Movie Nation

Today on “Escape to Horror Country,” we visit a haunted parsonage in Essex, a manor house that in a prior life, was home to a burned-out Christian sect, and the period perfect setting for “The Banishing,” a pre-war British period piece, because aren’t they all?

Christopher Smith’s thriller (now on Shudder) is proof that if you get the gloomy tone, the production values and period polish perfect, your haunted house tale is halfway there. But it’s that other half that’s that separates the terrifying from the travelogue.

Something’s going on in Morley Hall. A prologue shows us a vicar who descends into murder-suicide madness, obsessed by First Thessalonians 4:5, warnings about avoiding “lustful passion,” as St. Paul put it, “like the Gentiles.”

Hey now.

“Three years later” a new vicar (Paul Heffernan) is on the job and in the house. Bringing his wife (Jessica Brown Findlay) and daughter (Anya McKenna-Bruce) and their troubled marriage into it can’t be a good idea.

The bishop (John Lynch, good casting) didn’t warn him. He’s the one we saw walking in on the murder suicide, and promptly pouring himself a whisky in his best “nothing to see here” nonchalance.

But there’s this wild-eyed visitor (Sean Harris, great casting) who has…answers. It’s about the house, the “sect” that had a monastery on this land, what happened to them and what happens there now.

“Is the house playing games with your wife’s head?”

It is — visions, mirrors that don’t perform to spec, thump and moans, and these creepy dolls that little Adelaide finds and plays with, a girl doll that looks like “Annabelle” prototypes, and tiny cowled monks who watch over her.

The basements in these British fixer-uppers always look like dungeons, and that’s always where little girls wander and their guilt-ridden mummy’s see the awfullest things when they set out in search of their child.

That’s the state of the horror, here, a child menaced, perhaps possessed, a husband in denial and a mother under supernatural assault because of her childcare skills.

The kid is properly creepy, and Findlay (“Brave New World,” “Harlots,” “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society”) does a fine job of testily judging her repressed and somewhat shamed husband and increasingly alarmed mother not able to process the threats to herself and a little girl who stops acknowledging her as her mother.

Hefferman’s vicar in meltdown mode passes muster. And there’s value in putting the sinister, whispering Harris and menacing Lynch into opposition, playing two men at odds over “the secret” of the house and maybe the politics of Britain on the cusp of a World War where you were either fascist or anti-fascist.

That last element is handled quite clumsily. The story’s dawdling pace works against it, and attempts at injecting urgency into the third act seem too chatty and explanatory for suspense to build.

The effects are more interesting than chilling –sequences in which the vicar’s wife sees different versions of herself in various states of terror over what she’s experiencing, or fears she’s caused.

I have to say I like this sort of 1930s Gothic horror, even though I’m generally more impressed by the detail than jolted by the frights. But the cast and the period piece pall they perform under make this mixed-bag of a thriller worth a look.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Jessica Brown Findlay, John Heffernan, Anya McKenna-Bruce, Sean Harris and John Lynch

Credits: Directed by Christopher Smith, script by  David Beton, Ray Bogdanovich and Dean Bogdanovich. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:37

It’s coming to Amazon Prime in mid May. Perhaps Amazon will have stopped advertising on Tucker Carlson’s racist, treasonous TV show ny then.

Looks daft, and diddley aye.

“Home Alone” with an evil spirit/genie?

Looks enterprising and alarming.

May 14, “The Djinn” comes to us in theaters or on demand.

With R’hllor as my witness, I had no idea Nikolaj Coster-Waldau could be this offhandedly funny and charming.

The Danish “Game of Thrones” hunk is our guide through Greenland, a country he married into (His wife Nukâka is from here.), in “Through Greenland.”

It’s a starkly beautiful series, in English (and Danish with English subtitles) that he made for Danish TV and is now available on Topic.

He travels north to south, east to west over the surprisingly vast land and ice-scape, in helicopters and boats, witnessing the melting glaciers and shrinking ice sheet there with experts and UNDP officials (He’s a “good will ambassador” on climate issues for the United Nations Development Program.), meeting the people in remote villages and participating in the folkways.

Yes, Jaime Lannister from “Game of Thrones” gets mixed up in blood and gore — watching how a hunted narwhal is cut up and sampling the raw meat with the natives, and pitching in on butchering a musk oxen, a major meat source for Greenlanders.

He jokes around at the Thule Air Force Base, whose Cold War mission has morphed into space monitoring and radio telescopic science in recent years.

“So, you’re tracking the aliens?”

He hikes the ice sheet, visits an abandoned coal mining town and empty missile silos. He stops by the village of Dundas, evacuated in a cruel rush because the U.S. Air Force needed the land decades ago. He meets the survivors and descendants of that ordeal in Qaanaag. He goes fishing, visits his actress-wife’s childhood home in Uumannaq, and dines with her in Oqaatsut in H8, which has to be the northernmost French-Greenlandic restaurant on Earth.

Yes. Adjust your bucket list accordingly.

That marriage is part of why this is a “personal journey” he explains. But Thule is where his father used to work, in the Danish civilian crew that helped run the American Thule air base in the north of the country. Dad was “the guy with the clinking bottles” folks from there remember. His father was a very good bookkeeper and an alcoholic.

He marvels at what “hard work” it is, being an alcoholic, hiding your illness (rarely very well) and delivers a token of his father’s affection back to where it came from — a ball glove Dad “stole” from the base gym to give his kid as a gift from exotic America.

Through it all, Coster-Waldau wears his celebrity easily and his curiosity on his sleeve. He speaks of being humbled by being in a “vast polar desert” where nothing and no one gives a damn about his “schedule.”

“Nature calls the shots,” he says with a shrug when he and his small crew get fogged in, at one point.

It’s almost hilarious to see Air Force personnel fangirling out over his visit, the women blushing, the men trying to convince him they don’t know the TV show, “but my wife does!”

The bigger message of this loneliest corner of our “lonely planet,” is how urgent it is that this beautiful place and its enormous ice sheet and glaciers be saved. Much of Denmark and all of the “Low Countries” of Belgium and The Netherlands would be under water is that sheet melts and seas rise 25 feet. So yes, the UN wants people to start taking that seriously.

And if you can get an affable international star to tour his wife’s homeland with a crew to view the problem and get that message across, all the better. “Through Greenland” is as pretty and exotic an eco-travelogue as TV has ever served up.

MPA Rating: unrated, animal slaughter, toilet humor

Cast: Nikolah Coster-Waldau, Nukâka, Jo Scheuer

Credits: Directed by Eric Engesgaard. A Danish production now on Topic.

Running time: Five episodes @ :43 minutes each.

You remember Camp David, but do know the path his life took to get him there?

“Upheaval” comes our way June 7.

When it happens, your heart sinks, and maybe an “Aw, dude” crosses your lips.

Up until that moment, which we see coming, you could cling to the hope that Coach Fred was going to keep things professional with his new star skier. He’s tough, but motivating, clumsily nurturing when coaching, mothering and fathering his unmoored, unworldly young charge.

Lyz is alone, estranged from her father, disconnected from her mother, almost friendless at this academy where French Olympic hopefuls polish their downhill skills. She’s under enormous pressure. This 30something jerk can’t control himself around her in the worst way.

What 15 year-old should face this?

“Slalom” is a quiet tragedy ripped straight from any week’s sports headlines. In a culture where success in sport is so prized that we allow its pursuit to begin early and expect maturity in the still-childish, Charlène Favier’s harrowing drama lives in the fragile psyche of a star-in-the-making, a victim before she knows what hit her.

Noée Abita is Lyz Lopez, whose loveless good-bye from her mom tells us all we need to know.

“You’re lucky, you know?” (in French with English subtitles).

Lyz has been selected for the FL Alpine club, one of many such operations that polish talent and feed the French National Ski Team and its Olympic dreams. And she’s told, straight off, that she’s too soft to have much hope.

Fred (Jérémie Renier) clinically sizes her up, measures her body fat and shames her about her weight as he challenges her. “You’re a bit behind the others.”

When they’re in a team setting, he’s not shy about berating her.

“Don’t be as s— as her,” he tells her teen teammates.

Lyz doesn’t break, but we see the vulnerability. She’s got nowhere to go on weekends, as her mother (Muriel Combeau) is in Marseilles and living her own life. Dad might be good for child support, but probably not and he’s certainly good for nothing else.

Lyz finds herself leaning on coach and the academy’s teacher, Lilou (Marie Denarnaud), the couple who run FL. She wants “to make it to the top,” so she puts up with the insults, the side-eyes from teammates as she starts to show promise and steals all the the attention of her coach, who is stern and clinical but, we can’t help notice, a little handsy.

As we’ve learned from a hundred scandals and many a sad athlete biography, that’s a power dynamic ripe for disaster.

Abita, a bit player in “Sink or Swim” and support in “My Days of Glory,” ably summons up the misguided confidence and sullen disappointment of teenagerdom. We buy Lyz’s acting-out even as we fear how far she will take it, because she seems genuinely unconcerned with the risks she starts taking.

Are we seeing classic signs of hidden abuse, the deflated heartbreak of infatuation, or a painfully subtle blend of both?

Renier, who’s been around since before “In Bruges” and was in “Frankie” a year or two back, doesn’t play the lip-smacking villain here. He lets us see confusion as Fred idiotically thinks he can cross a line and then step neatly back over it, because he’s allegedly an “adult.” We cannot tell if he’s done this before, or if his self-control collapses because he’s finally landed himself a winner, one who looks like a young Mila Kunis.

Director and co-screenwriter Favier, making her feature debut, gives us scenes of icy intimacy and striking racing footage. We’re totally convinced Lyz is too young to get a handle on what’s happening to her, and reasonably convinced Abita/Lyz is as good on the slopes as everyone is saying, even if she doesn’t have ski-racing thighs.

The helmet-off moments after each race lack any sense of flushed, foggy breathlessness. If you’ve ever watched a Winter Olympics, you know what I’m talking about.

But those are tiny quibbles in a movie that takes a very sober look at something that is a major scandal in sport, something that should give any parent pause before they sign off on a child’s dream pursuit of athletic glory.

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

Cast: Noée Abita, Jérémie Renier, Marie Denarnaud, Muriel Combeau, Maïra Schmitt

Credits: Directed by Charlène Favier, script by Charlène Favier, Marie Talon and Antoine Lacomblez. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:32

“YouthMin” is a cute mockumentary in “The Office” mold — “The Office” at Church Camp.

It’s got the same “cringeworthy” comedy dynamic as the dysfunctional Scranton paper supply sitcom, a similarly clueless “leader,” but with teen hormones in comic conflict with “wholesomeness” as a new wrinkle.

It could use a few more laughs and another cringe or three, but this indie manages some giggles and a big “uplift” here and there.

Pastor D (co-director Jeff Ryan) is the backward baseball cap, soul-patch sporting youth minister at Bethany Church. He’s 30 and earnest, trying entirely too hard and toothbrush-dropped-in-the-toilet hapless. He prattles on about the big influence his own youth pastor had on him, but when he’s not on camera, there’s his cynical Christian Goth girl youth group member Deb (Geena Santiago) to set us all straight.

“Pastor D is probably the dumbest person I’ve ever met.”

That might be why the group isn’t that popular, and why only six kids have signed up for this year’s Camp Changed, a weekend camp for church groups from all over New England. And it might be why the church has hired Rachel (Tori Hines) as co-youth minister. She’s dropped on Pastor D (for David) just as they’re leaving for camp.

And when the kids meet pregnant and unmarried Rachel, they’re transfixed.

“Can I touch your belly?”

The kids are a collection of “types” — the Goth girl (who also knows all the “dark” parts of the Bible), the nerdish walking Bible Wikipedia (Luke Deardorff), innocent and unworldly Ruth (Amelia Haas) and doofus practical joker Mark (Will Martin) and his crush, Hannah (Grace Ulrich).

The new guy, Steven (Carl Schultz)? He’s the silent, anarchic type.

Camp Changed is as “rah rah Jesus” as you might expect, with an added touch of the old “camp competition” cliche. Pastor D must face his nemesis, trash-talking Redeemed Church youth pastor Jacob (Matt Perusse), once again.

The laughs come from Pastor D’s increasingly unhinged competitive “spirit,” maybe amped-up by the idea that he’s about to be replaced, Deb’s gift for messing with everybody, random bits of church camp slang, activities, singing “Pharaoh, Pharaoh, let my people go” to the music of “Louis, Louis,” and learning.

“MMM” class is all about “masturbation, marriage and monogamy,” “Bible Jeopardy” is one of the contests the groups compete in and while sweet Ruth needlepoints “Jesus Hearts You,” she can’t help but notice the “Sinners Burn in Hell” messaging of another.

Three days of “change” pass too quickly for Mark. “I wonder if it went this fast with Jesus...when he died!“

“YouthMin” doesn’t have the edge of a “Saved!” style mockery of religion, but is a lot edgier (some profanity, sexual gags) than “faith-based” comedies.

Let’s just say if you ever went to church camp or had a conversation with a youth pastor, you’ll grimace and grin at the many ways they send both up here.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, sexual humor

Cast: Jeff Ryan, Tori Hines, Geena Santiago, Amelia Haas, Carl Schultz, Luke Deardorff

Credits: Directed by Arielle Cimino and Jeff Ryan, script by Christopher O’Connell. A First-Names Films release.

Running time: 1:19

Call your broker. Fiat Chrysler stock is a “buy ” At least until we see the movie. June 25, popcorn makes a big time comeback.

Perhaps you remember the 1986 Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren and River Phoenix movie “The Mosquito Coast,” about an American family caught up in the “self-reliance” genius and mania of a father who decides to shed the corrosive culture of ’80s America and move them all to the jungles of Central America. Maybe you remember the acclaimed Paul Theroux novel it’s based on.

If you don’t, no worries, I do. I read the source novel back then, too. And no, that’s not necessary or even particularly helpful in tackling the new Apple TV+ series starring Theroux’s nephew, Justin Theroux. Truth be told, remembering Peter Weir’s descent-into-madness tragedy, set entirely on the titular coast of Honduras, could be more of a hindrance to enjoying this new take.

This “Mosquito Coast” is basically a prequel, an updated/gunplay-packed “how we got there” tale of a family on the run, of the mishaps, escapes and deadly encounters with the cross-border human and drug smuggling trade that gets so much attention in the culture and the media of today.

None of this “get away from Reaganism/consumerism/TV-rot” of our “doomed” civilization of the ’86 film, in other words.

We meet Theroux’s Allie Fox as he and his brood (Melissa George plays wife Margot) are living on the edge on a rented farm in California’s central valley. Allie is keeping them afloat in a maintenance job with Big Ag, running their vehicles on bio-diesel of his own concoction, raiding the county dump for inspiration. Son Charlie (Gabriel Bateman in the River Phoenix role) is his Dad’s biggest fan.

“How do you make ice from fire?” was and remains Dad’s big obsession, an invention that can bring cheap refrigeration to the bush. It’s getting him nowhere, only he won’t let go of it.

“It’s not genius if they don’t reject it, first.”

But Charlie and older sister (impressive newcomer Logan Polish) have their suspicions about their parents. They’re always having to move. Why?

“Did you ever wonder, if Dad’s so smart, how we got to be so poor?”

Dad’s an ill-tempered wild-eyed dreamer and Mom’s secretive. Their world is uprooted again, but of course Dad has planned for that eventuality, when government agents (Kimberly Elise and James Le Gros) come calling.

Now would be a good time to hightail it South of the Border, to fulfill Dad’s latest dream — a liveaboard boating life, off the grid on “The Mosquito Coast.”

Most movies make this sort of “escape” seem easy, or at least dramatically perfunctory. This series gives us a better taste of how somebody on the lam might manage that border crossing north-to-south.

How do you even find someone, a “coyote,” to get you across? Where would you try it, how much water would you need, how much money would it take?

And what on Earth will you do when it all goes wrong?

That’s the driving impetus of this take on Theroux’s novel (Paul Theroux took a producer credit.), nutty Allie’s mastery of this seat-of-the-pants, improvise, lie and hustle on the fly existence and how he’s enlisted his family in that lifestyle.

They will meet and cross drug lords, see death and cause other deaths and be hunted not just by mysterious Feds and their minions, but an assassin (Ian Hart in a black suit, porkpie hat and scarab bolo tie), all as they struggle to live the patriarch’s “Kokomo” fantasy in a paradise of his own creation and not in a world where he doesn’t fit in.

Putting more of the emphasis on daughter Dina than the younger, impressionable son, would pay off better if there was more of a struggle for her soul. Her pushing back is belated and underwhelming. George (“Turistas,” “Dark City) plays a less passive version of the spouse of the ’80s “Mosquito.” Margot has assertive flashes that stand out because she’s constantly, inexplicably caving to Allie’s whims.

Justin Theroux (“The Girl on the Train”) doesn’t do “larger than life” well. This Allie is a salesman and something of a con artist, not menacing enough to impose his reality on everybody through force of will. His “tough guy” moments are few because they don’t play.

I found the series to be somewhat unmoored, lacking the subtexts of the original source material. Here it’s all about the violence, the “MacGyver” ish escapes.

It’s also jumpy and disjointed, dropping the Fox family and us into situations that have already been covered by other films and limited series — meetings and meals with drug oligarchs, facing down hired killers in matching black Suburbans in lawless stretches of Mexico, etc.

What we’re meant to accept is how this lifestyle and Allie’s survivalist ethos has made everyone in this family capable of sizing up a situation and boldly charting a way out of it. That stuff — with this instant getaway driver or that get-the-drop-on-the-bad-guys — is pure hokum.

The action beats deliver, but there aren’t quite enough of them in each let’s-drag-this-odyssey-out episode to justify the investment in time. That’s a common gripe I have of the streaming era — drip, drip, drip storytelling.

Still, if you come into this without the expectations taken from the novel and/or the earlier film, you might not be as annoyed and let down by the whole journey into Allie Fox’s “Heart of Darkness” as I was. The “hokum” you’ll figure out on your own.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Justin Theroux, Melissa George, Gabriel Bateman, Kimberly Elise, Scotty Tovar, Kate Burton and Ian Hart

Credits: Created by Neil Cross, based on the novel by Paul Theroux. Premieres April 30 on Apple TV+ release.

Running time: Seven episodes @ :42-58 minutes each.