Movie Nation

The cast of “Heckle” includes “Police Academy/Three Men and a Baby” alumnus Steve Guttenberg, nearly 40 years past his heyday, Clark Gable III and Natasha Starkey, daughter of a famous drummer, granddaughter of the most famous drummer.

Seeing any one of those three names in a movie’s credits would raise an eyebrow, as in “this is how desperate the producers were for a ‘name,'” and “this is who the producers consider ‘name’ talent.” Showcasing all three is a very bad sign.

Not as bad as the beard that drifts from “real” to “fake” on our unheralded star from scene to scene. Guy Combes must’ve been called back for reshoots, which is where the grim, Astroturf matte was applied in place of whatever he shaved off. It’s the worst fake facial hair since “Gettysburg,” if not Groucho.

“Heckle” is a horrifically-bad horror tale set in in the world of British stand-up comedy. Everybody in it is at let’s just say “something less than their best.” The script is garbage, the direction, lighting and cinematography incompetent.

Feel free to shout “CUT, let’s go again, and THIS time, Guy, FIND YOUR LIGHT and STAY IN IT” at the screen.

Not that this will do any good.

After seeing Guttenberg, playing a coarse, cruel stand-up comedy “legend,” murdered in the first scene, you figure “He collected a check and maybe a trip to the UK, and got off easy. Good for him.”

But no, he’s here in flashback after flashback, playing the meanest comic in show business, one we never once see or hear do anything remotely funny. By the third or fourth flashback, you start to feel sorry for ol’Steve. And nobody wants that.

Combes, in greasy long hair (A wig? Dunno.), real-and-then-fake beard and cowboy hat (probably to hide the wig), plays Joe Johnson, an abrasive and shockingly popular stand-up who’s just landed the lead in “The Ray Kelly Story,” playing “my idol,” the jerk we see killed (Guttenberg) in that first scene.

But that news has earned Joe a new “”fan,” a heckler who shouts “Knock knock” in the most threatening manner possible in the middle of his act, causing on-stage meltdowns and later paranoid threats on the phone. Somebody has decided to “make destroying your life my life’s mission.”

Perfect time for Joe and his entourage (Madison Claire, Louis Selwyn, Stephane Leigh Rose etc) to dash off to the country, “no cell phones,” to throw an ’80s fashion Halloween costume party.

Naturally, somebody shows up in a red hoodie and killer clown mask to murderously thin their ranks and face down Joe over some grievance, real or imagined.

“I’ll take you to hell, and heckle you there, too!”

The accents are an off-putting mix of American and sometimes indecipherable British. Combes isn’t the only actor on board who forgets to “find your light.” Guttenberg is bad, and while not everybody on board is as bad or worse, enough of them are to make you puzzle over how something this crummy, but not crummy enough to be any fun, ever got made.

Oh, right. “We’ve got ‘Steve Guttenberg…and Clark Gable III! And Ringo Starr’s granddaughter!”

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Guy Combes, Steve Guttenberg, Clark Gable III, Stephanie Leigh Rose, Madison Claire, Louis Selwyn and Natasha Starkey

Credits: Directed by Martyn Pick, scripted by Airell Anthony Hayles. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:21

The brawny “assemble a team” action picture goes way back, probably predating “Seven Samurai, and is with us still. But its heyday had to be the 1960s, when “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Guns of Navarone,” “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Italian Job” and others chiseled the genre’s conventions in stone.

Richard Brooks’ “The Professionals” (1966) leaned on the tropes, archetypes and “mission/quest” plot as hard as any of them, often too hard. But it distinguishes itself in several ways that let it endure. The violence is brutal. And the cast is so boiling over with charisma that Lee Marvin could take a back seat, Robert Ryan didn’t have to break a sweat, Woody Strode could stand out while staying largely silent (the casting was “progressive,” but not that progressive), and Jack Palance and Burt Lancaster could grin, chew the scenery and devour the tough-guy talk that is this film’s calling card, decades after its release.

“Well, I’ll be damned…” “Most of us are.”

The assemble-the-team business already had its lazy shortcuts, and writer-director Brooks, Oscar winning screenwriter of “Elmer Gantry,” later an Oscar nominated director for “In Cold Blood,” grabbed every one of those he could. Ralph Bellamy is the rich man rounding up “professionals” to retrieve his wife, kidnapped and taken to Mexico in the late 1910s. The character recites each specialist’s resume, “Navarone” fashion, to introduce them to each other and the viewer.

The “tracker” (Strode) will pick up the trail, the horse handler (Ryan) will keep them going, the ex-military man (Marvin) will lead and plan the violence, and his Mexican-experience compadre (Lancaster) will handle explosives.

Because if there’s one thing that changes the odds in a firefight in a B-Western, even one with an A-list cast and director, it’s dynamite.

That team will take ransom money south to where the revolutionary Raza (Palance) resides, holding the trophy bride (Claudia Cardinale) and awaiting the payoff.

“Captain Jesus Raza. Jesus, what a name for the bloodiest cutthroat in Mexico!”

Brooks was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter long before he collected one for directing. The man had an ear for hard-boiled, quotable dialogue. He gives his “Elmer Gantry” star Lancaster most of the best lines, but not nearly all of them.

“So what else is on your mind besides hundred-proof women, ninety-proof whiskey, ‘n’ fourteen-carat gold?”

“Amigo, you just wrote my epitaph!”

“You go to hell!” “Yes ma’am, I’m on my way.”

“Certain women have a way of changing boys into men and some men back into boys.”

The cast is generally in fine form, with Marvin setting us up for “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Big Red One,” ensemble pieces where he was the face and voice of grizzled authority and Lancaster landing his punchlines with particular panache.

Brooks never specialized in one genre, and had his share of misses (“Lord Jim”) to go along with the hits. That’s one reason he’s not mentioned as one of the great filmmakers of his era, and considering his adaptations as writer-director — “Blackboard Jungle,” “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and just as a screenwriter (“Key Largo,” “Elmer Gantry,” “The Brothers Karamazov”) — that’s a crying shame.

He had the good fortune of working with great directors of photography and the biggest stars of his day. And if his pictures aren’t showy, they’re memorable for the performances and the distinctly crackling dialogue, either grabbed from the source novel or play, or cooked up by the man himself.

“You bastard!”

“Yes, sir. In my case an accident of birth. But you, sir, you’re a self-made man.“

Rating: PG-13 for violence and nudity

Cast: Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Woody Strode, Robert Ryan, Claudia Cardinale, Ralph Bellamy and Jack Palance.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Richard Brooks, based on a novel by Frank O’Rourke.

Running time: 1:57

Oh yes, a high end horror movie can be a great star vehicle, as Sandra Oh is about to demonstrate in this March 18 release.

Every place in time since the invention of the boat and everywhere there was commerce being moved over water, there have been pirates. That’s something Johnny Depp, Gore Verbinski and Disney belatedly got around to mentioning in their many rum-soaked “Pirates of the Caribbean” comedies.

“The Pirates,” best remembered as a 2014 “Pirates of the Sea of Japan” take on the genre, has produced its own sequel. “The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure,” throws bandits in with the pirate queen Hae-rang (Han Hyo-joo) for a lighthearted yet lumbering “romp” around that sea that separates Japan from the Korean peninsula.

These tales are set in the late pre-“Korea” Goryeon dynasty, and there’s quite of a bit of exposition explaining the collapsing kingdom, “traitors” and a “lost treasure” that might allow whoever tracks it down to “claim the throne not with rank, but with power” purchased by hidden royal gold and silver.

Hae-rang and her scurvy crew pick up a fistful of shipwrecked bandits “led” by Wu Mu-chi, a swaggering, cackling blowhard who bills himself as “The greatest swordsman in Goryeo!” When Mu-chi (Kang Ha-neul, pretty damned funny) leaps, spins, slo-mo and fast-motions himself into action, we see that he’s not just talk.

Everybody on that side of the law has heard of the treasure, a treasure map is procured and more clues are wrapped around an elephant’s tusk. But first the bandits have to convince the pirates that they fit in. And secondly, Mu-Chi has to start a comical power struggle with the tough broad with the perfect hair.

“The dragon is master of the sea, but the tiger runs on land!”

“If you say the word ‘TIGER’ in front of me one more time…”

That gets him about as far as you’d guess. But this power struggle, and others, becomes a running gag in the film. Whoever has the best idea about where the treasure might be is worth listening to, and even treating as “captain,” or so it seems.

There’s a power-mad villains (Sang-Woo Kwon) vying for the prize, Japanese pirates to overcome, obstacles both natural (swallowed by a whale, an epic lightning storm) and supernatural, caves and an undersea river reached by whirlpool, cannons and codes and battle junks turned into…junk.

These “Pirates” have a little more sexual tension, even if it is two-fisted and pierced by steel. There’s even a “real” princess (Chae Soo-bin) to set up a “love triangle.”

The fights are great fun, and the action beats — involving terrific stunt wirework — come off. The underwater effects are impressive and the leads are cute in the clenches, or in conflict with each other.

But the plot is convoluted to the point that the picture is almost never not ponderous. There’s a lot more “history” than is probably necessary, and less comedy than was required to make this come off.

Still, it’s kid-friendly and martial arts-happy and almost on a par with the least of the Depp “Pirates” pictures. Worth a look if you’re interested what “Yo ho ho” sounds like in Korean (or dubbed into English).

Rating: TV-14, bloody swordplay, combat-killed corpses

Cast: Han Hyoo-Joo, Kang Ha-neul, Kwon Sang-woo, Chae Soo-bin, Se-hun, Kim Sung-oh

Credits: Directed by Kim Jeonghun, scripted by Cheon Seong-il. A Lotte Entertainment movie on Netflix.

Running time: 2:07

Someday, not someday soon, but someday the phrase “lockdown rom-com” will be alien to a generation that never had to improvise around a life and love life suddenly shut in and limited by a global pandemic.

Here’s a cute-looking relic of that not-bygone era, a sort of “SXSW Special” pairing up a “Bad Education” supporting player and “Deadpool’s” favorite cabbie.

Cinedigm unleashed “7 Days” on March 25.

What A24 is to challenging, arty cinema, Well Go USA is to the coolest action from Asia.

It’s their brand and they rarely disappoint.

“Spiritwalker” comes to various platforms April 24.

In “Gasoline Alley,” Devon Sawa plays an ex-con tattoo artist who’s sure he’s being framed for a quadruple homicide in that corner of Tifton, Georgia that looks nothing like Southern California, which is where the story is set.

Sawa’s ex-con is sounding out an actor/friend (Kenny Wormald) on the set of some crap TV series called “American Siege” when an ex-con mechanic on set wonders if “this guy” is bothering him.

The moment the cons amusingly establish each other’s prison bonafides, Jimmy Jayne (Sawa) turns to Roy (Billy Jack Harlow) to ask for his card. “Got a ’66 Chevelle with a sticky clutch,” he explains.

It’s a rare light scene that more or less comes off in a movie where such moments die of loneliness. And nobody on that set — not the star, Sawa, not Harlow, who is Southern and should know better, and not writer-director Edward Drake, who directed Harlow and Bruce Willis in a “real” movie called “American Siege” last year, not a stunt driver, script supervisor, a transportation chief or a single Georgia production assistant — had the wherewithal to correct that blunder.

We’ve seen the pimped-out Chevelle. We see it again when it is hurled into the last place a vintage Chevelle SS with oversized rims belongs, an offroad car chase. And it’s plainly a ’71, which looks almost nothing like the double-headlight ’66 our “hero” is supposed to be driving.

That’s a stupid thing to fixate on, but it’s indicative of the class of movie Bruce Willis is collecting a check a month to appear in these days. “Gasoline Alley” is lifeless, formulaic hackwork created by people who might think they know where to put a camera, but have no business conjuring up stories, creating characters or writing dialogue that sounds like the speech of native English speakers.

Sawa’s tattoo artist is nosing around, trying to clear his name after a hooker (Irina Antonenko) he met in a bar turns up dead, with three other hookers. Willis plays one of the detectives on the case, the one without many lines.

Luke Wilson tries to make the swaggering, drawling chatterbox lead detective worth listening to. Det. Vargas is supposed to be on the ball, updating their chief suspect on the progress of the case they’re building against him, making threats.

They’re going to escort Jimmy to the “electric chair,” he promises. “It’s like that old Gospel number, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.'”

I guess that’s supposed to be a joke because A), it’s a classic of the American Songbook, from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “Carousel,” and B), I’ve interviewed Luke Wilson a few times, and he’s not stupid enough to leave that line be if he isn’t trying to be funny.

I get a sense, from the scenes where all three actors appear, that the other two are there to prop up Willis, who seems unfocused, the sort of participant in the project who can’t even feign interest in most of the scenes he’s in.

Whatever rumors one hears about Willis’s health these days, unless he’s working for the insurance he really is doing a number on his legacy in movies like this.

“Gasoline Alley” takes its name from a tattoo shop where virtually nobody shows up to get inked, leaving Jimmy plenty of time to ask around, get in fights and draw attention to assorted people, most of whom end up dead after he’s questioned them.

The one car chase is somewhat short of half-assed. And there’s one fight that looks real because the actors are actually in it and the choreography has a lot more wrestling, kicking and hair-pulling than roundhouse-punching movie fights typically offer.

Sawa sucks down a lot of smokes, wears a lot of black and gives the lead role a good old college try. But the lifeless script, the aimlessness that drifts from scene to scene and the eye-rolling cliche of a payoff and finale give away a movie that’s running on fumes, not ideas.

And the best reason for everybody else to collect a check for it is that no one will remember anything except Bruce Willis was in it, he was bad and the picture was worse.

Rating: R for violent content, drug use, language throughout and some sexual content

Cast: Devon Sawa, Luke Wilson, Kat Foster, Sufe Bradshaw, Kenny Wormald, Irina Antonenko and Bruce Willis.

Credits: Directed by Edward Drake, scripted by Tom Sierchio and Edward Drake. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:37

I’m about to sit down to review the first Bruce Willis movie of March. And as far as I can tell, the next film with him in it is six weeks away. But as prolific as he’s being, turning up in one B-movie after another, you never know.

The sequel to last year’s “Fortress,” “Fortress: Sniper’s Eye” reunites BW with his “Fortress” co-star, Jesse Metcalfe.

Bruce may narrate, but most of the action’s involving Metcalfe and Chad Michael Murray.

This one opens April 29.

The “cell phone thriller” has been around at least since the rise of screenwriter William Monahan, who perfected the script that only requires one “star” on the set at a time with “The Departed” and “Body of Evidence.”

Somewhere tonight, Monahan’s sitting in a Boston bar grousing “Hey I was getting there” as “The Desperate Hour” arrives in theaters. Here’s a movie that has just two stars — Naomi Watts and her character’s iPhone.

Phillip Noyce may be far removed from his peak years, when “Dead Calm” and “Patriot Games,” “Rabbit Proof Fence,” “The Quiet American” and “Salt” made him the most in-demand director of thrillers Australia has ever produced. But give him Naomi Watts, park her in the woods on a run with an iPhone, and damned if he doesn’t get a tight, engrossing “ticking clock” thriller out of that myopic scenario.

“The Desperate Hour” is a near real-time tale of a widow who gets her little girl onto the bus, rousts her disaffected teen son out of bed and takes a “personal day” to go for a run.

But as she jogs through the woods (the film was shot in northern Ontario), multi-tasking pleas from her little girl, errands from traveling parents and appointments, she gets a clue…or five…that maybe that “Siri, ‘do not disturb‘” command was a bit premature.

Police cars hurtle past her on the back road she’s running down — first one, then groups of two and three.

By the time the emergency alert comes over, a little guilt should be kicking in with a growing sense of panic. Something’s happening at her kid’s school. Which kid? Oh no, it’s the HIGH school?

“Desperate Hour” is what we pass with Amy, out in the woods, on trails and dirt roads, using everything that an iPhone can deliver — information, a long contacts list to plow through for “What have you heard?” updates from friends and other intermediaries with eyes on the school, navigation, ride sharing, social media research, live streaming video from “the scene” via local TV news, and 911.

That’s a number Amy proceeds to wear out over the frantic hour or so in which this “incident” unfolds.

The average viewer is going to pick up on a lot of things here that don’t mesh with reality. Amy’s got mad iPhone skillz, able to pop from screen shots and social media postings by her son and others to calls, calls upon calls, text exchanges and the aforementioned “live” video. But what stands out about her dizzying directory of dials is how unfailingly polite one and all are, how indulgent each and every cop, parent, mechanic, co-worker, kid and school secretary are of this demanding, pleading crazy lady on the other end of the line.

Only one person hung up on her? Oh. Right. Canada. Well, the setting feels like the more school-shooting crazed US, but you can see how the screenwriter, cast and crew might be confused.

If she’s not badgering the school and the SAME 911 operator over and over, Amy’s hassling the auto body shop where she’s supposed to pick up her parents’ car, because the shop is across the street from the school.

Call after call begins with “C.J. I need you to do something for me.” She’s pestering a parent of an injured child at the hospital, doing detective work about which vehicles the cops have been searching on school property through the aforementioned “C.J.” and generally rolling over whatever lockdown protocols the school and the cops have in place.

This, along with Amy’s lack of curiosity and alarm at being passed by a fleet of cop cars falls under “stupid stuff you have to half-ignore to enjoy this movie.”

Watts is unsurprisingly affecting as a woman growing over more frantic at the Lyft driver who can’t get to her, the teen whose radio silence is alarming on several levels and the helplessness any parent would feel, standing outside the school or “40 minutes away” as Amy always seems to be. She experiences this entire incident via phone.

“What’s that? What’s that noise?”

Watts lets us see a modern, cell-savvy woman who can work a problem, lunging from instant-question to instant-answer or new request, to being scared witless at the sad, bitter videos she sees her son has posted since the death of his father the previous year.

And Noyce heightens our pulse rate and our connection to Amy’s impotent desperation by circling her with a hand-held camera, emphasizing her isolation, playing up her gasping efforts to get to the school or get someplace where somebody can pick her up.

Yes, “Desperate Hour” has a whiff of “the longest, slickest iPhone ad ever.” There are plenty of “Who would DO that? What cop would ALLOW this?” And “What the hell is she THINKING?” about the film.

But as Watts hyperventilates, checks navigation for the nearest major road and pieces together, in her head, what’s really going on, I bought in. As Noyce and Watts bulldoze through lapses in logic, protocols or just plain common sense, I got more invested.

Whatever the “logic” of the piece, Noyce makes every limitation the scenario presents him with an asset.

No, it’s not a reinvention of the “ticking clock” thriller. But an expert director, a good actress, arresting settings and a sense of genuine urgency make “The Desperate Hour” pass in what feels like a breathless 45 minutes.

And “iPhone ad” or not, watching Watts power through this picture with nothing jogging togs and Apple’s pride and joy has me sold. Maybe I’ve bought my last Android after all.

Rating:  PG-13 for thematic content and some strong language

Cast: Naomi Watts, Colton Gobbo, Andrew Chown

Credits: Directed by Phillip Noyce, scripted by Chris Sparling. A Roadside Attractions/Vertical release.

Running time: 1:25

A hijacking case re-opened, an “inside job” suspected, “a mole” back in “Vienna.”

This thriller opens April 8.