Movie Nation

A big reason that critics and cineastes flocked to Asian thrillers and gangster movies way back when Hong Kong auteur John Woo was just starting out was the sense that Hollywood had shown us everything it had to offer in the genre.

Chinese hit man thrillers, Japanese Yakuza epics, Thai and Indonesian police pictures, all seemed exotic — both familiar and alien, generic and rule-bending.

“Night in Paradise” is a Korean kick-in-the-teeth version of the “gangster on the lam” tale. Writer-director Park Hoon-jung is best known for the horror gem “I Saw the Devil” in the West. But he’s worked in copland/gangland before. Here, he’s served up a thriller without pity, with violence as visceral as any that’s made it to the screen.

When your bad guys’ murder, torture and punishment weapon-of-choice is a knife, there’s little of this illusory “one shot and it’s over” tidiness of Hollywood. Things get real messy real quick when there are blades involved.

Tae-goo Eom, a detective in “I Saw the Devil,” plays “made man” Park Tae-gu. He’s a higher-level lieutenant in the gang run by Yang (Park Ho-San), a guy forced to manage negotiations with rival gangs and endure insults from their leaders because his boss is perceived as “weak” and “a cripple (in Korean with English subtitles).”

When we meet him, he’s having to sit through threats and parables — “the tale of the chariot and the mantis” — from one such thug. That makes him late meeting his sister and her precocious kid at the hospital. Somebody needs a transplant. Some relative might be a match.

“Don’t gangsters just hang around all day?” his sister (Dong-in Cho) taunts. “Try not to get stabbed, because that would be really bad” her six year-old (Ahn Se-bin) chirps in.

Aww. So cute, the both of them! Of course they’re killed in the very next scene, and thus The Rules for “Night in Paradise” are established. Don’t get attached. To ANYone.

Because as Tae-gu carries out his cunningly-planned revenge on the rival gang’s Chairman Doh, makes his getaway to an island hideout owned by gun-smuggler and former hit-man Kuto (Lee Gi-yeong) and his grating, bluff and depressed niece Jae Yeon (Jeon Yeo-bin), the gangland coup Tae gu started all comes apart.

With brutish Director Ma (Seung-Won Cha) on the case, wanting his blood, tongue or fingers in revenge, it’s “knives out” in the most literal sense.

And help? It might come from the usual (movie convention) places, or not come at all.

Park casts his picture in a grey-blue gloom of mourning. Characters die, or are dying. They all know it and act accordingly. Revenge offers no one any solace, but it’s what the fates ordain.

Tae-goo Eom and Jeon Yeo-bin (“After My Death”) create a brittle rapport for their characters, destined by genre convention to face the furies together. Park twists up their “relationship” and makes their connection more fatalistic than anything else.

There’s one stunning chase that begins on foot in the Seoul airport, reaches the freeway and adds violent flourishes every step or car-ramming along the way. When you’re not spattering brains all over the windshield with a dumdum bullet (there are plenty of guns), “catching” your quarry is just the first hurdle you have to overcome. Getting him out of the car without losing every single minion to injuries great and small can be a chore when he’s got the option of fighting back, and the desperation to do it.

That’s riveting to watch.

The torture is hands-on and bloody. Even the meals Tae gu and Jae Yeon share, with or without other gangsters or a mediating, paid-off cop (Mun-shik Lee), are brutal. The soups are mouth-watering, the slurping, belching table manners straight out of goon finishing school (a Yakuza movie convention).

Park’s patient, edge-of-your-seat storytelling is a delicious and dark “Around the World with Netflix” substitute for any genre fan weary of what Hollywood has to show you in a gang war vein.

There is no “paradise” in this world, and you can bet there won’t be one awaiting the slaughtered when all the scores are settled and everyone and I do mean everyone has gotten what they have coming to them.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Tae-goo Eom, Jeon Yeo-bin, Seung-Won Cha, Park Ho-San, Mun-shik Lee and Lee Gi-yeong

Credits: Scripted and directed by  Park Hoon-jung. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:11

Casting really good actors as the leads has paid endless dividends in “The Conjuring” films, and with every subtle, emotional gesture or realistic depiction of terror or shock, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make that as true in “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It,” the third film featuring these two as Lorraine and Ed Warren.

But the movie? It’s the worst of the trilogy, beginning and ending as an over-the-top blunt instrument, pounding home the opening act exorcism and middling finale with breathless editing and a soundtrack amplified into a sledgehammer.

The sagging middle acts are where the Warrens set out to “prove” a young man accused of murder (Ruairi O’Connor of “Teen Spirit” and TV’s “The Spanish Princess”) was “possessed” at the time he committed the crime. They were at the exorcism in which they witnessed a child (Julian Hilliard) turned into a pretzel with the voice that came out of Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” They heard the deal young Arne (O’Connor) made with the demon to “take me” instead and spare his girlfriend’s (Sarah Catherine Hook) little brother.

So naturally, the Warrens are interested in his case, accused of stabbing a man “22 times” after being subjected to Blondie’s “Call Me” at 140 decibels by his girlfriend’s beer-drunk boss.

The Warrens convince a skeptical lawyer of the “demonic possession” defense after inviting her over and introducing her “to Annabelle,” the funniest line in the movie, a moment embracing “The Conjuring” universe but doing it off-camera.

There are bravura bits, great effects in which Lorraine dives into “seer” mode, re-witnessing crimes as the Warrens try to tie Arne’s case to “Satanist” activity in an era when that hit the headlines every few days in assorted corners of rural America. Clever effects sell those moments as much as Farmiga’s performance, as committed as she’s been in all of these movies.

Adding the always-creepy John Noble (“Lord of the Rings,” etc) as the old priest who “knows things” is a nice touch. But the payoff is as conventional as it is uninspiring. The best of these movies have moved me to tears in their coda. This one was a big fat “meh.”

Those otherwise lumbering middle acts are where “Devil Made Me Do It” lost me, and having Farmiga assert “Ed and I have proven demonic possession dozens of times” is a a shovel-full I could have done without.

These movies, with their clips of the “real” Warrens interviewed by the chat hosts of the era (Phil Donahue and Tom Snyder were always booking them) and “real” case coverage in newsprint, are pointlessly passing off their balderdash as “a true story,” as some great font of occult insights and knowledge succeeding generations have merely forgotten.

Nostradamus built an entire posthumous career over “what he knew” that we have “forgotten.”

Stay through the credits. This version of the Warrens is rightly described as “characters created by” screenwriters. The real couple shared chat show time with “Aliens Built the Pyramids” crank Erik von Daniken, soothsayer Jean Dixon and spoon-bending hustler “mentalist” Uri Geller.

Suggesting they “proved” anything is rewriting their history and turning passable entertainments into “fake news.” Why not have Wilson tag the movies with “We depict, YOU decide,” an inside joke that properly IDs much of what we’ve just been shown as BS?

Of course, if Michael Chaves (he directed “The Curse of La Llorona,” weakest screen version of “La Llorona”) was closer to horror’s A-list and “The Devil Made Me Do It” had delivered, none of that would have mattered. Much.

MPA Rating: R for terror, violence and some disturbing images.

Cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ruairi O’Connor, John Noble, and Sarah Catherine Hook.

Credits: Directed by Michael Chaves, script by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick. Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:52

It’s always damned impressive to see Jonathan Rhys Meyers bring the same intensity he’s long been famous for in yet another “larger than life” role in the big screen.

Meyers gives a soulful turn as a benevolent despot from the glory years of the British Empire, and makes “Edge of the World” never less than fascinating drama, even if the “epic adventure” has lost its luster in a less imperialist/more enlightened age.

So say what you will about how out-of-date another “white man’s burden” tale is, how this sort of British history has moved beyond politically incorrect to something even less defensible in the grand march of social progress. The star makes the “hero” conflicted and riveting and maybe ahead of his time.

Meyers plays a Brit straight out of the pages of Conrad’s “Lord Jim” or Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King” in this screen biography of James Brooke, a man who became the Rajah of Sarawak on the gigantic island of Borneo in the mid-19th century. His life inspired both Conrad and Kipling, and as “The White Raj” — the working title of this film and other biographies of Brooke — his feats gave birth to every tale about a “civilized man” who comes in and takes over a “savage” land.

But as his Brooke, and those closest to him in this most foreign corner of the world, ask in the film, “Who will “civilize” whom?”

Brooke narrates his “Heart of Darkness” story, wondering “How long until they figure out that I’m a fraud?” — an Englishman born in India who “failed at school, at marriage, in the Army” now setting foot on Borneo on “a voyage of discovery, not conquest.”

Not that the two princes in charge of Sarawak, Mahkota (Bront Palarae) and the younger Badruddin (Samo Rafael) buy that. Not when Brooke and his cousin and Army friend, Crookshank (Dominic Monaghan) come ashore and make that claim.

Using “statecraft,” they finagle a journey up river, accompanied by those princes where they witness, firsthand, the “savagery” of the local “pirates” and the punishment meted out with impunity by both sides. This is a Muslim state, and beheadings are the preferred form of summary execution.

With the aid of his translator Subu and of the accomplished Chinese woman Madam Lin (Josie Ho), who appears to be an old flame, Brooke tries to avoid putting himself and the cannon on his personal schooner, the Royalist, at the disposal of the ruthless Mahkota, who is angling to better his chances to become the next Sultan of Brunei.

Prince Badruddin? He’s smitten with the man he calls “the white tiger.”

“So what do white men call it when princes lie to each other?”

“Diplomacy!”

As events conspire to envelope Brooke in the “war” that’s taking place in the jungle, events including his falling for the Princess Fatima (Atiqah Hasiholom), we see how he became Rajah and just what that led to.

Director Michael Hausman, best known for the Val Kilmer drama “Blind Horizon,” the experimental “A Study in Gravity,” and making music videos for JT and J. Lo, gives his movie a dense jungle, high-heat and humidity torpor, which tends to blunt the Rob Allyn screenplay’s narrative momentum.

A lot of complicated diplomacy, with Crookshank and a Royal Navy officer (Ralph Ineson) angling to add to The British Empire, which we’re reminded “the sun never sets on,” is muddied up for an action climax and a melodramatic finale.

And then there’s that whole ethnocentricism/implicit racism (embodied in Ineson’s fictional character) that cannot help but taint such a tale. British “discoveries” that led to “colonies” usually involved “conquest.” But not in this case.

Meyers is quite good at playing a man who seems loathe to take actions that he sees as imperialist, but loathe to avoid the entanglements that make those actions inevitable. His Brooke is a self-doubting, guilt-ridden sort who vows to snuff out slavery and head-hunting among the natives when he’s “given” his title and power. And his benevolence extends to those he keeps counsel with, two very smart and ahead-of-their-time outspoken women among them.

This makes for perfectly engrossing film that accurately mimics the way history treats James Brooke to this day — as heroic in a kind of “You take the good, you take the bad” arm’s length sort of way.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Dominic Monaghan, Atiqah Hasiholom, Samo Rafael, Bront Palarae, Ralph Ineson and Jessie Ho

Credits Directed by Michael Haussman, script by Rob Allyn. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:44

In this busy, rushed, multi-tasking world we live in, who has time for a movie that will not get to the point, a point, ANY point?

So it is with “Open Your Eyes,” the latest film to use that well-worn title — latest, last and least among them.

It’s a movie about a screenwriter, and as many learned long before writer-director Greg A. Sager ever spit-polished a lens, there’s nothing more suspenseful and exciting than watching someone tap tap tap away at a keyboard, writing another of his “low budget B-horror movies without any discernible stars,” as Jason (Ry Barrett) eventually tells his neighbor Lisa (Joanna Saul).

We’re grateful they’re having a conversation, because the movie’s first half is mostly just Jason writing, hearing noises, seeing this oozing, crack walking down his wall and trying to lure a cat out of the ventilation ducts. The first eight minutes have no talking at all, and the odd “Jason, you a–h–e” over some screen writing blunder isn’t much improvement.

The dialogue, once there are two characters to share it?

“Hey.” “Hey.” You are home.” “I am.” “I was knocking…” “Hence, I answered.”

It doesn’t make a sharp turn to screwball, scintillating or Shakespeare. Sinister synthesizer music underscores just about everything.

Something is eating at Jason, and we’ve seen him shrink wrap a rug he’s rolled something — Someone? — up in the first scenes. What’s he not giving away? What’s his secret?

Lisa seems to both attract and trigger him. Who or what is she? A normal filmmaker would start to reveal some answers, but Sager’s a “Why give ANYthing away?” sort. For over an hour.

That big revelation is a slow-fizzle, too. And without any “action” or compelling performances or any interesting thing at all — near kitchen accidents don’t count — what remains is a coma-inducing-dull “low budget B-horror movie without any discernible stars.”

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Ry Barrett, Joanna Saul

Credits: Scripted and directed by Greg A, Sager. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:40

You’ve got to meet this dopey desert slasher picture on its own terms.

You have to be ready to laugh at the archetypes/stereotypes, the one-liners, the D-movie bravado.

“Why don’t you step out of there and fight me LIKE A WOMAN?”

And of course you’ve got to get the oral sex while driving pun in the title. Because “Road Head” isn’t just about decapitations in the desert southwest.

They all come looking for the wonders of “Isola Lake,” even though the sign pointing to it dates from the ’50s and the “road” is that in name only.

That’s where the first couple we see decide to tempt driving fate with a little under-the-seat-belt distraction. That’s when we hear the sound of heads being sliced-off, mercifully off-camera.

Enter gay Santa Monican couple Bryan (Clayton Farris) and Alex (Damian Joseph Quinn) and their just-got-over-a-breakup friend Stephanie (Elizabeth Grullon). They, too, have been misled by the “lake” in the place’s name. And they, too, must face The Executioner (Adam Nemet), clad in chain mail and feathers and wielding a broadsword.

At least these three have bitchy put-downs at their ready command for “that Medieval Faire reject” and his “toy sword from a nerd convention.” No, they will not go gentle into that beheaded night.

Grullon’s Stephanie is the stand-out here, snide and given to under-reactions when the worst happens, but rallying to fierceness when the chips are down.

More amusing than militant Alex figures he can compliment his way out of a jam. “I love your outfit!”

There’s a chase, a pause for an anti-patriarchy, control-my-own body rant and more bloody almost-funny violence than you can shake a blood squib at.

And if it all didn’t end a lot more unpleasantly than it begins — sometimes “tripping up expectations” beheads your movie, kids — this might be a fun genre dive, a “Rubber” or “House of 1000 Corpses” with less carnage and more comedy.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual situations, pot use and profanity

Cast: Elizabeth Grullon, Damian Joseph Quinn, Clayton Farris, Clay Acker, Adam Nemet

Credits: Directed by David Del Rio, script by Justin Xavier. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:24

Bulky, tattooed goons beat up “foreigners” and show up at protests, snapping cell-phone photos, sneering, intimidating, just hoping to start a riot.

And the protesters have reason to wonder if the sometimes-passive cops aren’t on the thugs’ side.

Chanting “We are PEACEful, what are YOU?” doesn’t seem to help.

So some of them take to donning black hoodies and masks, “escalating” things in a fraught, divided country at a perilous moment.

“And Tomorrow the Entire World” is a footsoldiers’ eye view of a Big Picture movement, a thriller set against the clash of anti-fascists against fascists in a country more sensitive than most about just what rule-by-thuggery right wing authoritarianism leads to. This German story, when it works, is fraught with the tension young people there recognize as the stakes in this struggle.

In a part of the world that has safeguards against the “slow motion coup” of racist voter suppression of violent, dogmatic and cultish minority political movements, the right resorts to more direct violence to get its authoritarian way.

And as an opening title (voiced-over, as well) reminds viewers, their constitution underscores the right and duty to “resist those in society who seek to abolish the constitutional order.”

That is the group P81’s guiding principle. And that’s why Luisa, played by Mala Emde, has talked her law school pal Batte (Luisa-Céline Gaffron) into introducing her to them. They’re a small commune, united in their politics, their youth and their passion, showing up to confront fascist rallies and lend their support to other groups protesting the Reich-minded right, which never really went away after a World War was fought to exterminate it.

Luisa’s motives are unclear, but her sense of acceptable risk is in an instant. At a rally where skinheads start attacking protesters, she saves Batte from an assault by taking her assailant’s dropped phone.

He gives chase and assaults her, and only the intervention of Alfa (Noah Saavedra) saves her. She is attracted to the dashing king of “escalation,” and smart enough to insist that they dig into this phone and figure out what the other side is planning.

We can’t say that’s when Luisa’s radicalization begins, because plainly she’s already there. The early clues about her background transcend the “bored rich girl” (from the country) stereotype, and make her mystery all the more fascinating.

What is it about her baronial dad, their weekend hunting club events and her family’s politics and/or history that brought her here?

And will she be the cliche we suspect her to be, falling for the hunky anarchist who upsets the apple cart of “peaceful” P81 with vandalism, ambush assaults and the like?

Emde, who has played Anne Frank on German TV, makes a compelling tour guide into this world of planned protests and counter-protests, of disguises and escape routes to get past road blocks so that P81’s outliers can stymie the racists’ plans which Luisa’s stolen cell phone has given them access to.

You may find yourself, here and there, yelling at the damned TV, “Stupid stupid STUPID move” at some misjudgment in the making. But co-writer and director Julia von Heinz trips up expectations and delivers surprises, even if the film’s energy and forward momentum flag in the second act.

One thing the filmmaker has no control over is how Netflix cast the English-speakers to dub the German dialogue into English. The Nazis sound like folk-music singing hippies, or high school guidance counselors.

Thank heavens the film reverts to the original German for their actual anti-Semitic, foreigner “exterminating” sing-alongs. Even the Germans know theirs is a language that sounds angry, villainous and oppressive. So do the Proud Boys and assorted American Nazi groups, which adopt German phrases in addition to Nazi German iconography to inspire the faithful.

Other parts of the world might not have codified and institutionalized the right-left conflict to the degree that Europe in general and Germany in particular have (“right wing” and “left wing” are 19th century French inventions). But “And Tomorrow the Entire World” achieves a kind of universality in its messaging, its warnings about “escalation” and the historical consequences of shying away from that escalation.

People who have been brainwashed into “anti-fa is the REAL threat” won’t like it. But then again, they’ve never bothered to look up the what the “fa” part stands for.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sex

Cast: Mala Emde, Noah Saavedra, Tonio Schneider, Luisa-Céline Gaffron and Andreas Lust

Credits: Directed by Julia von Heinz, script by John Quester and Julia von Heinz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51

Cape Canaveral National Cemetery at dawn.

This version of the true story of Sir James Brooke, who explored Borneo and then set up his own kingdom there, stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Dominic Monaghan and opens June 21. https://youtu.be/ycgW26bzjq0

“Censor” is a horror satire about one of those intrepid, iron-stomached bureaucrats of the British Board of Film Classification, a woman who brings a zeal “to protect people” to her job in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

It’s the mid-80s, and the Fleet Street press and the public are in an uproar over the invasion of “video nasties,” extreme horror that was making its way around the censors, into stores and into the hands of children and the criminally suggestible.

Enid Baines sees herself as the last line of defense against a sea of sadistic blood and gore, movies that the public is sure are leading to imitation by the nation’s most heinous criminals.

Niamh Algar, of “Calm With Horses” and “Wrath of Man,” plays the censor her colleagues label “Little Miss Perfect.” She takes notes, watches and rewatches scenes, pushes back against the permissive posh (Nicholas Burns) they usually pair her with, a snob who dismisses this disemboweling or that rape as “nothing” or worse yet, “art.”

Enid is a loner, pretty enough to constantly be hit on by men, including the creepy producer Doug Smart (Michael Smiley, wonderfully oily) who’s always trying to “get a 15” (approval for watching by ages 15-and-up) rating for the sordid B-movies he puts out. Enid is immune to everyone’s charms.

Because Enid is focused on the work, driven by a trauma of childhood to treat her job with a missionary’s zeal. We learn about that at pretty much the same time that it all goes wrong. There’s a gruesome crime and the press ties it to a movie that Enid “let in” (with edits).

Somehow, they know not-quite-anonymous censor approved this particular “nasty,” so the harassing phone calls and scrums with the pushy press at her door begin.

That stress is the perfect thing to plunge her into an obsession over a horror actress (Sophia La Porta) who looks too familiar, whose movies seems to echo the great tragedy of Enid’s guilt-ridden childhood.

The Irish Algar is at her most buttoned-down here, hiding the “pretty” with “prim” and not wholly succeeding. She’s got standards — insisting, like Hitchcock, that “somethings should be left to the imagination.”

Eye gougings and rapes, axe murders and “tug of war over his intestines” are but some of the lines Enid draws in the sand.

But Algar, as she’s proven in film and on TV (“Raised by Wolves,” “Pure” and “The Virtues”), is adept at both overtly demonstrating a character’s edge and baggage, or leaving the merest suggestion of it in her performance.

“Censor” is a slight and obvious slasher film whose satiric points are both slapped-down and endorsed. Maybe violent cinema is twisting our heroine just as she worries it is twisting the public.

But the stern star and fascinating if limited peek into the world of ratings, even in a period piece set in a more conservative time, makes “Censor” a horror title well worth a look, “video nasties” included.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic horror violence

Cast: Niamh Algar, Michael Smiley, Clare Perkins, Sophia La Porta and Adrian Schiller

Credits: Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond, script by Prano Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:24

An Antoine Fuqua take on an action tale with sci Fi underpinnings. June 10 on Paramount +.