Movie Nation

Gawd, not this again.

“Torture porn?” Wanton self-injury and exploding head slaughter set to the tune of “Ten Little Indians?”

It’s entirely possible the creators of this nigh-on-unwatchable “Death Count” know that no less than Agatha Christie perfected this plot, thanks to a novel with a seriously racist title. That count-down the-dead thing may be the weariest trope in horror.

At least we know that they know they’re copying “Saw” and “Hostel,” because characters mention that in this cheesy, derivative C-movie splatter fest.

Eight people wake up in separate cells in another mass murderer’s dungeon. They have exploding collars on their necks, TV cameras and monitors in their cells.

The Warden (Costas Mandylor, in cowl, beard and one-eyed mask) has a “game” for them to play — online and streamed, their success/survival in it predicated on online “likes.”

The imprisoned include teachers (Sarah French), administrators and others from this one particular school. Their “game” involves inflicting “a non-suicidal self-injury” with the snips, pliers, sledgehammer, whip, etc. in a box on their cell.

The coach protests about “sportsmanship” and “rules” and complains that “You think some sicko is gonna get off watching this?”

Coach (Wesley Cannon) must be from Tibet.

Outside, Michael Madsen plays the sick-joking, unexplained eyebrow-stitched detective trying to track down this murderous event, which is blowing up the police station’s phones, lighting up the internet and tying up a WHOLE lot of “missing persons” cases that just were filed.

Madsen has the Reaganesque dye job and the world weariness to repeat that line, “I’m gettin’ too old for this s—” like he means it.

It’s a stupid movie that’ll probably make you dumber, just by watching it. The voyeurism of the victims’ predicament extends to anybody who checks in on films like this just to watch the “cool” ways people are killed, although some fanboy out on how the makeup is applied to create gruesome injuries — and wait for the naked cleavage.

My favorite cheesy touch? The filmmakers try to show the world news media transfixed by these murders streamed in real time. So they get “actors” to stand in front of fake foreign network graphics and read, in bad Little Theatre Foreign-Accented English, their headlines.

Damn. That’s…funny.

There’s an anti-public schools subtext that slips in here, and precious little actual problem-solving by those about to die to figure out a way to survive all this. So there’s nothing at all for us to invest in.

Mandylor isn’t bad, pretty much every thing and everybody else is.

But at least it’s short.

Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Costas Mandylor, Sarah French, Devanny Pinn, Wesley Cannon Robert LaSardo and Michael Madsen.

Credits: Directed by Michael Su, scripted by Michael Merino and Rolfe Kanefsky. A Mahal Empire release.

Running time: 1:22

Every now and then a debut feature film comes out that reminds you that not everybody dying to direct a movie is a slave to genre. Some filmmakers love actors and how they can touch, move and even inspire an audience.

“A Love Song” is an autumnal romance starring two of the best character actors in the business. If nothing else had gone right in Max Walker-Silverman’s first feature, the fact that he put screen veterans Dale Dickey and Wes Studi in the spotlight stands him in good stead. They make the showcase he paired them up in a lovely elegy on loneliness, loss and the rose-colored memories of youth.

Dickey was 15 years and scores of credits into her career when “Winter’s Bone” transformed her raw, weathered looks into a one of the most instantly-recognizable faces in film (“Hell or High Water”) or TV (Netflix’s “Unbelievable”). She stars as a solitary soul camping out by a Colorado lake in her ancient Shasta trailer.

Faye drinks her beer at room temp, makes her coffee from lake water, traps giant crayfish to eat and keeps to herself on this campsite in the heart of Nomadland. There’s vintage country blues on the radio, all sorts of flora, fauna and star-gazing she masters thanks to a couple of Audubon guides, and the occasional visit from the friendly young horse-riding postman (John Way). He’s important, because Faye wrote a letter. Any day now, she’s expecting a reply, or a visit from a high school flame from these parts.

Other nomads camp nearby, but well out of eyesight, not spoiling her mountain peak view or daily nature rambles. But Faye has her routine and her eye on the calendar. She’s giving this guy until mid-September to show.

The Oscar-winning Studi, a Native American screen icon since “Dances With Wolves,” “Last of the Mohicans” and “Geronimo,” is that guy. He shows up with a dog, a guitar and a lot of memories, most of them bittersweet.

Walker-Silverman keeps the dialogue spare and lets these two tell their stories with their faces and a sort of genteel shyness. It takes few words, a few looks and a few reminiscences to get them from “You know me?– “I don’t know.” to “Look at you. Look at us.”

The film is adorned with other lovers — a gay couple (Michelle Wilson and Benja K. Thomas) to pop the question — and a pleasantly cutesy quintet of siblings looking to rebury their patriarch, with the little girl (Marty Grace Dennis ) in their cowboy-hatted ranks their designated spokesperson. Faye’s parked on an unmarked grave, which requires a little good-mannered finessing.

Faye’s story is the one we’re following, the one wondering, “Reckon you can still love something that ain’t there no more?” It’s a fine, compact and soulful turn, on a par with Frances McDormand’s “Nomadland” performance. Studi adds more awkward grace to the proceedings, and a guitar lesson that leads to a sweet duet, Michael Hurley’s “Be Kind to Me,” a popular tune from their (@1971) high school years.

I’m taking the liberty of reviewing this slight and scenic cinematic chamber piece a few weeks before it opens, because it’s worth asking about and asking for at your local cineplex.

“A Love Song” is a lovely, valedictory film for two of the best actors of their generation, so it’s worth the effort you make to track it down. Any time a movie maker crafts something this gentle and fine for two wonderful players who rarely get the spotlight is to be celebrated.

Rating: PG

Cast: Dale Dickey, Wes Studi.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Max Walker-Silverman. A July 29 Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:21

This award winner looks charming and bittersweet.

Aug. 12 from Strand Releasing.

A father tries to check himself and his family out of a civilization he sees as hopelessly corrupt and doomed in “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” a parable of parenting and pollution set in Lebanon “in a near future.”

Co-writer/director Mounia Aki takes on “Mosquito Coast” themes for a debut feature whose ironic title — the “real” Costa Brava is the northern Spanish Riviera — reminds us that “paradise” can be anywhere, and that you don’t save paradise by checking out of the real world as an escape.

Aki, who once directed a short film on Beirut’s garbage crisis, uses that as the backdrop of this story of two people who met at a street protest, but years later have put their placards down and fled to the mountains, “the last green space” in the country. Walid (Saleh Bakri) and the former pop star Souraya (Nadine Labaki), their teen daughter Tala (Nadia Charbel) and irrepressible pre-tween Reem (Geana Restom) raise their own vegetables and chickens, off the grid with his mother (Liliane Chacar Khoury) on a mountain oasis that’s been in his family for years.

“Beirut will never change,” he says (in Arabic with English subtitles) of their former hometown, hot and polluted and overrun with trash as it drifts from crisis to crisis.

But Beirut’s problem is about to be dumped into their backyard. The harbinger of it is this statue they see as it is set up on land Walid didn’t even realize his moved-to-Norway sister had sold. The statue? “It’s of the president,” a functionary, Tarek (François Nour). Yes, they’re that far out of the loop. Still, it’s not exactly a good likeness.

The country has bamboozled foreign investors for yet another “save Lebanon from itself” project, a “green” eco-friendly waste dump carved out of undeveloped land and literally in their front yard.

It doesn’t matter that Walid and pretty much any countryman polled on the street knows how this will play out. “Green” is just “a PR stunt.” an environmental disaster is being visited upon them all, with dust, plastic bags of plastic garbage, heavy machinery and all-night-lights. An election is coming, and the debacle won’t become obvious until after election day. But taking pictures for his “lawsuit” is all Walid is willing to do about it. And yelling at his sell-out sister (Yumna Marwan) by phone.

They won’t “take a bribe” to leave, won’t sell out. We’ll see who blinks first.

Aki uses this struggle as the ultimate test for a family — a wife who misses their old cosmopolitan life and her notoriety, a husband lost in dogma, unable to reengage with the world, a mouthy little girl who idolizes him, ordering workers to “LEAVE” and throwing fruit at them when they don’t, and an isolated teenaged daughter who takes a shiny to hunky Tarek, who isn’t above returning the attention.

Salty, jaded, seen-it-all and supposedly dying — or emigrating to Colombia — grandma seems like the only one who isn’t taking sides.

Walid is “filling (Reem’s) head with horror stories” about the state of the planet and the nightmare of Beirut as a place to live. Mom is flattered by the attention of garbage workers who remember her pop career. And granny isn’t above cadging smokes off older workers, letting them use their bathroom during construction and shrugging off the statement that makes to the corrupt and their corrupted work force.

That’s no way to win a stand-off, sister.

As in “Mosquito Coast,” Bakri gives us a sense of Walid tilting at windmills, with the kids rebelling against it. But Labaki’s force-of-nature Souroya gives us the impression that she could shout down her “eccentric” husband at any moment and move this mountain, or them off of it.

A mix of overt shouting matches and subtler moments illustrate this war of wills, ideologies and parenting styles. And the odd hallucinatory reverie reminds the characters, and the viewer, that try as we might, there’s no wishing a big problem away when it comes bulldozing and dynamiting at your door.

If you want something to change, you’ve got to get back in the fight, back on the barricades, back in heroic light every parent wants their children to see them in.

Rating: unrated, mild violence, sexuality, smoking, profanity

Cast: Nadine Labaki, Saleh Bakri, Nadia Charbel, Geana Restom, François Nour and Liliane Chacar Khoury

Credits: Directed by Mounia Akl, scripted by Mounia Akl and Clara Roquet. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:44

James Caan, Vito Corleone’s toughest son and Buddy the Elf’s soft touch dad, has died. An old school hardcase who worked pretty much right to the end, he was 82.

“Thief,” “Gardens of Stone,” “The Godfather,” he walked away from good parts and seemed to have as many foibles as anybody who ever attained star status. But he was one of a kind.

Talented people wanted to work with him, even if he wasn’t the nicest guy to deal with on the set. I remember him dismissing “For the Boys,” and keeping Bette Midler, a packed LA cinema and a big band waiting for the premiere, one of a couple of times I interviewed him.

A lot of long “bathroom” breaks in that era in Hollywood.

That British series on movies and the star system that contrasted Caan with gladhander hack Schwarzenegger made Arnold look like a putz and Caan a bitter egomaniac.

And then there was William Golding, Hollywood’s most in demand screenwriter in his day, taking on adapting Stephen King’s “Misery,” not for King or future Oscar winner Kathy Bates or director Rob Reiner. But for Sonny.

RIP.

If you see veteran screen heavy Kim Coates in a velour dinner jacket in a thriller, you can’t go far wrong figuring “Well, he’s playing the Devil.” Wherever his career’s taken him — “Waterworld,” “Black Hawk Down, “Sons of Anarchy” — his look in his mature years can be sinister to the point of satanic.

But his presence is a puzzlement in the thriller “Neon Lights,” a movie so obscurant that even its title makes little to no sense.

We see him growling into the ear of a tech tycoon (Dana Abraham, who scripted this) just before the soft-voiced twitcher is interviewed on TV, where he melts down.

He’s whispering in Clay’s ear as he readies to meet his long-estranged family at a remote 1920s mansion. Is this man “the staff” of the mansion, a particularly pushy “I call, you answer” investor? An apparition in Clay’s head? A demon?

Then we notice that he has a reflection, that others seem to see him even if they don’t seem to know who or what he is any more than we do. And we puzzle some more.

The timid, cracking-up Clay tries to convince bully brother Benny (René Escobar Jr), Benny’s wife (Brit MacRae), other low-life brother James (Stephen Tracey) and niece Blair (Erika Swayze) that he just wanted to reconnect, to show them a swell time now that’s he doing well.

But he’s shell-shocked, “off the grid” as his company preps for an IPO, with rumors he may “lose my company.” And this fellow in the dinner jacker keeps muttering “Into the shadows Clay must go” and “You need to deal with your problems like a man.“

As we’ve seen Clay, shaken and bloodied in the film’s opening shot, we can guess what that might entail. His “personal demons” might be these generally unpleasant relations visiting him.

They just want to know “Why are we here?” and “You losing your marbles, bro?”

The script obscures the relationships, who exactly connects to whom, with characters not necessarily looking like each other and Blair calling those we assume to be her parents by their first names.

Clay is baited and bullied, people start to go through some things and Clay — seen in intermittent moments of psychotherapy and physical therapy — keeps telling himself “I’m not crazy, I’m not crazy.”

The Bangladesh-born Abraham, raised in Canada, is a young bit player who wrote and helped round up the cash for this star vehicle, which is basically a showcase for him playing whimpering timidity, mental mania and meltdowns.

All well and good, or at least adequate. But as a screenwriter his star vehicle has organizational problem and a twisty story in which all the energy is devoted to keeping those twists from being obvious.

The group dynamic he sets up is promising, the “What’s REALLY going on?” solutions a lot less interesting, bordering on nonsensical.

And Abraham, who has a sort of Bangladeshi nebbish Michael Stuhlbarg vibe, does well enough by this character’s twitches, persecution complex and cowering. But Clay isn’t remotely the most compelling character in a move about Clay, what’s in his head or what might really be happening to him.

Coates reminds us of this every time he’s on the screen. He’s a riveting presence, even in the worst movies. “Neon Lights” isn’t necessarily one of those. But it’s close.

Rating: R for violence, language, some sexual content and drug use.

Cast: Dana Abraham, Brit MacRae, Erika Swayze, Stephen Tracey, René Escobar Jr. and Kim Coates.

Credits: Directed by Rouzbeh Heydari, scripted by Dana Abraham. An eOne/Momentum release.

Running time: 1:34

Is it “real,” or is it all in our hero’s head?

Interestingly, our hero is a young gay potter with a boyfriend and a dark, violent past, troubled family history, the works.

July 29 in a few theaters, streaming Aug. 4.

A dark comedy about mental illness and its collateral damage, “The Enormity of Life” never really manages a laugh and rarely even crawls out from under its own dispiriting shadow.

And then it gets to one of its many points. A little girl, permanently-triggered by Sandy Hook, endless “Fox News…fear” and mass shootings, wants to stop in Marinette, a town where the one mass shooting that haunts her nightmares took place.

The film is fictional, but this part of it is at least inspired by a real incident. Well, they mess up the age math re: a “survivor,” but something happened in Marinette, Wisconsin that becomes a plot point. The film’s Ohio setting means the movie’s Marinette is meant to be in another state, supposedly off U.S. 16 (which spans the Dakotas).

So, as hard as it is to find a single real-life city or town name in the U.S. that hasn’t had a machine gun shooting event, the filmmakers took liberties with a real life tragedy. That’s unseemly, to say the least.

But long before we take a detour into Marinette, USA, “The Enormity of Life” has lost its way with little hope of ever finding it.

Character actor Breckin Meyer, a veteran lead or lead’s BFF since “Clueless” and “Garfield,” most recently seen on TV’s “Good Girls,” stars in a movie that reaches for cute laughs, sentiment and romance in the midst of depression and schizophrenia and suicide and a little girl broken by obsessing over a unique horror of American childhood.

Meyer plays Casey, whom we meet in voice-over as he reads his own suicide note. Things haven’t worked out, and as the film unfolds and we figure out who he is, who his mother his and see how his nightmarish sister (Debra Herzog) turned out, we kind of get it.

But unlike Casey, we know how tying a noose to a ceiling fan usually works out. They’re not really built for that, son.

That’s not so bad, as he drops to the floor to the sounds of the answering machine message that a probate lawyer needs to see him. Turns out, he’s inherited some cash.

We’re meant to get a chuckle out of the disheveled bottom-feeder attorney (Allen O’Reilly). Maybe things can be turned around when he chats up his cute neighbor (Emily Kinney from “The Walking Dead”), who just happens to be his waitress at a diner nowhere near home. If only he remembered she is his neighbor, that they’ve talked before, that he unclogged her sink once.

Casey is kind of deep into his own despair. He doesn’t really notice other people.

But over the course of a couple of days, he gets involved in Jess’s life, and that of her shooter-obsessed 11 year-old (Giselle Eisenberg), and even of his lowlife sister and off-her-meds mother (Anne McEvoy) as he tries to tamp down his own issues and figure out if this big check and cute blonde and her kid are reason to try again, or just distractions from a life he wishes he’d ended.

The acting here isn’t so much bad as dissonant, as if nobody here is aware “Enormity” is as charmless as it is.

Cleveland director and co-writer Eric Swinderman put some effort into making a Cleveland movie without anything other than the license plates giving away the locale. What he and this film were going for is a sort of life-goes-on, could-be-worse optimism which the viewer and its leading man do not share.

Sometimes things are just too awful, and a lump of cash, a new love and the prospect of helping a similarly despairing child through her funk isn’t enough.

And God forbid Casey should click on a VOD channel streaming “The Enormity of Life” to get him through this. I felt like opening a vein myself by the time it was over.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Breckin Meyer, Emily Kinney, Giselle Eisenberg and Debra Herzog

Credits: Directed by Eric Swinderman, scripted by Eric Swinderman and Carmen DeFranco. A BayView Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:42

“The Purge” meets “The Handmaid’s Tale?”

July 29.

What an interesting niche Paul Walter Hauser has carved out for himself. Whatever else he’s played as an actor, a universal character we might call “Person of Interest” dominates his resume.

From “Richard Jewell” and “I, Tonya” to his new series true crime series “Black Bird,” Hauser’s almost typecast as the seemingly slow, almost certainly “off” prime suspect in whatever crime is at the heart of the action.

With “Black Bird,” Hauser goes prime suspect tour de force as a twisted serial killer who may be in prison, but isn’t wholly trapped. Not yet, anyway. Not until somebody provides him the audience he craves. Hauser’s turn is over the top and stunning to behold.

This series, developed by “Mystic River/Gone Baby Gone/Shutter Island” novelist Dennis Lehane, is based on a prison inmate’s story of being coerced into getting details and perhaps even a confession from a probable serial killer fellow inmate.

With Taron Egerton as the high-rolling, drug-dealing son of a retired cop, Hauser as the suspect who may be released on appeal thanks to the nature of his confession, Sepideh Moafi (“The Deuce,” “The L Word: Generation Q”) as a short-tempered, desperate Fed and Greg Kinnear as an Illinois sheriff’s dept. detective who first puts the pieces of the case together, “Black Bird” becomes a taut, well-cast and beautifully structured limited series that pulls us in and doesn’t let go.

It’s damned good, with equal parts suspense and mystery, a tale told in flashbacks as the prospective “snitch” Jimmy Keene (Egerton) reads the case file on the guy — Larry Hall (Hauser) — law enforcement wants to keep off the street. The flashbacks later shift back to the damaged childhoods of the new prison chums as Keene tries to develop common ground through similar life experiences with a mass murderer.

As Keene’s cop-dad is played by Ray Liotta, in a moving, magnificent and wholly-committed final screen performance, that “We’re not that different” business doesn’t seem as far fetched as you might think.

Consider all the baggage this Hall fellow carries around with him, the simpler, slower twin (Jake McLaughlin plays the smarter, more handsome one), son of a gravedigger whose childhood was more ghoulish than you could imagine. He’s a professional custodian, expert at cleaning up any mess, from a murder scene or the possibly incriminating back of his Dodge van to the aftermath of a prison riot. He’s a Civil War reenactor, with the “Burnsides” to prove it and the marching ballad “We Are Coming, Father Ab’ram” from the war committed to memory.

But as our Fed and out intrepid local detective figure out, he pretty cunning for a guy who “had that look of somebody who’d never been loved or hugged.”

Hauser pitches his voice high and slow, in the M. Emmett Walsh range, for this character, a plainly-off and quietly paranoid man who practically has the run of Springfield (Federal) prison thanks to his mechanical skills and ability to clean anything.

“In my dreams, I kill women,” he confesses, which is all Det. Brian Miller (Kinnear, excellent) needs to be off and sniffing around.

Egerton bulked up from his “Rocket Man” babyfat to become the embodiment of a ’90s drug dealer on the rise — Dodge Viper, turtlenecks and sports jackets, catnip to every beautiful woman he meets, and not just because of his access to nose candy. Keene’s journey starts to resemble a breakdown as events, bad actors and circumstances close in on him stuck in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

Alone? This guy is as alone as they get.

There are prison complications, blackmail and an aged big time Italian mobster to contend with and the ever-ticking clock as Hall and the Feds become more and more convinced he’s going to walk out a free man, their only hope a desperate-to-shorten-his-sentence coke dealer.

The villains pile up, and then, “The Lovely Bones” enter the picture — pathos from a victim, quite unexpected in light of the rising suspense of the prison scenes, full of treachery and doom.

Some of the best scenes are the early ones, Miller’s infuriating pushback from his fellow local cops who dismiss his suspicions because they’ve dismissed their own, and Agent McCauley’s “testing” taunting and grilling Keene to see if he’s up to the job of finding common ground with a monster.

“What DON’T you like about women,” she snaps, because what they want is a guy who can connect with a man who traps young women and girls and kills them.

Liotta brings a fading-fast father’s guilt to his few scenes as Big Jim, the cop father who feels responsible for letting his son get away from him and into this trouble, and probably is.

Crime or true-crime has proven itself the most durable genre for limited streaming series, with the built-in cliffhangers, stand-offs, red herrings, underworld or here, prison — beware when the place goes “Riot Quiet” — milieus, interrogations and investigations and police procedural tropes that build in a puzzle and a ticking clock into the proceedings.

“Ozark” and “The Night Of” to “Fargo” or “Black Bird,” you can never go far wrong when you start with awful crimes and unravel the mystery and horror of them, one episode at a time.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug content, sex, nudity and profanity

Cast: Taron Egerton, Paul Walter Hauser, Sepideh Moafi, Greg Kinnear, Christopher B. Duncan and Ray Liotta

Credits: Developed by Dennis Lehane from the memoir “In with the Devil” by James Keene and Hillel Levin. An Apple TV release.

Running time: 6 episodes @:59 each.