Movie Nation

The box office is settling back into its time-proven pre-pandemic pattern of “If it’s horror, it opens at $18-20 million” with “Smile,” a nicely-hyped thriller built on the infectious “Smile” of its victims/perpetrators.

After a slow Thursday, a decent Friday is pushing this one to a $22 million opening weekend, according to Deadline.com.

That’s enough to win most weekends these days, with last weekend’s “Don’t Worry, Darling” slumping over 60% to $7.5 million on its second weekend out. It will have cleared $33 all-in, by midnight Sunday. Not a bomb, but not likely to have legs or clear $50 million when all is said and done.

“The Woman King,” on the other hand, may stick around longer as it adds another $6.2 million and will clear the $50 million mark by next week.

Billy Eichner’s first big screen kiss, “Bros,” is a wide-release bust. A $4.75 million opening for a heavily-hyped, generally funny but somewhat unromantic rom-com isn’t great. Back to “Billy on the Street” it is.

An Indian epic, “Ponniyan Selvan:Part One” managed $2.1 million in fairly wide release.

“Bullet Train” clears the $100 million mark thanks to another $1.3, and “D.C.’s League of Super Pets” is closing in on $100 million — shockingly clearing the $91 million mark. “Top Gun: Maverick” and the “Avatar” re-release killed any chance the Roadside Attractions Sigourney Weaver/Kevin Kline dramedy “The Good House” from opening in the top ten. That too, bombed (under $700K).

Walter Hill has been one of the modern cinema’s true masters of the Western film. He directed “The Long Riders,” “Geronimo,” and “Wild Bill,” and he directed the pilot of the TV series “Wild Bill” helped inspire, “Deadwood,” as well as a Western mini series of some repute — “Broken Trail.”

But “Dead for a Dollar,” which is almost certain to be his farewell to the genre, makes for a desultory curtain call.

The script is a nonsensical Western variation of the “kidnapped wife not really kidnapped” trope. The dialogue has its hard-bitten moments, but they’re few and far between. The texture is tidy rather than dusty and saddle sore, a Western with precious little grit as everyone and everything is freshly-scrubbed and coiffed, even the horses.

Did Martha Stewart do the production design? Not “a good thing.”

Hill built the film around the most colorless performance in Austrian showboat Christoph Waltz’s screen career, miscast Rachel Brosnahan as the “kidnapped” wife and Hamish Linklater as her jealous, jilted husband.

And Willem Dafoe and Benjamin Bratt aren’t good enough to rescue it.

Waltz plays “Mister Borlund,” a bounty hunter who always gets his man, always takes him by surprise and usually blows holes in him when he does.

“Just another fella dead for a dollar,” is the way one bad hombre (Dafoe) he brought in alive describes Borlund’s other victims. Joe Cribbens is about to finish his prison sentence when he gets a Borlund visit. Borlund warns him in a way that lets us know Cribbens won’t be taking the advice. These two “have a reckoning” coming.

Meanwhile, there’s this rich and powerful man (Linklater) in New Mexico Territory (1897) whose wife has run for the border with her latest lover, an Army deserter who happens to be Black (Brandon Scott). Borlund is hired to go south and fetch her from Mexico, with a Cavalry Buffalo Soldier (Warren Burke) assigned to guide him.

Standing in their way is the armed oligarch ranch owner who runs things in his corner of Chihuahua, Tiberio Vargas (Bratt).

A lot of the characters have a lot to say in this against-the-Eastwood-grain horse opera. Everybody talks and talks and talks.

“I guess you wanna know my story, too,” Corporal Pope (Burke) offers, a trooper inclined to overshare pretty much every time he appears on screen. He’s about to face a hired gun with a thing for bullwhips and feels the need to list his credits.

“First five years in the Army, they had me working as a TEAMSTER.” As if his foe, or we, need to be told how someone got good with a bullwhip. Pages of unnecessary dialogue clutter the screenplay.

Brosnahan’s Rachel Kidd tries to reason with her “rescuer,” wondering if the real crime is that she’s “run off with a man of color.”

Perhaps the real crime is fleeing, pretending to be kidnapped and demanding ransom of her husband. And she’s about 110 years ahead of the curve in using the phrase “man of color.” At least “uppity” is deployed in a Jim Crow-correct sense, although all these violent lowlifes seem to have had their speech scrubbed of the racial slurs so common in the 19th century, and lose some of their menace because of it.

There’s a testy poker game with a British popinjay nicknamed English Bill (Guy Burnet) that gives Dafoe one good line, and little else.

“If I was you, I’d get outta my sight before I run through all my good humor.“

Everyone involved can be excused for jumping at the chance to make a Western for one of the masters of the genre. But the performances, almost to a one, seem shellshocked at how little money was being spent to make it look, sound and feel right.

Brosnahan in particular seems to take Waltz’s “colorless” turn as the tone she chooses to strike.

A vintage Hill bit with a horse coming through glass doors and a couple of decent exchanges in an overall perfunctory big shootout finale arrive just in time to remind of us how great this filmmaker once was, and how sad it is that he has to hang up his spurs with “Dead for a Dollar.”

Rating: R for violence, some sexual content/graphic nudity and language.

Cast: Christoph Waltz, Rachel Brosnahan, Warren Burke, Luis Chávez, Brandon Scott, Willem Dafoe and Benjamin Bratt

Credits: Directed by Walter Hill, scripted by Matt Harris and Water Hill. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:46

Twenty four characters’ stories telling of life going on during lockdown, this stars Sandra Oh, Mary-Louis Parker, Elaine May, Moses Ingram, Raul Castillo, Don Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt and others.

Another “Zoom” reliant shutdown movie, but this one scripted and directed by the chap who gave us “Pieces of April” and the novel “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.”

Oct. 14.

“Deadstream” is a genial-enough send-up of “found footage” horror, a gory comedy built around a grating streaming TV stunt host whose latest clickbait is a night spent in a haunted house.

As Shawn Ruddy, host of “Wrath of Shawn” videos on LivVid — sort of a Youtube for live-streamers — star and co-writer/director Joseph Winter tries too hard playing a character who tries too hard. That results in a comedy that pegs the annoying meter from the start but only really strings together laughs in the scrambling, perilous and over-the-top third act.

Shawn, who pitches his show as “facing my fears, one dumbass challenge at a time,” has carried out stunts such as dogsledding in his underwear as a “human popsicle,” baiting cops and climbing into a trashcan to be picked up and dumped (and compacted) in a garbage truck.

But he has just come off a “demonetized” ban from LivVid for crossing one line too many with his hijinks.

For his comeback, he’ll face one fear he’s taken pains to avoid addressing — “ghosts.” He’ll spend a night, with a couple of cameras and his mother’s “paranormal” defense kit — Holy water, garlic, salt, crucifix and silver dagger — in “the most haunted house in the United States,” aka “the most haunted not too famous for me to film in,” a Payson, Utah ruin.

He rolls up in the dark, takes sparkplugs out of his battered pickup to guard against the temptation of making a break for it. Then he busts in, locks himself in to further force him to stay, and confronts whatever’s supposed to be scary about this long-abandoned place he calls “Death Manor,” which has suicides and other deaths attached to it.

He’s live-streaming, and interacting with his viewers as he does. If something suspicious happens, they taunt and force him to “check it out.” They order him to “PROVOKE the spirits.” And they’ll pepper him with comment questions that mock him as he attempts his latest feat.

“Did everybody call you ‘Crater Face’ in High School?” he reads one comment aloud. “No, because it was just acne, then.” He endures “fan-splaining” abuse and, with a hand-held camera and a helmet cam, keeps up a steady patter of Shawn shtick.

“Despite what people say, there ARE further depths I can sink to.”

Every now and then, something shocking happens and he catches himself swearing in fright, followed by a “PLEASE don’t de-monetize me, LivVid!”

The POV camerawork and editing are on the money, the makeup and effects on the “good and cheesy” end of the “good” to “cheesy” spectrum. The horror movies referenced (not by title, because Shawn is no fan of the genre) include classics of the “found footage” genre, with not one homage or staged fright here delivering much more than a jolt, and never a chill.

It’s not scary. At all.

And I have to say, despite a lot of joking around from the start, “Deadstreaming” Winter struggles to find and perform a laugh that lands. It’s all pitched in the same in-your-face/energy-drink hyped pace and volume, which all but beats the “funny” out of a lot of the attempted humor.

Not everybody can do pull off that breathless “Billy on the Street” thing.

Still, as the horrors of the night pile up and our live-streaming hero consults with viewers and finds ways to fight back against the things that go bump in the night, “Deadstreaming” picks up.

It finishes better than it begins, if that’s any consolation.

Rating: unrated, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Joseph Winter, Melanie Stone.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Vanessa Winter and Joseph Winter. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:28

Adam McKay takes a shot at Big Oil in this 1:49 second environmental satire.

“The Falconer” is an engaging account of a true story that manages to be uplifting despite a seriously unsavory wildlife smuggling and selling element.

Set in Oman, this tale of two friends — one Middle Eastern, the other a Westerner — touches on the different ways the developed world and the undeveloped one view wildlife as it tells a story of one friend’s efforts to save his sister, who wants to get out of an arranged marriage.

Tariq (Rami Zahar) and Cai (Rupert Fennessy) are best friends in Oman, but teens looking at significantly different futures thanks to status and family fortunes. Tariq can’t plan much beyond high school. Half-Lebanese, he sort of fits in, so long as the locals don’t quibble too much over his background. Cai may have been born there, but he is Western to the core, an animal lover and aspiring wildlife conservationist who expects to go to college in the West.

They met in school, pal around after hours and even have jobs at the local zoo, which is more of a petting zoo whose employees are seriously unsupervised.

A day of swimming and riding on a friend’s boat on the coast lets them hear the legend of a local one-armed animal smuggler, who lost that arm when a leopard he was trying to bring to Oman got loose on the freighter he was transporting it on. His is a cautionary tale, with a hint of magic (a “djinn” has cursed him and forced him to live alone) might figure into the boys’ future.

Because while Tariq’s sister Alia (Noor Al-Huda) might have had a beautiful wedding to her arranged husband, with the men dressed in their finest dishdasha gowns and the bride adorned with veils and jewels, the fact that she flees it within days means trouble.

If Alia wants a divorce, that means Tariq’s family will have to repay the dowry or “mahr” provided by the groom. As her situation promises shame and worse brought upon his family, Tariq takes to swiping and selling critters who won’t be missed at the zoo — pigeons, hamsters, etc.

Cai, the Western idealist who lectures Tariq and everyone else on the animals, and why the zoo’s new falcon can’t be simply released into the wild without being trained to hunt, finds himself trying to help his friend and fend off his ethical and moral qualms about what they’re doing.

The film, in English and Arabic, gives us a small glimpse of life in the barren desert, striking coastline and sleepy backwardness of Oman.

It nicely contrasts the dire straits Tariq finds himself in with the coddled comfort of Cai, who lives in big house full of exotic animals he keeps as pets.

The falconry of the title takes a while to introduce and a longer while to get back to as the script steps away from this titular plot element to explain Tariq’s dilemma. The moral quandary facing our characters is more a problem for one guy than the other, but it doesn’t take much for Cai to join in on the lax amorality of the place.

“The zoo has no idea how much this is worth,” he says with authority, as if they’re being invited to steal critters to help Tariq help his sister.

Co-writers/directors Adam Sjöberg and Seanne Winslow — documentarians making their feature film debut — spend much of their film wandering off on semi-interesting tangents. Nothing in this is as fascinating as the falcon and what must be done to train her, and every detour included here was added to make the obvious and the inevitable direction the story turns in less obvious and seem less inevitable.

Their mis-directions don’t really work, but that’s not a fatal flaw. It’s still a fascinating dip into a culture and its mores that few films have visited before, and that and the built-in culture clash are reasons enough to see it.

Rating: unrated, PG-worthy

Cast: Rami Zahar, Rupert Fennessy and Noor Al-Huda.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Seanne Winslow and Adam Sjöberg. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:40

There isn’t much mystery or suspense in “Jeepers Creepers: Reborn,” a horror movie whose characters are wholly aware there have been three other films based on this rural Deep South “urban legend.”

A bunch of them even cosplay the demon at the Horror Hounds fan convention which he strikes in this installment of the franchise.

As they know all about “The Creeper,” you’d think they’d be a lot quicker in figuring out how to outsmart the gargoyle who crawls out of the Louisiana muck every 23 years to dress up in scarecrow threads and Freddy Krueger fedora to slaughter humans who fall within his reach.

Screenwriter Sean-Michael Argo and director Timo Vuorensola filmed this in Finland and the UK (many scenes look sound-stagey) and Louisiana, and emphasize the slaughter, not making us identify with the slaughtered, fear for their fates or even anticipate with glee their murder.

A prologue set in the ’60s mimics the earlier “Jeepers” as an older couple (Dee Wallace, “E.T.’s” Mom, bane of the “Critters,” and bit player Gary Graham) is chased — “Duel” style — by an ancient International Harvester truck through the boondocks because they’ve seen the overcoated ghoul dumping bodies down a chute at his tumbledown ruin of a house.

Sydney Craven and Imran Adams play the present-day couple checking into this horror convention, cosplaying and dully-acting the leads whom we are supposed to empathize with. Laine is pregnant, and hasn’t told horror conspiracy fanatic Chase yet. Chase has a ring and hasn’t told her he’s proposing yet.

He’s a nerd and she’s a “scientist,” a biologist who repeats her own “legend” about that seasonal menace of windshields in the Deep South — lovebugs — as fact. Not much of a “scientist.”

Events conspire to send them to “The Creeper’s House” for the night, with a video crew and horror fest booth operator. Wonder who’ll survive? Wonder how this gigantic, winged beast who can drive a stick-shift truck will butcher them?

“The Creeper’s a fairytale, son.”

Because we know this screenplay is going to tell us a lot more “why” than we need to know or care to know. And that’s a sign they didn’t pay attention to more important things, like scripting more interesting characters, more terrifying situations and pithier lines, or getting the actors to buy in and give the viewer something to grab hold of.

Rating: R for violence, gore and language

Cast: Sydney Craven, Imran Adams, Matt Barkley, Peter Brooke, Ocean Navarro, Gary Graham and Dee Wallace.

Credits: Directed by Timo Vuorensola scripted by Sean-Michael Argo, based on the Victor Salva character and movies. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:27

Moody, sinister and tense. Leonard C. does that for you, and your movie trailer. The film looks good, too. Nov. 18.

It takes a funeral to bring these two together.

Apple TV has this one. Looks fun.

Margaret Qualley lands a starring role, playing a journalist who meets and tumbles into a shady operator played by Joe Alwyn.

It’s from A24, so we pretty much know it’s going to be good.