Movie Nation

Those old mates, collaborators and comic foils Nick Frost and Simon Pegg go once more to the well that produced “Spaced,” “Shaun of the Dead,” and so forth for “Truth Seekers,” a comic thriller series about ghost hunting in the UK.

And if it’s not as funny as their best efforts, and truthfully not the most original idea ever to pop out of them, it’s still worth a look and good for a few laughs.

It’s a Frost (“Cuban Fury”) vehicle, and he’s well-cast as Gus Roberts, veteran cable/wifi wizard for Smyle, a British telecom service. He’s so good at installations and trouble-shooting that his boss (Pegg) needs him to “train up” a new guy.

That would be “some clueless millennial mouth breather greenhorn.” That would be Elton John, or so his “greenhorn” trainee (Samson Kayo of several British TV series, “Youngers” and “Famalam” among them) calls himself.

Elton’s ride-alongs are how he learns about Gus’s side hustle. He has his own Youtube channel as “The Truth Seeker.” Because going into all these old houses, hotels, “Britain’s second most haunted rectory” and the like means he runs into The Unexplained.

Gus isn’t shy about snooping around and explaining, or at least documenting “the supernatural” wherever he finds it. Now that he’s got a “newb” in younger Elton’s parlance, that means Elton’s roped into these ghost hunts.

Not to worry, “You’re never really alone with a walkie talkie.” That demon-haunted hitchhiker (Emma D’Arcy) they pick up along the way?

“Relax. I’ve got Holy Water in the screen (windscreen/windshield) wash!”

The episodes begin with some supernatural occurrence — a soldier electrocuted into the early warning communications system for The Battle of Britain, the author of a 17th century book of black magic arrested by the Puritan inquisition, the origins of Astrid’s (D’Arcy) terrors. What follows folds today’s house call in with that “occurrence,” and that in turn weaves into the larger story.

The haunting refrain of “The Lincolnshire Poacher” accompanies one story thread, but there’s more going on than the lads at first realize, with a running gag being that things happen just as they walk, backs-turned, to the service van, or miss in the shadows, just out of sight.

Gus’s colorfully cranky dad (Malcolm McDowell, funny) and Elton’s make-up and cos-play obsessed agoraphobic sister Helen (Susan Sokoma), a mysterious secret official (Kelly MacDonald) and others turn up, a few DIY gadgets are trotted out (“electroplasmic spectrometer,” aka “a ghost detector”). And assorted spooks, specters and odd events appear, pointing to some sort of migration of souls (ghostly possession) theory.

The central comic premise is ghost-savvy Gus never letting Elton see him non-plussed, no matter how surprising much of what they encounter might be. Elton? He’s the one whose eyes pop.

“Here we go. You ready?” “NO!” “Come on, you big blouse!”

Frost, as the leading man, plays a toned-down version of his usual amped-up sidekicks, and earns grins for the ways he folds his hands high up his chest over his quite rotund belly. Sight gags — “levitating” dad via one of those stairlift gadgets — are much like the rest of the comedy, hit or miss.

Movie references riddle the scripts. A false wall hiding the entry to a hidden “study?”

“Shawshank!”

And the Big Picture story has a “Heaven’s Gate” connection, the cult, not the movie. Not much of a payoff to that.

Violence and attempted frights aside, “Truth Seekers” isn’t unpleasant to sit through. But for those longing for the snappy repartee and manic energy of early Frost and Pegg (he’s barely in most episodes) collaborations, this is a let down, all sheet and few ghosts, a chuckle here and there, rarely a real laugh.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Nick Frost, Samson Kayo, Emma D’Arcy, Susan Sokoma, Julian Barratt, Malcolm McDowell and Simon Pegg.

Credits: Created by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, Nat Saunders and James Serafinowicz, directed by Jim Field Smith. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 8 episodes @29 minutes each.

Alex Winter, the first half of “Bill & Ted,” has become an accomplished documentary filmmaker, and I’ve been looking forward this one since he first started talking it up last year.

It comes our way in November.

Raja is a teen, with a jerk for a little brother and a grandmother who barely looks after them. Her father is long gone, and her mother fled some while back.

But Raja (Elina Vaska) has some sense of her worth, even if she never lets us see where it came from. Boys may pay her little mind in her rural Latvian high school, but she is indifferent. She’s looked in the mirror, and she has that confidence of the beautiful, that Whit Stillman’s characters kvetch about in “Metropolitan.”

There’s an English language competition coming up, and in her magical teen thinking, it’s the answer to all her problems. Stop cutting classes, convince her teacher (Edgars Samitis), master English, win the contest, fly to London, and find the mother that deserted her and her brother (Andzejs Lilientals) to their fate.

“Mellow Mud” is a thoroughly engrossing portrait of Raja’s life, the bane of her existence and what she longs to escape from, if only to fetch her mother. Living on a remote apple orchard farm that the callous Olga (Ruta Birgere) is scheming to sell out from under them, raising the tweenage Robis, whose acting-out is even more pronounced than hers, she needs to change her fate. This contest is her only hope.

Writer-director Renars Vimba’s debut feature stays with his star, focuses all our attention on this child’s quiet desperation, which she hides behind a maturing young woman’s self-confidence. Raja makes every mistake in the book, because that’s what kids do, with or without adult guidance.

And her master plan goes off the rails the moment Olga dies. She doesn’t have to say why she dials the phone, and then puts it down. Reporting that would foil her plan to win a prize, fly to London and drag her mother “home.” The authorities would put her and Robis into foster care, and any hope for a “normal” future based on an idealized (probably false) past would vanish.

No, they’ll live off Olga’s pension, brush off the social worker (Zane Jancevska), “no more skipping school,” she orders, in Latvian with English subtitles. Raja knows she can no longer be “impossible to deal with. She’s smart enough to be able to catch up on all her schoolwork, and self-confident enough to curry favor with the young English teacher who can tutor her so that they can get their mother back.

Vimba’s film, titled “Es esmu seit” in Latvian, throws many an obstacle in Raja’s way, some you’d hope she (and her writer/director) would avoid.

We get no sense that Raja’s mastered English. Only one scene suggests she has a superficial command of it. We get little hint of her impact on boys, and we’re hoping her teacher is above that. The film takes “problematic” turns in ways far too easy to predict, and queasy to accept.

But Vaska, a wonderfully understated actress to be this young, lets us sense Raja’s native cunning, her feminine sophistication and the limits of each. The impulsive teen in Raja pokes through just often enough to make us fear what will happen when all the balls she’s juggling hit the clay-covered farmhouse floor.

The portrait of rural poverty and its impact on children feels real and more universal than Latvian. The kids make mistakes and exercise poor judgement at every turn. “Mellow Mud” makes us fearful for them and dread what is headed their way, because we can see that even if they can’t.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with sex, smoking and drinking, all involving an under-age teen.

Cast: Elina Vaska, Andzejs Lilientals, Edgars Samitis

Credits: Written and directed by Renars Vimba. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:45

Some filmmakers lay their stories and themes out for your passive consumption, some make you “work for it,” and some…are Dana Ziyasheva. Her “Greatland” is a sort of pandemic and death of democracy satire that one suspects makes more sense in her head. Or “only makes sense” in her head.

In an alternate reality of “inclusion, tolerant and diverse” people who “don’t stigmatize, the “Greats” are immortal, monitored by digital smart watches and obsessed with cats as opposed to dogs.

“Felinism” is totally a thing, and “anti-felinists” are perceived as a threat. They’re even having an election over that conflict.

Profanity has been banned, along with death itself. That rabbit you’ve just been handed and told is your “son,” named “Albert,” by the all-seeing/all-knowing voice of “Mother” in that watch, has big teeth.

“Son of Delight! He BIT me!”

Life in cross-dressing/gender-undefined Greatland is greater than life in Evil Nation because “they are all hate, we are all love…By love we all live forever!”

Until Ulysses (Arman Darbo) turns 15. “Mother” (voiced by comic Jackie Loeb) wishes a happy birthday to her “non-binary bundle of joy.”

California, amIright?

It’s just that Ulysses is suffering from a sort of ennui about all this love and cat-adoring, this life where procreation has ended and thus everybody’s free to let her/his/their freak flag fly — although dominatrix wear is about as sexual as this Brave New Candy-Colored World gets.

Ulysses’ pretty, misnamed friend, Ugly Duck (Chloe Ray Warmoth) may not sense anything amiss. But that detached heart that Ulysses somehow consults, Mr. Lee, is proof that outliers in this great land aren’t tolerated.

There’s talk of exile to “Repentance Island.” “Greats” may end up there. But do they become “clerks” (Nick Moran plays one) when they do? And what’s this virus that’s got everyone on tenterhooks? Ulysses, in search of Ugly Duck and answers, sets out to find out.

If you’ve ever wondered what a movie filmed inside a piñata might look like, wonder no more. This romp set in a Romper Room of streamers, bedazzled everything, sequined party wear and black lights is no-budget eye candy almost without peer.

But “romp” implies “fun,” and that’s in short supply. The mincing, dominatrix-attired priest (Donzell Lewis) is worth a grin. Otherwise?

Eric Roberts plays a leader of the Altruists, the “Greats” trying to find a cure for the virus. The bland mop topped leading man, Darbo, is known for “Itsy Bitsy” and for writer-director Ziyasheva’s “Defenders of Life.”

The arrival of “clerk” Moran flirts with the idea that this movie might be about something, that it could start to make sense. Cryptic pictures like “Greatland” make you focus until your head aches, waiting for that “Eureka!” moment.

A trippy, ripped-from-the-headlines trailer to this movie premiered to some attention last spring. That’s a cheat, with CNN, Bloomberg and Trump speech snippets trying to make something nonsensical topical.

Is this the post-pandemic paradise of tolerance and inclusion, that world we remake post Trumpian incompetence and intolerance?

Beats the delight out of me.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Arman Darbo, Chloe Ray Warmoth, Donzell Lewis, Nick Moran, J. P. Manoux, Jackie Loeb and Eric Roberts.

Credits:Written and directed by Dana Ziyasheva. Self-distributed.

Running time: 1:45

A Dec. 1 music doc about The Pogues? Julian Temple directed? Johnny Depp “presents?”

Time to stock up on the Guinness then.

It’s been thirty years since the earth shook in the remote desert Southwest, since giant worms hunted by sensing human footsteps, since gun nut survivalists proved to be a town’s salvation.

“Tremors” inspired half a dozen sequels and even a TV series at one point. But here’s another, “Tremors: Shrieker Island,” because giant “graboid” worms and Michael Gross have to eat.

Unheralded sequel specialist (“Jarhead: Law of Return,” “Death Race 4,” “Bulletproof 2,” and on and on) Don Michael Paul helms this desultory special effects slaughter, with “genetically altered” graboids picking up a collection of “slackjacked hipster hunters from Silicon Valley,” and only that Burt Gummer “legend” (Gross) standing between them and annihilation.

With those odds, I must say, I don’t like our chances.

Caroline Langrishe and Jon Heder play scientists who lose a local worker on their research team to something that cannot exist, but does. So they ask the biologist/extreme-hunting-experience entrepreneur (Richard Brake) running an Ultimate Hunt on an adjacent island off Thailand, what he’s up to?

“Imported” graboids, genetically altered. They shriek. Damn. Just call this “Shrieker Island.” The movie writes itself. Or it should have. Genetically alter that.

There’s mistrust and money involved, so the science team may be fighting not just fast-breeding shrieking monsters, but the hunting party. It’s a good thing Dr. Welker (Langrishe) has sent Jimmy (Heder) to find her ex, a guy who’s “not just a legend, he’s a super hero in some circles.”

“Destiny’s a bitch,” the old hermit Gummer mutters. Indeed.

The script is a collection of catch-phrases and one-liners masquerading as character detail.

“I don’t get women. Too many moving parts.”

“They reproduce asexually? That’s no fun.”

The effects? Competently-rendered digital monsters and big explosions, and littler ones — small charges meant to show the worms blowing up the ground they race under.

Cassie Clare plays a badass archer/hunting guide who slings insults along with her arrows. Heder hangs on to his “gee whiz” “Napoleon Dynamite” image — at least in his profanity-free speech.

And Gross chews through the scenery the way a graboid plows through volcanic island topsoil.

If you want a scary, tense and hilarious movie about giant worms eating desert California, rent the original “Tremors,” directed by Ron Underwood, starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Michael Gross and Reba McEntire. No “Shrieker” necessary.

MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for creature violence, language throughout, some gore and suggestive/drug references

Cast: Michael Gross, Cassie Clare, Jon Heder, Caroline Langrishe, Richard Brake, Jackie Cruz.

Credits: Directed by Don Michael Paul, script by Brian Brightly, Don Michael Paul. A Universal 1440 release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:42

“Blackjack: The Jackie Ryan Story” is a slow motion train wreck about a slow-motion train wreck of a basketballer.

That doesn’t mean that this story of a Brooklyn playground “legend” who never got out of his own way when it came to realizing his hoops potential isn’t interesting, here and there. There’s a decent performance or two, and a time-honored “redemption via sport” formula that has, on occasion, worked.

But as our lurching lead lumbers through middling on-court action, as we grimace at veteran heavy Robert Davi’s version of an Irish American priest, with every “Never saw THAT coming” blast of melodrama, “Blackjack” rolls craps.

Greg Finley, a character actor since childhood (“The Secret Life of an American Teenager”), seems awfully earthbound to be a basketball prodigy approaching his late 20s expiration date. He’s a burly presence on the court, and when guys like sportswriter Peter Vescey (Geoffrey Cantor) describe the “most perfect jump shot you ever saw,” we aren’t fooled. We’re practically looking at a middle school set shot.

“White men can’t jump” indeed.

Jackie grew up in a big, racist New York Irish family, headed by Big Jack (David Arquette), a short tempered construction worker who disdains any sport that isn’t football. Basketball? “Monkeyball” he calls it. His son is destined to “grind it out just like the rest of us.”

We don’t see the kid’s high school hoops skills that New York media hyped into a “white Michael Jordan” label, and eventually eulogized as “one of the biggest wastes of talent in the history of basketball.” Antonio Macia’s script narrows its focus to what amounts to Jackie’s last best shot, the weeks before and after a tryout — at 28 with the (then) New Jersey Nets.

Jackie drinks too much, smokes too much, cusses too much, has too many tattoos and horses around with his disreputable pal and co-worker Marty (James Madio, whose career dates back to “Blossom” and “Hook”). Can Jackie clean up his act long enough to impress Rick Carlisle and the Nets?

The return of old girlfriend Jennie (Ashley Greene of the “Twilight” saga) motivates him. She played in the day, too. Can she get him into NBA shape? She can’t even get him to stop talking about his NBA signing as a done deal.

“Floor seats, FLOOR seats” he promises and/or threatens everybody who hears about his dream. Dude can’t stop smoking and partying, and is so irresponsible he can’t even get a credit card, but OK. Sure.

We know that didn’t happen, so the only mystery here is how close he got and how good he might have been. Actor turned director Danny Abeckaser (“First We Take Brooklyn”) is painted into a corner, a leading man lacking the charisma to make the off-the-court scenes pop, and who plays the game — at 28 — the way Jackie plays it now, like a sharp-shooting fiftysomething.

Sports junkie Michael Rapaport plays a Nets assistant coach (unbilled). But Arquette, Greene and Moise Morancy, playing a neighborhood rival who made it to the NBA give the most interesting performances, with Morancy saying out loud what any basketball savvy viewer must think.

Jackie’s hype and endless “second chances?” They’re ” because you’re white.” Having worked at a newspaper where J.J. Reddick got more ink than everybody else on the Magic put together when he played here, I can totally see that.

That would have been an interesting story thread to follow, as we’re treated to a montage of Ryan’s NYC media hype in the film’s opening credits. What we get instead is a stumbling story about a more obnoxious “Rudy” we don’t like enough to root for, and who never shows us the game that all the fuss is about.

MPAA Rating: unrated, much profanity

Cast: Greg Finley, Ashley Greene, James Madio, Geoffrey Cantor, Moise Morancy, Michael Rapaport, Robert Davi and David Arquette.

Credits: Directed by Danny A. Abeckaser, script by Antonio Macia. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:38

The Big Guy makes a movie for Netflix , slated to stream Dec. 23. Looks bleak.

A little cartoon theology coming to Disney+ on Christmas Day.

“The True Adventures of Wolfboy” is “Teen Wolf” with some edge, a wistful fable that tends towards the melancholy.

It’s not about THE wolfman of myth. There are no farmers with torches and pitchforks, no midnight howling at the full moon. There’s just a lonely, scrawny bullied kid trying to find out who and what he is, longing for the mother he never knew.

Jaden Martell of “St. Vincent” is Paul, who starts in the bathroom mirror muttering his mantra — “I’m normal. I’m just a regular kid. I’m just like everyone else.”

The first clever twist in this tale from a screenwriter for “Legion” and a Czech making his feature directing debut is what it doesn’t show. Yes, Paul is bullied when his Dad (Chris Messina) takes him to the carnival. Yes, this “safe, inclusive” private school Dad enters him in might improve his quality of life. But we never see that.

We just meet the thirteen year-olds who taunt his father with the observation that he must’ve had sex with a dog. Dad’s at a loss for life advice for his “special” boy. “Show some dignity.” And whatever you do, “Paul, don’t run.”

But Paul does, and with his crested private school uniform jacket on. Thus begin his “true adventures.”

John Turturro is the carnival operator who seems sympathetic — at first. “That is…some kind of beautiful” he says when the kid removes the stocking-mask he wears to hide the fur. But Mr. Silk has an eye for the main chance, a billing — “The Dangerous DOG BOY” — and a promise. He’ll help the kid get to Pennsylvania, where a mysterious birthday present originated, if the boy will join the show.

The present? It’s a map, with an inscription, “When you’re ready, there is an explanation.”

But the carnival’s not the story they’re telling, either. Paul flees that as well, and not without revealing something a lot of unhappy 13 year-olds dabble in.

The next “chapter” in his adventure is “Wolfboy Meets Mermaid.” He falls in with teen dancer/lip-synch performer Aristiana (Sophie Giannamore of “Transparent”)) and sees her bubble act at a sort of Island of Misfit Toys bar-nightclub. He’s just met her and not-quite-addressed why her mother calls her “Kevin,” when Aristiana’s pink-haired, eyepatch-wearing pal Rose (Eve Hewson of “The Nick” and “Tesla” ) abruptly picks them up in her ancient van for that trek to Pennsylvnia.

Gas money? No worries. Lemme borrow that MASK. The quest has wheels, for a while, and armed robbery. Now there are cops and the carnie-wronged Mr. Silk after him, to say nothing of Paul’s Dad.

The parable here is heavy-handed and a little haphazard. It’s about the kids “who don’t fit in,” basically “The Greatest Showman” without songs or Hugh Jackman. Characters and means-to-an-end are introduced and dispensed with before we can commit to them.

Any one of these quest-threads — “transitory entertainment business” (carnival) convenience store hold-ups, “underworld” of gay or “special” young people — would have made for a more succint, if far more conventional movie.

Martell is quite good at this “lonely, disturbed boy” thing, as he proved in “Defending Jacob,” “The Book of Henry” and “St. Vincent.” Messina is sympathetic, Giannamore has hints of a spitfire and Hewson’s Rose is devil-may-care far beyond the pink hair and eye patch supercials.

The resolution isn’t as picaresque as the movie that precedes it, but good actors are brought in for that, too.

All of which makes for a movie that lopes along, introduces characters which make an impression or two, and then kind of fizzes away in the finale.

This “Wolfboy’s” adventures leave a sweet aftertaste, even if we realize it isn’t exactly a meal, or even a full portion of dessert, when we think about it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content, drinking, some strong language, sexual references and violence – all involving teens.

Cast: Jaeden Martell, Chris Messina, Sophie Giannamore, Eve Hewson, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Chloe Sevigny and John Turturro

Credits: Directed by Martin Krejcí, script by Olivia Dufault. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:28