Movie Nation

Joseph “Joe” Turkel of Brooklyn, New York, made well over 100 appearances on film and TV, more if you add in video games.

He died last week at the ripe old age of 94, a character actor who appeared in six decades of films, only five of TV, and that’s only because when Joe Turkel started out, there was no television — none to speak of anyway.

I stop short whenever I channel surf by old TV shows and suddenly, there he is — a German officer in “The Rat Patrol,” a GI in “Combat!,” a gangster on “The Untouchables,” “Bonanza.” Hell, there he is on “The Andy Griffith Show.”

But he owes his screen immortality to four films — two of them, really — and the deep-dive enthusiasm of film buffs. We know he was a favorite of his fellow Brooklynite Stanley Kubrick, and that Ridley Scott cast him because Stanley had. We’re the reason he ended up at fan conventions and film festivals, a coveted interview subject, right to the end.

He was unforgettable as the inscrutably menacing bartender Lloyd in “The Shining,” drink-mixer and confessor to Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance.

Kubrick completists recognized Turkel from a chewy supporting role as a soldier doomed to be arbitrarily executed in “Paths of Glory.” And every time we’d watch “The Killing” after that, we’d see him. He was hard to miss, even in a bit part in that earlier Kubrick outing.

“Blade Runner” was the sci-f magnum opus TV commercial director-turned-filmmaker Ridley Scott made with his “Alien” clout. What better way to underscore his change in status than adding a Kubrick mascot to his epic? Turkel plays the mysterious oligarch behind everything that’s going wrong with replicants in the hellscape LA of the future.

Turkel’s vulpine look conveyed menace and untroubled wisdom in his two biggest films. It’s always startling to see him in another guise, showing off real range as an actor beyond the iconic roles we remember him for.

Memorize that face. Keep an eye out for it every time you channel surf. He never had a headliner, above-the-title career. But for a character actor, Joe Turkel’s brand of screen immortality is the gold standard.

Ask Joey Pants, Buscemi, Tim Blake Nelson, Giancarlo Esposito or Jeffrey Wright. They know.

As World War II ground to its brutal conclusion, Germans and their occupied country collaborators hastily burned, blew up and buried as much of the evidence of “The Final Solution,” their mass internment and murder of European Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavic POWs and other “undesirables.

But the evidence of Nazi crimes against humanity lived on. Survivors in liberated and not-yet-destroyed camps bore witness. Some German records survived in the chaos. And after a hard rain at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Ravensbruk and other camps, you can still see the white fragments of bones, the product of the mass murder hiding crematoria, expelled from the soil where they were buried.

The rarest direct proof of what happened, what the camps looked like during the war, filled with inmates in the middle of civilization’s worst crime, are photographs taken by those trapped in what we’d later label The Holocaust.

Christophe Cognet’s “From Where They Stood” celebrates the six photographers who found a camera and found a way to get pictures in 1943-44, hide the celluloid and save it for posterity, not just “evidence” but grim, grainy reminders of the nuts and bolts operation of these murder factories and what those enslaved there went through.

The pictures are a frame or two here, a couple of others there, some of them blown up for various memorials or museums at the site of the death camps. Furtively-snapped with cameras either from the camp’s photographic department, or purloined from the storage house nicknamed “Canada” in one camp — where the final possessions of Jews and others interred there were stashed — every photo was dearly bought under the riskiest of conditions. Every photo tells a story, not just of the subject, but of how hard it was to get, and how brave the photographer had to be to take it.

That’s what Cognet’s film is about. He visits archives, interviews experts and blows up negatives that he can then take to the site and figure out how, when and exactly where the shots were obtained.

One photographer smuggled images, and even samples of human skin that the German Army’s S.S. had preserved in grisly in-camp museums, “traces of S.S. crimes,” out. Another wrapped his camera in a newspaper, taking secret snaps with a primitive Brownie style camera, carefully avoiding detection by the guard towers.

Another got inside a gas chamber and photographed out a window, detailed a field covered with bodies to be burned. Cognet and the experts (and translators) he takes with him on camp sites determine the time of day, the season of the year, the location of this shot or that one, with a magnifying glass, a lot of deductive reasoning and a little speculation.

That makes for an unusually forensic “Zapruder Film” take on a subject that is most often documented via gripping, wrenching interviews with the ever-shrinking pool of aged survivors.

This or that shot was later “retouched” to erase inmates lying on the fenced lawn in front of a crematorium, numb to the death all around them,” or to add definition to the blurred faces of nude women stripping to enter “the showers.”

Portraits of “human guinea pigs” showing us their injuries are mixed with simple looks inside an infirmary, a glance at emaciated prisoners, even of the photographers themselves “taking ownership of their image” in the face of this dehumanizing horror, are seen and deconstructed.

But for all the power of its subject and the rarity of its images, Cognet has made a dry and almost defiantly artless movie about these images and their provenance.

He uses no music, makes no effort to create striking compositions and even the editing of the sometimes hand-held explorations and zoom-ins on images is done without dissolves, that original motion picture “special effect.”

If he wants to show a location as it is now, with ruins or recreated buildings, juxtaposed with what the photographer saw back then, he shoots through a blown-up negative to physically lay one image over the other. He scrambles through overgrown, unrestored sites (Mittelbau-Dora) to try and mimic the shot the often long-dead photographer framed up, never daring to manipulate emotions with music or words or emotional reactions to what was captured, at the greatest possible risk, almost 80 years ago.

That makes for a documentary that is grimly clinical, as if the viewer, like the filmmaker, is holding that blow-up transparency at arm’s length over a scene to recreate it and imagine the horror that went on there.

“From Where They Stood” lacks the pathos or the damning condemnation of the best Holocaust documentaries or of the Spanish drama about one such in-camp witness, “The Photographer of Mauthausen.” It plays like a piece of scholarship and forensic evidence for the next “Holocaust Denier” trial.

Yes, this happened. Here are the photographs confirming survivor testimony and validating the production design of the many cinematic treatments. And here are the stories of those who took the photos, half a dozen men and women, risking their lives to capture images that would prove what happened to them, even if they didn’t survive.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Christophe Cognet, Pamela Castillo Feuchtman, Harry Stein, Corinne Halter, Tal Bruttman and Albert Knoll.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christophe Cognet. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:55

“Minions: The Rise of Gru” ate up over $10 million Thursday night, added another $38 million Friday and seems to be rolling to a $100 million weekend, $116-130 million by end of business Monday, July 4.

By comparison, Pixar’s “Lightyear” will finally clear the $100 million mark by mid-weekend, with the Universal/Illumination comedy (which “Lightyear” was not) basically doubling the earlier film’s opening weekend.

“Elvis” in on track to clear $20 million on its second weekend, which puts it behind Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” on track to hold more audience, weekend to weekend, than any film this year. “Maverick” will rack up another $23-24 by Sunday, nearly $27 million by midnight Monday.

“Jurassic World Dominion” will clear $15 million this weekend, after the dust has settled.

More on this as Friday night’s and Saturday’s presale numbers roll in.

Steve Carell gave away the game about “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” during his interview with Seth Meyers the other night. It’s not just a movie for kids and their parents, but “grandparents” might give some thought to volunteering to take the grand-tykes to this one.

It’s set in the ’70s. The Minions have always gotten laughs by singing their screwball gibberish versions of “original hits.” See the above clip from “Despicable Me 2.” As in the earlier films, most of the needle-drop musical moment laughs in it come straight out of that garish, dopey, “classic rock” era. And they can be hilarious.

These songs have become enduring motifs that cross generations, with even “OK, Boomer” 20 year-olds recognizing, or almost recognizing them. Some have been used in scores of movies and are so omnipresent that they’re in our DNA.

What’s that melody that’s a ’70s Minions version of “Whistle While You Work?” It’s this one, only sung in gibberish.

The setting of “The Rise of Gru” is ostensibly 1976. Disco! “Funkytown” time, K.C. and the Sunshine Band have their moment, as does this unlikely hit from a mirror-ball/polyester era.

The ’70s were a great era in soul music, generously sampled in the background and foreground, often played for ironic laughs. “Hollywood Swingers,” Miss Diana Ross…

Like many of the songs slapped in there, Universal and Illumination used cover versions. Most of us prefer the originals.

And what’s a classic rock era comedy without some actual classic rock? Credence Clearwater Revival, “Black Magic Woman,” “Cat Scratch Fever,” Steve Miller and hell’s bells, this little taste of Bowie and Mott the You-Know-Who.

There’s a lot of music that doesn’t fit the era, “Sabotage” by Los Beastie Boys, And RZA playfully plays a Hendrix look-alike biker who figures in the plot, so his “Kung Fu Suite” features in the score. This one is covered on the soundtrack, but begins in its original Karen Carpenter alto in the film.

A cover of “Instant Karma” here, a Minions-gibberish funeral ballad there. This song first popped up in that context, sung by the original bad boys of rock, way back in the Boomer classic, “The Big Chill.” It’s still sad in such a setting, but the gibberish makes it amusingly ridiculous.

“Rise of Gru” has those tunes, and more, used mostly for laughs. Fold in a few hundred sight gags, manic action, jokes and punchlines.

“Don’t CHEESE me, bro!”

The payoff is, as I called it, “a film of demented genius,” and that Variety rightly labels “the funniest movie of the year.”

OK, Boomers. What’re you waiting for? Sure it’s a cartoon, but you don’t need the grandkids to have an excuse to go. OK, maybe you do, so here it is — that excuse.

Screenwriter Yuri Baranovsky and director Mark Meir don’t go to any trouble at all in hiding their appreciation for, homage to and theft from Jordan Peele’s blockbuster, “Get Out.”

So it’d be remiss of me to not talk about the tribute that “The Summoned” is. It’s obvious in its borrowings and it’s a polished-enough horror thriller that it’s not an embarrassment to its antecedent, so there’s nothing “spoiler” about mentioning its similarities. It’s “Get Out” without a big studio behind it, without so much as a single “name” in the cast and without the potent racial messaging of Peele’s break-out film.

An attractive young couple (J. Quinton Johnson and Emma Fitzpatrick) make their way to a remote mansion for a self-help couples/therapy weekend with the hottest self-made guru going.

Their host, we’re assured, is “eccentric…He has changed people’s lives.“

Lyn (Fitzpatrick, of “The Social Network” and “Take Back the Night”) is a pop star who goes by Joplin Rose and is shallow enough to be thrilled to be in the exclusive care of the West Coast’s most idolized guru. Elijah (Johnson of “In the Heights”) is an aspiring musician but full-time mechanic who came along for this “white people s—” just to advance their relationship.

On arrival, the florid Dr. Justus Frost (Frederick Stuart of TV’s “Empty Space”) sells them on taking the chance to “alter what is possible in your and your lives,” as everybody realizes just how “exclusive” this place is. Only movie star Tara (Angela Gulner) and, unbeknownst to her, her rich and famous author/ex-husband (Salvador Chacon) are staying there as well.

Everybody’s “just trying to be less broken,” or “working on our couples’ ‘stuff'” or “If I could marry cocaine, I WOULD,” so you’d think they’d be too busy for any intrigues.

But we’ve already noticed that the place has no staff, that efforts to separate the one couple that’s currently “together” are part of the “cure.” Elijah keeps seeing this scary looking local (director Meir) who responded to their stopping to see if his truck had broken down by stealing Elijah’s necklace.

All is not as it seems.

The cast is pretty good, I have to say, with Gulner nicely vamping up the “sexy and I know it” bit. Stuart affects courtly, Old World or Old South “charm” which any horror fan knows is a cover for “sinister.”

The plot is entirely too predictable, so much in the thrall of “Get Out” that we don’t need to see anything other than the fact that there’s a lone Black man in the cast to sense what’s coming.

No, they’re not identical films and the differences are big enough and the twists different enough that it’s not a spoiler to compare the two. But come on.

Still, major style points to bit player turned first-time director Meir for managing a spooky tone and great atmosphere on a shoestring. He cast well, considering his budget. The plot? Hollywood pro forma, so much so that the homage gives itself away in the damned trailer. That’s no reason to not get another shot, though.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: J. Quinton Johnson, Emma Fitzpatrick, Angela Gulner, Salvador Chacon, Mark Meir and Frederick Stuart.

Credits: Directed by Mark Meir, scripted by Yuri Baranovsky. An XYZ release.

Running time: 1:27

The 16th Century was littered with naval battles that shaped the future.

Lepanto stopped the Muslim Ottomans from overrunning the Mediterranean and then Europe, England saved itself from the Spanish Armada and Korea fended off, if only for a while, Japanese depredations visited upon the peninsula.

This is one of the biggest blockbusters in Korean History. Probably not that much of a hit in Japan. They tend to ban movies that make them look bad.

Well Go USA has “Hansan” for North American release, set for July 29. Wow.

All I ever want out of a movie is a short trip to someplace I’ve never been, or never really “seen,” to get a look inside lives I’ve never lived. The thrills of action films, frights of horror and delights of romantic comedy are just icing on the cake. It’s that immersion in another world and other lives that counts.

“Queen of Glory” is a light indie dramedy that fills the bill on all counts. Set in an immigrant-rich corner of the Bronx, it’s about a Ghanaian-American grad student coming to grips with herself, her culture, her needs, her future and her body type after the loss of her mother.

It amuses, raises the occasional eyebrow and leaves you with the warm comfort of hope that at least somebody might get it together, find a more promising life path to follow…eventually.

Actress Nena Mensah of Netflix’s academic dramedy “The Chair” stars as Sarah, a grad student finishing up her dissertation in molecular neuro-oncology at Columbia U. She’s busy as a teaching assistant, planning a big move to Ohio State and having an affair with a married professor (Adam Leon) who just might be her supervisor and mentor.

And that move? She’s following him as he takes a better job.

So she doesn’t have time for all the family/Ghanaian drama her Dad-back-in-Ghana adds to her life, or that her mother’s always wrapped up in — gossipy, judgy relatives who notice “You’ve been eating,” and “those hips. You OUGHT to be putting them to good use!”

Then Mom dies, and Sarah’s Ohio apartment-hunting and sexual assignations and dissertation and everything else are put on hold. It doesn’t matter that her mother wanted to be cremated. There’s still a Ghanaian version of a wake, food and drink and condolences with lots of “Where’s your mother? Where’s the BODY?” questions. And that’s the tactful question. Most people want to know about Mom’s will.

And the wake is just a “white funeral” prelude for something more elaborate and more traditional to come, something that Sarah’s forced to plan and mount.

Then there’s her Mom’s roomy townhouse, which needs to be sold, and the small business Mom ran for years, the King of Glory bookstore. The added complication of an employee, a scary-looking ex-con her mother gave a second start to (Meeko Gattuso of TV’s “Euphoria”), who has to be told what’s coming, preferably in the gentlest way possible.

Sarah finds herself sucked back into the world she grew up in after they emigrated from Ghana, entangled in the lives of the gregarious Russian-Americans next door, especially very-pregnant mother of two Kaitlyn (Madeline Weinstein). Their noisy, quarrelsome, culture-clashing lives create just the right comic friction with old-friend Sarah.

“Such a big FAMILY,” the white Russians marvel at the wake.

No, “Everybody’s just Black.”

Mensah makes Sarah smart and cute and competent but riddled with insecurities. No, she won’t “get on the scale” to help an auntie weigh a piece of luggage. No, she won’t share that pizza with you, either. Something other than a lifestyle choice has given her a nauseated aversion to raw meat.

And that guy she’s been seeing? She’s waited on him to leave his wife and kids for three years.

So don’t expect her to tidy everything up quickly, because deflecting, aversion and backing away from decisions is her way.

“Queen of Glory” is a movie of vignettes, street scenes, shots of abandoned sneakers, the homeless man pushing a convoy of shopping carts holding all his possessions, the bootleg DVD-seller hawking his wares from a table in front of the closed “African Movies and Music” shop he might have owned at one time. At least he’s still able to make use of the sign.

Mensah fills her film with local color, African percussion groups provide the beat in this immersion in the New York melting pot. She adds other complications to Sarah’s trials. When her Dad (Oberon K.A. Adjepong) flies over for the funeral of his not-quite-ex wife, Sarah can either confront her issues with him or bend to his every patriarchal, sexist and “traditional” demand.

And that ex-con, Pit? He’s complicated the whole store matter not just by being a trifle scary, but by baking “Bible bar” cookies that make the place a lot more popular than your average trinket/CD/bumper sticker and T-shirt filled “book store.”

“Queen of Glory” isn’t some deep, complex interior journey. It’s a take-stock dramedy that bubbles over with sometimes funny, fractious life. I love the way Mensah stages one chat with Kaitlyn in her doorway, pregnant and hellbent on being a good neighbor and hostess to Sarah while in the foreground, upstairs in their townhouse looking down, we’re seeing and hearing bedlam as sisters shriek and quarrel and granny tries to keep the peace.

Not every actor should take that advice, “If you’re not getting the sort of roles you want, write a role you want to play and get it filmed.” Mensah should and did and let’s hope she does it again. And soon.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Nena Mensah, Meeko Gattuso, Adam Leon, Madeleine Weinstein and Oberon K.A. Adjepong

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nana Mensah. A Film Movement+ release

Running time: 1:18

As an ex-radio guy, I’m a sucker for most anything set in that milieu — be it a TV show, play or movie.

When your thriller’s titled “Final Caller,” sure I’ll take a look. It could be the next “Talk Radio,” “Feedback (also titled “Hostage Radio)” or “The Night Listener.”

Look at the sampling of photos I posted above and guess the error of my ways.

“Final Caller” is a gory, shlocky, ineptly-designed, poorly-cast, badly-acted and sloppily-directed splatter film. There’s not one thing to recommend it.

As it is by the director of “Clownado,” I probably shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.

Set in a radio studio that looks like cut-rate podcasting set-up — which is entirely plausible, thanks to today’s technology, but utterly robs the film of atmosphere — starring people who don’t have even the faintest whiff of “screen actor” about them, and shot in ugly close-ups with seemingly every “first take” (blown lines, clunky line readings) making it onto the screen, “Final Caller” is excruciating, first scene to last.

Douglas Epps plays the rage-aholic host of “On Through the Night,” a Western U.S. based late-night call-in show inexplicably “syndicated in 129 markets.”

Epps, as Roland Bennett, doesn’t have a radio voice. Shooting him in full-screen/mouth close-up doesn’t change that. It only makes the white-walled, non soundproofed studio look more like a rented office cubicle.

Roland is shrill, and Epps makes his on-air insults and off-air rages at his producer/call screener (Alexander Brotherton) and “the current but soon to be ex wife” Claire (Jane Plumberg) sound like tirades being read right off the page.

Nobody here has the gift of making dialogue sound fresh, invented in the moment. Even the callers, who have nothing to concentrate on but the vocal performance and the lines they don’t even have to memorize, read their lines by metallic rote.

And then there’s that one particular caller, “let’s just call me ‘The Outsider (Jack McCord),’ a creepy, mansplaining 60ish incel who starts lecturing on Druid rituals and his connection to them as we hear a woman’s stifled screams in the background.

It takes a couple of tries for him to make clear that yes, he’s kidnapping, torturing and murdering women. It takes a couple of calls for the producer, the continuity director (Rachel Lagen) and Roland’s in-studio “guest,” his “soon to be ex,” to convince raging Roland to take The Outsider seriously, and figure out that keeping him on the line is the only way they’ll have a chance to get the cops to track him down.

There’s no sin in a no-budget movie. But it is a sin if you’re not competent enough to hide that fact. This is an ugly looking film, and I haven’t even gotten to the gory power-tool torture and cannibalism yet.

Badly-designed and incompetently-lit, it’s painful to look at, much less sit through.

Most of the cast makes one wonder if writer-director Todd Sheets cruised biker bars looking for the greasy, the 50something, the tattooed and the nose-ringed with an affinity for carny-tart makeup.

Not one of them has the screen actor’s gift. The camera hates them all. Epps can’t pull off the added pressure of playing a “performing” radio personality. I wouldn’t listen to this screeching voice-bot if he was a caller to a talk show, much less the host.

The lines Sheets gives him to shout have a “Google searched” inauthenticity, and were probably as bad on the page as they are coming out of Epps’ mouth.

“Sounds like you logged a few too many hours of World of Warcraft online” in “your mama’s basement,” he cliche-fumes at The Outsider, who has eight victims to sacrifice according to his Druid calling.

I dare say anybody not in the cast or an investor backing “Final Caller” could watch five minutes of this and see exactly why it’s self-distributed. No self-respecting film studio would touch anything this amateurish and ugly with a ten foot power tool.

Rating: unrated, gruesome, explicit splatter movie violence

Cast: Douglas Epps, Jane Plumberg, Jack McCord, Alexander Brotherton and Rachel Lagen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Todd Sheets. An Extreme Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:31

“Kissing Booth” queen Joey King turns avenging angel in her latest, a movie about the Medieval mayhem unleashed when “The Princess” is hellbent on NOT becoming “The Princess Bride.”

Vietnamese action filmmaker Le-Van Kiet and his “Furie” fight choreographer Kefi Abrikh turn the former child star into a short, fiery harpy who slashes, stabs and pummels her way through the family castle to free her parents and little sister from the prince and his mercenaries who have taken them prisoner.

Even if you’ve figured out that the diminutive King will take on anything, from TV’s “Fargo” to “The Act,” from big screen teen sex comedies like “Summer ’03” to the historical tragedy “Radium Girls” and even the horror of “Slender Man,” it’s a shock to see her put through her swordfight paces here.

It’s also a hoot.

Kiet matches her up against mountainous, armor-plated fighting men in duals, three, four or five on one fights, and the character only known as The Princess tumbles, spins, dodges and slices them down to size, just the way you’d expect someone with a height disadvantage to manage it. She starts with the foot, the thigh and the Achilles heel. She cuts them down to her level and they drop like flies.

The Princess wakes up, in her wedding gown, visions of being drugged and shackled her most recent memories. There’s this ignoble noble (Dominic Cooper, perfectly vile) who strong-armed her “pacifist, placator” father (Ed Stoppard, son of playwright Tom) and reluctant mother (Alex Reid) into a kingdom-saving arranged marriage.

When The Princess bristles at this, Julius goes all Brutus on her and her family, unleashing a company of armed thugs on their palace, shackling her and consigning her parents and little sister (Katelyn Rose Downey) to the dungeon. His sidekick/side-piece (Olga Kurylenko), all leather and studded gloves and lethal bullwhip, is there to back him up every evil step of the way.

She wakes up fearing “This is all my fault,” for turning down a perfectly power-mad offer from a charmer whose love language is “I always get what I want.”

There’s nothing for it but to dislocate her wrists to lose the shackles, head-butt her captors and grab swords, ropes, crossbows and whatever else is handy and kill her way downstairs from the tower to that dungeon.

That’s all there is to the plot — fight, bind this or that wound, catch her breath, hide for a moment, and fight again, with flashbacks establishing that her parents, who really wanted and needed a son as successor, let her Vietnamese nanny-companion (the terrific Veronia Ngo of “Furie”) train her in the martial arts she will unleash to turn the Middle Ages into the Dark Ages in a single, savage day.

There’s no sense in working out the weight differential and simple physics of somebody Joey K’s size taking down blokes two or three times her throw-weight. Kiet makes sure there’s no time for that sort of reasoning.

And King and her stunt team do a damned fine job of tumbling, stumbling, strangling and impaling this Fury’s way from one fight to the next. It’s not nearly as frenetic and furious as “Furie,” but it’ll do.

The combat is personal, visceral and vicious — none of this “just knock them out and move on.” On no. One last through slash, brutal bash of the skull or stab in the sternum is in order, to make sure she doesn’t have to repeat herself. The body count is staggering, and can’t help but become a comical running gag here.

The screenplay’s simple point A to point B structure means that the writers, director, fight choreographer and star spent their time working out “gags,” ways to get The Princess out of this fix — yank off those pearls to trip up that mob coming her way — and into the next one.

The dialogue, with King affecting a period posh Brit accent, is strictly of the “Someone needs to teach you your PLACE,” “I’ve heard THAT before” variety.

It’s all eye-rolling, laugh-out-loud action nonsense, and often damned entertaining, another highlight of King’s ever-lengthening highlight reel of a career.

And Kiet turns his American movie making debut into a lean, silly and action-packed showcase. Not to oversell this, but he makes a sort of John Woo statement, with “The Princess” as his version of “Hard Target,” proof that he can take any Hollywood star, any simplistic script, unleash all hell around her and have her come out looking like a badass.

The world’s leading ladies should be licking their lips over the possibilities “The Princess” unleashes.

Rating: R for strong/bloody violence and some profanity

Cast: Joey King, Dominic Cooper, Olga Kurylenko, Veronica Ngo, Alex Reid, Ed Stoppard.

Credits: Directed by Le-Van Kiet scripted by Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton. A 20th Century release on Hulu.

Running time: 1:36

Don’t know if this 20th Century release was ever slated to go theatrical. As Joey King is the queen of streaming, Hulu is a smart place to park our perky pouty badass, star of many a teen romance/sex comedy in these past few years.

It’s fun to see the choices she makes with their newfound clout. “Radium Girls,” and a sort of “Knight’s Tale” riff on the “Princess Bride.”

One thing for certain. Dominic Cooper had been waiting for a foil/leading lady of her simpatico stature for years.

Premieres on Hulu tomorrow. Review shortly.