Movie Nation

What a sad and sappy seize-the-day satire “The Loneliest Boy in the World” turns out to be.

A candy-colored zombie comedy set in the bubble-gummy ’80s, it’s about a guy who grew up so sheltered he can’t connect to the real world. Friendless, he’s faced with the choice of living on in his late mother’s Bubblicious pink house, or being moved to an institution if he can’t make friends.

So he starts digging up fresh corpses from the local cemetery that can pose (literally) as “friends.” And guess what? They become the living dead!

Oliver, played as a lost, optimistic soul by Max Harwood (“Everybody’s Talking about Jamie”)) is being monitored by two shrinks — a cynic (Evan Ross of “The United States vs. Billie Holiday”) and his more sympathetic colleague (Ashley Benson of “Spring Break” ). They know his mother (Carole Anne Watts) died in a bizarre accident, and they’re sure she didn’t prepare him for living in this world.

If they knew he watched “Alf” religiously, showing up at her grave to relate each week’s plot to her, that wouldn’t help.

“Hah! WILLIE!”

The fact that he’s mercilessly bullied by the local jocks also seems like a barrier to independent living.

But while Oliver struggles to relate to cute stranger Chloe (Tallulah Haddon), the comical gravediggers tip him that there are fresh bodies aplenty, thanks to a nasty plane crash we’ve witnessed. Next thing we know, Oliver’s filled his house with “friends” who might be “the perfect family,” “just like on TV.”

Ben Miller and Susan Wokoma were older adult parental victims, obnoxious little English girl (Zenobia Williams) could be his sister. There’s even a Frankenweiner, “Ninja.” And Mitch (Hero Fiennes Tiffin, last seen in “The Woman King”)? He could be his “wingman” with Chloe.

If only they’d stop be corpses and start acting like a family! So they do.

The sight gags show off some pretty creative makeup, once we get past the scalding this corpse or posing that one bits. Living dead dining/drinking sight-gags, lost limbs and progressive decomposition can keep a family from being all it can be.

But as he continues to cope with bullies, shrinks and attempts at dating Chloe, they humanize and socialize the awkward lad living with the living dead, motoring around town in his late mom’s pretty-in-pink Chevy Blazer.

“I might be dead, but I’m not stupid” is the extent of the wit, here. As for profound life advice? Maybe Oliver needs to get on with his life, stop reciting “Alf” episodes to his mother’s pink tombstone.

“I can’t miss that show!”

“Sure you can.”

There simply isn’t enough to this beyond the ’80s nostalgia, which is as played out as zombies as a movie genre. We’ve had zombie invasions, zombie TV series, zombie war films, zombie romances (“Warm Bodies”) and zombie period pieces (“Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.” From the first, there’s always been some social commentary and satiric intent in the best of these films.

Not in “The Loneliest Boy in the World.” A charming-enough mostly-British cast riffing on ’80s TV (“Alf” was HUGE in Europe.) “families” adds nothing to the genre and hardly seems worth the effort to get everyone so beautifully made up.

Rating: R for language and violent content.

Cast: Max Harwood, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Ashley Benson, Tallulah Haddon, Carole Anne Watts, Evan Ross, Ben Miller and Susan Wokoma.

Credits: Directed by Martin Owen, scripted by Piers Ashworth. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:30

March 23, that’s a wrap on the one guy you don’t want to mess with.

Yeah, sleeplessness makes you crazy.

Not getting much else from the trailer for a Nov. 1 indie release.

One of the bloodiest “island hopping” fights across the Pacific is recreated in miniature with Casper van Dien, Louis Mandylor and Jeff Fahey.

A fictional account set during the struggle for the island, “Battle of Saipan opens Nov. 24.

Not how I pictured Saipan, but every island recaptured looked like Iwo Jima by the time fighting was done.

I’m not being flippant when I refer to the gritty, soulful urban drama “Signs of Love” as very much “a family affair.” It’s about drugs, dealing and addiction and how that weighs on one neighborhood and one family, and the violence attached to that on the mean streets of Fishtown, Philadelphia.

And it stars two of Sean Penn and Robin Wright’s children, and Rosanna Arquette and her look-alike daughter. So it’s a drama with “bloodlines.” But not all Hollywood nepotism is bad. This is pretty good, and the acting children famous actors are all good in it.

Hopper Penn has just the right rawboned seller/user look for Frankie, our antiheroic hero. When we meet him, the post-high-school punk’s watching the skateboarders and BMX riders practicing their moves on the curbs and culverts under an overpass. A kid leaves his bike for a second, and Frankie’s on it in a flash.

But he’s not just stealing for money or for his own use. He drops in on his teen nephew (Cree Kawa), pretends he doesn’t realize it’s Sean’s birthday, and then gifts him with the new ride.

So I guess that makes it all right.

Sean’s mom, Patty (Dylan Penn) has the self-involved air of an addict She cares about her child, but “taking an interest” seems a stretch.

Frankie deals, buys food for the house, gripes at his sister and once a week, meets his dad (Waas Stevens, outstanding) at their favorite local diner. Dad used to have a thing with a waitress (Roseanna Arquette). Now, he’s a bit too happy to see his boy.

“Are you high?” the kid wants to know. But commenting in his father’s rough appearance is a “You don’t want to go there” line of attack.

“You’re gonna look just like me at this age,” the old man chortles.

Frankie might want to “think about my future,” but his father pops that bubble.

“What? As a pusher? You ruin people’s lives for a living, at $10 bucks a pop!”

But in between sales and pitching in to strong-arm other dealers out of his boss’s territory, Frankie sees a vision. She has heart-stopping smile, freckled, tattooed, slinky and sexy, with a “Desperately Seeking Susan” look about her. He’s just got to make a move.

But Jane (Zoë Bleu Sidel, Arquette’s daughter) is deaf and mostly mute. She reads lips, which is something deaf characters in movies do for screenwriterly convenience. But mainly she communicates via text.

Frankie is smitten, and the beaming Jane is dazzled by his attention. Could this be “Signs of Love?”

Writer-director Clarence Fuller gives us plenty of colorful but utterly realistic characters in his feature debut.

Fuller and his players make this world feel lived-in, down-and-outers scraping by on hustles and government assistance. Frankie is hard-pressed to keep Sean out of this life, considering his environment, and taking into account his sister’s attitude.

“Relax, it’s only oxy,” she tells him when he finds pills the kid’s been selling.

We notice how quick Frankie is to play the victim card and the blame game. He holds his sister and his father responsible for his lot in life.

“Did your dad ever try to sell you for crack?” he spits at Jane, during one testy moment.

Fuller gives his story conventional pitfalls — Jane is well off and headed for college out of state, Frankie’s unsavory work (D’Jour Jones plays a menacing colleague) gets in the way – and a very familiar story arc. Some of the bigger scenes don’t pay off well because the script gives short shrift to “consequences,” except in the most melodramatic moments. And the finale is kind of an eye roller.

But this cast is top drawer, with Hopper Penn taking his first big lead and running with it, his sister furthering her character-turn trip towards a career and Sidel showing promise beyond the “socialite” label prominently-applied to her profile on the Internet Movie Database.

And Fuller shows us enough promise that we can see this movie working, even without the benefit of the scion of Hollywood bluebloods decorating its cast.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Hopper Penn, Zoë Bleu Sidel, Waas Stevens, Dylan Penn, Da’Jour Jones, Cree Kawa and Rosanna Arquette.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Clarence Fuller. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:38

There’s a grandeur to the finest moments in David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Ends,” a film meant to wrap up the saga that made Jamie Lee Curtis famous.

Green, an indie film mainstay before “Pineapple Express” made him famous, finishes up his “Halloween” trilogy by having Curtis recreate iconic shots and moments from John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978).

He folds in flashback montages that remind us of all Laurie Strode (Curtis) and her family have endured from the monstrous Michael Myers. And he exits with the serenely spooky song that Carpenter put on a car radio back in 1978, the unironically ironic “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

Perfect.

But the direction Green and a tag team of screenwriters take the characters and the story in this finale is hard to defend, harder to swallow. So, “pure evil” is contagious, “an infection?” Wait, it’s also learned behavior, created by environment, bad parenting and cruel peer pressure?

Even by Hollywood’s twisted “cinematic psychology” standards, that’s messed up.

The present day finds Laurie writing her memoir about her life of “looking in the shadows for the boogeyman.” Her daughter (Judy Greer) died on a previous Halloween. Granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) is now a nurse, looking for career advancement, trying to shrug off a stalky law enforcement officer she used to date.

But there’s a new guy on her radar. Corey (Rohan Campbell of TV’s “Hardy Boys” reboot) is a nerdy, shy 20something who is henpecked at home, struggling to make college money working at the auto repair shop with a handy scrapyard and car crusher on site.

We meet him as he’s called in to babysit a rich family’s brat. And it’s when that night goes horrifically, accidentally wrong that Corey gets on Laurie’s radar. She instinctively throws this traumatized young fellow in the path of her similarly traumatized and stigmatized granddaughter.

“I know what it’s like to have everybody looking at you like they think they know you,” Allyson says.

But Corey has “issues.” He’s being bullied by kids still in high school. And then there’s the homeless guy watching him, and that culvert running into the bowels of tiny, traumatized Haddonfield, Illinois. Wonder who lives in there?

Green and his college pal, the comic actor and writer Danny McBride, ensure that the jokes in this “Halloween” land. A child cracking that he’s not afraid of Michael Myers “because he always goes after the BABYsitter, not the kid” is always going to be funny.

But as the narrative wanders off the straight and narrow, we lose track of Laurie for stretches. Relationships seem forced, conflicts feel contrived and logic flies out the window.

And while one can appreciate the effort to deconstruct “how monsters are made,” the rationale is as leaky as your average Michael Myers stabbing victim.

Creative killings aside, when you leave Laurie out and then have to back-engineer ways to shoehorn her back into the story, when you water down the basic rivalry — Laurie vs. Michael — when you decide that victims are making the leap from near-death trauma to “burn it all down” mass murderers, you’ve lost me.

Pacing is another problem, as this film feels “saga” length and feels much longer than it is.

Give Green props for all that he got right, bringing Curtis back and making her the focus, for starters. But all involved seem to have painted themselves into a narrative corner that they weren’t able to write their way out of.

If Green wanted to remind us how all three of his “Halloween” films have a whiff of “there’s something off” about them, at least succeeded in that. As he’s filming he new “Exorcist” reboot, and will probably never get back to making the fascinating indie fare like “All the Real Girls,” “Joe” and “Prince Avalanche,” I guess that makes David Gordon Green one more victim of Michael Myers.

Rating: R for bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references.

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Rohan Campbell, Andi Matichak, Keraun Harris, Kyle Richards and Will Patton.

Credits: Directed by David Gordon Green, scripted by Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, Danny McBride and David Gordon Green. based on characters from the John Carpenter/Debra Hill film. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:51

A little Aviation Gin/Funny or Die soaked spin on Mister Scrooge’s Big Night.

Just in time for the holidays, early Nov. from Apple.

This looks and sounds wonderful.

Oct 28, it comes to Apple TV+.

Unfortunate timing brings the latest of a string of “Zoom” films set during the COVID lockdown, “The Same Storm,” to theaters and home streaming after the funniest outing in the genre, “7 Days,” long after the solid drama “Together” and the higher profile projects filmed in this split-screen/isolated style like “Locked Down.”

But the latest from writer-director Peter Hedges, who gave us “Pieces of April,” “Dan in Real Life” and “Ben is Back,” finds its first laughs quickly, and achieves its first tears within a scene or two. There’s tragedy to come, and irritation, loneliness and loss.

The heightened navel-gazing that the pandemic and its life-and-society-put-on-pause produced gave everyone doses of pain, worry, melodrama and political outrage. And that’s all here in this 24+ character collage, which takes its title from a quote from Scottish writer, broadcaster and wit Damien Barr.

“We are not all in the same boat. We are in the same storm.”

The relay-race narrative links characters together, one connection at a time. There’s the woman
(Noma Dumezweni) who struggles through a Zoom yoga class, only to get a call from a nurse (Raúl Castillo), his face bruised by the DIY PPE goggles, who has to pass on the news that her husband had to be intubated.

He becomes a comforter, struggling with the added responsibilities that an overloaded (New York) system lays on him. So when a fishnet-stockinged online sex worker (Mary-Louise Parker) greets a “Man from Queens,” it’s no surprise that it’s him, Nurse Joey.

And when they’ve worked through his “Wait, how old are you?” issues and her “granny” and “early bird special” insults, he shares that iPads have become “Goodbye pads” for so many. Roxy lets down her brusque front for a moment of tribute.

And then she moves on to a chat with her isolated mother (the great Elaine May). Talk about a conversation worth listening in on.

Mom: “Get a job?”

Yes.

“Is it essential?”

I like to think so.

They bicker with the brittle bite of co-dependency. Daughter Roxy uses a euphemism to describe her work as a “counselor.” Not that anything impresses her kvetching grump of a mother.

“Do I stay on this call, or do I hang up and go to bed?”

On and on the connections unfold, this health-care worker sending her son to hunt down a missing grandfather, teen lovers negotiating “Send me a photo” and we know what kind of photo, older paramours dancing on camera, serenading each other by ukulele.

Sandra Oh plays a mother checking in on her children, one of whom is having sex and the other is “off his meds” (Jin Ha, a stand-out in this star-spangled cast).

Ron Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt play comically-frazzled careerist parents throwing themselves at this “school at home” environment, and drowning as they do. Of course the poor teacher (Alison Pill) bears the brunt of their meltdown.

But that’s nothing compared to what the teacher’s gay journalist brother (Corey Michael Smith) endures from their MAGA/anti-masking family (Joshua Leonard and John Gallagher Jr.) and their cancer-stricken mother (Judith Light).

A cop father (K.Todd Freeman) frets over his “Black Lives Matter” protester daughter (Moses Ingram). Can an online memorial service be in the cards? Some folks figure this is a good time to double-down on AA meetings, thanks to the horrific stress of the situation.

By design and by definition, movies like this are “uneven.” Some sequences are more relatable, more entertaining or more moving than others. All of the films of this COVID-generated genre have their limitations. But Hedges, seen in the film’s Zoom prologue greeting the actors, gauging everybody’s technical savvy to see who’s up for tracking shots and trickier framing and who is Comedy Legend Elaine May and doesn’t need to know that, ensures that this is one of the most emotional (his “brand”) and also the best-crafted.

Of all the Zoomed pandemic movies, big budget and small, the brilliant storyboarding, concise scripting, motivated and moving performances (direction) and editing of “The Same Storm” make this the one they ought to teach in film schools. And of all the lockdown films, this is the one that brings back the fullest range of experiences, emotions, fears, fury and hope of 2020.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Sandra Oh, Mary-Louise Parker, K. Todd Freeman, Ron Livingston, Moses Ingram, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Jin Ha, Judith Light, Rosemarie DeWitt, Joshua Leonard, Corey Michael Smith,
Noma Dumezweni, John Gallagher Jr., Camila Perez, Alison Pill and Elaine May.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Peter Hedges. A Juno release.

Running time: 1:39

Jacki Weaver and Idina Menzel co star in this Oct. 21 release about a veteran con artist who aims higher and the FBI is all over it.