Movie Nation

A huge humpbacked steamer trunk takes second billing in “The Bride in the Box,” a new horror film. As I once spent a few years buying, restoring and re-selling such trunks, I was keen to see any movie that might have been more accurately-titled “The Trousseau in the Trunk.”

OK, some of that’s true. I have restored and sold such trunks, one or two to the “Wizarding World” theme park attraction at Universal Orlando. Top tip? Don’t buy premade replacements for the leather straps that rot away on this preferred luggage of 19th and early 20th century immigrants taking steamer passage to America. Measure the brass end loops that hold them on the trunk, and buy old belts that will fit at your local thrift store and cut them to size using the original loops.

But that’s my ONLY interest in this thoroughly uninteresting, not-remotely-scary horror tale. Yours?

The debut feature of writer-director Doug Bost stars veteran bit players Victor Verhaeghe and Carolyn Baeumler and Acadia Bost, who is — I’m guessing — the director’s daughter. They play a family splitting apart on a summer vacation in scenic, sunny Maine.

Husband Don is morphing into the primary child-rearer, thanks to a rageholic fit that got him fired from his job, not that his wife knows this. Heather is off TV acting in New York, leaving Don and daughter Iris to check into their rental house in Winter Harbor without her.

The house has this locked trunk in it. The rental property is run through an antique shop, where Iris stumbles across a post-WWII journal of a frustrated bride-to-be. And that’s where she also stumbles into an aged wedding dress, pitched by the the pale-as-death clerk (Tammy Faye Starlight).

You know what they say about wedding dresses, the pale one tells the 10-year-old. “You don’t pick it. It picks you.”

Next thing we know, Iris is talking to something or someone inside that old trunk. She’s hiding that dress, and sticks and twigs under the bed. She’s begging Daddy to play the “wedding” game, something that annoys the heck out of Mom (whom Iris calls by her first name). And not for the reasons you might expect. With Dad playing the preacher and the groom, it’s a game that leaves Mom out.

Don’s “Little girls have been marrying their daddies for centuries” is no reassurance to her, or us.

Honestly, is there anything promising in a story about a little girl who becomes possessed by a long dead would-be bride, who might have somehow wound up trapped in a trunk? The bits about how Iris will “need” such a dress “soon enough” from the locals are rural Red State icky, and only scary in a “Handmaid’s Tale” sense.

The adults may have their shouting matches, but there’s nothing in the child’s performance to make us fear for her and nothing in the way the film was written, shot and edited builds suspense or hints at terror.

With no jolts, no frights, zero effects and zero flair for shooting a sequence, scene or single take in a way that rattles or unnerves the viewer, “Bride in the Box” runs up against Big Question.

Why did they bother?

Rating: unrated

Cast: Victor Verhaeghe, Acadia Bost, Carolyn Baeumler and Tammy Faye Starlite

Credits: Scripted and directed by Doug Bost. A Random Media release.

Running time: 1:26

A single set sci-fi/psychological “experiment” take, testing its subjects in a white on white “cage.”

Aug. 19, things get messy in “The Immaculate Room.”

Today’s Around the World with Netflix trip is a jumbled, over-reaching thriller from Egypt creatively-titled “The Crime.” A sort of death-bed confessional/morality tale that an old man tells of his murderous past, it shows more ambition than skill in its meandering, clumsy narrative.

Ahmed Ezz is Adel, an old man haunted by his past and tormented by nightmares from it. He awakens each day at a mental hospital, asking after his son Hussein. One day, a kindly psychotherapist makes a call, Hussein (Mohamed Al Sharnuby) shows up, and Adel proceeds to unburden himself.

The ghost of his late wife is after him, and has been for years. Nada (Menna Shalabi) was cheating on him and mixed-up in the drug trade in the 1970s, “just after the war (Yom Kippur War, maybe?).” Adel had a lot of businesses back then, most of them legit.

“I did it all for you,” he insists to Hussein (in Arabic with English subtitles). “Everything I built will be yours.”

Hussein isn’t buying it.

“You’re a curse. You destroyed everyone.”

A string of very long flashbacks then take us back to that time as the film struggles to decide if it’s a straight-up murder mystery, a drug-deal-gone-wrong thriller or a ghostly horror tale, with victims of Adel turning up at his door, in his car trunk or even in the hospital to this very day.

Nada’s disappearance had a cop (Maged El-Kidwani) on the job, investigating the one and only suspect. Her family is sure Adel did it, and scenes that show Nada carrying on at parties and manipulating one and all suggest her shady side.

But what happened to her?

Writer-director Sharif Arafah (“18 Days”) sets up a “What is real?” and “What’s just in Adel’s head?” quandary, and manages that storytelling trick well enough, at least some of the time. He gets carried away and trips himself up in ways that make the plot harder and harder to follow with nonsensical twists delivered by his unreliable narrator, the crazy old man sort of admitting his misdeeds, sort of blaming his late wife for them as he does.

The police point-of-view thread in the story is poorly-developed, and the big shoot-out scene is executed in ways both clever and nonsensical. We see our narrator ducking and running from room to room dodging gunfire as edits show us those shooting at him picked off, one after the other, seemingly by some grassy knoll phantom gunman.

A vigorous re-edit would salvage some scenes. A vigorous re-write might help others.

“The Crime” shows promise in its production values and performances. But mystery-thriller problem-solving is one of the cinema’s toughest skills to master, and this mystery doesn’t solve enough of its problems in ways both surprising and logical to come off.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking

Cast: Ahmed Ezz, Menna Shalabi, Maged El-Kidwani and Mohamed Al Sharnuby.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sharif Arafah. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer (“Top Gun”) milks another ’80s property for a little extra cash for his dotage in this Showtime (Of course.) series adaptation of the movie.

Rosie O’Donnell, Gretchen Moll, Wayne Brady and a 1960s Jaguar E-Type co-star. Sept. 9.

A dreamy South African parable of a bloody past coming back to haunt the present, “Jewel” never actually takes us into the infamous Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. This Around the World with Netflix story is about the ripples of pain that pass through history, a great wrong impacting generations, reopening wounds and spreading trauma.

A group of mostly-white tourists take in the town and its memorial decades after it happened. One woman, Tyra (Michelle Bote) seems most keenly interested in Sharpeville, taking scores of photos but generally dissatisfied with the depth — or lack of it — of the history related by their tour guide.

She sees women dressed in white praying at the spot where 69 peaceful protesters were gunned down by the Apartheid police state’s uniformed goons, and is struck by one in particular. This vision of a woman, Siya (Nqobile “Nunu” Khumalo), simply must let her take her picture. She simply must become Tyra’s personal guide to the river, the town and the event she wants to experience.

Tyra’s in love…or some sort of white privilege lust.

Siya takes care of her diabetic grandmother (Connie Chiume of “Black Panther”) and tries to give the fiftysomething white woman the brush off. She has a man, after all. And Tshepo (Senzo Radibe) is a politically-aware man-friend with benefits. He isn’t going to like the white woman’s attentions. And when he hears why she’s come — her father used to be a Sharpeville cop and was stationed there when the massacre occurred — he is further outraged by this “white woman shooting black people…with her camera.”

The dreamy part of director and co-writer Adze Ugah’s film is the talk of how the past impacted the present, the lives cut-short, the grandmother Tshepo grew up without. Siya’s grandmother frets over what happened over half a century ago (the film’s “present” is uncertain) and what it might be doing to the younger generations.

And we fret over the movie’s shortcuts, the ways it artfully avoids taking Tyra into the terror she wants to learn about and instead focuses on an unlikely love triangle in the present, which it also shortchanges.

The acting is rather better than the script they’re working with, with Khumalo, Chiume and Radebe standing out.

I was hoping for something like “Sankofa.” But this film, which never really grapples with the Sharpeville Massacre history or the invented love story, contents itself with immersing characters in the river for their epiphanies and encounters with fate.

“Jewel” never amounts to more than a lovely but abbreviated, symbolic failure, a movie with ambition which loses its nerve in the end, and in the middle, too.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Nqobile “Nunu” Khumalo, Michelle Botes, Connie Chiume, Senzo and Senzo Radebe

Credits: Directed by Adze Ugah, scripted by Glenrose Ndlovu and Adze Ugah A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22

 Their voices are high-pitched and giggly, their attention spans short and their uniform skirts shorter.

Who would EVER think these dizzy young things are contract killers, petite Powerpuff Girls with itchy trigger fingers and their whole careers in front of them…once they finish high school?

That’s the zany premise of “Baby Assassins,” a Japanese shoot-em-up/beat-em-up from writer director Yugo Sakamoto (“A Janitor”). It’s a brazenly bouncy bloodbath built around that well known romantic comedy “type,” manic murderous pixie teen girls. OK, it’s an interesting sadistic twist on a popular rom-com type.

Akari Takaishi and Saori Izawa are a “crew” — “Stop calling us a CREW. We don’t work at McDonald’s!” — in the employ of the mysterious Mr. Tasaka.

Chisato (Takaishi) is a bubbly, bubble-gum music loving sociopath, not exactly well-equipped to deal with adult life (“How do we pay the rent again?”), utterly amoral when it comes to pulling the trigger or butting the head. She’s entirely too cute for this line of work.

“How could she be a hitman,” a yakuza wonders (in Japanese with English subtitles)? “I’m starting to get concerned for the hitman industry!”

Mousy, androgynous moptop Mahiro (Izawa) is the quiet one, the tougher one, just as amoral, just as puzzled by the protocols of normal adult life. We meet her as she’s interviewing for a job at a convenience store. She is blowing the interview, a little confused at even the most basic questions. Lucky for her the “interview” is just a way to get close to her mark and kill him.

But damned if she doesn’t have to knife-fight her way past the vengeful staff of that shop who may have yakuza ties, but five of them can’t handle this wisp of a girl.

And don’t go to sleep on her roommate, either. Chatty Chisato is easy to underestimate. But woe unto the yakuza who doesn’t think she won’t pop a cap in him and everybody he knows in a flash.

Of course the young ladies cross a line and mess with the wrong gangs. They’re hunted by a teen peer, daughter of a yakuza, a father and son team and a genuine, bona fide tough guy. Guess how much help their unseen boss provides?

Sakamoto goes “John Wick” deep into this underworld of gangs, families, “crews” and code. The girls get a firm talking to by the team their “insurance” brings in to clean up the blood, bullet casings and bodies. “Please, no more head shots.”

What’s funniest here is the sort of generational angst thrown into this silly, flippant spin on murder-for-hire. The teens don’t know what to do with these tax forms the boss’s functionary gives them, how to pay their bills and the like, and bristle at having to take the sort of crappy “cover” jobs — kewpie-doll voiced greetings for customers, kitty-ears and French maid’s dresses for waitress gigs at restaurants whose “theme” is that old school Japanese patriarchal “deferential to men” girlishness.

One mobster lectures his son that “Yakuza need to create a comfortable working environment for women” because “diversity is the KEY, nowadays.” Does the son listen? No.

Yes, this is the uncertain, insecure and sexist work world young women are wading into these days. Might as well pack a piece and get paid for not taking any Shiitake, ladies.

The epic fights and shoot-outs of “Baby Assassins” are all staged by veteran fight choreographer Kensuke Sonomura, who did a few “Resident Evil” movies. So he’s used to putting the lie to “You fight like a GIRL.”

The “Big Finish,” a raid-brawl in a classic “abandoned warehouse where the yakuza hang out” blood bath, is as over-the-top as you’d hope.

The social commentary is cute, and the picture turns decidedly more interesting when these shallow kids finds themselves not just hunters, but hunted.

But it’s the action that sells “Baby Assassins,” and it’s awesome, from the first shot fired to last punch thrown, with many a head-butt, kick, elbow punch and “shtick shtick shtick” of a knife puncturing flesh in between.

Rating: unrated, oh so violent

Cast: Akari Takaishi, Saori Izawa and Masanori Mimoto 

Credits: Scripted and directed by Yugo Sakamoto. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:35

“Thor: Love & Thunder” easily dominates the movie box office on its second weekend of release, getting no real competition from “Where the Crawdads Sing,” the adaptation of the popular novel, or a new cartoon, “Paws of Fury.”

But the God of Thunder fell off a cliff on his second weekend of release, pulling in some $46.5 million, awfully close to a 70% falloff from its opening. What do we call that sort of second weekend of release plunge, box office watchers? “A Tyler Perry Swoon.”

Don’t shed any tears for Marvel, as the film is still making bank. Still, the jokey approach of Taika Waititi doesn’t seem to sit well with audiences. Oh well.

“Minions” are minting moolah, pulling in a staggering $25-26 million take, closing in on $300 million by next weekend, I figure. Over $261 already.

“Where the Crawdads Sing” had a good Thursday night and a brisk Friday and looks to be a sleeper hit, opening at $17 million or so. Considering how little they spent on the cast, it’ll be in the black within a few weeks. A movie of middling quality and questionable history and racial politics, it’s doing well with a certain demographic. Trump women, maybe?

“Top Gun: Maverick” becomes Paramount’s biggest hit ever this week, taking in well over $1.2 billion here and abroad. It’s on track to earn another $11.7 million this weekend.

“Elvis” has NOT left the building, clearing the $100 million mark Friday, scoring $7 million this weekend.

“Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank” should have gone straight to Paramount Plus. A middling Thursday and tepid Friday point to a $6 million weekend. The samurai cats and canines comedy is a dog.

“The Black Phone” rang up another $5 and change. It’s already well into profit and should finish its run in the $85 million range.

“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is on 980 screens and is on track to make $1.74 million this weekend. And yes, this is THE movie to see this weekend.

“Umma” opened for a minute…and a minute only, last spring during its theatrical release. But even under the best of circumstances, with no pandemic, it had a limited ceiling.

It’s a quality horror film seriously short of frights, with some of those ready-made jolts mishandled by writer-director Iris K. Shim, a long-time production assistant and sometime editor making her writing and directing debut. The seriously deflating finale was a final bit of “mishandling” that ensured word of mouth on “Umma” wouldn’t be good.

But the presence of Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, Odeya Rush and Dermot Mulroney in the cast guarantees that the performances will be top notch. The production design, the novel Koreans-in-America story and the setting also contribute to the feeling that this is a “quality” production that has promise, even if that promise isn’t fulfilled.

Oh plays Amanda, a solitary beekeeper in rural Southern California living with her teen daughter (Stewart, of TV’s “Atypical” and “Roar”) Chrissy, producing honey that’s becoming an artisanal Internet phenomenon thanks to their friendly local feed store shopkeeper (Mulroney).

But that sign on the gate, to shut off your car engine and turn off your cell phone, isn’t for the bees, it turns out. Electricity makes Amanda sick, her daughter explains. There’s no power in the house, and anything electrical that Mom doesn’t want within her field of view she totes down to the root cellar and locks away.

Home-schooled Chrissy is only reminded of what she’s missing out on when she bikes to town, to shop at the store of their only friend, Danny (Mulroney).

A prologue has warned us that something about Mom’s past haunts her. When a Korean stranger shows up at their door, we start to figure that something out. Amanda’s Umma, “mother,” has died. Her stern, judgmental uncle (Tom Yi) has traveled far to track her down and let her know.

“A child’s obligation is to her parents,” he snaps, in Korean. Her mother isn’t just dead, she is “angry” and cursed. “You know what she’s capable of.”

Oh, and here’s her suitcase, with her mementoes and her ashes in it. Byeeee.

“Umma” is about Amanda’s unhappy past, her chilling present and Chrissy’s slow realization that Mom is going through some things, and they’re supernatural in nature. As the ghost of Umma (MeeWha Alana Lee) hisses to Amanda, “We starred as one, and we’ll END as one!”

Anybody who’s ever paid attention to a horror film knows how to manufacture jolting frights — a combination of lens, shots, edits and sound effects or music. But Shim has no idea how to build suspense, something she fritters away, time and again as Amanda comes under ghostly attack and Chrissy — shielded from it, or blind to it — doesn’t have a clue.

The script is on its firmest ground laying out its Asian mother-daughter connection, sacrifice and “obligation” tropes. There’s a running theme of “disobedient girl” running from mother to Chrissy, who rebels by sniffing around, finding evidence of granny and “testing” theories about Mother Amanda as she does.

But the scattered frights in this can’t-miss setting — a remote farmhouse — never build towards anything. The lack of involvement of old friend Danny is forgivable, but the presence of his niece, a new “friend” for Chrissy (Odeya Rush) doesn’t pay off. This slow and scenic thriller gives the impression that a lot was left out, either in the script or edited out before release.

“Umma” turns out to be a “quality” thriller that can’t be bothered to get down and dirty and scary.

Rating: PG-13 for terror, brief strong language and some thematic elements

Cast: Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, Odeya Rush, Tom Yi, MeeWha Alana Lee and Dermot Mulroney

Credits: Scripted and directed by Iris K. Shim. A Sony release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:23

I’m not positive it’s the definitive version of the Jane Austen novel, but for me, the benchmark adaptation of “Persuasion” was made for British TV and played in US cinemas back in 1995.

Casting newcomer Amanda Root as Anne Elliott, the woman who gave in to family “persuasion” and brushed-off poor Naval officer Wentworth, played by then-little known Ciaran Hinds, lent the story a bittersweet air of “last chance at love” that no other version has matched. Root, character-actress “plain,” and Hinds, then tall, awkward and hangdog-looking, were perfect as a headed-to-spinsterhood middle sister and the sort of second-choice man she’d attract.

Guess what my problem with building a winking, cutesy and anachronistic “Persuasion” around Dakota Johnson might be? Anyone wondering if one of the great beauties of her era, often cast in sexy roles, can pass for the “passed-over” and ignored middle sister in any family?

It’s not that the character is supposed to be unattractive, with limited options. Mousey, yes. But it’s damned near impossible to figure Johnson’s Anne wouldn’t have prospects the minute someone nearby threw one of those Jane Austen balls.

That said, this take on starchy, reserved, comedy-of-manners Austen isn’t awful. It may be peppered with anachronisms, from to “like I said…quite the upgrade” to “He’s a ten. I never trust a ten.”

And this Anne narrates her story, with an ironic, jokey Johnson smirk, right to the camera.

“My father — he’s never met a reflective surface he didn’t like.”

The wit seems a bit forced, the big romantic moment somewhat muted and the anachronisms just jolting enough to make us notice and think, “Wot wot? No one utters such stuff and nonsense in Austenland!”

Oscar winning screenwriter Ron Bass (“My Best Friend’s Wedding”) and actress-turned-screenwriter Alice Victoria Winslow had the unenviable task of modernizing and livening up Austen for National Theatre director Carrie Cracknell’s stumbling adaptation. They don’t wholly succeed.

They are aided by the usual Austen adaptation virtues — striking Great Houses, historic Bath, seascapes — and a good cast. Johnson’s coquettish whisper, with just a hint of period accident, goes down easily, and Cosmo Jarvis (“Peaky Blinders,” “Hunter Killer”) brilliantly conveys now-wealthy Captain Wentworth’s seven year-old romantic wound that will not heal.

Jarvis makes Johnson’s years of pining credible, and gives us everything a guy who lost a love who looks like Dakota Johnson might feel. The man seems gutted.

The wit comes from Anne’s delusional, self-absorbed sisters (a droll Yolanda Kettle and hilariously narcissistic Mia McKenna-Bruce) and primping, spendthrift father, played to perfection by Richard E. Grant, as we’d expect no less.

“Quick! Break out your finest frocks! We are about to touch…GREATness!”

And the complications, built around Anne’s forced reacquaintance with richer Captain Wentworth thanks to his Navy colleagues, her relatives and his friends, are given a brisk brush up by the arrival of the suave Henry Golding (“Crazy Rich Asians”) as a distant-enough-to-date relative who aims to inherit Anne’s father’s baronetcy, come heck or high water.

Individual scenes play better than the whole, just as some performances shine — McKenna-Bruce, Jarvis, Grant and even Ms. Johnson — and get the hang of dry Austen wit and its sometimes clumsy “try to keep up” updatings better than others.

But that mixed-bag feeling spills over to the central romance, which as I said at the outset, needs higher stakes and the desperation of “last chance at marrying for love” that the best version of this novel boasted.

The two of the three best looking people on the screen finally get together for the finale? Where’s the heartfelt relief and glorious release of that?

Rating: PG, mild innuendo

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Cosmo Jarvis, Henry Golding, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Nia Towle, Ben Bailey Smith and Richard E. Grant

Credits: Directed by Carrie Cracknell, scripted by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, based on the novel by Jane Austin. A Netflix release.

Running time:

Snippets of home movies reveal that they’ve been friends since childhood, BFFs forever growing up on a German island in the Baltic.

Now pushing 30 and living in Berlin, Paula (Cara Cult) and Jojo (Nina Gummich) still do everything together. Everything. Paula sees to that.

If she’s bored with whoever she’s hooked up with on a given night, she makes sure hers isn’t the only coitus she interrupts. Does she even know “grenzen,” the German word for “boundaries?”

Headstrong, rash and living in an almost permanent impulsive hissy fit, we wonder, as the Bee Gees sang, “How Deep is Your Love?” Because this isn’t a crush, isn’t an actual romance at all. It’s some sort of clingy toxic dependency that Paul has “For Jojo.”

Barbara Ott’s intimate, edgy film, based on a Stefanie Ren script, takes us inside a lopsided co-dependency as, we guess, it runs its course.

Cult, in that German shag haircut, leather, jewelry and sneer that’s become a Berlin Slacker Stereotype, ably turns Paula into a personal nuisance and a public menace.

Jojo leaves town for a stint of work in Mexico and Paula won’t leave her in peace to get her ticket to board. She spies a guy they grew up with in “Sh–sville,” on the island, and insults him repeatedly to his face. He’s flying to surf in Tulum, and Paula’s many, many calls to Jojo reveal that they’re hanging out and maybe falling in love.

Paula won’t stand for it. When they abruptly return together, Paula flips out at what they’re not telling her, stopping the shared car mid-bridge/mid-tantrum until they fess up.

When they drive Daniel (Steven Sowah) home with them, Jojo can’t stop insulting him and ignoring her doesn’t help. News that they’re already talking marriage reheats the ongoing meltdown. Jojo says she’s going back “home” with Daniel and Paula turns it up a few more notches.

“I give you guys two days,” she hisses (in German with subtitles, or dubbed into English). “Maybe until the weekend.”

So Paula is going “home” WITH them.

“I’m not letting you marry Daniel,” she declares.

Jojo ignores Maya Angelou’s advice — “When people show you who they are, believe them.” Bad move.

“For Jojo” isn’t some “Fatal Attraction” thriller. But for a non-violent drama it’s kind of brutal. The screenplay cooks up all sorts of ways for Paula — a narcissist who never thinks anything through — to sabotage this relationship that could cost her the best friend she’s been mooching off, leaning on and clinging to forever.

As Jojo is likely to say “Enough is enough” at some point, this is plainly a zero-sum game Paula is playing. We see it. She doesn’t.

Cult and Gummich plays these closer-than-sisters two in a way that makes every wedge Paula finds and every Jojo reaction to what she can see is happening in-the-moment believable.

The reasons for their deep bond are sketched in as Paula becomes completely unmoored in what is essentially a long tantrum of a movie. She uses people left and right, storms out of arguments and goes so far as sleeping on the beach to show her outrage.

Can this wedding be saved? What kind of a friend do you have to be to put up with that? We can only guess at the final straw, only speculate on the collateral damage.

And Cult, sullen and furious, manipulative and demanding, gives us as vivid a picture of toxic interpersonal dependency as we can stomach, never giving ground, crossing one line after the other until we’re screaming at her, Jojo, Daniel and the TV in indignation.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Cara Cult, Nina Gummich, Steven Sowah, Louis Nitsche and Anne Zander.

Credits: Directed by Barbara Ott, scripted by Stefanie Ren. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35