Movie Nation

In the dozen years since his non-starter first feature film, “Virus X,” writer-director Ryan Steven Harris has found his muse. It is his little girl, Haven Lee Harris. He’s made a short with the redheaded moppet, “Every Child is a Dream with Teeth.” And with “Moon Garden,” the editor-turned-writer-director has built a dark and wondrous star vehicle for her.

She plays Emma, a child whose quarreling parents cause a stairway accident that almost kills her. “Moon Garden” is the purgatory she’s trapped in, a “Mommy, I’m HERE!” netherworld of disembodied teeth and stop-motion animated monsters, of faceless demons and Satan-fingered monsters jerking, floating and crawling their way out of toilets, of a concrete rhinoceros that she finds herself riding around in, and of a staticky transistor radio, guiding her via the voices she hears on it.

Mommy (Augie Duke) singing Harry Nilsson’s piercing and poignant “Without You,” a lullaby she’d sing to her child every night, even the ones where she took a shot at bailing out of her unhappy marriage to Alex (Brionne Davis), Emma’s Dad.

“I can’t live, if living is without you.”

Our writer-director hurls a child into horror, but in some ways, she’s too young to know what to be afraid of and what to regard with mere curiosity.

Actors and stop-motion puppets populate this not-quite-afterlife, people dressed-up like Nosferatu, the vampire, a Black man in whiteface giving Emma faint encouragement by plaintively plucking out “With You” on the harp.

Time-lapse sequences capture fruit ripening, dropping and rotting as echoes of her father’s life-lessons advice supposedly guide this four-year-old.

“Every problem has a future…Consider the future. Imagine how to get there.”

The setting for all this is a smokey, steamy steampunk underground, or equally odd Earthly moonscapes as Emma wanders hither and yon, following the radio (supposedly), hearing her parents talk to her “no sign of brain activity” body, passing through smoke and fog and heading towards “the light,” or perhaps just climbing a ladder out of this place and into the next one.

The story is simple, and the narrative still manages to be muddled here and there, especially towards the end.

But “Moon Garden” is a dazzling use of various effects and animation techniques to tell a child’s-eye-view story of purgatory, or something awfully close to it. It favorably compares to the much-more obsessive, and far less interesting, relatable or moving “Mad God.” Seeing this after that decades-in-the-making dystopic horror tale drove home the shortcomings of that obsessive project.

It’s one thing to master the medium and tools of working in it. It’s another matter altogether to turn that mastery into a story work telling, one that doesn’t just impress, it touches and connects.

Thanks to his little muse, Harris has a visually-striking child’s-eye-view of the waiting room for Hell, and an adorable tour guide that we want us to lead us out with her.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Augie Duke, Brionne Davis and Haven Lee Harris

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ryan Steven Harris. A Fire Trial Films release.

Running time: 1:33

There’s a secret language shared by filmmakers and critics, words and phrases that connect an “I’m not sure what I meant” with “I really don’t what know to make of it” when it comes to movies.

The code phrases turn up in reviews and “director’s statements” on obscurant, trippy, diffuse and sometimes pointless films — “Fever dream,” “tactile,” and yes “trippy” give away the game. Nobody, including the person what made it, has a firm grasp on what it’s all about.

“After Blue,” the latest from Bertrand Mandico of “The Wild Boys,” is an oddly repellent, unfathomably thick homage to the “Barbarella/Zardoz” era of filmed sci-fi. A French lesbian Western with futuristic muskets and horses and desert and beaches and a civilization in decline, it’s got nudity and lurid, dank settings and an almost all-female cast — the planet in question, an Earth colony named “After Blue,” had its menfolk die out.

What it doesn’t have is a coherent story, anything that would drive the narrative and draw the viewer into the filmmakers’ universe, his “fever dream.” It’s all eye candy — 1970s vintage.

Perhaps the key to the picture is the name of the buried-up-to-her-neck outcast who promises to grant the young woman, Roxy (Paula Luna) “three desires” (wishes) if she digs her out.

The armed punk girls “Toxic” Roxy hangs with are all about the cruelty, making threats and then running off to frolic in the surf, leaving the outcast to her fate.

But Roxy is intrigued, and maybe it’s the mostly-buried woman’s (Agata Buzek) name that changes her mind.

“Kate Bush.”

Seriously, that’s what Mandico calls this genie/witch with a (Roxy and we discover) “third eye” where her vagina should be.

The screenplay is filled with “Militia” women hunting the outcast, and others — including Roxy’s hairdresser-mom, Zora (Elina Löwensohn) — asking “How could you dig up Kate Bush?” and “Where IS Kate Bush?” and “What does Kate Bush LOOK like?”

“She’s tall, with one hairy arm.” And she kind of rocks Roxy’s world…until the next peak experience comes along, anyway.

The real Kate Bush, a big deal in British art rock for decades whose biggest U.S. exposure might have been the time Eric Idle got her booked as musical guest when he hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1978, will no doubt be amused at hearing her name taken in vain scores of times.

Of course, she’d have to shrug off the “You must kill Kate Bush, in your own way” remarks and the like.

The sets and the bloody-minded search for Kate Bush/venture into emptiness vibe of “After Blue” may take those familiar with its antecedents right back to the early ’70s, which was apparently Mandico’s primary goal.

Cryptic interviews/conversations are rendered in gauzy static shots or dull, diffuse voice over narration.

I got nothing out of its vague “history” connecting people with the Earthly origins of their DNA — Polish, Russian, and Scots-accented English are heard, while most of the many lesbians here speak French (with subtitles).

Roxy isn’t finding answers as she and her Mom set out on their quest, with Mom now an armed hairdresser running out of patience with daughter.

“Kate Bush kills daughters, not mothers! Get that through your big fat bleached skull!”

That’s a hairdresser who has crossed the line and broken the code.

But as these folks wander the wastelands, comment on the state of their horses and stop for dips in DIY hot tubs, the pointlessness of it all vexes and irks so much that you almost want Mandico to cross some sort of PC line when Roxy’s “first man” enters the picture.

Almost. But no.

The pointlessness is the point, and there’s zero entertainment value in that, no matter how many critics throw up their hands and use “fever dream” as a reason to cop out, give it a thumb’s up, and move on.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, gruesome images, nudity

Cast: Paula Luna, Elina Löwensohn, Vimala Pons, Michaël Erpelding and Agata Buzek

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bertand Mandico. An Altered Innocence release.

Running time: 2:08

Yowza.

Nicholas Hoult, Janet McTeer and John Leguizamo also star in this fine dining fall thriller with a horror pedigree.

Of all the promising places “Frank & Penelope” hints at or threatens to take us, how’d they end up at a murderous “sin eater” cult at a combo tow truck service, garage and motel — complete with a tunnel and body disposal pit in the desert southwest?

Veteran character actor turned writer-director Sean Patrick Flanery (now on TV’s “The Boys”) references “Thelma & Louise” directly, “Something Wild” and “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry” and the like indirectly in this sexualized, infuriatingly-talky and slow genre thriller.

Frank (Billy Budinich) quits his job and catches his wife sexing up another man in their house. That’s how he ends up, dazed, in the alley behind that strip club. That’s how he meets a pole dancer (Caylee Cowan, channeling Melanie Griffith). Where ya’headed?

“Away.”

Me too, once, she says.

But “away’ just don’t show up on Google maps.”

You need to meet “Penelope,” she purrs. And thus another soon-to-be-satisfied customer is lured in, $25 drinks and private dance to follow. Frank is smitten. Penelope, “an act” she puts on, she implies — is good.

But he interrupts her and her boss/”boyfriend” (Flanery) as they’re brawling over her getting-too-friendly with a customer, and how much they’re going to steal off Frank’s credit card.

The scarlet woman this meets her first-ever knight in shining strip club armor.

“If a man don’t fly into a rage, he ain’t in love.

Trade the Prius for a ’68 Super Bee, and they’re off. They’re headed for the “the prettiest road in America,” Frank says, the one from “the last scene in ‘Thelma & Louise.'” Has Penelope ever seen the movie? She’s smitten, or damned good at acting like it.

“I gotta freight train’a love, headed only for him.”

Flanery’s script traffics in truck stop philosophy, con artist speeches and horror movie tropes that long ago turned into cliches.

I swear, there are just four run-down desert motels that turn up in every one of the hundreds of thrillers like thus.

Johnathan Schaech (“That Thing You Do”) plays the latest in a long line of “Appalachian sin eaters,” a white-haired cult king, keeping a handful of minions in line by means hypnotic or even supernatural. He’s going to interrupt Frank & Penelope’s odyssey. Permanently?

Kevin Dillon plays a flirtatious, drawling Texas sheriff who wears jeans on the job.

And horror icon Lin Shaye has a cameo as another “short term” guest in that motel, where patrons check in but don’t check out.

Flanery scripted this, and the big laugh in that is that somebody else had the cheek to claim a “story by” credit for this cut-and-paste-from-other-movies nonsense.

A framing device — we’re learning about the romance of Frank & Penelope through his “journal,” read/narrated by Frank’s nurse (Sonya Eddy). He’s in a coma. That conceit is mercifully abandoned once Flanery realized — belatedly — that it’s rubbish.

Cowan (“Sunrise in Heaven”) is the big find here, giving us a doll-voiced minx with a hardened sex-worker’s shtick and a survivor’s instincts. Penelope works her search for “something that makes my thighs twitch” act on every heterosexual male in range, and turns most into putty.

If only this script had found some place interesting to send her and Frank. If only the ending didn’t scream “We’re outta money/time/etc.” If only this crawling, drawling horror saga had gotten to the damned point and made something out of it.

Rating: R for strong violent content, sexual content, brief nudity, language throughout, sexual assault and some drug use.

Cast: Caylee Cowan, Billy Budinich, Johnathan Schaech, Sean Patrick Flannery, Donna D’Errico, Sonya Eddy, Lin Shaye and Kevin Dillon

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sean Patrick Flanery. A Redbud release.

Running time: 1:53

Lorraine Bracco, Keegan Michael Key and Luke Evans also star in this Robert Zemeckia (Remember him?) film.

Sept 8.

Pierce Brosnan heads the supporting cast in this comic book adaptation, part of the DC Shazam thread of comic book storylines.

Oct. 21.

Digital aerial combat has come a long ways since “Red Tails” and “Flyboys,” judging by the trailer of this October release. “Midway” raised the CGI bar.

Those are F4U Corsairs, WWII vintage fighter-bombers, flying missions in the Korean War of WWII vintage U.S. aircraft carriers.

This true story is about a famed Navy combat duo, pilot-and-wingman, who happened to be of different races in what was a first for the U.S. military.

Powell’s one of the hunky young pilots of “Top Gun,” now in theaters, Majors was a star of “Lovecraft Country” and “The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Christian Jackson, Serinda Swan, Joseph Cross and Joe Jonas are also in the cast.

I had to look up this Dutch translation after taking in the tense, suspenseful World War II drama “Riphagen,” retitled “Riphagen: The Untouchable” for its Netflix release.

“Nagelbijter” is the only Dutch word for it — “nail biter.” It’s a gripping, ugly movie built around one of the great villainous Nazi turns. As Bernardus Andries “Dries” Riphagen,Jeroen van Koningsbrugge is more than a hulking, evil presence. He is cunning incarnate, a brute with brains, the ability to read and manipulate people and as utterly ruthless as any death camp commandant or gas chamber guard.

Riphagen was a mob-connected Dutchmen who betrayed Jews and got them shipped to Poland to be gassed. But not at first. No, “I believe I can help you,” he’d purr. You just need to sign over your house, hand over your cash and jewels. Give me the keys to your roadster, your motorboat. Some of it will help pay off the Nazis,” he’d assure them. The rest he’ll “hold. Just…until all of this is over.”

And after he’d won their trust and bled them dry, gotten them to convince friends also in hiding to trust him, only then would their names turn up on SD (collaborationist Dutch State Security) lists so that they could be rounded up and turned over to the Germans.

Director Pieter Kuijpers and screenwriters Thomas van der Ree and Paul Jan Nelissen set out to air some Dutch dirty laundry about World War II and remind us that whatever simplistic treatment it gets in most history books, no Occupied Country came off wholly clean. And the man whose story they use to illustrate this is the very embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “the banality of evil.”

We see Riphagen work his reassuring magic with desperate people fearing for their lives, the ultimate salesman. He poses for photographs with every “client” as a way of reassuring them of his intentions.

Never mind that he and a partner, acting on tips they paid the cops for, carried out these searches and “discoveries” themselves. Once he’s sat down and started talking business, the used car, vacation timeshare or swampland in Florida is as good as sold.

That punching bag he keeps in his office? That’s not just for show. Bald and brawny, he isn’t shy about punching-out or head-butting anybody else who tries to extort or threaten his pigeons.

Konigsbrugge made a brief, memorable impression in “Spider-Man: Far from Home,” just a single scene as a Dutch soccer hooligan. Yeah, he’s credibly frightening.

But he has to suggest nerve and native cunning in this performance, as well. Here’s a man who is commissioned by the Nazis to round up Jews, and who is cheating the Germans out of the loot they expect to collect. Riphagen is condemning civilians to a horrible death, and the Resistance suspects as much and is keeping a file on him.

He has to placate the German Army commander in Amsterdam (Richard Gonlag), who has the power of life and death over him, and keep the police insider/secret Resistance fighter Jan (Kay Greidanus), an idealistic young man who suspects the worst of him, at bay.

The operating principle that separates good thrillers from great ones is that the villain must have a point of view. It’s easy enough to suspect that Riphagen sees shades of grey in his monstrous activities. That’s the side he shows the cute waitress (Lisa Zweerman) he courts and marries. She’s also seen him pummel her abusive, drunken father into behaving better on what amounts to their first date. She can see him as noble.

But as the film reminds us, wartime occupation creates an entire country of double lives. Jan, already living a double life and a married cop, is tempted by a new member of his Resistance cell (Anna Raadsveld). But she is Jewish, compromised and in the clutches of Riphagen. Some day, he’s going to find a way to profit from her “associations.”

One thing that separates this film from similar movies (Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book” and “Soldier of Orange” are two of the best) is that it takes the story past the German surrender and into the murky waters of post-Occupation collaborator-hunting.

Riphagen is cunning enough to disappear. Jan is dogged enough to keep searching. But in the shifting priorities of the returned “government in exile” and the new Soviet threat halfway across Germany, “communists” are as bad as Nazi sympathizers. Mistrust and betrayal are added to a populace where few could claim to be patriots, with the bonafides to prove it.

And all the shifty, smooth-talking, well-connected operators like Dries Riphagen would need to do is rewrite a little history, make things a lot more gray than black and white and convince yet another set of authority figures that they was indeed on their “side.”

Justice could seem a soft-focus pipe dream when compared to the simple clarity of wartime, where suspicion, just enough evidence and a pistol could bring matters to a swift, messy end.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, smoking

Cast: Jeroen van Koningsbrugge, Kay Greidanus, Anna Raadsveld, Lisa Zweerman, Huub Smit, Michel Sluysmans, Sigrid ten Napel and Richard Gonlag.

Credits: Directed by Pieter Kuijpers, scripted by Thomas van der Ree and Paul Jan Nelissen.A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:11

Glib, aged mercenaries face off with an Army patrol trapped with them in an Afghan tunnel in “The Prey: Legend of Karnoctus,” a C-movie that wants to embrace the campy cheese, but never gets closer than arm’s length.

Starring cigar-chomping tough guy Nick Chinlund, who’s been around since “Lethal Weapon 3” and “Con Air,” and the elder statesman of big screen badasses, Danny Trejo (“Machete”), it’s a lightweight mashup of combat film, heist picture and creature feature set in The Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan.

The “combat film” part follows a patrol of GIs as they stumble into a firefight that was provoked by the heist that the geezers — including Adrian Paul, Kevin Grevioux, whose voice is so deep it’s seismic, and Fito De LaParra, who is Trejo’s 70something contemporary — just pulled off with disguises, a tank, machine guns and a machete.

Survivors of the combat patrol stumble into a tunnel where the “special forces” guys — that’s how they identify themselves — have stashed these cases of loot that they just grabbed.

As we’ve seen in the movie’s opening tunnel-dwelling Taliban fighters and chemists snatched by the blue, four-eyed beast they know as “Karnoctus,” things are about to turn even less survivable.

What WAS that?

“Maybe a bear or something?”

Matt Musgrove, Masika Kalysha, Benny Mora, Mingyu Chu and Jacob Charlot are among those playing the soldiers, mostly generic and indistinguishable from each other save for their ethnicity. We give them a glance and figure we shouldn’t get too attached, because somebody’s got to be Karnoctus fodder, right?

We barely have time to note the cute rapport that the 60something Chinlund has with the spry and pushing-80 Trejo when “Vega, ” Trejo’s character, jumps into an army truck and makes his early first-act exit.

Maybe we think, “Hey, they’re going to fetch a “chopper” to haul their loot out? Why don’t they, uh, put the crates in the truck and take it to the chopper?” Maybe not. “Thinking” isn’t what we’re here for.

Don’t overthink the GI who is walking and talking moments after his field-tracheotomy, either.

The beast itself is a dude in a furry suit on all fours who looks like he recovered after Bill Shatner shot him off that jetliner wing.

The frights and fights are standard issue — nothing scary, nothing that fun either.

The first scene Taliban prey joke around and find out. “Are you HIGH?” The GIs try to play things by the book, the “special forces” fakers stage their shootouts to Canned Heat’s “Going Up the Country.”

The mission debrief on “The Prey” is that it’s not remotely exciting or scary enough to be worth a look, and not nearly goofy enough to be “so bad it’s fun.”

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Nick Chinlund, Masika Kalysha, Kevin Grevioux, Matt Musgrove, Benny Mora, Aaron Paul and Danny Trejo

Credits: Directed by The Hensman Brothers, scripted by Matthew Hensman and Gustavo Sainz de la Peña. A Lennexe release.

A dystopian, political, topical and fantastical musical from Africa, “Neptune Frost” is as unusual a film as you’ll see this year.

This Rwandan musical is cryptic and meandering, and easier to decipher than it is to follow. But like an opera in a language you don’t know well, even if they weren’t contorting and embellishing words and phrases in song, “Neptune” cuts through its own noise to speak to uncomfortable universal truths about Life Today.

That device you’re reading this review on? It’s got coltan in it. And chances are, you don’t know and don’t want to know what it is or how it got there. But maybe if that message is wrapped in songs in a colorful African fantasy it’ll go down easier.

In a coltan mine, ununiformed soldiers stand guard over slaves who bust up the rocks and extract the precious mineral. A rifle butt ends one miner’s suffering and prompts a singing protest, with a drum band appearing as magical accompaniment.

“Tekno” is no more.

Neptune, a pan-sexual symbolic figure played by Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja, rejects the “opiate of the masses” words of the preacher that presided over his/her/their friend’s funeral, bashes the pastor in the head and goes on the lam.

A cross-country odyssey that takes us over lakes and through villages ensues, with songs — “terrabytes in C-major,” and poetic speeches about the “free labor” (modern slavery) wrought by “unending war” in the region, wars that lead to “free labor” via “the currency of our depletion.”

Gender is fluid throughout the film as characters travel from “death to other passages,” dropping into dreams where the prophecies of The Wheel Man — a phantom with a bicycle wheels headdress — are delivered.

And how are those amplified? On the world wide web, by a hacker named “Martyr Loser King” who gets the word out that “WE power the system” and “The miner is the POWER source” to a world that just wants cheap cell phones, you guys.

As you might expect from an obscurant film like “Neptune Frost” (You do NOT want to know who ‘Frost’ is.), someone at some point is obligated to narrate, in Swahili, “Maybe you’re asking yourself, ‘WTF is this?'”

Striking, beautiful and beautifully-costumed characters with symbolic names (“Psychology,” “Innocence,” “Memory”) talk in poetic riddles.

“The mountains have not awakened.” “Their fire is our breath.” “The sunlight does not burn the ground.”

“One who swallows cocoanut husks trusts his anus.”

The pacing and deliberately opaque storytelling “won’t be to every taste,” — critic speak for a “challenging” film. But co-directors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyma give us a sci-fi dreamscape, a colorful slice of Africa, lovely multi-lingual music, and a “There’s no such thing as a free iPhone” message in their musical.

That’s quite the hack they’ve pulled off.

Rating: unrated, some violence

Cast: Cheryl Isheja, Elvis Ngabo, Kaya Free, Eliane Umuhire, Dorcy Rugamba, Bertrand Ninteretse, Trésor Niyongabo and Eric Ngangare

Credits: Directed by “Swan” (Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman), scripted by Saul Williams. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:44