Movie Nation

As the lady once said, “What fresh Hell is this?”

For everybody who found the polish, sophistication and gentility of “The Devil’s Rejects” a turn-off, we present “Derelicts,” a little slice of holiday slaughter from the people who brought you…

Hell, I’ve never heard of any of them, and neither have you.

It’s a slasher/splatter pic about murderous drifters who dismember, shoot, skull-crush and sexually assault a seriously dysfunctional family gathering for an uneasy Thanksgiving dinner.

And as ol’ honest reviewer Abe put it, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

Constance (Kelly Dealyn) wakes up with a dream droplet of blood on her cheek. Testy husband Gregg (David Lee Hess) has no time for that. He’s prepping the meal for HER family. And her ob-gyn Dad (Steve Uzzell) and his new girlfriend (Lana Dieterich) woke everybody up early with their noisy love-making.

Gregg’s an out-of-work theater company director, their near-adult son Leslie (Dalton Allen) is a sex-obsessed cretin and daughter Barbara (Emily Ammon) is going through a mental health crisis that manifests itself with blackouts on the (running) track and nosebleeds.

Then this slaughterhouse gang of five led by “Cap” (Les Best) wipes out Constance’s brother and nephew, hijacks their truck and apparently follows the onboard GPS (only way to explain it) to their house.

Let the torture, murders and dress-for-dinner games begin.

“This is MY house!” the Cap lets one and all know. “I carved it outta the bones of 40 dead Chinamen in Cambodia, and I’m about to PAINT it in your blood!”

He’s got an “x” tattooed between his eyebrows, so any resemblance to Charles Manson is intentional.

The gang includes “Black Forrest” (Sam Pleasant), killer shrew Bo (Kara Mellyn) and most horrifically, “Turk” (Andre Evrenos) who never speaks. He only screams. Oh, and he’s fashioned a pink teddy bear into a mask.

The mayhem starts with another murder getting in the front door, then sexual assaults and escalates from there.

“FINGER food?”

Anyway, you get the idea. There’s nothing remotely witty about this, no real room for pathos or outrage either.

But as outraged Gregg is moved to ask, perhaps speaking to the potential audience of such movies — “Is that how you people get off?”

Don’t answer that.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual assault, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Les Best, Kelly Dealyn, Sam Pleasant, David Lee Hess, Steve Uzzell, Dalton Allen, Emily Ammon, Marcela Pineda and Andre Evrenos

Credits: Directed by Brett Glassberg, script by Andre Evrenos, Brett Glassberg and Clay Shirley. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:13

There’s no footage of Hurricane Maria’ pounding Puerto Rico back in 2017, back when the storm made landfall and wrecked the island.

We don’t see the gas lines, people lining up for water, the months of governmental indifference in San Juan and Washington.

No, there’ll be no paper-towel tossing here.

Cecilia Aldarondo’s “Landfall” is an impressive, impressionistic and intimate overview of the unhappy “Island of Enchantment” as it stands today, years after Hurricane Maria hit.

She ends her film with scenes of the street protests that brought down the island’s corrupt government in 12 days back in 2019. But everything that comes before is people reminiscing about the “tragedy” of Maria and “the real disaster (that) happened afterwards.” New Orleans level devastation, all levels of government services lost, decades of mismanagement, postponed infrastructure and incompetence all came home to roost.

People on the farms of Orocovis, in the beachfront tourist cities, on Vieques Island were cut off. “We didn’t know when help from the U.S.” was coming.

Those warehouses full of cases of bottled water that was never distributed? They’re shown here, and the natives are still furious about that.

Aldarondo, director of “Memories of a Penitent Heart,” travels the length and breadth of Puerto Rico, Bartolo to Dorado, San Juan to Rincón, sketching in lives interrupted but getting back to dinner-party-normal, fishermen back to harvesting spiny lobster, farmers hitching up oxen to the plow again.

But beyond all that, there is youthful discontent and island-wide fury at “The Junta,” the Obama-appointed fiscal management board trying to get the island’s debt under control.

In mid-crisis, outsiders are still looking for ways to cut costs and services.

Luxury real estate developers are cashing in, luring blockchain/crypto-currency hipsters into buying mansions. That’s a hustle that amounts to an entire chapter of “Landfall,” with Brock Pierce and other tycoons of digital currency trying to sell the island on becoming a haven for their online business and a tax shelter for their class of entrepreneurs.

Aldarondo captures a heated meeting with locals, with Pierce losing his temper but holding his own, in Spanish and English, with skeptical Puerto Ricans, who see this blockchain pitch as another short-term “gain,” like the island’s brief flirtation with industrialization in the ’50s and 60s.

Using old newsreels and tourism promotional films, she paints a portrait of past promise, and promises broken. If the Bitcoin billionaires get their way, will Puerto Rico progress into some status other than “territory/colony?” Not if that means taxes.

That’s one of the take-aways from “Landfall,” which will be on PBS’s “POV” series next year, but can be streamed during its Oscar qualifying run via DOC/NYC this week. As Puerto Ricans march, take over abandoned schools to house themselves in co-ops run like communes, and fight off complaints about “socialism,” none of the mostly-unnamed interview subjects makes any noise about “statehood.”

One member of the New York Puerto Rican diaspora complains about the city not being “my country.” Do they want independence? Will there blockchain mogul money behind such a push?

“Landfall” doesn’t really ask such questions, or answer them. Aldarondo was going for something more impressionistic and kaleidoscopic. But the documentary makes this much clear. The days of ignoring and neglecting Puerto Rico need to end. Puerto Ricans remind us that they deserve it, and that from now on, they insist on it.

MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity, smoking

Credits: Directed by Cecilia Aldarondo. An ITVS/POV release.

Running time: 1:34

Young woman wants to make it as a stand-up comic, stalks her geezer heckler, “a comedy urban legend” until he agrees to coach her.

We all know where “All Joking Aside” is going, basically by the time the opening credits end. But those credits, underscored with a collage of comic bits, have a point that I’ll come back to — this joke.

“NOBODY wants to be a stand-up. We all wanted to be actors. But crunches are HARD!”

So watching and listening to 20something Canadian actress Raylene Harewood struggle and “get better,” as the stand-up film formula ordains, one can be forgiven for getting stuck on that opening credits zinger delivered by a comic whose face we don’t see.

She’s lovely. She’s done the crunches. She gets more comfortable on the stage, the script’s “material” improves, and she’s still not funny.

So why would she want to play a comic?

This Canadian production doesn’t differ from any other movie about the struggle to be a stand-up, from “Punch Line” on down the line. So let’s pass along the best of the sage profundities served up by the “washed-up” alcoholic comic, ably played by veteran character actor Brian Markinson, who had the good sense to never do a “set.”

“Look girl, there are two types of people in this world — funny people and happy people. You cannot be both. Do yourself a favor and go try to be happy.”

“A comic is judged every twelve seconds of his life.”

And “Bob,” the legendary comic who never got a sitcom, who supposedly managed 1000 sets, all different, in one epic year on the road, opens “All Joking Aside” with the best single-sentence review the picture could hope for.

“I’ve seen this movie a dozen times, sweetheart.”

Harewood’s a good actress, and gives a little weight to the “problems” Charlie, her character, deals with, that “personal s—” she’s supposed to “work out on the stage.”

But she’s not funny. Her delivery is all rounded locutions, prissy posh Kerry Washingtonish, not exaggerated enough to be Drew Barrymore funny.

Not that we’d see either of them as stand-ups. Because they’ve done the crunches.

“All Joking Aside” isn’t awful and Harewood isn’t its lone shortcoming. The script is too thin to hold our interest. Stand-up is so over-covered as film subject matter that the only way it can work in a movie these days is as backdrop for a more interesting story in the foreground.

Jenny Slate’s “Obvious Child” comes to mind. She’s funny, a convincing stand-up, but that’s not what has to carry the movie.

Not saying that this movie needed an unwanted pregnancy story, with stand-up as its subtext. But all joking aside, that would’ve been funnier.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking.

Cast: Raylene Harewood, Brian Markinson, Dave “Squatch” Ward, Katrina Reynolds

Credits: Directed by Shannon Kohli, script by James Pickering. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:23

He was a modest, pious farm boy sent into the slaughterhouse of trench warfare in World War I.

When his moment came, he covered a withdrawal of Allied forces by single-handedly staying behind and mowing down the Germans with a succession of Lewis (machine) guns.

He didn’t sing his own praises, but as others recognized what he did and called attention to it, he became his country’s most famous infantryman of The Great War. They even named his hometown after him.

Seen through American eyes, Aníbal Milhais is Portugal’s Sergeant York, brave, a crack shot whose grit stood out among the faceless masses of the trenches, a symbol of sacrifice and a “Hero on the Front.”

Milhais earns a generic combat bio-pic from co-directors Gonçalo Galvão Teles and Jorge Paixão da Costa, nothing that will make anyone forget the superb action, suspense and artistic aims of “1917,” but technically and aesthetically serviceable and well-acted.

The script follows Milhais into the trenches as a young man (João Arrais) and back home, raising his daughter years later as an older father (Miguel Borges), someone not impressed enough by the ceremony where they rename his village for him to show up on time, distracted by farm problems, including the wolf that’s killing his sheep.

The illiterate young man copes with the deadly tedium in the trenches, the snipers that thin their ranks, the whistles that officers blow to send them “over the top”) and strain that sends comrades off their rocker.

A kind doctor convinces him to write to his (also illiterate) beloved (Filipa Louciero) back in Valongo.

Back home, older, wiser and decorated, he hasn’t let go of the cynicism that pervaded the ranks of Portugal’s 75,000 man expeditionary force.

“The soldier is an ornament for politicians to parade,” he tells his little girl (Carminho Coelho), in Portuguese with English subtitles.

As the combat service proceeds to Aníbal’s moment of truth, we follow the older father as his daughter trails him into the foothills and forest, in search of a sheep-killing wolf.

That’s a nice parallel in Mário Botequilha and Jorge Paixão da Costa’s script, a little heavy on the war/wolf allegory, but it works. And the striking settings of Aníbal’s north Portugal home can be both pretty and primal. This is where life and death has always been on the line.

The combat sequences are good, if nothing we haven’t seen before and staged and shot more impressively in films from Europe, America, Australia and Turkey.

That goes for “Hero on the Front (titled “Soldado Milhões” in Portugal) as well. Political unrest in Lisbon is the background for the expeditionary force’s departure and is unexplained. The strain on the soldiers didn’t have a name until World War I, and is thinly developed.

But it’s still an interesting story of a farm lad who did his duty, survived the slaughter and didn’t think much of the people who sent him there or their honors and decorations.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: João Arrais, Miguel Borges, Raimundo Cosme, Carminho Coelho and Ivo Canelas

Credits: Directed by Gonçalo Galvão Teles, Jorge Paixão da Costa, script by Mário Botequilha, Jorge Paixão da Costa. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:29

The totality of human existence might be summed up in the forlorn, inquisitive and sometimes playful narrations of the great German filmmaker, that keen-eyed observer of humanity Werner Herzog.

For his latest, the filmmaker who gave us “My Best Fiend” (about working with madman/actor Klaus Kinski), “Grizzly Man” and “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” travels the world with a Cambridge planetary scientist in search of meteorites, their impact on life on Earth — perhaps even as the source of life on Earth — and on human history.

In “Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds,” Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer visit meteor craters in Australia, India and the Yucatan, travel to Mecca (via pilgrims’ cell phone video of touching the pre-Islamic sacred meteorite, “The Black Rock”) to Antarctica with scientists look for fresh meteors and to Norway where a jazz musician and amateur meteor hunter finds micrometeorites. They visit the quirky French Alsatian town of Ensisheim, where a 1492 meteor strike became famous for altering European history and is commemorated to this day.

His co-filmmaker, scientist Clive Oppenheimer, questions the legions of astronomers, meteor specialists and Planetary Defense (“killer” meteorite hunters) and natives in the Outback.

Herzog captures faces, and the spectacle of Mecca and the skull makeup word by participants of a Day of the Dead festival in Merida, Mexico, the exultation of scientists finding a fresh meteorite on the snow of a high plateau near the South Pole.

And Herzog narrates, comments on scientists who might be able to go on and on on their subject, “never boringly,” breaking off a digression into an “impossible form of matter” (quasi crystals) found in meteors with “Yes, it gets so complicated now that we’re not going to torture you with details.”

Then, there’s Paul Steinhart, once dragged to Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in search of the early 20th century extraterrestrial explosion that leveled forests, even though his “outdoor experience did not extend beyond the lawns of Princeton.”

Herzog sets the travelogue scene in far away places like the shoreline of the Yucatan peninsula in the center of where the “dinosaur killer” asteroid struck eons ago.

“Chicxulub Puerto is a beach resort so godforsaken you want to cry…only leaden boredom weighs upon everything.”

That’s our Werner.

The narration tries a bit too hard this time out. It’s almost his sole presence in “Fireball,” so much so that you fret “He’s gotten too old to be making these journeys into the mystic himself” any more. But no. A single off-camera question lets us know he’s back on Antarctica, where he filmed “Encounters at the End of the World.”

But he’s still the most curious, empathetic and fascinating filmmaker the screen has produced. And if his curiosity is cave paintings from the Dawn of Man, the last days of the Grizzly Man, or our relationship to fireballs from the sky, we’re blessed to have him inviting us along as his traveling, investigating companion.

Cast: Narrated by Werner Herzog, with Clive Oppenheimer, Kelly Fast, Meenakshi Wadhwa, Jan Braly Kihle, Jon Larsen, Simon Schaffer and Paul Steinhart.

Credits: Directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer, script by Werner Herzog. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:37

There’s no one “Eureka!” moment when “Echo Boomers,” a fictionalized “political statement” burglary version of “The Bling Ring,” goes wrong.

It’s a solid enough heist picture, with the hook that the thieves are all aggrieved millennials lashing out at a “fixed” economy by stealing from the rich, and trashing their mansions as they do. But as it marches down a well-worn path to a conclusion we see coming well in advance, investment in the characters flags and interest in their fates vanishes, like all the cash these 20somethings are “earning” and burning through.

Patrick Schwarzenegger is the lead, and is adequate in the role of “the conscience” of this gang. Until he starts voice-over narrating their story. The framing device is interviews being conducted by an author (Lesley Anne Warren) who talks to Lance (Schwarzenegger) and others in prison. Schwarzenegger reads the voice-over as if he’s woodenly reciting lines he’s never rehearsed.

Lance comes to Chicago after college with $60,000 in student loans and little prospect of ever paying them back thanks to his degree in art. His cousin Jack (Gilles Geary) promises to hook him up with his “start up.” Jack picks him up in a Porsche Cayenne, so “the good life” beckons, right?

Lance meets Jack’s associates and half-notices the stick-on sign peeling off the panel truck they need for their work. No worries, Lance. You’ll be working with art, “in acquisitions.”

His first clue that they’re thieves is when he’s handed a skeletal mask, they pile out of the truck and break into a suburban mansion.

He is slack jawed at the destruction he witnesses. Ally (Haley Law), Chandler (Reggie Law), Stewart (Oliver Cooper) and the rest don’t just steal — they shatter, rip, spray paint and utterly trash these monuments to affluence, “destroying someone else’s life” in a vendetta against the one percent.

It isn’t until after the smash-and-grab-and-smash that he gets the sales pitch for “joining.” That’s ridiculous, but then again, they’ve already made him an accomplice.

“Don’t you feel cheated?” leader Ellis (Alex Pettyfer) asks. All this playing by the rules — good college, good grades — got them all nothing but debt. “We’re not just stealing. We’re sending a MESSAGE!”

Michael Shannon is properly menacing as the fence who gives them addresses (provided by Big Insurance) and underpays and threatens them when they screw up.

Considering how they party and snort away their profits, time and again, there’s a lot of screwing-up going on.

Lance narrates this story, passing along the “rules” to this enterprise — “When the system’s corrupt, why play by their rules?” is one. “If they won’t let us dream, we won’t let them sleep” is another.

What director Seth Savoy’s film (he’s also one of three credited screenwriters) is aiming for is a sort of “Point Break” sympathy for the gang of “misfits,” and “Boomer” never comes close to achieving that.

There are montages capturing the way cable news labels and shames millennials and recreating the awful economic prospects that generation faces when it enters the workforce. But then Ally drags Lance along for drinks with her college buddies, who have Peace Corps work behind them, professional success and budding families. Yes, they probably had advantages. But they’re millennials and they’re making it.

And then there’s the business of hiring a middling actor with a famous surname to star in your movie about have-nots who never had a shot stealing from the super rich to “get even.” There’s a disconnect there.

“Mixed messaging” drags on the script, basically from start to finish. The idealism espoused loses its bite when you’re sticking it up your nose.

The heists skip over the details — “grace notes” — that would showcase why they need Lance in their gang. He knows real art and what has value. Why not have him explain this vase, that painting or sculpture? Was the leading man not up to it?

And the prison interview framing device takes more of the mystery away than it should.

There are good players surrounding Schwarzenegger, so at least he’s taken that old Hollywood actor’s adage to heart — “Always try to work with Michael Shannon.”

But “Echo Boomers” — terrible title, BTW — can’t get by on echoes of better thrillers that covered the same ground. And betting on Schwarzenegger making the family name an acting dynasty seems like a long shot, even in a business known for its nepotism.

MPA Rating: R for drug use and pervasive language

Cast: Patrick Schwarzenegger, Alex Pettyfer, Haley Law, Lesley Anne Warren and Michael Shannon.

Credits: Directed by Seth Savoy, script by Kevin Bernhardt, Jason Miller and Seth Savoy. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:34

If there’s one thing any film fan should take away from “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on ‘The Exorcist,'” it’s exactly the same thing you should take away from “Friedkin Uncut,” the earlier doc about the quintessential hotshot Hollywood director of the ’70s.

The man can tell a story. And how. William Friedkin weaves anecdotes about “Exorcist” stars Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller and folds in stories about the great composers Bernard Hermann and Lalo Schifrin, both of whom he rejected when it came to scoring the film.

“I wanted a piece of music” he says, that felt “like a cold hand on the back of the neck.”

“Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield would do.

He rejects the notion that he was “foreshadowing ANYthing” in the iconic demonic possession thriller. Friedkin talks about “serendipity,” and “instinctive” choices, quotes the great Fritz Lang about how relying on those “accidents” and coincidences and gut feelings is “a kind of sleepwalking security” for filmmakers like Lang (whom he interviewed for a doc in the ’70s) and himself.

He recalls using an on set gun shot to get the right shocked/startled reactions from his actors.

He tells of visiting a zen garden in Kyoto when premiering the film in Japan, wondering “What the hell’s THIS about?” and then weeping at the rocks in a sea of “raked sand.”

And he declares that “It looks like, in retrospect, that I knew what I was doing.”

He did. A notoriously “volatile” figure on film sets, he’s aged into a movie making/film history/art history raconteur of the First Order, a Peter Bogdanovich, Oliver Stone or Orson Welles lite.

Friedkin sits down with filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe to break down, deconstruct and remember “The Exorcist,” revealing his “subliminal” tricks with sound and one-to-five frame glimpses of ghostly images inserted, the people he hired or wanted to hire, from the aforementioned composers to actor Stacy Keach (who would’ve been GREAT as the younger priest) and the “influences” he recognizes, from Hitchcock’s “Psycho” to Dreyer’s “Ordet.”

But Renais (“Last Year in Marienbad,” “Hiroshima Mon Amour”) and Welles (“Citizen Kane”) were on his mind, too.

He praises the cameraman Ricky Bravo, who “followed Castro through the jungles and into Havana” as a documentary/news photographer, and who roamed Friedkin’s sets, shooting hand-held to give movies like “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist” immediacy and energy.

And he talks about art and artists, from Vermeer, Rembrandt and Pollack to James Ensor, Magritte and Caravaggio, with a nod to the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, all of whom impacted how he framed shots and lit human faces.

He takes credit for restoring the Iraq prologue to “The Exorcist,” bringing his camera and star Max Von Sydow to an actual archeological dig in Al Hadhar, a sequence so beautiful Spielberg repeated it for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

The guy is urbane, cosmopolitan and artistically sophisticated, and while there is no peer to Orson Welles as director/raconteur, Friedkin is no slouch and a fascinating character to listen to.

No, he’s not an unimpeachable narrator in telling his own story. He gives himself the credit for taking on William Peter Blatty’s novel (Blatty chose Friedkin, not the other way around). And his Bernard Hermann story is funny, but makes him come off smarter and funnier.

Hermann’s story is Hollywood legend, and probably the true version of how the great Welles and Hitchcock collaborator snarked himself out of scoring “The Exorcist.”

And Friedkin’s ready supply of references and recollections is so impressive as to make one wonder how much of this is scripted, polished and rehearsed. Is anybody this witty off-the-cuff?

But that takes nothing away from this Friedkin appreciation, essay and “How I made that movie” documentary. He’s a genuine character, and his stories make it plain why he’s a favorite “An Evening With” guest of film festivals. On celluloid or in person, Billy Friedkin’s still a great storyteller.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic horror violence, profanity

Cast: William Friedkin

Credits: Written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:44

A young working class woman with a baby and few job prospects comes to terms with disfiguring injuries in “Dirty God,” a compelling drama about self-image, dashed dreams and the growing up that might be on the other side of despair.

This engrossing if not entirely satisfying drama is built around a marvelous turn by Vicky Knight, an actress who, thanks to a childhood tragedy, didn’t have to rely on makeup to get into character. She’s lived at least some of this, and Knight lets us see the hurt at the cruelty and the disappointment that comes with how life closes in around you, thanks to scars like this.

Something happened to Jade, something that left her in the hospital for ages and covered in scars. We won’t learn exactly what for a while, but we pick up bits of that as she starts to piece together her life after coming home.

Her Mum (Katherine Kelly) has been raising her toddler. Little Rae (Eliza Brady-Girard) bursts into tears at the sight of her own mother. Jade might be devastated, but she wont show it.

She’s in her very early 20s, and seems all too happy to leave the kid with Mum to go out clubbing with her mates, Shami (Rebecca Stone) and her rapper-beau, Naz (Bluey Robinson).

Jade notices the stares, but Shami’s got her back, and Naz says a lot of compassionate things, which help.

Because Jade has issues. She wasn’t making good decisions before, and now she’s added rage and self-pity to her repertoire. An older woman keeps coming by, looking in on Rae.

That’s Rae’s other grandma, we figure. Because Jade goes OFF on her, every time she shows. Her baby daddy is responsible for what happened to her face.

And clinging to hopes that her “next surgery” will fix this isn’t helping.

The doctor may coo, “I’m really pleased, but Jade is furious that “I’m left with this f—–g DOG’s dinner” for a face.

Over the course of a few months, Jade finds a goal — “cheap plastic surgery” in Morocco — and a job, working at a call center. She figures out that using hand puppets and hiding under a blanket lets her bond with Rae.

Sexual fulfillment? Maybe online hook-ups will do, for now.

But Mum isn’t sure about this Morocco thing, the job is a place where alleged adults can be childishly cruel and “My web cam’s broke” is a sure way to get cut off from a LuvBuddy.com connection.

Knight lets us see Jade’s desperation and confusion, struggling with problems that no social worker can fix, questions that she’s only comfortable asking for herself online. That can be perilous.

“Oh, you’re one of those FOOT people, eh?”

Every step of the way, there are mistakes and pitfalls. Even her day in court with her assailant is a nightmare.

One of the script’s most promising touches is Jade’s realization that hijabs allow Muslim women to be whoever they want, hidden in plain sight. One online “how to wear one” tutorial later, she is liberated — if only for short while. Still, all signs point to “Morocco.”

Director and co-writer Sacha Polak sets Knight up with our sympathy, and then has the character tear little pieces of that off with her temper, her careless parenting and a narcissism that was there before her injuries. We see every mistake she’s about to make, and cringe on her behalf.

Maybe by the end of her “story,” we hope, Jade will do a little cringing of her own and change her destiny. Or maybe not.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, explicit sex, profanity, alcohol abuse and smoking

Cast: Vicky Knight, Katherine Kelly, Rebecca Stone, Bluey Robinson and Eliza Brady-Girard

Credits: Directed by Sacha Polak, script by Sacha Polak and Susie Farrell. A Dark Star release of a BBC Film.

Running time: 1:43

Back in vaudeville and the silent cinema, they called them “gags.” It’s the problem solving process, usually in comedies, that gets a character into or out of trouble or the next situation.

Such as “How do you get a character, paralyzed in a wheelchair, out of a locked bedroom in the second story of a remote farmhouse?”

That’s one of the clever bits of problem solving in “Run,” scripted and directed by the team that made “Searching.” This is a simple, myopic thriller with suspense, a few neat twists and superb “gag” writing by director Aneesh Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian.

Sarah Paulson plays a single mom who isn’t shy about letting her support group know that she’s given up “dating, travel” and everything else for her daughter. We saw the birth. We get it. Chloe was a preemie, and paralysis, diabetes, asthma and other conditions are what put her in a wheelchair — for life.

Still, “She is the most capable person I know,” Diane declares.

Pill regimen, insulin tests, inhalers, home schooling and doting care characterized Chloe’s childhood. But Chloe (Kiera Allen) is 17, smart and getting a little annoyed at the things she’s going without — friends, a social live, school and a smart phone, for starters.

She’s eagerly awaiting a college acceptance letter. And then comes to the fateful day she digs into Mom’s Kroger bag, hunting for candy. There’s a pill bottle there. And the prescription is in her mother’s name.

That triggers a manic curiosity and a cat-and-mouse game pitting the resourceful, suspicious teen with limitations, and a canny and paranoid mother whose motives Chloe comes to question and eventually fear.

Allen, making her screen debut, gives us flashes of shock, joy, fury and despair as Chloe improvises, plots and DIYs her way to answers she’s too young to fear the way she ought.

And Paulson underplays the Motivated Mom from Hell thing so well that when lines are crossed and the “game” is out in the open, we still don’t know what to expect from her.

“You need not understand this now. But I’m doing what I think is right for you.”

The wit is in the script’s collisions between Chloe’s native cunning and real world obstacles that would foil anybody. Need to find out what a prescription is in a small town after your wifi mysteriously goes out? When the pharmacist’s instincts, even the 411 service provided by your landline company, will give you away?

The funny bits are the way both mother and child play the “I’m paralyzed, feel sorry for me (her)” card.

But the thing that sets “Run” apart, even from other movies that cover similar ground — from TV’s “Sharp Objects” to “Everything, Everything” and “The Night Listener” — is the top drawer gag writing, putting a problem before Chloe, and letting her and the viewer reason, wrangle and “science” her way out of a jam.

Well done.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic content, some violence/terror and language

Cast: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen

Credits: Directed by script by Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian A Lionsgate film, a Hulu release.

Running time: 1:30

Vince Vaughn runs like a teenage girl. News flash, right?

In the body switch horror comedy “Freaky,” he puts that rarely-seen talent (check out the touch football game in “Wedding Crashers”) to good use as a serial killer who switches bodies with a mousey high school girl.

When “The Blissfield Butcher” becomes meek high school mascot Millie (Kathryn Newton of “Blockers” and “Big Little Lies”), “she” becomes ravenously ruthless and murderous.

And he screams in fright, realizes “Standing and peeing is kinda rad” and scampers hither and yon with his-her hands in the air like a girl who who’s scared.

It’s “Freaky Friday” with a “Scream” twist. Throw a bunch of teen “types” in the path of a pathological killer, with each death meant to generate a laugh– whacked in a wine cellar, chopped in shop class, crushed by a commode.

Millie’s two BFFs, Nila (Celeste O’Connor) and Joshua (Misha Osherovich) get it.

“You’re Black, I’m gay. We are sooooooo dead!”

Millie, stuck in her Blissfield Valley Beavers’ mascot costume, waiting for her widowed wino mom (Katie Finnernan) to pick her up after the Homecoming game, sees the stadium lights go out and a hulking dude straight out of local urban legend marches toward her.

“Please don’t be The Butcher! Please don’t be The Butcher!”

It’s no use. But the murderer, who has slaughtered his way through a couple of Homecoming’s over the years, stole this collectible Mayan dagger. When he stabs her, their bodies switch.

She is he and he is she. If only they can remember that.

“PRONOUNS!” Joshua the gay kid is here to keep that “straight.”

Over the course of a long night, Millie needs to convince her friends she’s in “his” body, track down The Butcher, dodge her sister the cop and reverse the body-switch with the magic knife — that’s now police evidence in an attempted murder.

The bullied, sexless girl is transformed into an assertive bombshell, and the tall, middle-aged brute finds a sensitive side.

A couple of one-liners land in the first act, but the movie doesn’t start until Butcher/Vaughn starts running like a girl.

And truthfully, while he makes the whole “I’m really your meek, sweet friend Millie” thing funny, not much else plays that way.

A cruel shop teacher (Alan Ruck of “Ferris Bueller” cast against type), assorted jocks, bullies and a mean girl — who will face Millie’s revenge?

Director and co-writer Christopher Landon (the “Happy Death Day” films were his, and “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) doesn’t have enough jokes or amusingly murderous sight gags to make “Freaky” take flight.

Terror? Suspense? They don’t figure here, even with a “Butcher” on the loose.

What Landon and “Freaky” have is Vince Vaughn running and shrieking like a girl, and making eyes at the boy Millie crushes on. That’s not quite enough to make this movie’s “Freaky” flag fly.

MPA Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence, sexual content, and language throughout

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Celeste O’Connor, Misha Osherovich, and Alan Ruck

Credits: Directed by Christopher Landon, script by Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon. A Blumhouse/Universal release.

Running time: 1:41