Movie Nation

“Lara and the Beat” is a shiny bauble of a Nigerian comeuppance comedy, a romp through Lagos affluence, pop stardom, conspicuous consumption and losing it all in a flash.

Well, that’s how it begins. It doesn’t go wholly wrong all at once, but damned if the filmmakers don’t lose the thread and stumble and lurch and pad this thing until their Nollywood film is Bollywood length, without the wit, warmth or content to justify it.

We’re introduced to privileged Giwa sisters Lara (Seyi Shay) and “baby sister” Dara (Somkele Iyamah-Idhalama) at their peak. Lara is the diva to end all divas, a singer, celebrity and free-spender, dismissive of all, ordering everybody around — servant, relative or “friend.” And Dara is some sort of film producer, far more polite and modest, and about to go to graduate school.

Dara’s the one trying to learn the family business, a media company they inherited. But the first board meeting we see her attend is the one the Nigerian IRS raids. Tax fraud. The family’s been pilfering while Lara’s been over-spending.

Nobody mentions how much Dara’s seriously non-commercial movies have been costing. That doesn’t fit our narrative, even though everything else, and then some, does.

Lara’s never bothered to learn the real names of her “servants.”

“Do I look like I care? Of COURSE not!”

She can’t believe the news, which she picks up on Twitter — #Giwagate, #Giwasbroke. Schadenfreude is big in Nigeria, and the country’s resident Kardarshians are getting their comeuppance.

Lara is hit the hardest by all this — the loss of the Mercedes, the house, “my 1,000 pairs of shoes and handbags.” Oh, that proposal she’s expecting from rich beau Jide? Don’t bank on that, either.

Dara’s just trying to figure out what happened, where they can stay the night (“Friends” are all-too-happy to turn Lara down.).

The sisters make mention of “the village” where their family is from, their last reliable relatives (The ones with the company are fleeing town.), but a place “that doesn’t even have WIFI,” Lara whines.

THIS is where “Lara and the Beats” could have gone. Rich, spoiled city slickers humbled and launching their comeback from BF Nigeria might be a trite, tried and true formula for a comedy about the rich who fall into poverty. But often as not, that formula works.

Nope. This script instead takes an equally predictable and far less interesting route, with Lara looking for glory from her travails through Sal, the driver (Vector the Viper) Lara never gave a thought to (or remembered his name) who just happens to be an aspiring writer and music producer himself.

At some point in the latter acts, I lost all interest in this. The forgivable sins of sloppy pacing — too many shots of people entering and exiting Bentleys and Porches, or polishing them, scenes pointlessly staged on a motor yacht to show how the idle rich idle — aren’t a bother when you’re throwing us into Lara’s meltdowns over her plight and her entourage’s’ evil smirks when she hits bottom.

We chuckle along with them.

It’s all the tedious things Dara must “discover” and Lara must figure out that bog “Lara and the Beat” down for the last 70 minutes of its 137 minute run time.

I’ve watched a number of Nigerian films these past few years, partly due to a growing interest, mostly to due to Netflix’s insidious “show you more like that” algorithms. Some were OK, some were “close” but near misses, and a few were indifferent.

“Lara and the Beat,” pretty and shiny as it is, was the first I felt was a serious waste of time.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Seyi Shay, Somkele Iyamah-Idhalama, Chioma Chukwuka Akpotha, Kemi Lala Akindoju and Vector the Viper

Credits: Directed by Tosin Coker, script by John-Arthur Ingram, Kay I. Jegede and 1pearl Osibu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:17

Real life has precious little to do with the latest frights from Blumhouse.

The demons we battle come from within, the “haunting” of a house spins out of the stresses, betrayals and failings of those who live in it.

“The Nest” is a chilly domestic melodrama bathed in the tones of horror, a tale of greed, ambition, deceit and disappointment. Anyone choosing to see it as a parable of the “greed is good” go-go ’80s can do so without stretching to make the point. And for those of us who fret that this point in time is where the Western world went wrong can find hints of that here, as well.

Built on a powerhouse, brittle break-out performance by Carrie Coon (“Gone Girl,” “The Post” and TV’s “Fargo”), it recounts the final acts in an illusion that started to dim before the opening credits and a collapse that seemed destined before the 1987 Reagan stock market crash.

Jude Law, who has been playing working-class over-reachers since his arrival on the screen, is perfectly cast as Rory, smooth as an oil slick, and about as toxic. It’s the mid-80s, and we get just a glimpse of the life he’s provided for his family in New York.

Allison (Coon) gives riding lessons and runs a stable, their son Ben (Charlie Shotwell) seems happy and her teen daughter from an earlier relationship (Oona Roche) is content, near as we can tell. You know teenagers.

But Rory drops “I think we need to move,” on “Al” first thing one morning. Allison is an independent woman, not some “trophy” he plucked out of the American working class. She gives it all away in a single line responding to that entreaty.

“Go f— yourself.”

They’ve moved “four times in ten years,” but he insists that going back to his old firm in London is “the chance to make some real money.”

Even her mother nags her to be more traditional, “just go with it,” and leave the worrying about how this will work and pay-off “to your husband.” Next thing she knows, Rory’s showing them the estate he’s rented, the place he’ll “build you a stable,” the historic nature of the place.

“Led Zeppelin, Led ZEPPELIN stared here when they recorded one of their albums!”

So the bump-in-the-night noises some of them hear are…the ghost of John Bonham? Allison hears them, and Ben? “This place scares me.”

Writer-director Sean Durkin (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”) drops little hints of horror into the proceedings. But he uses that dread-what’s-coming tone to give grim weight to the domestic tragedy that plays out.

Rory’s dismissive of Allison’s desires and quick to throw money around. The seeds of mistrust were there before they ever got on the plane. Durkin lets his camera linger on Coon the moment she has her suspicions confirmed, and Coon lets us see Allison deflate, stagger and buck up for the test ahead with just her shoulders and her eyes.

And she plays the hell out of the nasty, cutting lashing-out scenes that follow.

Rory’s boss (Michael Culkin) might tolerate his swing-for-the-fences swagger, but that doesn’t mean he”ll indulge it.

Law can still make us smell the sweating his characters do when they’re gambling, striving and hoping like hell to keep all the balls they’re juggling in the air just a few moments longer.

“I don’t see markets. I see risk, reward and money!”

The period detail — from the British synth pop to the swank restaurants that still allowed the well-heeled to light up — is spot on.

And the movie itself isn’t bad, a tad circumscribed — limited aims, truncated character arcs. The hints of something less scientifically or psychologically explicable never quite reach the point where “The Nest” feels like a cheat.

This is a living nightmare, one anyone trapped in a situation they’re helpless to remedy will recognize, with a dread anybody living beyond his or her means will feel.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some sexuality, nudity and teen partying

Cast: Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Oona Roche, Charlie Shotwell and Michael Culkin.

Credits: Written and directed by Sean Durkin. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:47

The very definition of “midnight movie” includes transgression. “Bad taste?” Sometimes. “Out there?” Ditto. “Offensive?” Almost a given.

So there’s no sense in holding “12 Hour Shift” accountable for the misfortune of its timing.

A movie about a lethally corrupt nurse, post “Nurse Jackie,” might have seemed timely when it went into production in Arkansas back in the sunny days before the #WuhanDon pandemic. But with nurses across the country dying in the process of doing their heroic duty, many quitting the deadly jobs because of corporate callousness or governmental malfeasance?

Kind of seems “too soon,” or more precisely “too late” to get the reception it might warrant.

Actress turned director Brea Grant (TV’s “Eastsiders”) serves up a pungent, gory goof of a nurses-gone-bad comedy, dark as dirt and corrosive as Clorox. Veteran actress Angela Bettis, who was in that TV version of “Carrie” in 2002, is Mandy, remote, cynical and on probation in 1999 in the small city hospital where she is about to “work a double.”

She smokes. She stalks the halls with purpose, her quick-march set to a percussive “Whiplash” score, checks her watch constantly, and not because she’s taking anybody’s pulse. She’s quick to dismiss the hospital’s resident hypochondriac or tell off a colleague.

“You chipping in for flowers?”

“Probably not.”

This misanthrope’s bedside manner might include a smile we literally watch her paste on when she thinks it’ll work.

An elderly man on dialysis muses “Have you ever smelled sadness?”

“Only every damn day.”

Mandy’s got to watch herself, being on probation and all. And that’s tough, because there’s a side hustle she’s running in these healing hauls. Mandy harvests organs from the newly-dead, bags them up and sells them on the black market. The implication is, that Mandy sometimes “helps” them die.

Arkansas, amIright?

But on this night, bringing her ditzy-blonde cousin-by-marriage (Chloe Farnworth) into the scheme blows up in her face. Someone she cares about has OD’d. And there are cops in the place because a convicted murderer, played with his usual gusto by David Arquette, tried to kill himself — probably before his eventual execution. Arkansas cannot have that.

A scrambling, bloody and comically horrific night ensues.

Writer-director Grant serves up acrid Southernese dialogue in an ice-cream scoop here, having the various “types” take their stereotypical moment to preach a sermon.

“I don’t like it when people call women ‘nuts.’ I’ts just an excuse to belittle their problems. Mental health is NOTHING to belittle!”

A colleague earns an eye roll because “She only reads the Bible — and those ‘Good News’ bulletins that folks leave on your porch when you don’t answer the door.”

What lets Grant down in the lack of urgency this eighty-eight minute nightmare. This story should sprint by, and the director takes her cue from her star. Bettis, while fascinating to watch, half-deadpans her way through this, which is fine. Mandy never gives away panic. Also fine.

But when the crap starts hitting the fan, when dire legal or deathly consequences face her, maybe this drug-snorting “angel of mercy” should feel a need to get a move on. She never does.

A movie that saunters through heartless murders, organ removal by nitwit, mob threats (Mick Foley is the main heavy), bystanders killed or badly hurt, family members freaking out and the last patient you’d expect fighting back is a movie that has pacing problems.

If this “12 Hour Shift” sprinted by, we could forget how nasty it is to nurses, at least while watching it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity.

Cast: Angela Bettis, Chloe Farnworth, Nikea Gamby-Turner, Mick Foley and David Argquette.

Credits: Written and directed by Brea Grant. A Magnet/Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:28

Novelist Donald Ray Pollock narrates the film of his “hillbilly Gothic” saga, “The Devil All the Time,” from start to finish — and all points in between.

His is an authentic Appalachian voice, and when I pick up the book, I expect to hear it on every page, with every omnisciently-narrated line.

But narration on the printed page and voice-over narration on the screen are two entirely different beasts. And Pollock’s incessant restatement of what we can see with our own eyes, his portentous intoning about the obvious, drags and drags this wallow of rural corruption, perversion, pathology and superstition to a halt.

“Serial murderers aren’t the most trusting kind.”

It’s a fundamental flaw of the producer (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”) and occasional director Antonio Campos’ film, one that slows its progress and betrays a kind of patronizing remove from the material.

We know rural Protestant America isn’t “salt of the Earth” righteous. We get it thrown in our face on the TV news every day this election cycle. As a grim, two-fisted veteran (Bill Skarsgård) teaches his little boy in “Devil,” “It’s a lotta no-good sons-of-bitches out there.” The movie is full of them. A narrator describing them, when we can what sons-of-bitches they are for ourselves, is just purple prose piling on, without illuminating or explaining them.

How’d these “God fearing” Christians get to be so hateful?

It’s a story of a scattered but connected group of characters from two locales — Coal Creek, West Virginia and Knockemstiff, Ohio, which Pollock called home. We skip through three time settings — 1943, 1957 and 1965 — showing the evil women and men do and have done to them.

Some are preachers, others devout church-goers. And Pollock, whose prose and dialogue is basically Flannery O’Connor with F-bombs — lurid and violent and extreme — preaches a 140 minute sermon of revenge and retribution, not redemption.

Two mothers, a father and a dog are killed in the first act. And things don’t get gentler after that.

The bulk of the story is in the 1965 fictive present, when that boy (Tom Holland), orphaned at nine, has grown up to be the defender of the “pious” step-sister (Eliza Scanlen) his grandmother (Kristin Griffith) raised him with,.

The horrors of his childhood, watching his mother (Haley Bennett) waste away, seeing his father curdle into fundamentalist desperation, soured Arvin on religion. But bullied Lenora still prays at the grave of her murdered-by-her-preacher-husband mama (Mia Wasikowska), and hopes Arvin will be moved by the word. Eventually. But not before he’s applied his late father’s brute-force justice to her tormentors.

A new preacher turns her head, high-pitched voice and ladled-on drawl and all. Hey, he’s got Robert Pattinson‘s sleepy eyes, and that classic English actor’s attempt at “Southern” accent. We get it.

“He’d never win a fist-fight, but he could recite the book of Revelation in his sleep.” Is that a novelistic description, or an author “explaining” the lightweight playing this preacher-predator?

And then there are the “serial murderers” Pollock throws into the mix. Sandy (Riley Keough) is the blonde waitress who has her head turned by “photographer” Carl (Jason Clarke), joining him for his deviant and deadly version of that highway “hobby.”

Only a floozy with a wholly corrupt sheriff (Sebastian Stan) for a brother could get away with what they’ve been doing for years, all along the backroads of West Virginia and southeastern Ohio.

Holland acquits himself admirably in a role that has deeper flaws and more emotional conflict than Spider-Man ever could. Keough, Elvis’s granddaughter, has carved out a nice niche on the trailer trash side of the cinematic tracks.

Clarke and Stan play Appalachian versions of the villains that are becoming specialties. Wasikowska and Bennett are barely in the thing, and more’s the pity.

But we’ve got to show one woman’s murder, because that’s the kind of excess this brand of Gothic traffics in. We need to see a preacher test himself with spiders, because snake-handling is I guess passe in this corner of Appalachia.

Campos spares us no violence, and stops just shy of wallowing in the seedy sexuality, drawing such scenes out in a way that, with all that narration, makes “The Devil All the Time” unfold at a miniseries pace. The tendency to explain every character’s fate, and in graphic detail, betrays a literal attention to the novel that feels burdensome.

There are deaths we don’t need to see, fates we don’t need to know, scenes that don’t move the story forward.

A little mystery and a lot less narration would have better-served this sordid saga.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, bloody/disturbing images, sexual content, graphic nudity, and language throughout

Cast: Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keough, Haley Bennett, Jason Clarke, Eliza Scanlen and Sebastian Stan.

Credits: Directed by Antonio Campos, script by Antonio Campos and Paulo Campos, based on the novel by Donald Ray Pollock. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:18

This one comes out Oct. 6.

“Spiral” is a cleverly-conceived riff on familiar horror themes, an attempt to make a gay “Get Out.” A same-sex couple moves to suburban Illinois with one partner’s teen daughter, and weird, scary things begin to happen.

But this film, not to be confused with the “Spiral” movie from “The Book of Saw,” starring Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson and due out next year, doesn’t quite come off. It traffics in too many false frights, leans heavily on lapses in logic and loses its way when super-naturalism kicks in.

Aaron (Ari Cohen) and Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) figure this fresh start — a move to boost Aaron’s career — is just what they need, the peace and quiet of small town life.

Kayla (Jennifer Laporte), Aaron’s daughter from his just-ended marriage, is an eye-rolling teen who doesn’t judge her dad’s new love. Malik, a younger man who came out early and grew up to be a writer, appreciates that.

“Choosing to live your life loud and proud is about the bravest thing you can do in this world.”

But “this world” is ready to put that to the test. Vintage cars and an ancient, homophobic Patrick Buchanan red meat “values” speech on the radio tell us this is the mid-90s. The first neighbor (Paul McGaffey) they meet is elderly and seemingly hostile to this same-sex/different races couple.

Aaron may head off to work each day, and Kayla takes her shot at being the exotic ” new girl in school,” but Malik is at home — tapping away on a PC, “ghost writing” the biography of some academic shaker and mover.

And Malik hears and sees things. He comes back from a job and finds a slur painted on the living room wall. He notices the starchy looks, even from neighbors (Chandra West, Lochlyn Munroe) who make an effort to seem ‘friendly.'”

“We don’t have any of you in town.”

Malik is, as we say these days, “triggered.” He has flashbacks to a hate crime of his youth. He gets more “warnings” and…he doesn’t tell Aaron any of this. He simply confides to an old friend from his “single” days, and has an alarm system installed.

Director Kurtis David Harder (“Kody Fitz”) struggles to make this story an “Is it real or is this all in his head?” thriller, and have it all make sense. Apparitions, a glimpse through a window at a strange ritual, a “clue” that prompts a search through the archives, it all fits together but doesn’t do so gracefully.

Bowyer-Chapman, of the Lifetime series “Unreal,” and Cohen (of the “It” movies) bring a warmth and familiarity to their couple, with hints of a “swinging” period in the relationship. With such intimacy, though, the lack of a reasonable explanation for Malik’s keeping his growing fears a secret is jarring.

The villains are mild-mannered archetypes, and thus never fool us for a second.

Bowyer-Chapman has to carry the film, and he does — believably depicting Malik’s loosening grip on reality, not seeing what the viewer has leapt ahead to conclude.

But for all the unraveling psyche and worst-fears-realized stakes, there’s not much suspense here, and little to grip the viewer and draw us in.

As the film crawls toward its conclusion, there’s a sense that the “Spiral” here is going straight down the drain.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, Ari Cohen, Jennifer Laporte, Chandra West, Lochlyn Munroe and Paul McGaffey

Credits: Directed by Kurtis David Harder, script by Colin Minihan, John Poliquin. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:30

Here’s a sadistic Spanish thriller that begins dark, turns darker and ends darkest of all, with unhealthy servings of paranoia and claustrophobia along the way.

Mario Casas (“The 33”) is Angel, “The Paramedic” (“El practicante”). And Angel first gives us a hint that he’s not an “angel of mercy” in this odd peccadillo he’s picked-up on the job.

He keeps souvenirs from car crashes he responds to — women’s sunglasses. Locks them in a cabinet in the apartment he shares with leggy, blonde and French Vane (Vanessa), played by Déborah François of the indie Western “Never Grow Old.”

Angel is a sullen type, barely tolerating his too-chatty driver/partner (Guillermo Pfening).

But “souvenirs” aren’t the only sketchy thing he does on the job. He robs the dead and sells their jewelry to a fence.

The loving relationship he thinks he has with Vane is tested by their attempts to have a baby. She is gorgeous, keeping odd hours, taking veterinary school classes and getting texts she makes it a point not to respond to when he’s around.

“El guapo Roberto,” Angel hisses (in Spanish, with English subtitles). “The one you dress up for to ‘go study’ with!”

So Angel does what any loving partner would do when faced with this suspicion about the woman who wants to have a baby with him. He acquires spyware that allows him to listen in and watch her through her phone, check her texts, the works.

And then he has a wreck in the ambulance, putting him in a wheelchair. This doesn’t improve his temperament or paper over the huge flaws in his personality. How will their lives change? Will he adjust? And what about the baby plans?

Director and co-writer Carles Torras (“Open 24h” was his) keeps the foreboding in the foreground, and only dangles the occasional moments of hope that all will be well and that everybody here will find some measure of contentment.

The second act post-accident turns in the tale aren’t that far-fetched, but the third-act twists are. We aren’t properly set up for the war-of-wills “The Paramedic” evolves into.

Casas wears Angel’s bitterness like a Halloween mask. We “get” that this guy’s a dark, unsavory sort from the start. And yet Vane does not. His “No Losers in Heaven” Jesus t-shirt, post-accident, is the closest the movie comes to telling a joke — an ironic/acidic one, but there you go.

I like the ending probably more than I should. And the milieu — this world of after-hours accidents, emergency rooms and calls for the old and dying — is thinly developed, and only grappled with in the opening act.

But regardless of preliminaries, “The Paramedic” builds up to a fine, furious finale that atones for some of its first and second-act sins. It’s a mixed bag of a thriller, but short enough that one doesn’t have a lot of filler to shake off to appreciate how bleak and appropriate that conclusion feels and plays.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, drugs

Cast: Mario Casas, Déborah François, Guillermo Pfening

Credits: Directed by Carles Torras, script by David Desola, Hèctor Hernández Vicens and Carles Torras. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Call it “Adult erotica” fiction, or adult erotic romances, but chances are, you hadn’t heard this literary genre mentioned in polite company. Then “Fifty Shades of Grey” blew up the best seller lists and the motion picture box office.

And that opened the floodgates, not just on wider cultural exposure, but on the literary dreams of scores of would-be authors — women, mostly. All of a sudden, their ambitions to join the gold rush and culture shift that turned fiction of the Harlequin Romance variety into “rape fantasy” erotica were within reach.

Thanks to self-publishing and the playing-catch-up publishing industry, “Mommy Porn” became all the rage. And thanks to the Internet, women from all walks of life could get their work published and let the online marketplace decide if they deserved careers.

No middle “men,” no publishers-as-gatekeepers, no limits.

That’s the story that sweeps through “Naughty Books,” the playful feature documentary directing debut of Austin Rachlis. She got access to authors, famous and/or notorious, publicists and publishers, agents, booksellers, bloggers and academics and has them tell the story of this literary moment — “wish fulfillment fantasies” meet “feminism.”

Writers like Laurelin Paige, CJ Roberts and others playfully bicker about whether or not they’re writing “porn.”

“Well, it is a LITTLE porn,” one laughs. They can joke about being “the girl that writes dirty books” and whether or not any member of “my Catholic family” or any other relative should be reading their tales of “really good sex” and “the magic, the healing power of a billionaire’s orgasm.”

Oh my.

Writers of real ambition — Jamie Blair had a home in Young Adult fiction before taking on the name Kelli Maine and trying her hand at erotica — struggle with being dismissed for writing in this genre, even as readings (set to animation) from their works show flashes of genuine writing talent.

“Nobody wants a lot of plot with their sex.”

Rachlis takes us to a Vegas convention where erotic romance writers and sex toys and male strippers are on display, and we get a generous sample of how they’re a lot like their fans — “curvy,” salty (f-bombs), often rural and looking for a little escape.

But Rachlis gets into not just the industry that they’ve upended, but the fickle tastes of the public (Fame here can be like “youtube celebrity,” short-lived.), the “freedom” of self-publishing vs. the demands of major publisher book contracts to the flipping of gender roles in their often traditional, suburban marriages.

Some of those marriages end. A husband recalls the depression he felt upon realizing “We no longer needed my income.” One of the divorced authors allows that “The more successful I got, the less successful he got.”

One writer tears up over what she gave up to be a success, another takes a hard take-stock look — with friends — at the sales math and shifting to “darker and dirtier” tastes of readers, and a third decides she’s done what she can with it and backs away from this world.

The academics are here to put this “fad” into perspective, to praise the way these women have leveled this one corner of publishing’s playing field and warn about the dangers of “rape fantasies” in such fiction.

All in all, “Naughty Books” is a pretty good introduction to a publishing and reading phenomenon that came after Harlequin Romances. Here are women writing, publishing and purchasing books by women, for women and taking taking inspiration from the women who came before them.

“After I read ‘Twilight,'” one writer admits, “I thought if SHE could do it…”

Cast: Kristen Proby, CJ Roberts, Laurelin Paige, Kelli Maine (Jamie Blair), Glorya Hidalgo

Credits: Directed by Austin Rachlis. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:22

A LOT of famous to famous-ish voices populate this 2018 BRON Studios/Canadian production, just now heading into release.

James Marsden and Rosario Dawson, Jane Krakowski, Nathan Fillion, Rob Riggle and Alfred Molina, anyone?

“Henchmen today, supervillain tomorrow.”

It seemingly had a limited theatrical release, but gets a “virtual cinemas” release on Oct. 9.

“No Escape,” a “Saw” like murder-puzzle thriller originally titled “Follow Me,” hits enough of its marks to earn a “not half bad” label.

It may not do the best job of putting-us-in-the-hero’s predicament. But as for the grisly chills and suspense presented by that predicament, it delivers the goods.

Keegan Allen of TV’s “Pretty Little Liars” is Cole Turner, a gonzo “Escape Real Life” vlogger/adrenalin salesman. He, with his team, promises to “take you somewhere you’ve probably never been” seeing and doing something “you would never do.”

He’s accomplished at selfie live-streaming and a master of hype. All he and “American Gladiators” tough Samantha (Siya from “Sisterhood of Hip Hop”) and his right-hand man Dash (George Janko) have to do is make each hyped-to-hell adventure more gonzo than the last.

And this Moscow outing, to this “next-level-loaded” Russian oligarch’s escape room complex, promises to be just that. Bringing along girlfriend Erin (Holland Roden) and “my best friend in the world” Thomas (Denzel Whitaker of “Black Panther” and “Cut Throat City”) ensures that it’ll be like a vacation, right?

The odd edgy/violent encounter with foes of their host, a hipster parody of a young Russian oligarchy (Ronen Rubenstein) doesn’t harsh Cole’s hype.

“I don’t know why everybody s–t talks Russia. Besides the guns and gangsters, it’s not that bad” he uploads onto his site.

There’s all this sketchy stuff going on around them, but Cole only has eyes for his audience. A visit to a lavish Russian nightclub is just “Whoa, so much CONTENT” to him.

The puzzle? He and his friends will be parked in “Bolshevik Prison,” with each of them in a cell in a torture device — The Rack, the Iron Maiden, a glass booth filling with water, an electric chair. Cole has to puzzle them out of these fixes.

Writer-director Will Wernick, whose previous film was titled “Escape Room,” tries to write around repeating himself here. The first act introduces us to this scary, alien world (Nobody in the crew speaks Russian, no subtitles are provided for the viewer, either.) where “they don’t have the same rules.”

Cole is all “I wonder if Alexei got that” harrowing moment on camera, self-absorbed and chill.

“Relax, bro, it’s a game.“

The first act set-up does its job of laying out the terrain, the players and the stakes.

The escape room takes up the middle act. That middle act — where one “clue” is hidden in a fresh corpse Cole must dissect — is where all the suspense and the few inventive touches to the script reside. It’s where the quintet journey from “just a game” to “What just happened?”

It’s the third act where “No Escape” loses its way, becomes even more generic than the “Saw” inspired puzzles and lapses into something a lot more like “Hostel,” and a limp imitation of it at best.

Most of the characters are badly under-developed. Even Cole is painted in broad, simplistic strokes. Putting glasses on Thomas makes him “the smart one.” That’s lazy screenwriting.

The Russians in the cast are here for their generic hulking menace.

It’s a step up from “Escape Room,” but “No Escape” shows Wernick’s uphill battle to make a mark in the genre. There have been other movies titled “Escape Room,” and others titled “No Escape.”

He’s a writer-director in a trap of his own typing.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence, grisly images, pervasive language, some graphic nudity and brief drug use

Keegan Allen, Denzel Whitaker, Holland Roden, Ronen Rubinstein, George Janko, Siya

Credits: Written and directed by Will Wernick. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:31