Movie Nation

It takes a while, a good overlong while, for the Thai thriller “Ghost Lab” to get going. But man, once it’s on its feet, saddle up for a fun ride. Hair raising moments, touches of pathos, gonzo violence, decent effects and the occasional laugh.

Director and co-writer Paween Purijitpanya flirts with “Flatliners” and “Ghost” in this Around the World with Netflix tale of two surgical residents at a Thai hospital who resolve to prove “that ghosts are real.”

Wee and Gla have been close friends since med school. Wee ((Thanapob Leeratanakajorn) is the sad, nerdy and serious one, doting over his dying, hospitalized mother. Gla (Paris Intarakomalyas) is the handsome practical joker, always pranking Wee with fake “ghost” frights.”

But Gla has a secret. He’s been “researching” ghosts ever since childhood, when he was sure he saw his dad shortly after his father’s death. He’s traveled to Asia’s great haunts, even that cursed “Suicide Forest” in Japan. He’s interviewed scores of people with ghost sighting stories.

Although he hasn’t seen one since the night he saw his father, Gla is sure they can “prove ghosts are real.” Wee, facing his mother’s impending death, signs on and the two of them — young men of science — start working the problem.

First question, “How can ghosts be real?” Physics isn’t much help. Are ghosts “photons” or “energy?”

But as they question how ghosts manifest themselves, why they would and to whom, they figure they can “group” ghosts and perhaps make some progress.

Wouldn’t you know it, right after swapping jokes with nurses about a corpse that came in, burnt to a crisp, Wee and Gla see the victim (digital, creaky stop-motion) manifest itself in the dark of the break room.

There’s CCTV video from all around the hospital showing filing cabinets opening, chairs sliding across the floor and wheelchairs navigating empty hallways. There’s lots of death in hospitals. The ghost-hunting duo figure they’re onto something, especially when they stumble into a “dance of the wheelchairs” in one gloomy corner of the basement.

How to get ghosts to manifest themselves in ways that allow others to see, audiences to be convinced and science to accept a research paper? Their “solutions” to that quandary take up the latter half of the film.

The hair-raising moments come in underlit scenes of empty with objects moving under their own power. The pathos comes from death and loss as these callous “cutters” face the limits of their callousness, and make ridiculous leaps to “prove” their point.

And the laughs burst out of the blasts of profanity at each gobsmacked “Eureka” moment of discovery.

The dialogue is largely corny, and the “Ghost” moments, meant to tug at the heartstrings, are few. As I said, we spend the lumbering first act and part of the second hearing “I think I was born to prove to the world that ghosts exist,” and the like.

But after that patience-testing/bar-lowering first half, I was quite impressed by the second. Sure, it’s a mixed-bag, sentimental and soft even as the story contrives to put the friends at odds, with deadly consequences. But “Ghost Lab” has flashes of style and wit that suggest we’ll be hearing more from this filmmaker, and that it could be fun.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity, suicide

Cast: Thanapob Leeratanakajorn, Paris Intarakomalyas and Nuttanicha Dungwattanawa

Credits: Directed by Paween Purijitpanya script by Paween Purijitpanya, Vasudhorn Piyaromna, Tossaphon Riantong. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

Ok, who hasn’t dreamed dark thoughts about some social media troll who’s made disgusting, cruel or hateful comments about something you’ve said, shared or posted?

No one, right? There’s something very satisfying about the thought that some thinks-he-or-she-is-anonymous online troll realizing, with shock, that they aren’t protected from their ugly, sometimes violent opinions by “anonymity” just before they catch a bellyful of shotgun pellets.

Just me? Never mind. If you make your living opinion writing, it’s a hazard of the trade, just as much as the always trolling trolls.

“The Columnist” is a sick and twisted journalist’s revenge fantasy from Holland, a tale of an embattled opinion writer (Katja Herbers) who ignores the advice that many share and few are willing to stick to.

“Don’t read the comments,” (in Dutch, with English subtitles). “NEVER read the comments.

She lies awake at night over the hate mail. And after say, 470-too-many “Nazi” and “whore” and “pedophile” and worse shots, she identifies such a troll and knocks him off the roof, a troll who will troll no more.

Is this DARK? Oh my stars and garters, yes.

Herbers, of “Westworld,” plays Femke Boot, a single mom who drives a Prius, but like many of her environmentally-aware countrymen, prefers a bike. She takes stands in her newspaper, “Volksrant,” and takes the hits.

Only they don’t roll off her back. Femke goes on TV to plead, “Look, can’t we just have different opinions and be nice about it?” As if that was ever the case.

Her debater that night is a horror writer whose pen name is Steven Dood (“Steven Death”), an eye-linered, Satanic-goateed success at what Femke herself can’t get a grip on. She has a book deal and first-time-novelist “writer’s block.”

Her ways of shedding that and getting a start on her book? Sleep with Steven Dood, starting a relationship with him. And she starts taking out the SOBs who fill up the comments on anything she writes with the Dutch word that — in English — rhymes with “runt.”

An extra wrinkle? Her teen daughter (Claire Poro) is a journalist at her school newspaper fighting a profane (and funny) war over “free speech” with the school headmaster (Harry van Rijthoven). As Femke, who makes her living exercising her right to free speech, either ambushes or directly confronts and then kills her online tormenters for exercising their version of the same thing, she’s trying to support her kid and ignore her own hypocrisy.

“They’re only words,” the kid shrugs. “Words can still hurt,” murderess mom rationalizes.

The script here limits the pre-murder accusations and debates that Femke gets into with her attackers, choosing instead to leap right into the revenge killings. That robs the film of any gravitas and of much of its political subtext. She’s a woman writing on things that seem to enrage men, some of whom have Trump photos on their Facebook pages. But we don’t really see translated versions of the writing that sets them off.

Nor are those hateful comments, sampled generously on the screen, translated from Dutch. That’s a big blunder, even if we kind of get the gist.

I was reminded of the dark Canadian comedy “The Last Supper,” one of Ron Perlman’s finest films. In that, “liberals” decide to trap and execute the Rush Limbaugh of their nightmares, a corrosive conservative talk show host played by Perlman. That film managed to make the hypocrisy of non-violent people taking violent action over someone swaying public opinion against them by exercising his free speech both more amusing and dispiriting, in terms of abandoning one’s core principles.

“The Columnist” isn’t that subtle and doesn’t manage that finesse.

Still, Herbers makes a fine Fury, rarely second-guessing her “solution” to this outrage and injustice that’s keeping her up at night. And if you’ve ever been tempted to get even with some online tormentor with more than wit and the English language as a blunt instrument, here’s a movie that’ll help convince you otherwise.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Katja Herbers, Bram van der Kelen, Claire Poro and Harry van Rijthoven

Credits: Directed by Ivo van Art, script by Daan Windhorst. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:24

Here’s what we know so far. Thursday night, “A Quiet Place II” did over three times the business that “Cruella” did.

As of end of the evening Friday, “A Quiet Place Part II” has tallied $19.3 million. “Cruella” started Saturday with $7.7 million in sales.

Both are on a boatload of screens. A TON. Over 3700 for “Quiet Place,” with “Cruella” a couple of hundred less.

“Cruella” is also showing on Disney+, which considering its pace and length, is the best place to watch it. So Disney will be declaring it a hit no matter what.

This “official” start to summer is a lot closer to resembling other summer opening weekends. Figure “Cruella” to finish Monday with just over $20 million, “A Quiet Place II” over $40. Box Office Pro is saying as much as $60 over four days. Are people that “over” the pandemic that this many will show up? I’m thinking maybe $45-50 would be the top end.

Not staggering numbers by 2019 standards, but depending on how the Sunday-Monday audience pans out, a lot more of a sign that people are going back to the cinemas.

What would horror screenwriters do without murderously sadistic millionaires? They’re so very handy when you’re trying to concoct a means for putting say, eight reality TV and streaming show stars in a “Funhouse” where online viewers can revel in them slaughtering each other.

Actor turned writer-director Jason Lee Williams (“The Evil in Us”) tries on that tired trope as the “brains” and bucks behind “Furcas’ Funhouse” in his foot-dragging variation on the “And then there were none” theme.

It’s a not-quite-soulless slaughterhouse thriller with dull deaths, drab staging and funereal pacing. So even the visceral promise of its premise fails to pay off.

Valter Skarsgård, Khamisa Wilsher, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Christopher Gerard, Karolina Benefield, Amanda Howells, Mathias Retamal and Dayleigh Nelson portray assorted “personalities” recruited for this show that almost celebrates the golden age of “fame whores.”

One’s an MMA fighter on the ropes, another is a ruthless celeb gossip blogger, one’s an Instagram bombshell, another’s a reality bachelorette, and so on.

They all wake up, drugged, in a remote, sealed-off mansion filled with cameras where they will fraternize, “confess” their true feelings to viewers in a booth and “compete” for a $5 million prize. They all had agents who arranged this, so they have no idea what “only one of you will be with us to collect the $5 million prize.”

Still, “It was in your contract.”

Our oligarch (Aussie Jerome Velinsky of “The Evil in Us”) loves Beethoven and appears to his contestants as a CGI talking panda, serving up exposition, endless “rules” and “competitions” (“Pinata Party” involves beating somebody to death while blindfolded and not realizing you’re doing it), insults about each of the eight’s backstory and popularity polls results from online viewers telling us who gets to fight to the death, or face torture and and execution.

There’s TV “coverage” that looks little like real cable TV, a flippant, “This must be fake” youtube “reviewer (Bradley Duffy) snarking away about the show, shots of slack-jawed viewers of all ages gulping down this latest serving of “the Kardashianization of humanity,” and an ever-shrinking populace of “Funhouse” contestants, who don’t resist this dehumanizing murder-for-entertainment, unless you count whining about it as “resistance.”

“We had a DEAL!”

And there’s the “outside” search, by police, for where this mass murder is being staged, as drably-handled as everything else.

The surprises don’t amount to anything that improves our appreciation of what’s happening, although a couple of the players — Gerard’s MMA fighter “Tombstone,” and Wilsher’s utterly out-of-her-depth “Bride to Be” star in a kill-or-be-killed “game” — stand out.

There’s an audience for this sort of crap — bloody hackings, dismemberments, sex and (female) nudity. But even fans will be put off by the moronic “sermons” by the pontificating rich guy/panda and the “Moonlight Sonata” pace of a no-fun-allowed “Funhouse.”

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Valter Skarsgård, Khamisa Wilsher, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Christopher Gerard, Karolina Benefield, Amanda Howells, Mathias Retamal, Dayleigh Nelson, Bradley Duffy and Jerome Velinsky

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jason William Lee. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:46

Can’t tell a lot from this clip, as it is seriously generic in the first act get up and get going tradition.

“Annette” opens July 7 in la belle France, with Simon Helberg. Opera singer and stand up comic have a kid with a “gift.”

“So May We Start,” Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard and a taste of “Annette.”

You’d think we’d explored all the possibilities of being trapped in a small space with time running out in “Buried,” and all the emotions of a life circumscribed by such limitations in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

Ah, but have we been served those dishes in a sci-fi setting?

Thus, “Oxyegen (Oxygene),” a French thriller of limited setting and limited interest, a pretty good film that exhausts its chances to generate interest entirely too quickly for my taste.

This Around the World with Netflix outing is 100 minutes long, and I figure it hits the wall at 60 minutes and never punches its way through it.

Melanie Laurent (“Beginners,” “Now You See Me”) plays a woman who wakes up in a chrysalis, gasping for breath until the thin web of whatever tears and she can gulp down air.

She is confined, wrapped in that sheathing, restrained and with tubes and monitoring patches all over her. Her confinement is in a hi-tech white bubble with smooth, curved lines, like a coffin designed by Steve Jobs. And it talks to her with a disembodied voice (Mathieu Amalric, of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” in the French-language version).

She can speak, but she has no memory of how she got here, and not even her name. She fees just enough of herself to start arguing with the soothing computer voice that calls itself MILO.

“Would you like a sedative?”

“Let me out, let ME OUT!”

She quickly ascertains she’s in some sort of life support cryogenic pod, that it has failed and her oxygen is running out. MILO is a machine, so he can’t tell her who she is, just her pod-“biological unit” number. But little flashes of memory start to piece that together.

And if she asks the right commands, she can start to reason her way out of this, because she’s no dummy. She asks for and gets through to the police. Except she has no idea who she is or where she’s being kept.

There are gadgets within the pod designed for her “care,” but that could hurt her. As she starts to unplug this and break that, she gets a stern warning from MILO.

“Damaging a cryosalide unit is a European Federal offense, punishable…”

Never mind. She’s got to get the cops to come get her, got to help them find her, got to remember things like the “husband” (Malik Zidi) she sees in her mind.

And she’s got to outsmart that digital bastard MILO, who can’t be reasoned with but who might be circumvented if she asks the right questions and figures out the right commands.

Director Alexandre Aja made his name in horror films such as the classic “High Tension” and the recent gators-in-the-hurricane-flooded house thriller “Crawl.” He’s used to creating suspense and telling stories with the walls closing in around his heroine.

Which is what he manages here…for about an hour.

As the film starts to explain itself and leaps of logic have to clear canyons, I found myself wondering about dinner, what the French version of “The Simpsons” (Melanie Laurent’s dad voices Ned Flanders and Mr. Smithers, in French) and which of this picture’s third act climaxes will be the real one?

MPA Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Mélanie Laurent, Malik Zidi with the voice of  Mathieu Amalric

Credits: Directed by Alexandre Aja, script by Christie LeBlanc. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

A pretty young French musician tries to surf the coming electronica wave in Paris in “Le choc du futur,” a “musician finds her sound” tale set in 1978.

The film isn’t a tale of triumph over adversity, paddling against the musical current or getting in on the ground floor of a sound that would come to dominate music, although all that is in here, with lip service paid to the “bourgeois” music of the present — disco and guitar rock.

“You know the ’80s are coming,” Ana (Alma Jodorowsky) shouts (in French with English subtitles) at some grizzled producer/naysayer (Philippe Rebot) whose commercial she has just blown off.

“Le choc” is about “the future,” but also about the sexist, retrograde environment Ana is trying to make her music in. Guys are hitting on her, dismissing her, making excuses for her and reminding her how unheard of it is for “a chick to do music” and know how to manipulate the much-more complex synthesizers of the time.

But we watch doors opened, money lent, allowances made and a tech who came over to fix her wall-sized synthesizer/sequencer set-up as a favor then agree, without his bargained for “kiss,” to lend her one of the first beat-boxes ever made. Ana may not be “working it” to get her way, but she’s certainly using her looks to get to “yes.” She’s playing with a double-edged sword.

She is staying in a “friend’s” flat, and using all “his” electronics, although at least she brought her own keyboard. She blows off deadlines and still hopes to have something to play for the record company heavyweight she’s invited to a big party tonight — in her friend’s flat.

Idealistic, impatient, inspired and spoiled, she has yet to learn “the artists who succeed are the ones who check their answering machines.” And “they” have yet to learn that the sound of “today” isn’t “Le choc du futur (the shock of the future).”

Jodoroskwy’s focused performance has moments that mirror Ana’s tightrope walk. An opening scene has the star of the notoriously sexy “Blue is the Warmest Color” exercising, unself-consciously, in her underwear.

The film star is playing up her sexuality the way the character is constantly being reminded of the same thing. “You’re a pretty girl, you should be a singer.”

The character’s a tad irritating, in that “doors open for beautiful women, and still they complain” sort of way. But she’s intriguing, in that “Will she ever get off her lazy ass and do the work” sort of way.

One fun scene scene has Geoffrey Carey as a friend, an older British record collector, come in and show off the new electronic LPs he’s scored, the true pioneers in this transition from electronic “space music” and disco to New Wave, which would synthesize the two. Here’s the latest from the Belgian Aksak Maboul. And there’s this “great new band” in Sheffield, Human League.

The enduring French disco queen Corinne plays herself as an early-adaptor of synthesizer-backed disco-pop.

And then there’s the singer (Clara Luciani) who improvises lyrics and a vocal style to front Ana’s “new sound” — dreamy, breathy, romantic. It’s kind of a backhanded compliment to suggest just how little might have gone into creating a beat and rhythmic sound textures of electronica, and even less that went into the lyrics.

But Ana is preaching about the coming “new way” of listening to music and performing it, suggesting “trance” music a decade before that was born.

This brief, fictional film doesn’t have the scope or the ambition and intent to be the last word on a music and an era. It’s not “24 Hour Party People,” after all. “Le choc du futur” still does an engaging job of introducing a time and a place, and just what a woman like Ana might have to put up with, on top of getting people to accept her “future,” to make a mark in music.

MPA Rating: unrated, drug use, profanity

Cast: Alma Jodorowsky, Philippe Rebot, Clara Luciani and Laurent Papot.

Credits: Directed by Marc Collin, script by Marc Collin, Elina Gakou Gomba. Now streaming on Film Movement+.

Running time: 1:18

What a peculiar, sometimes bizarre movie “Homunculus” is, a brain-experiment sci-fi thriller that lurches between dull and downright revolting.starts with graphic brain surgery, crosses into “creepy,” and freely-acknowledges that when it does, as it dabbles in the Japanese obsession with uniformed “schoolgirls,” and goes gonzo gross, before settling into sheer tedium.

This Around the World with Netflix thriller starts with graphic brain surgery, crosses into “creepy,” and freely-acknowledges that when it does, as it dabbles in the Japanese obsession with uniformed “schoolgirls,” and goes gonzo gross, before settling into sheer tedium.

It’s about a homeless guy (Gô Ayano) who lives in his ’60s Mazda, occasionally socializes with the homeless encamped in a nearby park and gorges on big swathes of the menu when he deigns to go out.

He’s got money, everybody says. But he’s living like this. He must have his reasons.

They don’t become crystal clear when he’s approached by a pierced, pushy street punk (Ryô Narita) who turns out to be a “rich kid doctor.” He wants to do a little ancient brain surgery on Nokoshi, and eventually gets to the heart of his pitch.

“Do you ever feel alive?”

Nokoshi ignores the dangers of the most invasive of surgeries, the dubious credentials of his pitchman and Ito willingness to resort to extortion, and agrees to the surgery.

Maybe he’ll “remember what you forgot” after this trepanation — trepanning, boring a hole in the skull (seen in “Master & Commander”). Maybe he’ll discover a sixth sense. There are all sorts of possibilities when you pop the bone off the lid of your noggin.

“ESP, psychokinesis,” Ito teases, dubbed into English or in Japanese with English subtitles. “Give me seven days and I’ll give you a reason to live!”

What he actually gives Nokoshi, aside from a big band-aid covering the hole in his forehead and the recovery of “memories,” is the ability to see people as “homunculi,” beasts as they really are. Some are made of sand, others of water. They can be walking chains or “empty” creatures covered in sunglasses.

Nokoshi knows the yakuza whom he confuses for a robot has a gigantic emotional scar he’s based his life on. His threat of violence can be turned on his by twisting his mind.

This school girl (Seiyô Uchino) who moonlights in a peep show (the school uniform fetish) has hang-ups that come off as pervy older man wish-fulfillment fantasies. I’m not overstating it in saying this borders on nauseating.

The performances never quite achieve “compelling.”

And the action of the first half of Takashi Shimzu’s film — based on a manga, of course — is abandoned for far duller later scenes and acts, less sick or sickening, but not thought-provoking enough to hold interest.

That’s how the film leaves you, with a wincing realization that “That’s it?”

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual violence, sexuality and profanity

Cast: Gô Ayano, Ryô Narita

Credits: Directed by Takashi Shimizu, script by Eisuke Naitô, Naruki Matsuhisa and Takashi Shimizu, based on the manga by Hideo Yamamoto. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

Annasophia Robb, Minks Kelly, and as a young Meyer Lansky? John Magaro.

Emily Blunt, The Rock, CCR, and “a tree” with “powers.”

Did I mention the U Boat?

So the cut and paste screenwriters have seen “The African Queen” and “Murphy’s War?” And every Disney movie with a whiff of magic?