Movie Nation

There’s a little “ick factor” that nestles itself into the heart of today’s Around the World with Netflix venture, the sci-fi action rom-com “Ai Love You.” This Thai film expects us to root for a machine that’s taken over a hapless human’s body.

But the AI, named “Dob,” takes over Bob out of love. I guess that makes it all right. Hey, “one night in Bangkok” is all that matters.

“AI Love You” is a glossy, high sheen science fiction imagining of the near future, when smart buildings are the rule and digital personal assistants come with that package — intrusive, nosy, interfering and always “monitoring” digital assistants.

Dob the robotic building (cute) has eyes that see over the skyline, and personal data harvesting capabilities that make Facebook seem like rubbing two sticks together. Dob knows Lana (Pimchanok Leuwisetpaiboon) down to her temperature and heart-rate.

“How’d your date go last night?” Dob wants to know. That big presentation she had to give? She blew it, but then, “You heard EVERYthing,” she snaps. Lana is a little leery of this all-invasive digital babysitter’s place in futureculture.

But Dob pitches in with her do-over marketing presentation, and it’s a hit. She overshares with him, and sure enough, he gets the wrong idea
“Love.” After is possible, after all, because “feelings are nothing but codes and numbers.”

Lana brushes him off. And that creep date Bob (Mario Maurer) who took “be a tough guy” rude-jerk suggestions from the online “Love Guru” (David Asavanond)? He doesn’t have a prayer, either.

It’s just that Bob, it turns out, works in IT with the company that maintains this particular smart building. He sees what Dob has been doing, obsessing about and stalking Lana and all. Bob attempts a “2001: A Space Odyssey” computer lobotomy/reset. That’s how Dob shocks his way into Bob’s body, and the romantic possibilities take on flesh-and-blood implications.

Can Dob as Bob turn on the charm that almost worked on “But you’re AI, it would never work” Lana, as Bob? Can Dob as Bob learn to eat, brush his teeth, speak and everything else required to operate as a human body?

There’s nothing particularly serious about this, until you start pondering where technology is taking us, whether we want it to or not.

At one point, Dob as Bob consults Bob’s building’s AI, Chip, for suggestions and advice on correcting his behavior/programming so that he doesn’t get into a nightclub fights or come on too strong to strangers, just to learn how to court Lana. Yes, a machine is helping another machine that’s guilty of a “Level 5 Body Hijack” win the fair lady.

There’s also violence here that’s aimed at both the gadgets and people, which kills any buzz that this somewhat hopeless tale might have generated.

The computer in a human body thing could have delivered laughs, but the slapstick is limited and Mauro’s jerky motions, quizzical looks and machine-as-human quirks never quite get there.

The look of this “future” is sunnier than “Blade Runner,” and the nightclubs have an ’80s Devo music video vibe.

The only laughs here are seeing how the English language dub (it’s in Thai with subtitles, or dubbed) differs — to a profane degree — with the direct Thai translation.

Computers blackmailing people to go on dates, studying us so that they can give us exactly what they calculate that we want? That’s just creepy, and no way no how should anybody be rooting for “Dob/Bob” to “get the girl” at the end.

Rating: TV-14, with violence, crude sexual innuendo and profanity

Cast: Pimchanok Leuwisetpaiboon, Mario Maurer and David Asavanond

Credits: Directed by Stephan Zlotescu and David Asavanond, scripted by Stephan Zlotescu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

Yeah, we also recognize the distinctive vocal stylings of Sam Rockwell in this April 22 release. Sam makes this trailer fun and tasty.

But then there’s Awkwafina, Zazie Beetz, Richard Ayoade, Craig Robinson, Marc Maron, Anthony Ramos and Alex Borstein.

“Let Me Be Me” is an upbeat documentary biography of Philadelphia fashion designer Kyle Westphal.

We see him at Drexel University, prepping dresses and the like for his college program’s senior collection. We feel Kyle’s enthusiasm and attention to detail at his work. We also pick up on Kyle having a somewhat feminine voice and maybe a Forrest Whitaker droopy eyelid. He’s making eye contact, not a lot of it.

And then we see his home movies, the baby with an undeveloped eye muscle, a child who didn’t really master speech until six or later, who “didn’t relate” to his siblings or his parents.

We’re shown a montage of the way TV news — local and national — covered autism in the ’80s and ’90s. Wherever Kyle is now, he was born with a birth defect, grew up gay-but-didn’t-know-it, and he was autistic at a time medicine was slow to abandon the “childhood schizophrenia” diagnosis.

Katie Tauber and Dan Crane’s film uses home movies, interviews with Kyle and his family, his teachers and others to show us how he was and the vast support system that “Let Me Be Me” and become the engaged, creative adult he plainly is.

The filmmakers, the parents and their subject emphasize “each unique situation” nature of how lives are lived “on the spectrum,” and present Kyle as a sort of case study. A lot of things, starting with a proper diagnosis and early, persistent and exhaustive intervention, as well as “learning” from TV shows and movies, contributed to Kyle’s socialization and self-actualization.

But as this biography of an autistic fashion designer progresses and we notice who most of those outside the family are giving testimonials to Kyle’s treatment and his prognosis are from the same “institute,” “Let Me Be Me” prompts a wary raised eyebrow of skepticism.

The film is not just about Kyle’s unique story. It’s also a not-skeptical-enough endorsement of the Son Rise program of behavioral treatment for autistic kids, an immersive, all-in commitment that some experts say may have value and may get positive results, but lacking peer-reviewed science to back it up, could be just a “somewhat” effective and even well-intentioned goldmine for the family that founded it.

Later efforts to walk back this wholehearted endorsement in the film are halfhearted at best.

“Let Me Be Me” is on its surest ground in showing the ever-evolving understanding of autism and how radically views about it have changed just in last few decades. We get a sense of the desperation that every parent we know who’s dealt with this, that we’ve ever seen interviewed on TV about the subject must feel, the hope for a “cure.” We even hear the judgmental “You just need to get control of your child” that parents faced until medical science reassured them “It’s not our fault.”

The footage of the Son Rise-sponsored “play room” stripped of distractions where parents and volunteers kept Kyle company, joined in with games of his own invention, is most fascinating. And hearing Kyle give an insider’s view of the autism experience, why an autistic child spins, repeats gibberish phrases (Disney cartoons provide a lot of “Bippy, boppity boos”) and covers him-or-herself in blankets or hides under cushions is illuminating as well.

A play room that cuts down on the overstimulating outside world — vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers, noisy siblings, TV — seems to give an autistic child a calming baseline to start experiencing the world from.

Hearing Kyle talk about “learning how to act” from the TV shows his siblings and peers loved is also interesting. “Buffy” and “Alias” and others shows showed him behaviors that passed for a “norm,” and “Gossip Girl” gave him a future outlet for his childhood Disney princess fascination — fashion.

Aside from its tacit Son Rise approval, “Let Me Be Me” has value in reinforcing the difficult concept we hear so much from autism experts, that every child on that spectrum truly is a “unique” case. The film, Kyle and his family suggest a “whatever works” ethos that can be heartening to desperate parents looking for something that helps with a child they can’t reach.

But you don’t have to dig into Son Rise’s effectiveness or financials to know that kind of “outside the box” and “outside science” thinking is what drives the Jenny McCarthys of the world as well. “Evoling understanding” or not, we don’t know “whatever works” is working, or just a case of misdiagnosis, until experts study it and their peers weigh in to back them up.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Kyle Westphal, Jennifer Westphal, Jeff Westphal, Barry Neil Kaufman

Credits: Directed by Dan Crane and Katie Tauber, scripted by Dan Crane. A Greenwich release.

Running time: 1:15

If you love Foo Fighters and have a soft spot for the “splattertoons” corner of horror, you won’t want to miss “Studio 666.”

No, it’s not very good. None of these guys are actors and the chap they hired to direct it made “Hatchet III” for Pete’s sake. But there are scruffy, shambolic laughs, giggles amped-up by the band — especially founder/lead-singer Dave Grohl — playing exaggerated versions of themselves.

And where else are you going to see canceled creeper Jeff Garlin (“The Goldbergs”) play a Satanic record producer?

Studio 666″ is a Foo Fighters horror comedy about the band setting up shop in a haunted mansion in Encino to cut their tenth LP. Grohl is “musically constipated,” blocked, not realizing he’s composing songs he’s already written, searching youtube tutorials on creating power chords, grasping for inspiration.

He sits at the keyboard and starts a ballad, and just when we see his eyes take on a flash of “EUREKA,” just when we recognize the tune, a spectral Lionel Ritchie materializes, expresses a few words of sympathy about how hard it is to “find inspiration,” and then goes OFF with “but that’s MY f—–g SONG. Get your own…NERD.”

Yeah, “Hello.” It’s kind of like that.

Grohl plays a “raging a—-le” version of himself, a diva who orders the other five Fighters — Taylor Hawkins, Pat Smear, Rami Jaffee, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiftlett — around, demands that they move into this house that they’re recording in and drives the road crew nuts as he positions and repositions the drums (he was Nirvana’s drummer, remember) to get that “perfect” sound.

“Did you just say ‘NO’ to DAVE GROHL? I’m a f—–g ROCK STAR. I get the best parking wherever I go…for all ETERNITY! That’s the RULE!”

“There goes my hero” indeed.

But stuff starts to go wrong when their crew chief gets fried setting up their gear. Nobody — not the band, not the too-too-friendly neighbor (Whitney Cummings) who figures she could be a backup singer, and auditions unprompted for the part (hilarious), not the fanboy GrubHub delivery dude (Will Forte) who has “a demo” — is safe.

The many murders committed by whatever haunts this place involve things like a charcoal grill and a chainsaw as Grohl makes the journey from “raging” yo- know-what to “possessed” raging you-know-what.

Grohl’s funny in interviews and TV ads, and that’s kind of enough for him to carry this off. His acting tends towards mugging — eyebrow raising, overly obvious “indicators” showing us he’s seen/noticed/been-surprised-by something. He’s still the most polished member of the musician-actor cast, and he’s also the one having the most fun.

Fake-vomiting, you say?

“No more oat meal beer bongs for Dave!”

Cummings and Forte deliver, and keen-eyed horror fans may notice one of the recording engineers, who wrote the title tune for this movie but long ago made Jamie Leigh Curtis a star.

The whole package is more foul-mouthed fun than your typical dark and grim and more self-serious Rob Zombie rocker-to-slasher filmmaker outing.

Keep your expectations low — a 30 minute+  unending instrumental is meant to be their epic, “like ‘2112’ times 2112!” — and your tolerance high for a bunch of rich 50something rock stars messing around making a movie and “Studio 666” might be the monster track you’ve been waiting for.

Rating:  R for strong bloody violence and gore, pervasive language, and sexual content

Cast: Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Pat Smear, Rami Jaffee, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiftlett, Whitney Cummings, Jeff Garlin and Will Forte.

Credits: Directed by BJ McDonnell, scripted by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:46

Maybe an hour or an hour and a half into “Big Gold Brick,” the thought struck me that somebody must really love actor-turned-first-time-feature-director Brian Petsos. But who exactly loved him enough to let him make this pointless, aimless, endless indulgence of a “comedy?”

It’s the sort of empty experience where mind-wandering speculation kicks in. Was it relatives who helped finance it? Parents? Certainly Oscar Isaac must love the guy.

Isaac has a couple of scenes late in the third act. As he’s somebody who has apparently supported the Chicagoan Petsos’ movie-making ambitions by appearing in some of the shorts he made between acting gigs — Petsos was a “Dude” in “MacGruber,” “Pete” in “Bridesmaids,” and Kristen Wiig is listed as a producer here — Isaac may be the reason “Big Gold Brick” got made.

But as Petros attracted Andy Garcia, Megan Fox and Lucy Hale to be in his 132 minute “comic fantasy,” the man must be charming.

The “fantasy” comes from the film’s anti-hero, a disillusioned young writer who, from the comfort of interviews, book readings and signings, tells the story of this “Floyd” fellow who changed his life and is the subject of his book. As for the comedy? It’s nowhere to be found in “Big Gold Brick.”

The film is a laughless, drifting riff on unearned celebrity, the lies people tell about themselves to themselves and anybody gullible to believe them. In film buff terms, it’s a little “Flim Flam Man,” a bit of “The End of the Tour” and a dollop of “The Magic Christian” in its surreal, stream of nothingness episodes about the distracted, ice-cream-loving character (Garcia) who runs over Samuel the would-be writer with his Caddy, and commissions him to write his biography when the hapless Samuel wakes up.

“I challenge you…this was meant to be,” our omnipresent narrator recalls him saying in a voice-over ostensibly from the finished book.

That narrator and the star of the film is Emory Cohen, a bit player bedecked in assorted ill-fitting Ozzy Osborne wigs and so uninteresting as a character, an actor and a screen presence that I wouldn’t mention him at all if it wasn’t required.

Samuel is taken from the hospital to Floyd’s house where he meets Floyd’s dysfunctional family — the much-younger-and-plainly-cheating second wife (Fox), his flirtatious (and nothing else) daughter from his first marriage (Hale) and a disaffected, perhaps sociopathic younger son (Leonidas Castrounis).

The endless narration fills in silent montages of family members’ stories — daughter Lily’s alcoholic and cocaine-fueled breakdown which ended her budding career as a violinist, the wife’s cheating, the son’s bunny killing and Floyd’s yarns about the life that got him this mansion, trophy wife and Cadillac.

“I’m an open book,” he brags. But this will be “a secret book.” Only Floyd talks about it constantly as he drags the befuddled Samuel through his days, introducing him to colleagues and thugs he apparently owes money to as “my biographer.”

Isaac plays the lender — the thug in chief — in a showy, florid performance that dominates the film’s third act because really, Garcia’s charm playing an under-scripted toothpick-obsessed con-man can only take one so far.

There’s telekinesis, a manipulated high school (plainly 30ish) basketball star (Tevin Wolfe), and one person (Shiloh Fernandez) who appears to “really” know Floyd, because they work together and not in anything that would explain Floyd’s large way of living.

As if his toothpicks and fondness for hotel buffets didn’t give him away.

No social, psychological or satiric point is made. No laughs are scored. And nobody involved will be slapping this on their “sizzle reel” or resume…save for the writer-director, who may be beloved but who may never ever get to make another movie after this “all-star” debacle.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Emory Cohen, Andy Garcia, Megan Fox, Lucy Hale and Oscar Isaac

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brian Petsos: A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 2:12

Veterans of the Honk Kong martial arts movie scene star in “Time,” a tale of martial arts assassins in retirement, a comedy that has ties to “Kung Fu Hustle” and “Shaolin Soccer” and enough promising ideas passing in front of the lens that you keep waiting for a big finale that never comes.

Here’s what I mean by “promising.” How would low-rent contract “muscle” make ends meet in its dotage? Maybe hired killers could take on freelance work from online ads — aged contemporaries who know “There’s nothing worse than being bedridden (in Cantonese with English subtitles, or dubbed).”

The killers would become “assisted suicide” contractors. That’s the best idea “Time” loses track of over its 98 minutes.

A kick-ass hit-man/woman trio, “The Invincible Trio,” used to rule Hong Kong’s underworld back in the day. We catch them in their prime in an old-fashioned slo-mo, freeze-frame to animated still brawl in the opening scene, which has the groovy music and cartoonish facial expressions that characterized the Bruce Lee-and-earlier era in kung fu cinema.

These three — Chau, Chung and Fung — were unbeatable, with the cold-blooded Chau usually delivering a throat slitting coup de grace via a “the Lethal Slash” of his curved blade.

But that was decades ago. Chau (Patrick Tse) is now a wizened noodle cook, too slow with his handmade pasta to keep up with his nephew’s new automatic noodle maker.

Fung (Bo-Bo Fung) still sings, which she has to do to support her deadbeat son, daughter-in-law and grandson. Her moves are pretty rusty and she’s looking at assisted living options.

And roly-poly Chung (Suet Lam), their driver and sometime rescuer, has gotten even rounder and is diabetic, short of breath and enamored of a sex worker one third his age.

A DJ’s message on the radio gets the band back together. But these assignments are sad and the infirm, aged and sickly or just lonely clients who hire them are even sadder.

Fung lives by the same aphorism she tells audiences (older) for her cabaret act. “Life is short, death is sure.” Live while you can. But these new clients helping them pay the bills? They’re a bummer.

“Don’t make my wife wait,” one wealthy, aged widower pleads.

That whole story thread is abandoned when Chau takes one job too many, one hit that’s way out of the ordinary. Tze Ying (newcomer Suet-Ying Chung) takes off her Beats, snaps a selfie with the old, ponytailed hit-man, all dressed in black at her door. He yanks the phone out of her hands, ignores her “I want to DIE” pleas, and flees.

But she’s got the drop on him, snatching his phone as he took hers. She’s determined to make him help her with her problem. And she’s maybe 16, 17 years old.

First-time feature director Tsz Pun Ko and his screenwriter find a few funny things to do with this situation, confronting the boy who dumped this lovesick teen, for starters.

Hey, the kid protests, “I took her to a BTS concert already.” He’s paid his dues. He’s entitled to break up.

Most of the attempted humor here is about clueless old folks still able to get a dirty job done and the enervating shrug of deciding whether or not to just “give up” themselves

The fights are fun, but far between.

If you’ve watched Hong Kong gangster movies or martial arts comedies, you’ve seen these folks in their prime. There’s not inherently sad in seeing them now, as Tse still has the air of menace, Lam still a waddling punch-line and Fung still “the girl.”

But the generically-titled “Time” never finds many laughs and never finds its way through these twilight years, when the “invincible” are more vulnerable, but still need the work.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, blood, sexual situations

Cast: Patrick Tse, Bo-Bo Fung, Suet Lam and Suet-Ying Chung.

Credits: Directed by Tsz Pun Ko scripted by Ka-tung Lam. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

No self-respecting werewolf movie would be caught undead without its silver bullets, a torchlit search for “the monster” through the gloom, with survivors gathered in a church that doesn’t offer nearly enough protection.

Writer-director Sean Ellis, whose real-history WWII thriller “Anthropoid” I loved, serves up a gorgeous but conventional tale of the beast with “The Cursed.” It’s a ponderous entry in the genre that adds a few new wrinkles, but not nearly enough, to put this one over.

An awkward framing device shows a gas attack, charge and mass machine gunning in the trenches of France during World War I. A victim, treated in the gory field hospital, puzzles the surgeon.

“That’s not a German bullet!”

Thirty-five years earlier, in the part of France where the characters have Irish Christian names and sing Irish ditties and are played by Irish actors and yet are French, something awful happened. It started as a land dispute and ended with a massacre. As the landowner (Alastair Petrie) was murdering Gypsies with a claim to some of his land, he’s the last to realize that the slaughter is only beginning, even though he hears the curse invoked.

Because he had no idea the Romany woman (Pascale Becouze) had this “Gypsy silver” on her person. A silver set of false teeth with fangs and runes inscribed on them was buried with her in a mass grave beneath the human scarecrow the gentry cruelly set up.

As the children of the village and of the gentleman’s great house start having nightmares about what happened at that Gypsy encampment, their weird visions come to life.

And that’s when a traveling pathologist (Boyd Holbrook of “Logan” and TV’s “The Fugitive”) happens by. A child disappears, another is mauled, the kids aren’t telling what they know. But this Dr. McBride has some notion of what’s causing this. He might even have an idea of how this all started, and how it all will play out.

The World War I framing is cumbersome, but at least that animates and provides visual varoiety to the bookends of “The Cursed,” which lumbers through the grey/black (with splashes of orange torchlight) color scale of the production design — shadows and fog, with nary a clear sky nor a flash of green in the late-winter forest to change up the look.

As the wealthy family is attacked, as the locals still go out in small groups to be turned into victims, Dr. McBride has to convince them, pretty much one at a time, that whatever this is, he’s seen it before and it’s just the sort of thing that can curse a family into extinction.

“Is what you just saw absurd?” isn’t a punchline or unintentional commentary. Everybody, especially Holbrook, takes this all quite seriously. Kelly Reilly and Roxane Duran stand out as the lady of the house and her maid, women numbed by the shock of the unknown.

That shock is, as happens too often in movies about the extraordinary, muted. What, werewolves are old hat in this corner of France?

The effects are standard-issue CG beasts, with one passing muster even on the dissection table (Ewww).

What works against “The Cursed” is its conventionality and its pacing. When we know the genre story beats — yes, somebody has to MAKE the silver bullets — the way to make them play is to dash through them, saving your pauses for big confrontations, big revelations and a big fire. The beats are here. They just pass like sands through the hourglass — ever-so-slowly.

You could Oscar short-list the production design (Pascal Le Guellec, Thierry Zemmou) and art direction (Patrick Schmidt, Paulo Gonçalves), even pay special homage to Ellis’s cinematography. That doesn’t change the fact that the writer/director/DP has made a werewolf movie as pretty as a painting, and almost as animated. It looks better than it plays.

Rating: R for strong violence, grisly images and brief nudity.

Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly, Alastair Petrie, Roxane Duran and Nigel Betts

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sean Ellis, an LD release.

Running time: 1:51

“Fresh” is a nasty, satiric swipe at the predatory nature of dating and how ill-advised any “Just go for it” ethos is for a single woman in the America of today.

Screenwriter Lauryn Kahn and director Mimi Cave take a broad swipe at “Just give me a smile,” sexism and the objectification of women.

Their aim is dark comedy — darker than dark, darker even than “Promising Young Woman.” But the chuckles are mostly in the finale.

Using “patient” to describe this grim horror tale is just being polite for “Could you go any slower?” Any film that starts with a 30 minute+ prologue and ends with a series of “Jesus, isn’t this over?” anti-climaxes is almost bound to frustrate.

The characters are wafer thin “types,” the predicament introduced early and dragged out in ways meant to be excruciating, but the plot turns are more predictable than one might like.

And considering that “predicament,” which has hints of “Misery,” “Hannibal,” “Split” and pretty much any thriller built on a kidnap victim and the awful things an awful person might do to her or him, there’s just a hint of miscasting.

As everybody reviewing this is being coy about that awful hook at the heart of the picture, I’ll join in and limit my complaints about the picture’s fat missing where it’s needed and turning up where it isn’t — starting with excessive length.

Runway-thin Daisey Edgar-Jones of “Normal People” and TV’s “War of the Worlds,” plays Noa, a city 20something who laments her relationship status more than she should, at least according to her gay BFF Mollie (Jojo T. Jones of TV’s “Twenties”).

“You do NOT need a man” falls on deaf ears, which is why Noa swipes right and winds up with one boor after another. But this guy at the supermarket, while tossing old pick-up lines around, at least delivers them cute and smooth.

“You live around here? Because I live over…on aisle six.”

Steve, given an oily, older-man polish by Sebastian Stan of “Pam & Tommy” and the Marvel Universe, gets her number, gets a date and gets to wake up with Noa, who snaps a picture to let Mollie know that she’s finally met a charmer. Steve is courtly, genteel, considerate, a doctor doing “my second residency,” which he looks almost young enough to pull off.

Mollie’s getting a “stranger danger” vibe, but naive Noa leaps right into the “let’s go away for the weekend” pitch. A little cell phone silence and cyber-stalking raises Mollie’s antennae higher. But by then, it’s too late. Noa’s in somebody’s remote, luxurious lair, one with a basement that could be AnyDungeon. What might Steve have in store?

“I’m gonna tell you, but you’re gonna freak out.”

That’s just the set-up, the first act. “Fresh” is about Noa’s dilemma, how she works that problem and Mollie’s efforts to find a friend who has lost control of her phone.

Stan brings a real relish to his captor character, dancing about to early MTV (“Obsession” and “Restless Heart”) hits, calmly taunting Noa, lightly scolding her when she doesn’t “relax” and just go along with his heinous plans like “the others.”

Cave’s stylish but sluggish debut manages a surprise or two, but botches thriller basics. She lingers over the clues Noa and/or Mollie pick up, but skips giving any hint of Noa’s mettle or cunning. The “ticking clock” hanging over her is gruesome and urgent, but she seems numbed to it and the picture’s pacing underscores that. Lots of cute camera angles and shock-shots of what’s in that house and what Noa is fated to become take the place of urgency.

The “dating is deadly” metaphor is introduced, and lip service is paid to not letting “victim blaming” enter into anybody’s thinking. But that feels shoehorned in.

The casting is problematic in a couple of ways, the least of which is the 15 year age difference/sophistication gap that our lonely waif never picks up on.

Although the genre isn’t really my thing and this particular entry in it is more “Human Centipede” than I care for, most of these quibbles wouldn’t matter if the picture clipped along, which it doesn’t. All that screen time, and we know virtually nothing about anybody in this — victim, villain, best friend or otherwise.

That dulls whatever edge this satire has, and in a movie like “Fresh,” “cutting” is the whole point.

Rating: R for strong and disturbing violent content, some bloody images, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sebastian Stan, Charlotte LeBon, Dayo Okeniyi and Jojo T. Gibbs

Credits: Directed by Mimi Cave, scripted by Lauryn Kahn. A Searchlight Pictures release.

Running time: 1:54

A snow storm, a closed interstate, five people holed up in an interstate rest area and somebody there has a little girl duct taped in a van.

This 20th Century release is coming to Hulu Friday and stars Havana Rose Liu, Dennis Haysbert, Dale Dickey, Danny Ramirez and David Rysdahl.

Samuel Goldwyn has this “You’ve no idea who yer dealin’ wit” thriller, which opens March 18.

Michael Smiley, Annes Elwy and Iwan Rheon are the stars.