Movie Nation

A missing person, suggestions of crime and down-and-out working poor trailer-park Angelinos struggling to get by — let’s label “The Cleaner” an indie film noir and see if I can make that stick.

This quirky, laid-back and downbeat drama is a star vehicle for King Orba, whose credits cover a wide range of jobs, positions, “additional crew” and the occasional acting job (“The Mighty Orphans,” TV’s “Stargirl”). He co-wrote it with first-time feature director Erin Elder and plays Buck, a broke 50ish house cleaner who lives in an RV next to the trailer housing his retired “piss and vinegar” house cleaner mother (Shelley Long).

Buck’s barely getting by on a good day, pedaling an old beach bike to cleaning jobs from a client list he inherited from his mother Sharon..

It wasn’t always like this, though we get the impression it was never much better. Buck used to sell RVs, like the one he lives in. But something happened.

At least his make-ends-meet struggle leaves him just enough cash to score a little weed from his younger friend, James (James Paxton of TV’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”). James is all about making his own marijuana blends and giving them cute names — “marketing.”

Buck juggles work and keeping an eye on his medicated, beer-loving Mom, and not very successfully. Their new neighbor Becky (Eden Brolin of TV’s “Yellowstone”) might help out. It’s the least she can do after she gets Mom drunk at her trailer-warming party.

Then this new client, Carlene (Lynda Carter, TV’s “Wonder Woman”), an elderly retired singer, springs this on Buck.

“I don’t want you to clean my house, Buck. I want you to find my son.”

Buck, a guy without a car, without a computer, without a cell-phone, is supposed to locate an estranged adult son with “problems,” somebody who doesn’t want to be found in one of the largest cities in the Americas.

Even with a little help from James, who at least knows how to use social media, and Buck’s cop-brother Craig (Faust Checho), Buck is plainly “not qualified” to do this and is out of his depth.

But the singer favors him with a song, and shoves cash in his hand. It’d be rude not to try.

“The Cleaner” is so laid back it’s on the Matthew McConaughey “J.K. Livin'” spectrum.

The dialogue is spare, the “clues” Buck picks up on simple and obvious as he pedals his bike around East L.A., following up, masking his innocuous requests (“You seen this guy?”) behind unnecessary mystery because he’s probably seen the way the gumshoes do it in old movies or “The Rockford Files.”

The screenplay has just enough peripheral complications to keep things interesting. Cop brother Craig is almost estranged from his mother. He tries to bring his fiance (Soleil Moon Frye) to meet her, and that dinner goes from awkward to “trailer trash” ugly in a flash. Neighbor Becky is in an abusive relationship.

The script’s grace notes include a clever way of introducing Craig. Buck comes home to find his mother’s turned her ankle at Becky’s beer bust. He goes to get her pain med prescription filled, learns the medicine isn’t covered by Medicaid and winds up shoplifting batteries for her TV remote. He’s caught.

The cop who picks him up starts in with “Aren’t you ashamed?” Then we find out he’s his brother.

“The Cleaner” is the sort of movie you can make if you spend a lot of time on film sets and are personable enough to start conversations with the stars. Luke Wilson starred in “The Mighty Orphans” with Orb in a supporting role. Hey Luke, wouldya do me a solid?

Wilson, long a champion of indie cinema, signs on for a couple of scenes as a house cleaning client.

Veteran character players M.C. Gainey and Mike Starr join Long and Carter and Moon Frye and Shiloh Fernandez (of “Evil Dead,” playing the missing son here) and Sean Penn and Robin Wright’s son Hopper Penn in a cast whose assembly would be a fun tale to tell, and who ensured “The Cleaner” got financed.

And all that pays off with a quietly-compelling mystery set in a milieu that’s grittier than most of the characters living in it are willing to admit, struggling people who are colorful, believable and (mostly) relatable.

It’s not a polished jewel, but even in the rough “The Cleaner” shines, more proof that you don’t need to limit yourself to horror to get your first film made.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse

Cast: King Orba, Shelley Long, Eden Brolin, Lynda Carter, Soleil Moon Frye, Mike Starr, M.C. Gainey and Luke Wilson.

Credits: Directed by Erin Elders, scripted by Erin Elders and King Obra. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:33

Well-crafted but not particularly well thought-out, “Halloween Kills” is a hot mess of a horror homage.

David Gordon Green’s take on venerable slasher franchise has ambition, an attempt at intellectual heft and one of the most empathetic performances of the great Judy Greer’s career. What it lacks is frights. What it traffics in is nostalgia, a warm feeling for John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic. And it all but murders that.

The Scott Teems (“That Evening Sun”) script travels along two timelines –1978 and 2018 — and weighs in on our troubled era as Haddenfield, Illinois descends into mob rule and sloganeering mob violence.

No, Michael Myers hasn’t changed masks as he enters his AARP years. But the Trumpism analogy is right there in the open, with no less than Anthony Michael Hall (“Sixteen Candles” to “The Dead Zone” to “The Goldbergs”) playing a child survivor of that “Halloween” night long ago, leading the enraged citizenry in “Evil Dies Tonight!” chants as he sends vigilantes far and wide, hunting for the masked mass murderer who is literally changing the town’s demographics in a single night.

This is a “Frankenstein” village, assembling to meet a threat, but ranting and raving and following their worst instincts. All that’s missing are the Tiki torches.

The story begins as Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), that babysitter of yore for kids like Tommy (Hall), now “that crazy lady that almost got killed,” is wheeled into a hospital, gut-stabbed and still screaming “We GOT him. Shot him in the FACE. BURNED him alive!” She’s sure they finally shot, clubbed, stabbed and burned Michael Myers to death.

Her daughter (Greer) isn’t relieved. And when others start showing up — a bleeding-out Officer Hawkins (Will Patton) and corpses — daughter Karen starts shouting what we already know from the film’s dull “first kills,” what the TV news is in the process of confirming. Myers isn’t dead. He’s staggered out of that burning house, wiped out a fire brigade, impaled and gutted a teen or two and shown us he’s just getting warmed up.

Nobody listens as Karen pleads and demands police protection for her mother in the hospital, or that her daughter (Andi Matichak) at least stick around, help keep watch over her grandma.

But Tommy, who we see tell “The Haddenfield Boogeyman” story as part of a bar talent show this All Hallow’s Eve, has other ideas. Hall takes on the “Dead Zone” scowl of a man scarred by trauma, enraged into fanaticism by this latest twist in that murderer’s story. He picks up a baseball bat and rallies the citizenry.

Flashbacks take us back to Tommy, Laurie and others 50ish adults’ (Kyle Richards, Richard Longstreet) childhood memories of that awful Halloween of 1978. We see the worst night of Officer Hawkins’ life (Thomas Mann plays Patton’s character as a rookie).

New characters are introduced, set up to become someone the audience might root for, and pitilessly ventilated with knives of every description, without suspense or frights. As we hear the random giggles of slasher film fans feigning appreciation of this fireman’s saw slaughter or that pithy punchline — “This is for Doctor LOOMIS, Michael!” — punctuated by Michael killing the speaker, “Halloween Kills” pretty much goes to hell.

The idea here, aside from giving this renewed franchise some topical/socio-political relevance, it to make an “Empire Strikes Back” chapter in this planned trilogy. There’s a hopelessness and sadness that permeates every scene that doesn’t have mouthy tweens playing pranks on the gay couple (Scott MacArthur and Michael McDonald) now living in Michael Myers’ old house. Greer’s now-ironically named “Karen” embodies this.

Karen weeps for her murdered husband, fears for her hunted, wounded mother and her vengeance-seeking teen daughter and despairs at “what Michael Myers has done to us” — fomented an unthinking, chanting mob, misled by fear and ignorance.

Much respect for the director of “Pineapple Express” and the franchise-renewing “Halloween” of 2018 and the screenwriter for trying, but this misshapen, unfocused blunder is never more than a space-filler franchise installment, killing time and a whole lot of Haddenfield until the third film comes along.

The flashback references but doesn’t use Carpenter’s iconic film or even get a firm handle on its style in recreating the slaughter way back when. Finding a Donald Pleasance impersonator is just one of the crimes against cinema of those scenes.

Curtis isn’t the only actor from the original seen in this sequel, but not all of those cast as “surviving kids who grew up and hit middle age in Haddenfield” are very interesting actors. And Curtis, burdened with heavy-handed sermonizing speeches at the film’s conclusion, wipes away some of the goodwill the 2018 “Halloween” won her.

The film’s flurry of close-ups, a view of a fireman facing death by fireaxe from inside his glass-covered helmet, can be arresting.

But you can’t help but sense Green, who used to make self-conscious, sensitive and geography-specific indie films like “All the Real Girls,” “Undertow” and “Snow Angels” until the New York Times profiled him and noted that he’d never made a movie that made money, isn’t wholly invested in this genre or this subject. The director of “Joe” and “Prince Avalanche” and TV series like the hilarious “Vice Principals” seems to more interested in commenting on horror than actually delivering frights.

Even die-hard horror fans can’t help but notice “Halloween Kills” stumbles through the nostalgia that made Green’s “Halloween” reboot work, and that “Kills” isn’t scary in the least. Is he laughing with you as you giggle as the many ways Michael Myers kills (not that inventive), or is he saying “Dear Dr. Fauci, here’s what happened to American empathy for others” with his latest?

The fact that Green is in pre-production on “Halloween Ends,” the “finale,” and “Hellraiser” and “The Exorcist” should give Green fans, horror fans and Green himself pause.

But at least the New York Times will be happy.

Rating: R for strong bloody violence throughout, grisly images, language and some drug use

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Anthony Michael Hall, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Thomas Mann, Kyle Richards, Dylan Arnold and Will Patton

Credits: Directed by David Gordon Green, scripted by Scott Teems, based on the John Carpenter/Debra Hill films and characters. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:46

Scott Adkins, Ashley Green and Ryan Phillippe star in this Nov. 5 release, which the CIA and the Navy SEALS trying to avert a dirty bomb disaster.

The title also refers to this being a story filmed in “one take” (simulated).

Looking forward to this one, mainly because of the history of the franchise and Jamie Lee and Judy Greer.

Bitterly disappointed that this Australian trailer wasn’t dubbed into…Australian.

Why would actor, writer and director Miles Doleac (“Hallowed Ground,” “The Dinner Party”) set his latest horror fiasco in Der Black Forest of Deutschland? Did he meet folks he’d eventually cast in it at a continuing education class, Conversational German?

Just a guess. But there is no guesswork, or mistaking the sounds of second year community college German from the villains of “Demigod,” a disastrously dull dud of a thriller that makes you question the origins of the word “inept,” because “ept” never figures into it.

Robin (Rachel Nichols of TV’s “Man in the High Castle”) and Leo (Yohance Myles of TV’s “First Family”) are a couple checking out her late grandfather’s Black Forest home when they stumble into the legend — or a cult that’s really into it — of Cernunnos, “Supreme hunter” in this forest according to forest lore.

Not for a while, mind you, For nearly half an hour, we’re bored to tears by them wandering around the house, admiring grandpa’s stuffed critters, gutted critters and antique gun collection, eventually stumbling into Mr. “Yah, I knew your grandvatter,” the hunter Arthur Fuchs (Doleac in front of the camera). He briefs them on these “haunted woods” and the “monster” who lives therein.

This demigod/demon was “der lord of de before,” Arthur intones in Olde Hollywood Germanic English. “Before men began to wreck ZE VORLD!”

People disappear here and “It iz as if ze voods SWALLOWED zem whole!”

The couple is then attacked and kidnapped in the dark of night by this cult, mostly women, in one of the lamest kidnapping scenes ever staged in front of a camera.

But that’s nothing to what happens, slowly and dully, to Robin, Abe, Arthur and others rounded up by that cult and tied up in what looks to be a pine forest in the rural American South.

“Let ze disemBOWELing commenze!” Because they must make things ready for their “hunter” lord’s return.

“Ve vill repay hiss comink mit fresh game und sport!”

Every act of violence against the group of strangers tied up in the woods is met with an awful under-reaction by one and all.

Every line is worse than the one before, with those deigning to speak German sounding as if they’re not quite finished with Hooked on Der Phonics.

“Demigod” is awful, so bad that I grow weary of mocking it. Approach at your own peril.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, entrails and whatnot, and profanity

Cast: Rachel Nichols, Yohance Myles and Miles Doleac.

Credits: Directed by Miles Doleac, scripted by Miles Doleac and Michael Donovan Horn.

Running time: 1:34

The French leader, WWII hero and long-serving president of post-war France is remembered in his first blush of fame, trying to keep France in the fight while badgering Churchill for aid and standing in London after the French surrender in 1940.

Lambert Wilson has the title, role, with Tim Wilson as Churchill and Gabriel Le Bomin (“Fragments of Anton”) behind the camera. “De Gaulle” opens Oct. 22.

“She Paradise” arrives in North America just as the first snows hit — mid-November.

A little island patois and Jamaican music, post-Marley, and some seriously sexy dancers.

Todd Haynes, director of the Dylan-of-Many-Faces biography “I’m and Not There” and glam/punk appreciation “Velvet Goldmine,” isn’t interested in spoon-feeding anybody a history of “The Velvet Underground.”

Haynes figures if you show up for it (Apple TV+ has it), you already know a little something about the highly-influential/legendarily “unsuccessful” 1960s and early-70s band fronted by Lou Reed and John Cale, produced by Andy Warhol and sometimes featuring the imposing film starlet, model and singer Nico, “the blonde iceberg in the middle of the stage” filled with musicians and their avant-garde rock.

So what Haynes delivers is a lovely, warm and impressionistic sketch of the band — montages of images and archival news, interviews, “Factory” and concert footage to set the scene and place the Velvets within their time. That and old interviews with members no longer living and fresh, fond and sometimes blunt takes on why they matter from surviving members Cale and Maureen Tucker. Fans, relatives and others paint a picture of a famously-experimental band that (with Warhol) invented the ’60s version of “multi-media” musical performance and influenced generations that came after them.

Haynes “shows” us rather than “tells” us a lot of the basics. We see the cover of Michael Leigh’s scandalized 1963 book “The Velvet Underground,” an exploration of “paraphilia,” that the band took as its name — eventually.

We hear from Reed about his first interest in music, listening to “The Diablos, The Jesters, The Paragons, doo-wop, rockabilly,” and from childhood friends and Reed’s sister Merrill about his sexual curiosity, performing at New York’s Hayloft gay bar as a teen.

There’s nothing of Reed himself talking about his sexuality.

Cale is first seen in an appearance on the 1960s TV quiz show “I’ve Got a Secret,” where the Welshman’s 18 hour long performance of a piano piece by an avant-garde composer he knew is puzzled over, respectfully acknowledged and lightly ridiculed by the program’s panel.

Cale’s brief discussion of his childhood mentions how he “got taken advantage of” as a child. You have to know, or look up his life story to learn about his abuse at the hands of a music teacher and Anglican priest.

The film doesn’t dwell on drugs, barely touches on them in fact.

But we see footage of what Andy Warhol’s “Factory” was like, and hear ringing endorsements of how this artists’ coop/workspace “was all about the work,” the way the painter, film and music impresario pushed those he invited there, including Reed.

The Velvets — Reed and fellow guitarist Sterling Morrison, who met at Syracuse University, multi-instrumentalist and classically trained Cale, Morrison’s childhood friend, drummer Maureen “Moe” Tucker, and later, when Warhol got the idea they needed a sex symbol out front, Nico (Christa Päffgen) who was in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” — are heard and seen as they’re tracked through a surprisingly long and depressingly downhill career.

They started out as Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the “house band” at Warhol’s happening and hip “Factory,” became celebrated in New York for Cale’s “droning” musical backdrop on viola or whatever and Reed’s clever, arty and poetic pop sensibilities, made clear on songs such as “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs.”

It’s fascinating to hear snippets of Reed’s pubescent pop tunes — he cut his first record at 14 — and Cale talk about his early exposure to “the 60 cycle (motor) hum of the refrigerator,” which to him and his earliest collaborators was “the hum of Western civilization.”

Applying that primal “drone” to the texture of rock records made even their most poppish tunes distinct and strange.

“That weirdness, it shouldn’t have existed in this space” an early acolyte marvels.

“You need physics to describe that band at its height” another enthuses.

Haynes tracks down big fan Jonathan Richman (of The Modern Lovers, and the movie “There’s Something About Mary”) and he speaks adoringly of his experience meeting with and being mentored by members of the band. Jackson Browne, of all people, remembers playing guitar for Nico shows in the ’60s.

There’s not enough of the music, not really enough of the “experience” of seeing them live when they played with Warhol films projected behind them, psychedelic lights, “white polka dots” bathing them in performance, with Nico struggling to stay on pitch during her brief turn as a singer.

Immersive and informative as it is, that keeps “The Velvet Underground” from being definitive. And that in turn lets it fall short of making its case, backed up by musicians and music critics (not seen here), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, of their seminal status.

But Haynes handles the band’s post-breakup years in a lovely, warm final montage that celebrates Reed’s growing fame and later life, Cale’s revered status in music circles and the lives — too short, some of them — that this “it” band of the ’60s avant-garde went on to lead after shaking music up every bit as much as The Beatles, if not as profitably.

Rating: R for language, sexual content, nudity and some drug material

Cast: John Cale, Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker, Mary Woronov, Nico, Sterling Morrison, LaMonte Youung, Jackson Browne and Jonathan Richman

Credits: Scripted and directed by Todd Haynes. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:01

Neve Campbell had me at “I’ve been through this…a lot.”

Next year.

Looks like mostly an homage to the original. And it looks like it works.

Denis Villeneuve’s film of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” looks exactly as it should on the big screen — epic in scale, baroque in design, fatalistic in outlook, grim in its life-or-death stakes.

But then the reason we know what it’s supposed to look and feel like from David Lynch’s flawed 1984 adaptation, if not the SyFy Channel’s malnourished dive into it. This dense, tense and Bedouin culture/feudalism-in-space piece of science fiction, first published on the heels of David Leans’ “Lawrence of Arabia” in the 1960s isn’t so much “unfilmmable” as a bit played out in terms of themes, action beats and plot points. Herbert stole from desert Arab culture. Everybody from George Lucas onward stole from Herbert.

So as faithful to the spirit of the novel as this adaptation is, as wonderfully as visionary Villeneuve cast it, as stunning as the “Arrival/Blade Runner 2049” director’s production design and art direction team makes it, this pretty picture often plays as ponderous.

And Villeneuve makes that conclusion entirely too easy. You don’t have to remember Lynch’s “Dune” to realize that while Villanueve added material to the opening act and stripped away narration that organized both the novel and earlier adaptations, his film mimics the earlier film’s pace. You don’t have to remember the story from the novel or earlier adaptations — also referenced in “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” the documentary about a third “visionary” who almost made a version of this desert planet saga back in the ’70s — to get impatient with Villeneuve’s many lingering shots of “Star Wars” sized military formations, gigantic worms, ginormous spaceships and the “Thopter,” the dragonfly-like ornithopter that flies over the planet Arrakis, coveted s for its hallucinogenic, interstellar-travel enabling “spice.”

“Dune” gives us the dreams of its hero, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), heir to the dukedom of House Atreides. Again and again, we’re teased with flash-forwards thanks to Paul, son of not just Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), but of his witchy spellbinder of the Bene Gesserit mother (Rebecca Ferguson). This “chosen one” has glimpses of a possible future, which creates impatience in the story as it plods through everything it takes to put our hero in those more-exciting-than-what-we-see-here dream scenes from “Dune 2” and/or “3.”

Even though Villeneuve & Co. realized that Herbert’s book was going to take multiple films to cover, unlike David Lynch and his producer Dino DeLaurentis, by pacing this “Dune” exactly like Lynch’s — both films give us our first taste of the Sand Worms” one hour in — he all but ensures the slowest “origin story” franchise film in ages.

House Atreides, led by Duke Leto, has been given the “fief” of Arrakis, sending him and his vast armed clan to take over the spice mining on this forbidding desert planet whose natives, the Fremen, aren’t keen on “Outworlders” making a mess of things and giving them nothing in return.

The Duke, his concubine Jessica (Ferguson), his son Paul and most trusted lieutenants (Jason Mamoa, Josh Brolin and Stephen McKinley Henderson) and palace guards will take over from their bloodthirsty rivals, House Harkonnen, led by its bloated ogre of a Baron (Stellan Skarsgård) and his thuggish nephew (Dave Bautista).

“When is a gift not a gift?”

Arrakis is a poison pill for Atreides, a hellishly hot place infested with people-and-machinery-devouring sand worms, wracked by terrorist attacks from the Fremen. The Duke hopes to pacify the place by “negotiating” with the natives and fixing everything the Harkonnen messed up.

Fat chance.

Javier Bardem plays a gloriously insolent leader of the Fremen, Zendaya is a native dominating Paul’s dreams of the planet and his future. Charlotte Rampling is the forbidding Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit, who “tests” Paul, reminding him “You have more than one birthright, boy!”

“Dune” takes us from grand, oversized sets to striking Norwegian coastal cliffs and the stunning desert vistas of Abu Dhabi as it immerses us in this universe of intrigues and a Chosen One’s martial and ESP Bene Gesserit training from Mum.

“Use ‘The Voice!'”

And the film introduces us to an arid world where shade is a life-saving must just after sunrise, where water is so precious it has to be recycled in special suits and spitting isn’t the insult it is in much of our world, even though it’s just as gross.

Chalamet tends to overdo his many take-a-thoughtful-pause moments and Bautista seems woefully miscast in this ensemble of Oscar nominees and an Oscar winner.

But Mamoa and Brolin are macho delights, Ferguson soulful and scheming, Isaac and Sharon Duncan-Brewster (playing an Imperial ecologist) make strong impressions and Stellan Skarsgård, almost buried in (Digital?) prosthetics, tickles as an embittered, bloody-minded beast with little control of his “appetites.”

Hans Zimmer’s score leans heavily on the Arabic influences that inspired Herbert, whose novel gave much of the Western world its first taste of such words as “jihad” and The Mahdi.”

David Lynch was forced to suddenly squeeze in two thirds of the novel into the ruinously-rushed last 45 minutes of his “Dune,” and Villeneuve faces no such dilemma. But his take on the tale dawdles, pretty much from his opening scene to the anti-climactic finish.

There’s a trick to making first-film-in-a-franchise films, and while the sweep of this one is every bit the eye candy fans could hope for, Villeneuve, the screenwriters and I must add composer Zimmer don’t so much stick the landing as let their picture peter out.

Let’s hope “Dune 2” turns Villeneuve’s vision into more entertaining action epic.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive material

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Mamoa, Josh Brolin, Zendaya, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Javier Bardem, Chen Chang, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Dave Bautista and Stellan Skarsgård.

Credits: Directed by Denis Villeneuve, scripted by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth. based on the novel by Frank Herbert. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:35