Movie Nation

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

And you thought Canadians were nice. Well, aside from the hockey players and seal killers, I mean.

Here’s Woody, playing a torturer/killer from you-know-where, and of course Kevin Hart’s the EveryLittleMan confused for him who has to pretend he enjoys this sort of thing.

As do we all.

June 24, right after my Netflix subscription lapses. Could be funny, although sick and twisted and hammy seem safer bets.

An $85 million second weekend has turned “Top Gun” into Tom Cruise’s biggest US hit ever. It should clear the $300 million mark by Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.

Boffo overseas, of course, but even Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” career-savers didn’t dominate the way The Return of Maverick has.

“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” has dazzled, with another $8.8 million on its fifth weekend. That puts it over $388 million. Will “Maverick” hunt him down and bring him to heel?

“Bob’s Burgers” isn’t doing great, even for a cult animated TV series for adults adapted into a movie. Under $5 million on its second weekend, a 61-70% drop off from its opening.

The original animated caper comedy “The Bad Guys” is a reminder that even non-Pixar “original” animation, when done right and aimed for kids, is still the smarter bet. It earned another $3.3-4 and might come close to the $100 million mark before “Lightyear” from Disney/Pixar eats its lunch.

“Downton Abbey” is doing decent business for a period piece/sequel/TV adaptation-continuation. It earned another $3 but will be very fortunate indeed to reach $50 (it’ll have cleared $35 in North America by Sunday night).

The Indian wide(ish) release “Vikrum” did better on its opening weekend than David Cronenberg’s latest, “Crimes of the Future.” “Vikrum” will have netted $2.1 by Sunday night.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” will have cleared $60 million by Sunday night. Another $2 million or so this weekend add to its total as A24’s biggest hit ever.

“The Lost City” is winding up its run, with another $1.3 million. It should end its theatrical run at around $110 million.

Neon’s “Crimes of the Future” did less business than “Vikrum,” which was only on 2/3 of the screens David Cronenberg’s latest is on. $1.17 million, a tenth place finish on opening weekend. This is what a marketing failure looks like.

A wealthy, 60ish husband is getting nagged by his wife in their United Arab Emirates mansion. She’s heard of a husband who built a mosque in loving tribute to his late wife.

Doesn’t her husband love her that much?

“Great,” he says. “I have land and I’m ready to start building.” Pause. Smirk. “The rest is on you!”

And there it is, ladies and gentlemen and Albert Brooks and anybody else “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World” — a marriage joke complete with set-up, punchline and laugh, all in Arabic and courtesy of the Egyptian comedy “Emergency Travel.”

It’s a broadly-played and simple “fish out of water” farce about mistaken identity, miscommunications, a search for a “father I never knew” and Egyptian bumpkins suddenly ensconced in oil money luxury.

Habib Ghuloom is the lead, playing a mouthy, not-wholly-broke Cairo “Doctor…” of computer, cell phone and vacuum cleaner repairs.

“There’s nothing wrong with your vacuum,” a complaining customer is told after passing on his spouse’s excuse for dirty floors. “There’s something wrong with your wife. You should marry another one, or just replace her!”

The jokes are corny and old-fashioned and way out of date, by Western standards, which explains the film’s G-rating.

A friend’s “business opportunity” has them wondering where they can round up some cash. “Maybe ask your Dad” over in the Arab Emirates, the friend suggests. Nope. Dad’s dead.

But later, “Doctor” Faris hears a confession from his late mother’s sister, Aunt Shushu (Badria Tolba). The father he never met “isn’t dead.” His mom only told him that as the final lie in a long-running effort to “shame” the man who never supported them.

There’s nothing for it but for Faris to fly to Abu Dhabi and find his father, based on sketchy instructions the flaky aunt passes on. And when those fail, there’s nothing for it but Aunt Shushu to fly over and “help.”

There is barely a laugh in a whole mistaken for a “real” doctor and expert on “The Common Arab Market” idea (Doctor Faris decides to LOUDLY wing it when asked for a “presentation”) that begins with an airport limo pickup and ends with Faris kicked out of an out-of-his-league luxury hotel.

He’s always griping “What Indian film is this?” as if his comic complications could only come from the country whose comedies most easily translate for the Arab world.

The search has a few “Around the World with Netflix” examples of what passes for comedy in Egypt and the Arabic.Middkw East m. One possible prospect for the long lost Dad lists his wives, one of whom is Chinese.

“When you married the China woman, did you BREAK her by accident?”

Aunt Shushu just howls at her own knee-slapper.

I got a little chuckle out of the “Beverly Hillbillies” third act, when they’ve finally located the rich man and proceed to upset his posh lifestyle with their modest, working poor ways. Aunty is “corrupting” and teaching lost-dad’s daughters how to properly pick, court and marry a man, when their father would rather do the picking for them.

Much ululating and laughing ensues at the old fashionwd old man’s expense.

There isn’t enough comedy that translates and travels in this Egyptian effort. But its general lightheartedness sets you up to be pleasantly surprised with the occasional out-of-nowhere giggle.

Rating: TV-G

Cast: Habib Ghuloom, Issa Arab and Badria Tolba

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nasser Al Tamimi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:20

Imagine Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” staged and cast by gangster-obsessed Martin McDonagh and set to the music of Morrisey, imitating the work of Jonathan Larson.

That’s my best shot at describing “The Score,” Malachi Smyth’s debut feature about two mobsters waiting for a “meet,” with one of them falling in love and singing duets with the waitress at the remote cafe where things are about to, as they say, “go down.”

The structure has a tried and true sturdiness to it — tensions rising and tempers flaring as an annoying, impulsive tough guy and his meaner partner get on each other’s nerves about the dangers to come. The execution is novel, fascinating and just musically/romantically entertaining enough to not totally muck up the suspense that’s built in.

Will Poulter (“The Revenant”) and Johnny Flynn (“The Outfit,” “emma.”) play the criminal minds waiting for some sort of cash split. Troy (Poulter) is a brute who fancies himself a an English wit. He prattles on about words with multiple meanings — “sacked” and the like.

This “score” they’re about to make might involve “settling old scores.” And as the opening split-screen sets up their meeting and their goals makes clear, this “score” will be musical, as every now and then characters break into song — sometimes solo, sometimes in duets, occasionally acapella, often accompanied by offscreen musicians.

Troy’s brother is in prison. He kept all the money he and Mike (Flynn, who also composed the music) had from their “jobs.” Now, there’s some sort of split involving third parties whom Troy has never met.

The younger Troy has problems following the most basic instructions — “Stay here,” Keep quiet,” “Keep a low profile.” Guys like him always have to remind others “I’m not stupid.” He starts a brutal brawl waiting at the pumps at a rural gas station while hotheaded Mike “Mikey” is bullying the clerk inside into undercharging for this, making an exception to the “restroom isn’t for customers,” etc.

Troy further drifts off script when they arrive at the secluded diner where their “handoff” is slated to happen. The sassy, sexy clerk, cook and waitress (Naomi Ackie of “Small Axe” and “The Corrupted”) smarts off about him being “a poet” thanks to his word play. What’s your name? Troy?

“It’s classic,” he says.

“You mean classical,” she says, correcting him for the second or third time in their first conversation.

“You like telling people what they mean, don’t you?”

As Mike insults and glares at “Gloria,” bullying her into changing the diner’s rules just for him, Troy is falling into her smile and sense of style.

Every musical has its “check in” or “check out” point for viewers who are indifferent to the art form. When Troy and Gloria exchange lyrics in their first flirtation/courtship duet, the viewer faces that moment of truth. I went with it.

“I’m burning for thee,” he sings. “Run run run through me,” she replies. “Have a care to fill this vessel of your heart.”

He is smitten. She is smitten. She is wary of this embittered, testy tough guy Troy is paired up with — “He has the air of a wife-beater.” But as they sing in a beached rowboat out back, we get a sense Troy just might change his plans and his destiny for Gloria.

Everybody does his or her own singing, with Ackie and Flynn having the most interesting, soulful voices and Poulter holding his own.

The tunes are pleasant enough, depending on your taste, and no more memorable than most of the melodies Glen Hansard wrote for “Once,” or the vast majority of the work of “Rent’s” Larson or Lin-Manuel you-know-who.

They complement the story and heighten the emotions or the drama, which is all the songs need to do here.

Such “meets” to settle a “score” have a limited number of ways they can come out, but Smyth manages a few surprises in between the tried and true tropes. No, he’s no Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) or John Michael McDonagh (“The Guard,” “Calvary”), or even a Guy Ritchie.

But then, none of those tough guy filmmakers has had the nerve to set one of their mob-influenced morality plays to music, have they?

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Will Poulter, Naomi Ackie, Johnny Flynn, Lydia Wilson and Lucian Msamati

Credits: Scripted and directed by Malachi Smyth. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:40

The folks who made that Beatles dramedy “Yesterday” are behind this Will Poulter/Naomi Ackie/Johnny Flynn musical dramedy.

Flynn did the tunes, too. Looks fun. June 10, theatrical.