Movie Nation

Director Christos Nikou did “Dogtooth,” to that’s worth remembering when deciding whether or not to check out this late June release.

Danny Trejo’s in this wackness on the half shell.

Charlie Clark (Who?) plays a character named Charlie Clark.

With veteran military movie set consultant Dale Dye, Sofia Pernas and Michelle Lee.

June 24.

A Thanksgiving theatrical release with a 1950s Sci Fi vibe.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Alan Tudyck are the only credited voices in this on IMDb at the moment.

Maybe it’s just me, but just once I’d like to see a “documentary” about aliens, mythic creatures, ghosts and the paranormal start from a position of “healthy skepticism.”

Yes, this baseball rolled off a staircase, on camera and seemingly on its own. And yes, the self-trained/self-anointed “experts” brought in a contractor to ensure that “The House in Between” is level, and an electrician to see if he could find no reason lights were/are flickering on and off.

But that doesn’t mean you’re licensed to go straight to “ghosts,” something from another dimension, psychic “energy” stored up in the limestone beneath the foundation and what not.

No, co-directors Steve Gonsalves and Kendall Whelpton, you or anyone else saying on camera “As soon as I came in the room, I felt uneasy,” doesn’t constitute “evidence.”

No, homeowner Alice Jackson, hyping the “fact” that “two mediums, who didn’t know each other” felt “a presence” is some irrefutable “fact.”

And former boxing reporter turned paranormal podcaster Brad Cooney, while video of a faintly rotating chandelier, its shiny shiny brass center capturing the reflection of two doors opening and closing, is a fascinating puzzle, that’s not “well documented” proof of the existence of ghosts.

Lacking that skepticism, with filmmakers hellbent on creating something “sensational” (meh) that fellow believers will want to see, “The House in Between” is never more than an endlessly-hyped collection of “Didjoo SEE that? (We see nothing), “Hear THAT?” (maybe a thumb) moments. Is your “investigation” really “balanced” with a couple of academics — one a foreign born physicist from Jackson State — politely indulging Gonsalves’ credulous questions and assertions, and gently suggesting that maybe “ghosts” aren’t the first “solution” to this puzzling house’s mystery.

“I don’t believe ghosts, I believe science,” a real physicist says, making us wonder why including Cooney’s drawled “It defies the laws of physics” assertion was a good idea.

Keeping the “technology” developed to “detect” spirits and the like at arm’s length was smart. A closer look might reveal how dubious that stuff is, no matter what the ad on eBay promised.

Give these folks the benefit of the doubt and assume this isn’t a hoax. But as curious as a couple of CCTV recorded “incidents” might be, there’s nothing here demanding that the viewer do what the filmmakers and their self-trained experts do — leap to the conclusion that they’ve got “proof” of anything paranormal.

But but, “a famous ‘alien abduction‘ happened”…just uh “three hours” from this house…in 1973. That doesn’t make the sale, any more than the fact that this house is on the Buckle of America’s Gullibility Belt — Florence, Mississippi.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Alice Jackson, Steve Gonsalves, Brad Cooney, John Bullard

Credits: Directed by Steve Gonsalves and Kendall Whelpton. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:20

“Paskal” is a Malaysian Seal Team Six thriller, an action picture that rarely missteps when it’s all about the action, but that takes too many detours into dull, cliched melodrama to recommend.

We see the county’s elite force, formed in the ’80s, deployed against Somali pirates and Filipino terrorists, doing undercover work, and in flashbacks, training for all this where we learn that Malaysian drill instructors are just like DI’s the world over — hardasses.

But the film, which opens with the recapture of a tanker in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia, loses its way through the middle acts as the tired tropes of such action pictures are trotted out — the crisis of confidence one commando (Hairul Azreen) suffers after the death of a comrade, his efforts to help out his dead colleague’s widow (Jasmine Suraya Chin), a finale that includes her being held hostage by a Paskal alumnus who’s “gone rogue.”

Director and co-writer Adrien Teh shows us a lot of commandos, but only a hint of the lives of a couple. He’s more interested in the chain of command, the places they’re sent (UN peacekeepers in Somalia, mobster tracking back home) and their various means of deployment — in an anti-piracy warship, on fast boats and inflatables, by helicopter, parachute and even submarine.

All fascinating stuff to take in as we study the tac gear they’re suited-up in, with multi-purpose eyepiece screen communications (night vision, through-wall X-ray scanner), armor and the omnipresent machine gun-with-silencer, sniper rifle, sidearm and — for the Big Fight — commando knives

Our hero, Amran (Azreen) just wants “to know what my Dad died for,” in Malay with English subtitles.

The sniper, targeted by suppressing fire by one group of terrorists, gets the sole tough-guy one-liner in the script.

“How impudent!”

Once “Paskal” finally slips back into combat for its action-packed third act, we’re treated to scores of terrorists, lots of hostages on an oil rig, a bad guy who used to be “one of our own” (Ammar Alfian), and over-the-top elaborate booby-traps and situations rendered in the “hero vs. villain” or “nick of time” traditions of such films, the obviously fictional exaggerations stuffed in this “inspired by a true story.”

Not half bad, but the bad half is all obvious self-inflicted wounds.

nasty knife fight

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Hairul Azreen, Ammar Alfian, Jasmine Suraya Chin, Tiger Hu Chen

Credits: Directed by Adrien Teh, scripted by Adrian Teh, Chee Ang Keoh, Frank See. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:00

Straight to Paramount+ streaming, June 23. Maybe one half chuckle in this trailer. It’s a different world, you fart knockers.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been fuming at boutique distributor Neon, which was waffling on whether or not to preview screen “Crimes of the Future” in my market, or anywhere near me.

Coupled with a general lack of advertising, this latest outing in oddity from David Cronenberg seemed more likely to be one of those movies that “escapes” rather earns a decently-promoted release.

But after seeing it, I feel the poor marketers’ pain. Sure, they should have pitched this as a horror mindf–k, something the cognoscenti would know to look for and be sure to find. Everybody else? “Hard pass” is putting it politely.

Cronenberg’s dark and cynical vision is “Crash” stripped of the eroticism and extrapolated into the not-distant-enough future. There are nods to his “Videodrome” and “Dead Ringers,” too, for those Deep into the Cinema of David.

It alternates between challenging and unpleasant, and is just dull enough to blur the line between the two.

“Crimes” is a story of a world in which the human senses have been wholly-dulled, with pain and much illness banished and sensations in general in retreat. “Performance Art” has replaced podcasting as people’s mania for attention hasn’t abated. Entropy and cultural decay are reflected in the weathered, abandoned or long gone-to-seed settings (the exteriors were shot in Greece). Surgery has turned faddish, and the human body seems to be evolving in ways that don’t bode well for our survival.

Saul Tensor, played by Cronenberg muse Viggo Mortensen (“A History of Violence”) is a celebrated artist cowled and masked in black, a man who grows tumors by accident, removes them by design — often in public, with the aid of his former doctor, now lover/performance art partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) — and “catalogs” them, which has earned the interest of the unfunded National Organ Registry, staffed by Wippet (Don McKellar) and his assistant Timlin (a breathless, whispery Kristen Stewart), who is a Saul Tensor fangirl, it turns out.

Tensor’s “making art out of anarchy” created in his body, Caprice declares. His Accelerated Evolution Syndrome makes him notorious.

That’s why Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) also eyes him with interest. “Evolution” interests Dotrice, especially since we’ve seen his odd little boy (Sozos Sotiris) smothered by his disturbed and with good reason mother (Lihi Kornowski).

Tell him to “come fetch the corpse of that creature he calls a son,” she tells an intermediary.

Cronenberg’s return to science fiction after a 20-year-plus vacation from the genre serves up his trademark nauseating surgery, sickening eating/vomiting scenes and lots and lots of (mostly) female nudity. The exotic technology displayed in these abandoned-bunker sets, where some live, some work and performance artists perform, is insectoid and under-explained, leaving us to figure out why FutureFolk need the assistance of a rocking, rolling and spoon-feeding exoskeleton chair to eat.

This long-shelved script takes the plastic-choked, notoriety-obsessed and increasingly insensate present into “end game” territory. The world we have is headed towards a future like this, Cronenberg seems to be saying, when old laws and punishments don’t fit new crimes and perversions of humanity.

Well, that’s MY interpretation and I’m sticking with it.

Welket Bungué plays a New Vice cop on the case of what Tensor and Caprice are about, and what he suspects the mysterious Lang Dotrice has in mind for himself and “the corpse of that creature he calls a son.”

That’s a lot of exposition, and it doesn’t cover every character or very many of the situations set up here. The movie’s like that, filled with explanations, begging for still more, and struggling to find something interesting to do with this universe he’s created.

Mortensen is intense, quiet and reflective, Stewart more mannered than usual — her character is practically dry-humping the idea of self-injury as “art” and showmanship — and Seydoux is loving, supportive and naked, which is kind of her thing as well.

Movies that make you come to them are, by definition, thought-provoking. But aside from concentrating and grasping at any actor, character or plot wrinkle that might let us “into” Cronenberg’s world and thought processes, there isn’t anything here that invites, entertains or even titillates.

The “outrage” the picture generates isn’t so much directed at the state of things now dooming us to the state of things depicted here, with the “humanity” of humans somehow at stake. It’s more of the icky, gooey, “What revolting thing HASN’T David Cronenberg shown us in “Scanners,” “Naked Lunch,” “The Fly” and so on?

Which makes most of this review superfluous, when all I really want to say about “Crimes of the Future” is “Yeah? And?”

Rating: R for strong disturbing violent content and grisly images, graphic nudity and some language

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Don McKellar, Lihi Kornowski, Welket Bungué and Scott Speedman.

Credits: Written and irected by David Cronenberg. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:45

The line for the 1130am showing of “Crimes of the Future” starts here, in the parking lot of Raleigh, NC’s Cinemark Grande. Apparently.

Ancient corpses uncovered in a bog haunt the residents near it in “Moloch,” a gloomy, suspenseful thriller from the Netherlands.

Director and co-writer Nico van den Brink makes his feature filmmaking debut an exercise in menacing a mother and her child in a house on the edge of a bog, where archeologists are exhuming preserved but gruesome corpses from many centuries ago.

How might that lead to present-day assaults on the nearby house of an old woman, her daughter and granddaughter?

Consider the title, used in earlier films and on a current TV series. There’s a folk legend celebrated in this town that revolves around an Old Testament entity and practice, something the locals still celebrate and commemorate for some reason.

Where is “Moloch” mentioned? Why, in that scariest and most problematic Book of Leviticus, of course.

Young widow Betriek (Sallie Harmsen) is OK with the researchers now digging holes in the peat. She’ll even help translate — and sugar coat — any concerns the townsfolk have with this team, led by a non-Dutch speaker, Jonas (Alexandre Willaume).

But a couple of things give the viewer pause.

The film’s opening scene is of Betriek as a child — trapped in the basement of the house at the bog’s edge she now lives in — as her grandmother is brutally murdered upstairs. And the blood dripping through the floorboards and even oozing from the walls suggests that was something more supernatural than just a “simple” brutal murder.

And then there was the mysterious “bag man,” a homeless fellow who took to digging his own hole in the bog not far from the archeologists, and died in it.

When Betriek sees something in the shadows outside her mother’s house, her divorced dad (Fred Goessens) is alarmed, even if her mother (Anneke Blok) isn’t. When that “something” turns human and makes his way inside, one of the research team waving a knife and screaming “I’m sorry, I’m SORRY, they’re MAKING me do it,” the jig is up.

The buried might not want to be dug up.

Betriek’s reaction is a mixture of shock and deja vu, and considering the peril — surviving a knife attack, knowing her own past trauma — the most unbelievable thing in the movie might be that she’s not grabbing her child and fleeing, and insisting her mother join them.

There’s a flirtation between Jonas and this laywoman who knows more about this mystery than she’s letting on. Betriek lashes out over not being taken seriously, and lashes out in ways that suggest she’s been triggered by the current trauma reminding her of the past.

As the scientists consider the state of the corpses they dig up and one reads of the traditions they think these corpses might connect to, children act out the folk legend on stage, a clever bit of illustration that advances the plot and foreshadows the finale.

The attacks themselves are the film’s big jolts, more hair-raising than the threat of them, although the apparitions Betriek is seeing would give anybody the willies and send stronger women or men into therapy.

“Moloch” has a fairly conventional plot with story beats and a resolution that will have the ring of familiarity to anybody who’s ever seen a horror film based on a folk tale. But van den Brink and his crew bathe this beast in a gorgeous murky gloom that sets the tone.

And in Harmsen, he’s cast someone well-suited to let us see Betriek’s lighter moments are but occasional respites from a brooding memory of a horrific past, and a dazzling beauty who beguiles and puzzles the scientist ostensibly there to study corpses, but wondering how this stunning blonde connects to them.

How striking is Harmsen? She was gorgeous enough to be a replicant in “Blade Runner 2049.” There’s nothing for it but to admit you can’t take your eyes off her.

Her casting is a major draw in a thriller that would still be interesting, in a genre-appreciating way, without her, lifting this spooky-spirits-of-the-bog tale out of the gloom and into something harrowing enough to feel real.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Sallie Harmsen, Anneke Blok, Fred Goessens, Noor van der Velden and Alexandre Willaume.

Credits: Directed by Nico van den Brink, scripted by Daan Baker an Nico van den Brink. An XYZ Films release on Shudder.

Running time: 1:39

Anybody familiar with his early work has to realize that casting Lloyd Bridges (1913-1998) as a hero was something of a waste. Tough “good guys” are a lot less interesting that tough guy villains as his treacherous deputy turn in “High Noon” proved.

That’s why he was so hilarious in the “Airplane!” and “Hot Shots” movies. Tough can be taken over the top, and boy did he ever. Rewatch his elderly exercise guru on “Seinfeld” and watch Jerry struggle to not break character. “Over the top” came entirely too naturally for Beau and Jeff’s dad.

“Trapped” is a darker-than-dark noir whose Feds-always-get-their-man messaging is so heavy-handed it borders on parody. Voice-over narration repeatedly pounds-home the dogged determination of the Secret Service, chasing down the source of bogus $20 bills, and “the good guys” in the film are so wired (literally) into the underworld types they’re pursuing that they can seem omniscient.

But a young Bridges, Barbara Payton (“Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye”) in her breakout role and director Richard Fleischer (“Narrow Margin,” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “Fantastic Voyage”) managed to turn out a memorable, brisk thriller that is the epitome of the genre the French later labeled “film noir.”

A compact, tightly-framed and efficient opening scene establishes that there are counterfeit $20 bills in circulation as a little old lady is stricken to learn the money she’s passing at a bank is bogus, and that she’s out $20. A hectoring narrator lectures her and us that “people need to learn” to spot funny money, because it costs us all.

The Secret Service, the agency overseeing currency crimes, recognizes the bill as “the old Stuart note,” and somebody is dispatched to check out its printer. “His address is still Atlanta.”

That’s where the counterfeiter’s in jail. Tris Stewart (Bridges) stands out not just because he’s been allowed to keep his sportscoat, black shirt and dress pants in prison. He’s a cynical smartass. How is he responsible for fresh phony $20s?

“You figure I been, uh, floating’em out the window?”

Somebody has his old printing plates, and they’re going to need him to track them down. An elaborate ruse of an “escape” is engineered, with Stuart affecting a real escape by punching out the agent assigned to shadow him.

Bridges is instantly credible as a tough guy thanks to his commitment to the realistic violence of this opening brawl. He slaps around law enforcement and others like he’s auditioning for “Airplane.”

Stuart is on the lam, tracking down his “cigarette” girl girlfriend, Meg (Payton), passing herself off as Laurie Fredericks out in LA. She’s got the attention of another suitor (veteran character actor John Hoyt, oily and vile even early in his career). But it turns out the charmless mug Johnny Hackett is also a Fed.

They’ve been watching Meg/Laurie. They even have her apartment wired. The film follows them as they track Tris and Meg through LA’s underworld, through old associates, to find those $20 bill printing plates.

The conventional story and its docu-drama treatment aside, the thing that grabs your eye straight off is old school cinematographer Guy Roe’s velvety contrast lighting design and put-it-on-a-poster framing. It’s startling to see a B-movie from that era — and with Eagle-Lion distributing “Trapped,” “B-movie” can seem a tad generous — this gorgeous. A few years later, Roe somehow found himself in Japan with Raymond Burr filming the original “Godzilla” with the A-bomb lizard-obsessed Japanese.

The screenplay by Earl Felton and George Zuckerman is a primer in noir hard-boiled. If there’s a pithier noir one-liner than “No cream, Sugar,” and a better guy to deliver it than Bridges, I’ll eat my fedora.

Payton suggests the star she might have become in her grit-beneath-the-beauty, stand-by-her-bad-man performance.

“Trapped” isn’t one of the greats. But Bridges and Payton, Fleisher and Roe turn this Secret Service recruiting docudrama into something special. They pack a lot of story, a set piece fight or two and flinty shootout finale into a tight, era-appropriate 78 minutes that could teach modern screenwriters, especially those trapped in the slow, soap-operatic cliffhangers of “streaming series,” a thing or two about storytelling economy.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lloyd Bridges, Barbara Payton, John Hoyt, Russ Conway, James Todd and Robert Karnes

Credits: Directed by Richard Fleischer, scripted by Earl Felton, George Zuckerman. An Eagle-Lion release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers.

Running time: 1:18