly play fair — shifting his narrative’s point of view, folding the story back in on its opening image, then cheating its way past it. But damn, it’s quite a ride.

A motherless middle school girl (Aoi Itô) has to come down to a shop where her father (Jirô Satô) has tried to skip out on a bill. He seems drunk, distracted, and we get the impression that this isn’t his first run-in with the Osaka PD. We also get the impression that whatever happened to his wife/her mother might be behind it.

Kaede gets Dad off with an “As you can see, my dad’s not all there” (in Japanese with English subtitles). But we’ve seen the film’s opening image. And thanks to the news, we know what some people do with hammers like the one her father is seen staggering around with, confused and upset, in that moment.

Kaede should be obsessing over that boy at school who is determined to be her middle school beau. But no, her father — reduced to day work jobs — is a mess. And then he disappears.

“Don’t look for me. I’m fine” was his last text message.

The cops want to know if Dad drinks, if he’s in debt? The wrecking yard where he supposedly showed up for day work has another man with his name on the clock, a young, boy-band skinny nail-biter. Is that a clue?

Why yes it is. But not one Kaede shares with the police. We heard Dad mention that he’d seen a guy who appeared on a sort of “Japan’s Most Wanted” TV show on the train, a skinny, brooding nail-biter.

With Mr. I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend in tow, and later with a concerned teacher, Kaede travels far and wide in suburban Osaka in search of her father, or the serial killer who might know what happened to him.

Katayama makes Kaede’s share of the story entertaining by showing us a brave, furious child out to find a father who doesn’t want to be found. If something happened to him, so be it. She’ll find this “No Name” killer, whom the cops have named (Hiroya Shimizu).

When she stumbles into him in an abandoned building, what does he do? Kill her, because, you know, that’s what serial killers do? No. He flees.

We get it. She’s a teenage girl. Terrifying.

I like the way the story sort of hands off responsibility for Kaede from one character to another. And then, just as we’re settling in for a quest, Katayama changes points of view. We start following Dad and see what he’s been up to and how all this ties together.

The violence in this second half of the narrative is more explicit, the reasons for it deeply rooted in Japanese culture and altogether grimmer. And every time we think we have a handle on who’s doing what to whom, and how that works in this murderous puzzle, another wrinkle is added.

It can be a little confusing as we shift back to “three months ago” and then “13 months ago,” tying everything together, climaxing with a masterfully-conceived game of real-time ping pong that has a whiff of cat and mouse about it.

Katayama — he also wrote and directed “Siblings of the Cape” — announces himself as a Japanese thriller director to watch with this. “Missing” leaves nothing out, no mysterious stone unturned, no surprise twist un-attempted and little to chance.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Jirô Satô, Aoi Itô and Hiroya Shimizu

Credits: Directed by Shinzô Katayama, scripted by Shinzô Katayama, Kazuhisa Kotera and Ryô Takada. A DarkStar release.

Running time: 2:03

Love this idea for a sequel. Love Amy Adams, Idina Menzel, James Marsden and Patrick Dempsey…and they added Maya Rudolph.

Loved “Enchanted.” Let’s how “Happily Ever After” goes off the rails.

Nov. 18.