Movie Nation

Last Christmas’s “Nosferatu” remake was a Gothic Robert Eggers creep fest hit.

So now there’s a mad dash to see who else can get THEIR version of a vampire tale in front of audiences, with Luc Besson’s “Dracula: A Love Tale,” with Christoph Waltz, a Keanu Reeves “Dracula” and now this cheaper knock off based on a story by Stephen King’s horror-novelist son, Joe Hill.

Cute of King to provide a blurb for use in the trailer.

This tale takes vampire hunter Van Helsing (Welliver, of TV’s “Bosch”) to the US West to hide out in the early years of the 20th century. But the vampire finds his family.

Shudder and AMC made this and RLJE Films is putting it in theaters July 11 before it makes its way to streaming.

Megan Stalter stars in as the dim American abroad in this series that looks like it could have enough laughs, situations and characters for a 90 minute movie rom-com.

Alaa Habib, Richard E. Grant, Emily Ratajkowski, Naomi Watts, Kit Harington, Andrew Scott, Aylin Scott and Will Sharpe also make appearances and co-star in a production backed by the “Love Actually” braintrust.

A bit coarse and comically raunchy, from the looks of things.

July 10, this screens on Netflix.

“And Mrs” is a bittersweet and offbeat romantic comedy of love and loss and mourning, and a most unexpected star vehicle for unfiltered Irish comic Aisling Bea, nicely paired up with Carrie Fisher’s kid, Billie Lourd.

Bea, one of the English speaking world’s greatest talk show guests, stars as a woman whose fiancé dies just before their wedding. Lost and bereft, she decides to follow through on “what Nathan wanted” more than anything else, to be married to her.

Gemma will battle friends, family, customs and her own guilty conscience to make this happen. And as she’s living in London, naturally there’s a loophole in arcane British law that allows such “necrogamy” nuptials.

Gemma, a London-Irish graphic designer, was never the “big gesture” and big emotions one in her relationship to Nathan, played by Colin Hanks. He botches his first “I Love You” by prematurely playing The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You” on his phone. He can’t get her to commit to an early “I love you,” just “I’m very, very fond of you.”

And he later made his very public proposal awkward enough for the record books.

But when she comes back from a morning run with her mates Ruth and Mo (Susan Wokoma and Omari Douglas) and Nathan doesn’t wake up, her shock is such than when the paramedics start zipping up the body bag, all she can think to say is “D’ye think he’ll be alright?”

Her parents (Sinéad Cusack and Peter Egan) are little comfort. Talking to Nathan, whom she still “sees” now and again, helps only so much. But when Nathan’s dizzy and somewhat less than considerate (never answers her phone or texts) sister Audrey shows up at the airport for the wedding, pink haired, gay and very pregnant from the surrogacy she took on to pay the bills, Gemma has an ally, someone “who gets me.”

Let friends and family tell her this idea of “doing what Nathan wanted” is “tasteless” and absurd, just a way of not coming to grips with grief. Short-skirted, impulsive and foul-mouthed mom-to-be Audrey is down for the dare.

“Grab hold of your labia! Let’s DO this!”

Melissa Bubnic’s script leans on the tropes of romantic comedies from “P.S. I Love You” to “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” with a particular focus on “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

A clumsy hired officiant (Paul Kaye) begins the funeral with “It doesn’t matter if we’re one or 101, we’re never ready to say goodbye,” and then goes completely off the rails with tactless jokes and self-absorbed confessions that wholly misread the room.

Gemma’s mum and her bestie Ruth are dismayed at her fool’s errand of going through the motions — catering, bookings, fitting her dress and the like.

But brassy Audrey, given a kind of dazed disconnection in between outbursts of American self-righteousness by Lourd, becomes Gemma’s wounded ride-or-die, ginning up public outrage over a judge (Harriet Walter, droll) determined not to allow a loophole to puncture 200 years of precedent and tradition.

Yes, Gemma’s online and media nickname becomes “Corpse Bride.”

Director Daniel Reisinger has a lot of story, flashbacks and “explanations” to get through, so the film is longer than it feels. Nathan and Aubrey’s childhood must be contended with (Elizabeth McGovern is the estranged mom) and Gemma’s flashbacks underscore her own “issues.”

Lourd is game, if a tad underwhelming as the “nut” who gives the picture life, but better at hinting at the heart hurt Audrey is dealing with. Bea’s grim sarcasm nicely serves the character and the picture as she gets over her fury of having to break the news to Nathan’s “only family” that he’s died in the arrivals gate at Heathrow.

Of COURSE she’ll take Audrey in.

“Hardly going to throw a pregnant woman out in the streets. It’s not BETHELEHEM, after all.”

And Reisinger and Bubnic follow nuptial-comedy specialist P.J. Harvey’s (“Muriel’s Wedding,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding”) edict that when family and friends gather for weddings, they can’t resist a sing-along, the “comfort food” of any wedding comedy ever since Shakespeare’s “Hey nonny nonnies.”

The narrative has heart and hurt and laughs and a big finish. Sure, it’s formulaic and not every scene has a proper pay off.

But in a cinelandscape where rom-coms that work are as rare as hope for a better tomorrow, “And Mrs” plays, and gives Bea another year or two’s supply of chat show anecdotes and jokes. Not that she’s needed them.

Rating: unrated, with lots and lots of profanity

Cast: Aisling Bea, Billie Lourd, Colin Hanks, Susan Wokoma, Harriet Walter, Omari Douglas, Peter Egan and Sinéad Cusack.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Reisinger, scripted by
Melissa Bubnic A Vertical release on Amazon Prime, other streamers.

Running time: 1:51

The first laugh in the martial arts quest thriller “Nine Ring Golden Dagger” might be its title. It was called “Blocking the Horse” in China. And the “dagger” that was mistranslated here is a sword attached to a seven or eight foot pike.

And the second laugh is in first title to appear on the screen in it. This movie is “purely fictional,” we’re reaassured.

Those two sword-fighting sisters who struggle with a brawny sea of sworn enemies over a “Nine Ring Nation Stabilizing Golden Sword,” warriors flying with the aid of springboards and wires and shooting hailstorms of arrows and crossbow bolts and swinging clashing, clanging and cutting blades that mainly deliver survivable wounds are all just made up.

Good to know.

The Song and Liao factions are fighting over the lands of the Han Dynasty, either before or after its breakup (that’s unclear). The Song General Yang (Wue Yue) lost the titular golden dagger/sword/pike and his life in battle.

Weeping sisters Baba and Jiumei (Tianshuo Song, Xintong Zhang) resolve to retrieve it from a Liao stronghold. They dress up as soldiers and have no trouble at all passing for cute, thin fighting men or infiltrating this fortress capital and the Indiana Jones-booby-trapped room where the sword is kept.

They survive wounds and a chase by assorted minions of a security chief (Yu Kang, et al) and take shelter in a roadhouse run by a Song expat (Kai Zhang) ready to return to their homeland. A mistaken identity brawl is how they get acquainted.

“How do you know the Yang family sword-fighting technique (In Mandarin with English subtitles)?”

“Find out in HELL!”

After they figure out they’re on the same side, they’re all basically trapped there for much of the movie as waves of bad guys overtake them, and partake in the house wine before figuring out these are the droids sisters they’re looking for.

The bar brawls are impressive and alternately bloody and low comedy amusing. There’s a towering waiter and diminutive cook sight gag, a foppish foe related to the Liao dowager empress and a lot of strangely survivable slices and impalings as every time you figure that’s it, it’s CURTAINS for this or that protagonist, they somehow rally with a balm or wave of the (three) screenwriters’ hands.

There’s so much exposition and so many characters that the picture is awfully cluttered and even hard to follow before the narrative settles down in that one important location.

Choreographer Gao Meng’s fights are less impressive than the state-of-the-wirework art films in this genre, but pass muster in what amounts to an overpopulated but handsomely mounted martial arts B-picture.

Rating: unrated, lots of violence

Cast: Tianshuo Song, Xintong Zhang, Kai Zhang, Yu Kang, Liu Xinlei, You Xianchao and Wue Yue,

Credits: Directed by Feng Xiaojun, scripted by Gen Zi Qi, Xu Wen-Zheng and Chen Peng. A Well Go USA/Hi-YAH! release.

Running time: 1:34

Hand cuffs, French toast, “Give me twelve hours to show you” what a “relationship” can be like.

Who hasn’t been THERE, right?

Molly Gordon, Logan Lerman, Geraldine Viswanathan, John Reynolds and David Cross star in this kinky (ish) flirting with murderous (ish) comedy.

July 25 it is.

Whitney Peak from “Hunger Games” stars, but you will recognize a couple of other faces in this “Sandman is coming for you” thriller. 

June 20, theaters and VOD via Vertical Releasing.

Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, rivals in a Southwestern town riven by America’s poisonous political landscape and the lies that divide us.

Emma Stone and Austin Butler also star in this one, which doesn’t exactly promise cinematic “escape” from the country’s dire straits.

July 24.