Movie Nation

The question you have to ask when making a reboot is how much of the earlier incarnations of the story you’re setting out to tell anew do you include in your new “origin story?”

In “Hellraiser,” the eighth film spun out of the horrific works of Clive Barker, they decided “None at all.” Two credited screenwriters and director David Bruckner (“The Night House”) just throw a new victim into Pinhead’s sights, give us a new spacesuit/swimsuit-edition Pinhead (Jamie Clayton) and leave out explanations of this ancient and murderous puzzle.

Was the word “cenobites” ever used? Not that I caught it. I’ve seen several of the earlier “Hellraisers,” but it’s been a minute as this franchise drifted off the big screen and into direct-to-video and streaming, where this new one resides (Welcome to Hell, Hulu!). I kept wondering why self-absorbed junky Riley (Odessa A’Zion, not bad) wasn’t more than shocked at all the supernatural mayhem erupting around her when she and her latest squeeze (Drew Starkey) burgle a warehouse and all they find is this baroque Rubik’s Cube looking thing.

You’d think the underneath that unruly Janet Joplin mop-top, our heroine who gets lots of other people killed in excruciating ways might have “questions.”

Oh. Right. “Junkie.”

The basics of the franchise remain the same. You get the ever-shape-shifting oblong, hexagonal or whatnot metallic puzzle, it stabs you in your hand and you’re doomed. Pinhead or her minions come to you in a dark and gloomy corridor and tell the stabbed, “If not you, bring us another.”

Riley gets her hands on a book, but its explanations are not cut and dried, not enough to help her, her lover, her brother (Brandon Flynn), her brother’s lover (Adam Faison) escape their doom.

The ones with answers might be the evil owner of the box (Goran Visnjic), or at least his amoral lawyer (Hiam Abbass). But cracking into Voight’s metal latticework-caged mansion only brings bloody consequences to Riley and anybody unlucky enough to try and help her.

“Your suffering has barely begun!”

These pictures have always been about the pitiless, unemotional murdering machine with pins in its face, their sinister tone and the increasingly gruesome means of death — skin flayed, hooks and knives and pins and the like. Bruckner delivers in that regard.

But at this point, the only real novelty is making Pinhead a (voice-altered) female and limiting the credit passed on to Barker. There’s not enough that’s new to merit raising this corner of hell all over again.

Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity.

Cast: Odessa A’Zion, Jamie Clayton, Brandon Flynn, Adam Faison, Drew Starkey, Hiam Abbass and Goran Visnjic.

Credits: Directed by David Bruckner, scripted by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, based on the novel by Clive Barker. A 20th Century release on Hulu.

Running time: 2:01

It isn’t the few jolts, the horror shocks that get you in “Smile.” It’s the stress. Here’s a thriller that creates unease and does a decent job of sustaining it even as it takes its sweet time in reaching the obvious resolution.

And it’s not the gruesome, self-injuring, self-skinning, blood-letting effects that make the sale. It’s the cheapest horror effect ever, every “victim” about to pass on her or his victimhood breaking into a demonic, Nicholson in “The Shining” or Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange” grin.

Sosie Bacon of “Mare of Easttown” stars as Dr. Rose Cotter, a shrink at the Emergency Psychiatric Unit at Newark’s Mount Pleasant hospital. Emergency cases are sent her way to determine if they’re a danger to themselves or others. She may be petite, but she never hesitates to sit down, alone, in a room with people experiencing crises and exhibiting the most deranged behavior.

We hear her refer to one frequent patient as “harmless,” and we worry that she’s read him wrong, if she’s experienced enough to make that call and if she’s put herself or the staff in jeopardy in the process.

But it’s babbling, shrieking Laura (Caitlyn Stasey) who really rattles Dr. Rose and us.

When Laura says “I’m seeing things no one else can see but me,” she shouts it. When Laura declares “It’s LOOKS like people, but it’s NOT a person!” we buy it. And when she warns “It causes s–t to happen around me,” we wish Dr. Rose could appreciate the threat, not that she’d be any more able to reason her way out of it than we would, in that office with her or sitting in a seat in the safety of a cinema.

Laura proceeds to kill herself in the most gruesome fashion imaginable right in front of the stupefied psychotherapist she just met.

As you gathered from the number one movie in America’s TV commercials and trailers, when you see that demonic smile, you’re a goner. It’s a madness passing from one person to the next. “Smile” is about Rose’s search for medical, mental or supernatural reasons for this to be happening, and a way to escape the fate that’s seemingly been given her.

Writer-director Parker Finn, turning a short film into his feature filmmaking debut, gives us a thriller of austere, quiet settings, extreme closeups and pin-your-ears-back scares. And Bacon ably leads us through a health care professional’s traumatized and increasingly desperate efforts to explain the “symptoms” of what happened to Laura which are now happening to her in a way that doesn’t make her seem crazy, too.

As she’s seeing things — Laura’s smile, and others wearing that same smile — things that she’s sure are “corporeal” and not just in her head, Rose panics. As reality bends and her fiance (Jessie T. Usher), her cop ex-lover (Kyle Gallner), her irritably self-absorbed sister (Gillian Zinser) and her own psychotherapist (Robin Weigert) don’t seem to “get it,” we invest in her quest and try to puzzle out an escape clause with her.

The chilly minimalism of “Smile” limits that viewer investment, keeping events on the screen at a sort of clinical arm’s length. The casting is more”gets the job done” solid than compelling, affecting or empathy building. While Finn takes care to give his players close-ups that they dress up with gestures, tics, looks and “bits of business,” I can’t say any of the deaths here moved me.

But there’s no denying that this works as a thriller, that “Smile” is a well-crafted fright delivery system even as it slows to a crawl and stumbles into an ending we’ve seen coming for the past hour.

Rating: R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language.

Cast: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Caitlyn Stasey, Robin Weigert and Kal Penn.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Parker Finn. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:55

This November release takes us back to the early days of the Korean War, when the propeller driven WWII vintage F4U Corsair fight bomber was still the Navy’s go to weapon for close ground support, and even air superiority.

Integrating the military was another mission of the US military, and that’s the story of this Nov. Release.

“God’s Creatures” is a quietly gripping Irish coastal drama kept afloat by a powerful, understated performance by Emily Watson, who lets us into the unseen agony of a mother’s questions unasked.

Co-directors Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer bathe their film in the overcast gloom of a fishing town where men sometimes drown, almost as a local tradition.

“It’s bad luck to know” how to swim, is how matriarch Aileen O’Hara (Watson) describes it.

“If they can’t swim, they won’t jump in and help anybody else,” is daughter Erin’s (Toni O’Rourke) more cynical view.

Shane Cowley’s script brings a little sunshine into this world, where oystermen regularly misjudge the tide in their heavy waders and get pulled down in a flash when the water laps high enough. With every death, the whole village shuts down and everyone falls into mourning.

But Aileen’s prodigal son Brian (Paul Mescal of “The Lost Daughter”) returns, after years out of contact far off in Australia. Aileen’s first unasked question is why he’s come back, what went wrong Down Under. Her daughter might be blunt enough to wonder more than that. His first love, the now-married Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), is almost too shattered to let herself care.

But Mum just brings him in, watches him comfort her near-catatonic father and reach an uneasy truce with his leery Dad (Declan Conlon) and tries to help. He wants to work old Paddy’s long-idle oyster beds? Let her swipe a few bags of seed oysters from Guiney’s Atlantic Sea Foods. He might be encouraging old feelings in unhappily-married Sarah. Mum’ll turn a blind eye.

Then something happens, something serious, made all the worse by the fact that it happens in a tiny town where everyone knows everyone else. And Aileen finds herself with one other question not to ask.

The twice-Oscar-nominated Watson, most recently lauded for her work on TV’s “Chernobyl,” creates an easy, motherly rapport with Mescal and O’Rourke. Aileen may be a fair-minded supervisor at the sea food processing plant, but these two are too old to listen to any advice she has for the wandering son or new single mom.

There’s even a hint of a lifetime of abuse from her almost speechless aged father (Lalor Roddy). Aileen bears it, and Brian’s shortcuts in life and work, without much protest.

The script sets us up for tests and heartbreaks, showing us the ritualistic grief that comes with a drowning early in the film, with Franciosi giving us a taste of Sarah’s bitterness and vulnerability — she also sings at funerals — and Watson serving up stoicism barely betrayed by weary, her edge-of-tears eyes.

Davis and Holmer, veterans of assorted jobs behind the camera, soak up the atmosphere of County Donegal, painting their portrait of this world in careful, considered strokes — the green-walled pub where Guinness and G&Ts are poured, songs are sung and community is made and shattered, the blessing of the skiffs of the fishing “fleet,” the grueling and dangerous nature of what looks like simple work, harvesting oysters between changes of the tide.

Its modest ambitions notwithstanding, in “God’s Creatures” they’ve created something like the perfect film for autumn, a beautiful portrait of intimacy and warmth and family tinged with a chill that can only lead to tragedy.

Rating: R, violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Emily Watson, Paul Mescal, Aisling Franciosi, Declan Conlon and Toni O’Rourke

Credits: Directed by Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, scripted by Shane Cowley. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:41

I think my favorite moment in the anti-cell-phone Estonian horror comedy “Kratt” comes when a priest is confronted by a demonically possessed grandmother, and his only prayer is whipping out his phone.

What priest wouldn’t keep an instant crucifix app loaded and ready for deployment at all times?

“Kratt” is a dark, violent not-exactly-kiddie comedy about city children (Nora Merivoo, Harri Merivo), bored when deprived of their cells while staying with their ancient granny (Mari Lill) on her tumbledown farm and too lazy to do their chores. So they summon an ancient mythic creature created out of whatever junk you have lying around the yard — tools, implements, car parts.

A Kratt is depicted here as a demonic helpmate conjured to life in a blood ceremony by the light of the moon. “Give me WORK,” it barks, when it comes to life. And you’d better. When it runs out of work, it’ll turn on you. The kids and seemingly the adults, save for the violent, vengeful and grievance-filled priest, don’t have a clue what to do about this.

Hilariously, if the damned hypocritical grownups had let them keep their phones, the kids could have gotten out of this in a snap. There’s even a youtube tutorial set up to get you out of just this sort of jam.

That’s going to be the only time I use “hilariously” in the review, alas. This Rasmus Merivoo romp-that–never-was is a classic 75-80 minute movie swallowed by a 112 minute long boa constrictor. It takes over an hour just to get the kids the means to create the Kratt, and that’s unforgivably late.

First we have to see the shallow parents — Mari-Liis Lill (Daughter of Mari?) and Marek Temmets — who know they need to keep their kids away from cell phones, but can’t follow their own advice. They drop them off with Granny so that they can go off on an Estonian “AIO Xyacka” (ayahuasca) retreat — God knows what that’ll be like.

Smart aleck daughter Mia has her own Youtube channel. She’s an influencer…at 13. Kevin, a few years younger, is just along for the ride.

The parish governor (Ivo Uukkivi) is caught between a local landowner hellbent on harvesting all the trees in their “sacred forest” and the green activists led by hulking Lembit (Paul Purga) hellbent on stopping him.

Oh, and the wild-haired dwarf (Alo Kurvits, way-over-the-top) running a snack booth on the edge of town? He might be Satan. The kids figure that out when they visit his shop.

“May I interest you in some fentanyl,” he purrs, in Estonian with English subtitles?

“We’d like to buy a SOUL.”

Writer-director Merivoo has lots of amusing sidebars that he throws into this. The kids, when they finally seek help via cell phone, deal with “Vivi,” the Eastern European version of Siri or Alexa. Vivi, how do you trick a Kratt? Vivi is actually child labor online operators working in the back of their Russian mom’s meth lab.

The governor goes a bit mad from the pressures on his chances of being reelected. There are flashbacks to the “little count” who brought the Devil there in the 19th century, and we see the priest beating Wee Satan over all the evils in the world — war, hunger, “promiscuity, gay propaganda, rock’n roll, contemporary art.”

The problem right from the start is that Merivoo can’t see the Sacred Forest for the trees. The flashback, the whole sacred forest thing, anything to do with the governor is only peripherally connected to the Kratt that the kids build which then falls on grandma, who is trying to destroy it. That’s how she becomes possessed.

“Give me WORK!”

Once it finally got going, I laughed at this. And I shook my head at it every time the filmmaker in charge lost the thread and wandered off, which that was far too often to let “Kratt” catch a break and unleash the crazy.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Mari Lill, Nora Merivoo, Harri Merivoo, Ivo Uukkivi, Mari-Liis Lill, Marek Temmets and Paul Purga.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rasmus Merivoo. A Red Water release.

Running time: 1:52

Action film fans will forgive a lot if we get enough from “the cool parts” of a thriller. Luc Besson built an entire career out of that.

“Subway” (1985) launched the future director of “The Professional,” “The Fifth Element,” “Nikita,” “Lucy” and “Anna” into the international action spotlight, a thriller with a punchy opening, a punch-drunk finale and a lot of tedium in between. But “the cool parts” are what you come for — a chase or two, the sight of a pre-stardom Jean Reno as a homeless hustler and drummer nicknamed “Sticks,” the vivid depiction of a subterranean underworld beneath Paris.

Many of Besson’s trademarks — he later wrote (or came up with the stories) and produced “The Transporter” and “Taken” movies — are present in this, his second feature. We see rude French folk, a seedy criminal world policed by brusque, hapless and goofily inept cops, Jean Reno and over-coifed and over-dressed antihero criminals and breathless bits of action set to an electronic funk score by frequent collaborator Eric Serra.

The storytelling can feel haphazard, which may explain why the guy who ventured into a Joan of Arc period piece (“The Messenger”), an utterly mesmerizing competitive free-diving drama (“The Big Blue”) and science fiction has basically settled into repeated versions of “Nikita” starring fetching young actresses in his dotage. Well, that and the creepier side of his personality explain his fixation on young to very young starlets.

The then-unknown Lambert plays Fred, a handsome hustler/safe-cracker who repays the invitation a beautiful woman (Isabelle Adjani) gives him to a posh party by blowing her safe and stealing her “papers.”

When we meet the hair-gelled Fred, he’s fumbling through cassettes in a hurtling stolen Peugeot, trying to find proper tunes to be chased with. He’s in a tux, and four armed goons in tuxes in a big ’80s Mercedes are ramming the tiny Peugeot from behind as he makes his getaway.

He flees into the subway and stumbles into a vast underworld beneath the tracks, escalator motors, plumbing and wiring. He may meet the Skater (Jean-Hugues Anglade), a notorious pickpocket from that pre-rollerblade era, who takes him in and shows him around. But Fred isn’t very good at this extortion thing.

Helene (Adjani), his “mark,” calls his bluff and lowballs him. That’s OK. He’ll hang on to the papers, which include a childhood photo of the woman he decides “I am in love” with.

“You want me,” she asks, in French with English subtitles? “Oui.” “Well, you won’t GET me!”

The fact that a crew of goons chased him should scare Fred off. Helene is married to the mob.

Michel Galabru leads the subway police force, fighting a losing battle against the thieves and squatters who infest the system. He has little faith in his uniformed force, even less in the detectives he’s contemptuously nicknamed “Batman and Robin.”

Fred? He’s just a guy who can’t sing who’s decided to “get a band” together. Reno, as “Sticks,” and assorted other subway dwellers flesh it out as the movie meanders off course through its middle acts.

The plot skips over some things and flat out stumbles into others. The cops who try to help Helene have been hunting this damned “Skater” for almost a year. She marches downstairs and stumbles right into him.

The fake-blind “florist” (Richard Bohringer) figures into the hunt for the underground crooks and the missing “papers.” There’s also a hint of a heist, which Fred may jump into if he gets bored getting the band together.

But whatever failings the story and pacing may have, this much was obvious from the start. Besson has a way with action beats, an eye for striking compositions and exotic — if often seamy locales — and a nose for talent. He went on to write and produce the “District B13” and a lot of the action films that define our times.

Back in 1985, he was all about the hair, making his muse Reno a star and bringing French action films up to date. He did.

These days we can watch “Subway” to marvel over the music, the lighting and the staggering amount of hair product consumed on one film shoot. But we stay for “the cool parts,” which he promises with this film’s opening chase, a promise he only keeps over the course of the decades of films that he was able to make thanks to this quirky, uneven star-making vehicle.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Christopher Lambert, Isabelle Adjani, Richard Bohringer, Michel Galabru, Jean-Hugues Anglade and Jean Reno.

Credits: Directed by Luc Besson, scripted by Pierre Jolivet, Alain Le Henry, Marc Perrioer, Sophie Schmit and Luc Besson. A Gaumont release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers

Running time: 1:42

But not insipid J-pop ballads. Apparently.

This looks campy enough to be fun. Oct. 21.

Kids movies have to pass what I call “The Jerry Orbach Test.”

Back when the animated “Beauty and the Beast” came out, I interviewed Orbach and he told me what persuaded him to take on the role of Lumiere. He and his wife went to a revival showing of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

He was to voice Lumiere in “Beast” before “The Little Mermaid” came out and revived Disney’s animated brand. And Orbach, a stage song and dance man turned tough guy character actor wasn’t sure he wanted to risk his new brand singing in a cartoon.

He talked about the kid-crowded theater and the chaos that entailed for watching a then 50 year old animated classic. “And then, the movie started and it was dead quiet. They were rapt in awe. I thought, ‘Anything that gets kids to pay that close attention is worth doing. It’s going to last.”

Ever since, I’ve watched to see how much children act out and seem distracted by kids films. The good ones sit them down and shut them up, except when it’s time to laugh.

“Lyle” looks jaunty and juvenile. I’m totally down for that. It opens this coming weekend.

Well shoot. I was all set to catch a Sunday matinee of “Smile,” as Hurricane Ian washed away my Wed. preview of it last week. I get to my closest AMC, an older cinema (AMC Classic). And they’re closed. The power is on and every store around them is open.

I wonder if this is one of those theaters AMC will sneakily bail on its lease and close. This is the way movie theaters disappeared @2000-2001 by the hundreds. Was the hurricane a mere coincidence, convenient moment to pull the plug?

We’ll see. Meanwhile, 20th Century’s Disney-owned reboot of “Hellraiser” beckons. I’m on…pins and needles over this one. Streams later this week.

“Red River Road” is a dramatically-flat paranoid thriller about an isolated family unsure about the reality of the pandemic that put them there.

Sources of paranoia? Start with an enforced lack of information, a “box” that brings them food, a ban on cell phones and Internet usage, which is blamed for the contagion, and an assault on memory that could be described as “gaslighting” in a more sinister light.

The Cape Cod filmmaking family of writer-director and star Paul Schuyler made this, a reasonably polished (the odd “off mike” moment) but dully-scripted affair that taps into conspiracy theories that date back decades. No, not “contrails” and “vaccines” and the like, but that ’80s “The Government is planning to ENSLAVE us with barcodes” mania. “They’ve even got them on the HIGHWAY signs!”

And “chips,” or course. No meal for the paranoid in America is complete without implanted “chips.”

Stephen and Anna (Paul and Jade Schuyler) and their sons Wyatt and Shawn (Quinn Schuyler and Shaw Schuyler) fled Boston for “the summer house” some while back to escape a plague.

“The less people the better,” Stephen declares. “It’s safer here.”

Anna laments that they have “no life to go back to…’Someday’ has no meaning for me” any more.

Whatever this contagion is, it bends people’s perception of reality. Just like social media? And it’s killed people they knew. Just like…

But as we yawn through the banalities of their daily existence, we see how this isolation works, and works on them.

They get a tense, scheduled phone call which requires that they answer it with ID numbers and order necessities in the most curt fashion possible. A green barcoded plastic bin arrives when they’re sleeping with old movies (“The Ninth Configuration,” the John Carpenter version of “The Thing”) and food.

There are finite limits to their world — cell phones, etc., banned, sharply-defined borders to how far beyond the edge of their yard they can go. And as they follow the rules, their memories start to work on on. Some of them start to wonder what is real, and what all this obedience is gaining them.

The acting is drab, save for the inevitable third act meltdown when the picture pokes around for a resolution. The shot selection, overly-urgent score and editing hypes this bland affair into something it decidedly is not — exciting.

Whatever the messaging, it’s just not very interesting or compelling. “Red River Road” is more a movie that putters along, not really going anywhere, not taking any time to create suspense until very late in the game, not conjuring up a mystery most would care to solve before the characters do.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Paul Schuyler, Jade Schuyler, Quinn Schuyler, Shaw Schuyler and Art Devine.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Schuyler. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:31