Movie Nation

Warner Brothers had no clue how to sell the screwy, blundering “Malignant” and gave up on it. James Wan has a big old bomb on his hands, a $5.5 million opening weekend, a dog by every measure. Horror movies are usually a reliable $15 million up opening weekend genre.

The “Candyman” reboot earned almost as much, $4.8 million, but on its third weekend. It will clear the $50 million mark (not great, not yet) by midweek.

“Free Guy” cleared another $5.8, it’s fifth weekend and now it’s over $101 million. That was good enough for a second place finish.

“Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” dominated and won it’s second weekend with an impressive $35 million second weekend, a dip of just over 50%.

“The Card Counter” also got little support from its distributor, only pulled in $1.1 million despite getting good reviews.

That put it behind the $1.2 million “Don’t Breathe 2” managed.

That’s half what “Paw Patrol” picked up on its latest weekend ($2.2).

The thing about James Wan’s “Malignant” is that it’s utter nonsense, until that moment it isn’t. All becomes clear. Ish.

And the damned monstrosity that it was up until now abruptly becomes even worse.

Who knows what Wan, who finally graduated from his lucrative and critically-honored horror ghetto to direct “Aquaman” into blockbuster status, was thinking in flinging this crap against the wall? Kids heading to very expensive colleges, maybe?

But whatever his motives, the director of “Saw,” “Insidious” and “The Conjuring” takes a big’ol swing and a miss with this misguided tale of a woman whose childhood “invisible friend” acts and sounds an awful lot like Venom.

Genre veteran Annabelle Wallis (“The Mummy,” “Annabelle”) stars as Madison, a very pregnant nurse with an abusive husband (Jake Abel) and a history of miscarriages.

All it takes is one shove against the wall and we figure “There goes another one,” but this time, she wakes up to a dead husband and only a vague notion of what happened to relate to the two cops (Michole Briana Whit and George Young) who investigate.

When people start dying and she starts getting phone calls from some hairy, reverse-jointed “Ring” entity, we think back to the opening scene of “Malignant,” at a research hospital where somebody named “Gabriel” is going through staff like a serial killer through hot butter. We get a glimpse of him. And maybe we remember what the title “Malignant” infers.

Maddie Hasson and her wonderbangs play Cindy, the sister who tries to help Madison piece together her past and how it relates to her present, and dashes in and out of Greater Seattle in her Prius, looking for answers.

But everything she and her sister relate to the detectives gets Wanda Sykes-style sass from Det. Moss (White).

As in “You mean to tell me your IMAGINARY childhood friend did this?” And after Madison and then the other detective see this monster of the night in the flesh and get a police artist to sketch “it” — “So, I’m putting out a BOLO (Be on the LookOut) on ‘Sloth’ from ‘The Goonies?'”

And before you say “So, it’s having a laugh?” No. Those are the only two jokes in it.

So, not funny. Not scary. Aside from dull, what else’ve you got?

The effects, which include an impressive room-morphing-into-a-different-room effect and a horror filmmaker’s wet dream of a chase through the long-abandoned bowels of Seattle, are the standout feature of the film, what Warners was really paying for when they hired the director of a lot of Lionsgate and then Universal horror movies (and “Furious 7″) to be their DC/”Aquaman” guy.

The violence is of a bashing/stabbing/slashing variety, and spills an awful lot of fake blood.

But this, for want of a better word “script,” based on a “story” Wan collaborated on? Yuck. For a minute or three, after we’ve seen the very-pregnant Madison and after we’ve gotten that flashback of “Gabriel,” who looked an awful lot like a fetus back in 1993, I thought this might be a horror film riff on abortion, at least in an allegorical sense.

Nah.

It’s the sort of enterprise where a character dashes off to that now-abandoned, cliffside NYC Dakota-looking high-rise research hospital, reads the dust-covered wall directory and sees only two floors and the basement listed. The other 10 stories? They’re just on the OUTside.

If you stick around long enough — and I don’t advise that — you can see legendary stuntwoman and Tarantino favorite Zoë E. Bell in the inevitable police holding cell (with slaughter to follow) scene.

Performances? Nobody in this will be topping their resume with it. Neither will the director. Let’s hope it’s just a blip, a disaster soon to be forgotten by him and the studio that wrote the checks for it. I’m pretty sure he already has.

Rating: R for strong horror violence and gruesome images, and for language (profanity)

Cast: Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, Michole Briana Whit and George Young.

Credits: Directed by James Wan, scripted by Akela Cooper. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:50

A Hollywood landmark, emptied by COVID, stir crazy newlyweds and some strange disappearances from the hotel’s register are nightmare fuel for “Shelter in Place,” a seriously slow psychological horror tale bathed in blood…eventually.

Sarah and John, played by Tatjana Marjanovic of “TV’s “Purgatory” and Brendan Hines (“MacGuyver”) are the “only guests” at the historic Roosevelt Hotel, trapped there as the airlines, then the state and finally the country go into lockdown.

John may wax poetic about the original home for the Academy Awards and busy himself with swimming and drinks by the pool, bowling and drinks by the alley, drinks in the bar and a bottle in their room. And Sarah may go on and on about “gratitude” as a vlogger and online social influencer, fielding lucrative offers to “video my feet” among other deals-in-the-making. But yes, this sheltering-in-place is getting to them.

“Life inside is for HERMITS!”

It’s not that they feel guilty about trapping two staff — forced to stay there and stay on duty with them. Manager, concierge and bartender Ty (Kevin Daniels) keeps his public face friendly, and maid-and-by-necessity-cook Adela (Ola Kaminska) is a model of flirtatious efficiency, if no great shakes as a chef.

But Sarah has just run out of her stress pills. And John is getting entirely too used to a “What, me worry?” life of indolence and alcohol.

And they didn’t see the film’s first scene, in which a creepy poolside entrepreneur-bro was lured into a room with blinding light, only to crawl out, tattered and bloody, facing a future of death or handcuffs, we can’t figure out which will be worse.

Former “Saturday Night Live” crew-members turned writer-directors Chris Beyrooty and Connor Martin stumble through their first feature, shifting points of view, giving the audience more information than our protagonists but never really making us fear for their safety.

Because John is a drunk, and when he’s polished off a bottle of Jack Daniels truth serum, his description of pretty poseur Sarah is savagely on the mark.

“Little Princess f—–g HAPPY pants” is the “queen of curated narcissism.”

He is tactless, boorish and not-that-clued-in to their surroundings. Nosey Sarah is the one who starts to perceive a threat — reading through the hotel’s register, seeing names crossed out and one, aside from her and John, that isn’t, and spying on Polish Adela.

“I get it. I’m the creepy maid.“

The empty hallways, nearly-empty bar scene and big, echoing lobby give off the faintest whiff of “The Shining,” a notion that lasts, alas, but an instant. The pacing doesn’t build dread, the characters don’t build empathy.

In a movie in which Ty reminds us of mid-lockdown boredom, when “time doesn’t seem to matter any more,” “Shelter in Place” makes one keenly aware of the time it’s taking to get to its point, to pick up the pulse if not the pace.

We know something awful’s coming. Martin and Beyrooty may eventually get to their bloody denouement. But they do a very poor job of holding the viewer’s interest, of convincing us that “What’s out there is scarier than what’s in here.”

Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Tatjana Marjanovic, Brendan Hines, Kevin Daniels and Ola Kaminska

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chris Beyrooty and Connor Martin. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:29

Dropping in to knock out a review before checking out James Wan’s unpromoted Warner Brothers release “Malignant” here in New Smyrna (pronounced “SuhMYRNa” by the locals),so let’s leave this odd but fun Chinese parable which I reviewed some months back as a gift.

Yes, I am Roger DVDseed, dropping off free discs to public libraries up and down the East coast in my travels.

Libraries have been life savers during the pandemic and they’re a great place to donate your discs. Who has a hankering to “collect” these films in disc form any more? Not me.

Anyway, thanks to Film Movement for sending “Dead Pigs.” Hope the New Smyrnans dig it.

Even allowing for the minimalism of its formula, the German “hunted in the woods” thriller “Prey” offers slim pickings for those who enjoy watching and reasoning one’s way out of the pre-ordained predicament it puts its victims and the viewer in.

The set-up is so familiar your average 12 year-old could script it. Five friends set off on a kayaking/camping hike into the mid-European forest. Somebody starts shooting at them. They don’t know who, and even after they do, they have no idea “why.”

As they’re picked off and avenues for escape, “plans” to get out of this come to nothing, who will show himself capable of learning, scheming and figuring out how to fight back before they’re all dead?

Such thrillers, even the most unsurvivably supernatural among them, have the hunted and the viewer experience a learning curve. That’s who wins these Darwinian Hunter Games, those who adapt.

But there’s no learning here, no scheming. The most important figure to go into this kind of clueless and come out the same way is writer-director Thomas Sieben. If you ever wondered how boring and frustrating it might be to watch the young, athletic and helpless stagger to their deaths, with little agency in their fate, Sieben’s made a movie for you.

No. That’s not giving away the ending. But when Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David vowed they’d make an American sitcom whose characters lived by a “NO LEARNING” ethos, they had no idea they’d inspire some German with a Netflix deal to try it in a thriller.

Sieben (“Kidnapping Stella”) serves up a bachelor party of five, guys with little woodlore among them, riding inflatable kayaks, hiking and perhaps camping in a national park in early winter.

Roman (David Kross) is about to get married. Albert (Hanno Koffler) is the start-up entrepreneur some of them work for. Vincent (Yung Ngo) is the one most out of his depth, the one given to throwing up under stress and whimpering and crying when things get real.

You would be, too, if you were the first one shot. They hear what they assume to be hunters’ rifle fire, here and there. But it’s only when they try to get in their SUV and leave that the “accident” that winged Vincent stops looking like a mistake. They’re being hunted.

They flee into the forest without their gear, with no cell signal and little to fight back with save for a single knife and their wits.

In Sieben’s screenwriterly mind, that’s game over. These guys have “issues.” Little is done to develop the group dynamic, just this guy needing a job, that one needing investors, Vincent just wanting it all to end and Roman wishing he was with his fiance.

There’s talk of “every man for himself,” which sounds even uglier in German. The shots keep coming, even as they halfheartedly attempt to reason their way out of this jam, or plead from afar with the motiveless, murderous shooter.

“Why are you DOING this?”

Flashbacks show the “tests” Roman has faced in the relationship he’s about to consummate with marriage. Yawn.

When your Around the World with Netflix film puts more effort into explaining “motivations” than it does on five educated, healthy men incapable of teaming up, brainstorming or spitballing until they find an escape or counter-attack that works, that “explanation” had better justify all this.

It does not.

Perhaps our writer-director was making satiric fun of male bonding, the myth of primal male woodland prowess and the like. Probably not, and seriously, that’s all I’ve got on “Prey.” Alas, Sieben has to admit the same.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: David Kross, Hanno Koffler, Robert Finster, Yung Ngo, Klaus Steinbacher and Nellie Thalbach

Credits: Scripted and directed by Thomas Sieben. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

There’s one thing you can say for a melodrama that gives you whiplash. It must be quite a ride.

Actor (“This is Us”) turned writer-director John Pollono brings his off-Broadway slow boil of a thriller “Small Engine Repair” to the screen in an immersive, Big Twisty and somewhat uneven star vehicle that still delivers the goods. A great supporting cast will do that for you.

It’s a slice of Flyover America male bonding built around a trio of friends played by top dog character actors Jon Bernthal and Shea Whigham, with Pollono holding his own with two of the best. “Engine” starts clumsily — no, we don’t need to to have the nickname “Manch Vegas” that locals pin on Manchester, New Hampshire explained — and meanders ever onward establishing the characters, revealing their flaws and flashing back to explore their lifelong history.

And then it turns dark on a dime. And turns darker. And still, in all that lethal seriousness, it finds a laugh or two with these mugs, how they talk and what they find funny.

Pollono is Frankie, owner of said “Small Engine Repair” shop, a guy we meet as he gets out of jail, his arm in a cast. It was a short stay for this single dad. Fortunately, he’s got his childhood pals Swaino (Bernthal) and Packie (Whigham) to look after little Crystal.

Swaino’s an unfiltered blowhard who brags about sex and “makes one too many gay jokes” to not take a ribbing about that. Frankie’s jail stint was where he put down the bottle and what made him give up bar brawling. And while he might have raised Crystal (Ciara Bravo) to have his filthy vocabulary and coarse sense of humor, a few years later she’s headed for college.

Packie seems on-the-spectrum and off-center, the sort of talker who knows everybody’s buttons and clumsily pushes them at just the wrong times. But he’s smarter than he looks.

“Small Engine Repair” spends its first hour just hanging with these three, reveling in their “one-legged duck swims in a circle” witticisms, sex life anecdotes and red letter days and nights from their collective past.

It’s New England. Yeah, they have a “Game Six” story.

But one bar fight too many means they have a big falling out. We’re left wondering what it would take to bring them back together.

No matter where the story goes, I laughed a lot at the weather-and-whisky-worn rapport of our power trio. Whigham’s way with Packie’s many layers of tetchiness is a delight. Don’t use this word or make light of that subject. He’s thin-skinned about it. ALL of it.

“As an Irish American, I f—–g offense at that!”

Bernthal has a lot of fun with a brawny, butch and over-compensating lug whose friends don’t know he still does group facials with his sisters.

Bravo (“Cherry,” TV’s “Wayne”) throws her weight around in this bantering bucket of testosterone.

Jordana Spiro sinks her teeth into Karen, the blowsy, high-mileage tart who rarely sees her daughter Crystal, or the guy who fathered her.

Pollono’s Frankie is the alleged grownup in their midst, and even he is quick with the un-PC putdown.

“Who without a vagina actually f—–g SAYS that?”

As a director, Pollono doesn’t do much that doesn’t signal “stagebound” in turning his play into a film. But that “Game Six” anecdote, which starts out nostalgic, turns grim and shocking and finds one helluva punchline to exit, is the film’s great set-piece. Packie tells the story, and Pollono has the adult Whigham place himself back in their collective childhood, watching the World Series with two child actors playing his friends as they were then.

The abrupt shifts in focus and tone are jarring, and the finale feels a lot less satisfying than it should. But “Small Engine Repair” is the sort of slice-of-life, drinking buddies tested melodrama that will resonate with a lot of American men, and the kind of movie that’ll play in Nash-Vegas, O-Vegas, Minni-Vegas or Manch-Vegas without some actor/playwright/filmmaker patronizingly explaining the obvious to us.

Rating: R for pervasive language, crude sexual content, strong violence, a sexual assault, and drug use

Cast: John Pollono, Jon Bernthal, Ciara Bravo, Jordana Spiro and Shea Whigham.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Pollono, based on his play. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:42

Watch a film from another culture, live in that world and learn about it for two hours.

“Luzzu,” the title is what they call their traditional colorful fishing boats in that corner of the Mediterranean, opens Oct 15.

“Kate” is the most laughably predictable thriller since the silent film era. We know where it’s going the instant it starts. We know what the hack screenwriter used for his mashup — “D.O.A./Crank” meets “The Professional.” We know the rancid cheese dialogue by heart before anybody utters a word of it.

The lady assassin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has “one simple rule, no kids.”

Her handler, the guy who “groomed” her for this work (Woody Harrelson), has his cliches memorized — “Not your first rodeo…collateral damage” yadda yadda yadda.

She wants “a life, a real regular life.” She wants to “finish the job, and then I’m out.”

His jokes — “picket fences…suburbs” are older than he is.

And it’s all downhill from that opening scene.

Visual effects artist turned director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan — he did VFX for “Snow White and the Huntsman” and got to direct the “Huntsman” sequel nobody saw — and screentypist Umair Aleem (“The Extraction”) make the most of the movie’s most arresting element, its Japanese setting.

We see Noh theater performed (to no audience), yakuza and geishas and J-pop and lurid blacklit nightclubs and neon-drenched streets and a tall, willowy American hit-woman who doesn’t stand out. Oh no, not at all.

In one glorious moment, after Kate has botched an assignment because she’s got the shakes from the Putin-approved poison somebody slipped her, she makes her escape in the most conspicuous getaway car this side of the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile.

See above.

The whole movie’s like this. She’s an assassin captured by the cops and hospitalized after wrecking that garishly painted and lit tuner/hoonigan getaway car. And she wakes up with no cops present.

She has just enough time to get her “24 hours to live” diagnosis, make a plan and start her escape before the first J-cops show up. It’s pretty much the last we see of them.

Kate must chase and catch and threaten and kill her way to whoever ordered the hit on her.

Granted, she has no right to be offended. Because she MURDERS people for a living. But hey, we’re all a little self-righteous these days.

There’s a fouled-mouthy kid (Miku Patricia Martineau) and a lot of about-to-be-dead mobsters, a laundry list of them Kate must shoot, punch, stab, kick and head-butt her way through to get to whoever wanted this “revenge.”

She sickens every step of the way, and the kid — whom she kidnaps — speaks her mind in Janglish and American-accented curses.

“F— you, cancer b–ch!”

Winstead and/or her stuntperson handle a little parkour and a whole lot of fight choreography with a modicum of ease. No, the supermodel physics of such movies never computes. It hasn’t since “La Femme Nikita” or its Hollywood cover, “Point of No Return.” But Winstead rarely lets us see enough to say “No WAY SkinnyKiller could manage that.”

But the movie? It’s not much fun, and not particularly gripping. The opening scene tells us pretty much everything to come — the kill, the “kid,” the fatal misstep — all of it.

That just leaves Tokyo at night. And as luridly arresting as that can be, it’s just not enough, “Kate” or no “Kate.”

Rating: R, for strong violence and language (profanity) throughout

Cast: Elizabeth Winstead, Miku Patricia Martineau, Jun Kunimura, Miyavi and Woody Harrelson

Credits: Directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, scripted by
Umair Aleem. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

This looks intense, extreme.

“Runt” opens Oct. 1.

Walton Goggins and his unique brand of drawling, skinny redneck ornery is so in demand that he’s always got a couple of TV series going on while Hollywood tries to find a way to pair him and Tim Blake Nelson up in something Western — modern, with pick-up trucks, or vintage, with saddlebags.

But in between episodes of “The Righteous Gemstones” and “The Unicorn,” making a killer pilot for a TV version of James Ellroy’s “L.A. Confidential” (not picked up) and movies such as “Words on Bathroom Walls,” he squeezed out a goofy little one-joke short “John Bronco” for Hulu.

It was a vamp on ’70s TV, men with mustaches, the disco era dating ideal (Bo Derek) and a “legendary” pitchman who shared his rawhide-tough name with the pre-OJ SUV, the Ford Bronco.

And for a one-off, it was just funny enough to work, immersing us in how a guy famous for commercials in TV’s cheesiest era could make a big mark in show business.

I can’t say as much for the sequel, “John Bronco Rides Again,” premiering Sept. 13 on Hulu. They’ve ridden that one-trick pony lame, slurped that waterhole dry and what not. There’s barely a laugh in it.

The entire team concocting it is different. They don’t have Dennis Quaid narrating. And when you’re not so much scripting the zingers as relying on the funniest line on the set improvs to pay off, you’d better have funny actors and actresses on the payroll to help with the heavy lifting. Goggins is on his own.

This one is narrated by a John Bronco geek (Tim Baltz) who is a Ford Motor Co. archivist, host of the Broncast podcast, and man searching the country for the reclusive ex-pitchman so he can get him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Leaving the voice-over narration to his character is a non-starter. Trying to wring laughs out of exposition is a blunder.

The Bronco “King of All Media” snippets packaged here include a 1960s Texas Exposition (not the World’s Fair) sketch for kids that went wrong, a Scooby-Doo knockoff kiddie cartoon — “John Bronco Mysteries” — a brief stint as a Vegas stand-up, John Bronco Reads the Classics audio books (“Moby Dick,” as vaguely recollected by the pitchman, who confuses it with “Jaws”), his own brand of breakfast cereal and of course, lots of lots of Ford Bronco TV commercials, “meaner’n a wet panther you forgot to invite to your birthday party.

The new Ford Bronco co-stars, pitched as “There’s nothing better for the inside of a man, than the outside of a Bronco.” There’s also Tim Meadows as Bronco’s cynical longtime manager, with cameos by Michael Chilkis, appearing here as a former child-actor traumatized by working with Bronco, and Brian Austin Green.

I’ve been a big Goggins fan for years, and keep hoping he’ll land something as funny as “Vice Principals” again, teamed up with Danny McBride one more time or Tim Blake Nelson. So I’d say this was funny if it was, but I can’t because it isn’t.

Rating: unrated, seriously inoffensive

Cast: Walton Goggins, Tim Baltz, with Tim Meadows, Michael Chiklis and Brian Austin Green.

Credits: Directed by Jonathan Krisel. A Hulu release.

Running time: :25