Movie Nation

There’s something going on in an abandoned mine in an emptied-out town in BFE, Kentucky. And the only person who can get our Cambridge scientist and his team there is a mysterious and hyper-competent Spanish guide.

No, “The Devil Below” isn’t another European horror story set in Appalachia and shot in Romania. But the casting, the fact that they pass off a Kentucky quarry and caves as “the Shookum mine,” and that it’s not so much a thriller set “below” as what is being kept below getting out and “up here” make it disorienting enough to be interesting.

Alicia Sanz of TV’s “El Cid” and “From Dusk Till Dawn” is Arianne, the woman with the gear and the Land Rover to get Darren (Adan Canto), his skeptical colleague Shawn (Chinaza Uche), security guy Jaime (Zach Avery) and tech-guy Terry (Jonathan Sadowski) to a place that’s literally been removed from the map.

Arianne has the swagger to not be put off when locals are hostile about giving her directions. To her, that just means “We’re close.”

Darren’s out to find out what’s still on fire far below ground, but Shawn, a geologist with an “intelligent design” bent thinks this sealed mine was a government Cold War project related to something the Russians found when they drilled down too deep — Hell. He’s even got a tape.

“Some say it’s the screams of the damned!”

Darren can gripe that “We’re not here to find the Hell. We’re here to to find holes and smoke” all he wants. We’ve seen that opening scene. We know a miner (Will Patton) saw his miner son yanked down a hole, never to be seen again.

Shawn? He’s the first to say “We shouldn’t be here, man.”

They dodge angry locals, find the entrance and open Pandora’s mine shaft. And that’s when Hell is let loose on Earth.

“The Devil Below” is at its best when our soon to shrink quintet is on the run, scrambling to figure out what’s chasing them and if the locals are there to help or make things worse.

The more we “see” the threat — which is much more menacing as a far-off growl and glimpsed through a night-vision scope — the more conventional and dull “The Devil Below” becomes.

There’s not much suspense, not much empathy built into the characters. We’re just treated to little speeches, bits of backstory revealed, big moments of personal sacrifice, grisly deaths, all shot in the gloom of night or shafts and caves “below.”

There’s a half-decent thriller in this plot, maybe even with this cast. But the minute you set aside most of your budget to show us “the creatures” in their various forms, you lose the thread. It’s not what we see that’s alarming, but what we sense. “The Devil Below” deserves a movie as resonant and harrowing as its title.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Alicia Sanz, Adan Canto, Chinaza Uche, Zach Avery, Jonathan Sadowski, and Will Patton

Credits: Directed by Bradley Parker, script by Eric Scherbarth and Stefan Jaworski. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:31

If there is a simple formula for making a movie you assume the horror audience will embrace, the British thriller “Sacrilege” lays it bare for all to see.

“Bare” as in nudity — discrete, teasing and of course female. And gay. Skinny dipping, makeup sex, that sort of thing.

It’s got nubile lesbians isolated and under attack in the British countryside in the Lands Where You Get No Cell Signal.

There’s a pagan cult because of course there is, a festival celebrating a veritable “Wicker Man,” this time with antlers and a deer’s skull. Well, it’s not exactly wicker — more weeds and twigs and such.

Throw in the silent, hulking groundskeeper (Rory Wilton) at Mabon Lodge and you’ve got the makings of 767 other horror movies, varying only in geography and casting.

David Creed’s formula picture fails to generate any real frights or suspense, despite hewing as closely to horror formula as any thriller in recent memory.

Four young professional Londoners — Tamaryn Payne, Emily Wyatt, Sian Abrahams, Naomi Willow — meet at Blake’s Bar, gay-friendly as it’s run by Blake (Abrahams), and decide the news that the man who attacked Kayla (Payne) got out of prison early is reason enough to skip off to the country for a weekend.

Social influencer Stacey (Willow) and Kayla’s “cheating” ex Trish (Wyatt) pile into the van with them for a little “getting silly again together” at an early fall getaway.

“Here’s to the women in their stiletto shoes, who make all the money and drink all the booze.”

They pick up a hitcher on his way to “the festival,” which they’re promised will have music. He turns up later, after they check in, to make sure they’re coming.

And once they go, there’s enough alcohol and potent weed to take away their inhibitions and make them ignore the old woman (Emma Spurgin Hussey) who warns them away, to not follow the instructions of Father (Ian Champion) who has everyone scribble down their greatest fear on a scrap of paper and toss it into the bonfire.

See where this is going? Yeah, me too.

The women keep separating, and as they do, their worst nightmares flash before their hallucinating (maybe) eyes. And they’re picked off in generally gruesome ways.

The foreshadowing could not be more obvious than the “let’s get naked” moments. The performances are D-movie desultory, even if the production values aren’t bad.

“Sacrilege” may very well have the formula that lures in viewers. But you’ve got to get creative with it, everybody on board has to buy in, and you need the talent and shooting, directing and editing skill to make it come together in a way that generates fear and suspense.

“Sacrilege” doesn’t defile a horror formula. It just shows us how following the recipe to the letter doesn’t always work.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Tamaryn Payne, Emily Wyatt, Sian Abrahams, Naomi Willow, Ian Champion, David English, Rory Wilton and Emma Spurgin Hussey

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Creed. A DevilWorks release.

Running time: 1:23

Here’s another project from the filmic pre-history of Peter Sellers, a little-seen if not “lost” comedy made his with fellow “Goon Show” castmates.

If the through-line of modern sketch comedy runs from the Goons to Monty Python to Second City and The Groundlings to “Saturday Night Live,” Kids in the Hall, “In Living Color,” Upright Citizens Brigade, Broken Lizard etc, where did the Goons draw their inspiration?

“Goon Show” radio recordings point to English Music Hall, simply sped-up and given a surreal twist. The 1951 debut “Goons” film, “Penny Points to Paradise” has that in excess, beginning right from the opening credits.

The film is peppered with Bob Hope-ish one-liners.

A chatty landlady merits “I bet she was vaccinated with a gramophone needle!”

“The blunt end?”

“No, probably in the arm.”

Scads and scads of these bubble from our “heroes” — played by Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, founding members of the radio program, which had just begun broadcasting as “Crazy People” and devolved into “The Goon Show.”

Secombe plays a football pool (lotto) winner googly-eyed Milligan is his equally out-of-his-depth mate returning to their favorite dumpy hotel in Brighton, even though Harry’s hit it rich.

“The old place hasn’t changed, has it?” “Nooo. Not even the sheets.”

But as this farce, about forgers setting out to substitute their winnings with counterfeit five pound notes, gets going and Sellers shows up in a couple of roles (a fast-talking Canadian salesman, and the dotty, harrumphing “Major”), we’re treated to a lot of silent screen comedy — mime, fast-motion chases, slapstick golf and the like — all accompanied by a tinkly spinet piano score, just like you’d hear at the nickelodeon.

Even in an era when TV was emerging and vaudeville (in the US) and English Music Hall vets were its early stars, the film probably felt corny and dated the moment it hit the screen.

The band? “Felix Mendelssohn and his Hawaiian Serenaders.”

But if you’re a “completist,” trying to sample all the performers who shaped comedy for generations all across the English-speaking world, this one fills in a few more blanks.

MPA Rating: None at all.

Cast:  Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, Vicky Page, Peter Sellers, Alfred Marks, Paddie O’Neil

Credits: Directed by Anthony Young, script by John Ormonde. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:11

There is no “bomb” in the Disney Universe, not with all those streaming subscriptions and upcharges to take the edge off.

Still opening at a little over half what “Tom & Jerry” did is a bad look. $8.6 million.

“Boogie” barely registered, a decent film that only cashed in with $1.2.

The epic fail of the weekend has to be “Chaos Walking,” years delayed, reshoots included, weak reviews (it’s watchable and forgettable) maybe $100 million sink into it, only $3.8 and no streaming safety net in sight.

Imagine “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” or “Rock’n Rolla” set in a world of Colombian gangsters.

Some have colorful names, many have down and dirty secrets and nobody’s shy about spilling blood.

That’s “Dogwashers,” a Carlos Moreno thriller with lots of tell-tale borrowed Guy Ritchie visual flourishes, just as Brit Ritchie borrowed from Spaghetti Westerns and Hong Kong shoot-em-ups.

It’s a dark comedy that could use a lot more comedy. And it’s a Ritchie homage that fails to copy the most important ingredient in such bloody romps — speed. This ungainly beast lurches along when it needs to sprint. It’s slow — like a stoner Guy Ritchie mob comedy.

Moreno tells a convoluted story of rival mobs, a ruthless younger thug leaning on the older, failing Don Oscar (Christian Tappan) and his minions. After a machete slashing blood-spattered prologue, he identifies the cast of characters, from the mob leaders down to the aged gardener and the gardener’s grandson, and the mob’s sumo-sized dog washer, Jobolitro (Ulises Gonzalez) in the opening credits.

One of those minions is cheating with Don Oscar’s wife (Isabella Litch). But Don Oscar is cheating all over town, and not above killing a mistress if he suspects treachery. As the cops have moved in next door to the sprawling, tumbledown mansion he’s taken over, and he owes money to this younger rival, he suspects everyone.

His paranoia isn’t helped by heavy middle-aged-man meth use.

The rival Dubernay is hellbent on collecting his cash. Then again, maybe not. He’s a sadist and seems to enjoy killing Don Oscar’s footsoldiers.

“We are crooks,” he shrugs at one in that opening scene. “Crooks solve problems this way.”

So Don Oscar’s got a decision to make, is fretting over the “workmen” he realizes are cops at the property next door, had mistresses to see and drugs to smoke. And all those around him are trapped in his slow-motion slide into annihilation.

“Slow motion” describes the 107 minute movie, too. There’s a literal ticking clock of peril closing in around them and Moreno’s script is intent on showing this or that bit of sex, throwing in more subplots about stolen mob money and several characters having the dream of using that cash to “get out.”

The elements are here to make a pretty good expectations-flipping farce with firearms. But Moreno, who appears to intend this as a period piece (’90s phones, ’80s and older beat-up cars and trucks), slow-walks everything.

What’s worse, he gives us no one to really root for. Sure, the big guy washes the dogs and goes to church. Sure, the gardener’s grandson is looking at no future at all. But do we develop real empathy for them, or any of the double-crossers arrayed against them?

Our director conjures up an ugly, sweaty, fly-infested world of pigs who eat, groom, kill and copulate like pigs. His characters have a hint of “character” about them. They could have been funnier, more outlandish. But none of that matters when the comic thriller they’re in has all the moves of a Galapagos tortoise.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, explicit sex, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Anderson Ballesteros, Ulises Gonzalez, Christian Tappan, Jhon Álex Toro, Isabella Litch

Credits: Directed by Carlos Moreno. A 64-A Film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:47

Marvel’s upcoming “Remember these guys?” release.

There is no crying, no overt expressions of grief. But we can feel the loss in this house.

Everybody is “processing it,” as we say these days, an expression that sanitizes death in ways that surely Hallmark and the funeral home industry would approve.

But “Sophie Jones” is 16. If Dad (Dave Roberts) isn’t openly weeping, and older sister Lucy (Charlotte Jackson) isn’t breaking down, if we’re not seeing or hearing her friends and classmates offering sympathy, can Sophie figure out on her own what to do after “the funeral,” the one they had for her mother?

Writer-director Jessi Barr’s sweet but edgy debut feature doesn’t follow any conventional movie path about dealing with grief. Sophie, like the rest of her family, seems fine. She hangs with her BFF Claire (Claire Manning), talks candidly and crudely about boys, jokes around with her fellow student actors and frets over her performance in the school play.

But something more is going on. She comes on, directly and innocently, to a castmate, Kevin (Skyler Verity). And then she runs away. She argues with Claire, and that’s it for the “best friends.” They’re finished, too. Other friends and boyfriends are embraced and pushed away.

She smiles and laughs, but she seems numbed, drained and a little lost.

Jessica Barr, the director’s cousin, co-wrote and stars as Sophie, giving us an unaffected kid who is acting on impulse, looking to feel something, anything. Maybe it’s sexual, maybe it’s more of a response from her family.

“What are we gonna do with all these flowers” after the funeral? She talks her sister into getting into the tub, full of water covered in flower petals. Sophie photographs her.

She is impatient to get this or that “out of the way,” eager to lose her virginity, losing herself in punk pop abandon when she’s alone in the car, taking a hard look at her mother’s leftover pain pills.

This or that boy catches her eye and the older girls coach her how to approach them. “It’s the chase he’s after.”

But the close friends are the ones she hurts as she herself hurts. “All these intense things happening in my life,” she shrugs. And if anybody dares suggest a reason? “It doesn’t have anything to do with my mother.”

The Barr cousins give us a film of novel scenes, comical moments of sexual experimentation which have a few laughs and a little pathos.

Plenty of predictable things happen, but even scenes that set you up for something take the path less traveled as they unfold. Like Sophie, we start craving a “release” that isn’t within our reach.

It’s a film of family routines and warm intimacies and somber, silent reveries, with one poignant moment that promises to be a lot bigger than it plays.

But Jessica Barr never breaks character in a way that reminds us that for a lot of kids, big emotional responses are something reserved for TV and movie melodrama, not life.

A real teenager might work through something like this afraid of showing tears, channeling her energy into distractions, overcompensation, groping for gratification and affirmation to fill a void.

That’s the performance Jessica Barr gives us and the movie Jessi Barr builds around her, a sad coming-of-age story told in muted, almost-jokey tones by a heroine not mature enough to respond any other way.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, teen drinking, drugs, profanity

Cast: Jessica Barr, Skyler Verity, Charlotte Jackson, Claire Manning and Dave Roberts

Credits: Directed by Jessie Barr, script by Jessie Barr and Jessica Barr. An Oscilloscope Laboraties release.

Running time: 1:25

A hundred minutes of monologues, tirades and sometimes testy exchanges filmed in black and white, “Malcolm & Marie” adds up to a tepid two hander, a “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” without the writing to come off.

The dialogue and direction virtually never shakes its theatricality, the feeling that we’re hearing and watching a play. Writer-director Sam Levinson has John David Washington and Zendaya bark out lists — of credentials, backstory, film theory, past lovers, failings and grievances. They fight over the lists. And it’s exhausting.

Washington plays a filmmaker who has finally made a movie critics and the public might embrace. But Malcom’s celebration with his girlfriend of five years, an energetic James Brown sing-along and good Scotch, ridiculing white critics who finally are making the “Spike Lee and John Singleton and Barry Jenkins” comparisons (racially confining) and white liberals guilted into seeing “political” African American cinema, is smothered by Marie’s chilly response as she makes him mac and cheese.

He forgot to thank her in his speech at the premiere.

“You’ve never gotten a good review in your life,” she drops. “Mediocre” pops up when he stops ranting about about “What’s wrong?” And no, he will not admit that his screenplay was stolen from her real life addictions and recovery.

He’s self-absorbed — as creative folks inevitably are. And he multi-tasks, wolfing down her mac and cheese and opening his counter-arguments to her “It’s not until you’re about to lose someone that you start to pay attention.”

“Malcolm & Marie” comes from writer-director Sam Levinson, of “Assassination Nation,” and TV’s “Euphoria,” which stars Zendaya, and wears its intentions in every speech, every pretentious black and white frame.

Washington is already making it in Hollywood, thanks to “BlackKlansman” and being Denzel’s kid. But here’s another big screen chance for singer/actress Disney alumnus Zendaya to step out of “high school” (even the HBO drama series “Euphoria” is a sort of senior year experience) and into adult roles.

That it does. She’s getting most of the buzz from this. Is she great in it? She’s fine, but Oscar nomination fine? Washington goes so far over the top that she’s subtle by comparison. There’s no affectation to the performance. Well, this looks like her first drag off a cigarette. There’s not a lot of fire and spark, just blase dismissals of her man, her man’s “neediness” and tiny glimpses of her damaged past.

Malcolm’s profane, breathless tirade as he reads his first review allows her to patiently absorb, in ways that she must have absorbed “the misunderstood artist” rants for years. But Zendaya’s big emotional moments tend toward bloodless. Raising her thin, girlish voice doesn’t add presence or years. There is an awful imbalance in screen heft here thanks to how Washington pitches his performance — loud, overwhelming bellows and barks. This isn’t a great part, and she isn’t not be the best choice to make it one.

The ebb and flow of their real-time bickering and making-up feels script-dictated and inorganic.

Levinson’s script fills the soundtrack by emptying his memory banks of every film school conversation about “the male gaze,” dolly shots vs Steadicam, “The King’s Speech” and the generation of Jewish creatives who made “Gone with the Wind” and lionized “that Nazi-loving Lindbergh.” He turns his hero into the very forest-for-the-trees “educated” analyzer that he professes to despise. Maybe he can’t help himself, being born into the business (his dad directed “Rain Man”).

All this cinema-talk analysis is tedious, making the movie Malcolm made sound tedious, too.

And all this theatricality in the writing, blocking and acting always leads to a film that keeps the viewer at arm’s length. No amount of Washington shouting or Zendaya overwhelmed in his tsunami of speechifying changes that.

MPA Rating: R for pervasive language and sexual content 

Cast: Zendaya, John David Washington

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sam Levinson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

“Know Fear” is a grisly haunted house story distinguished mainly in the extensive use of the sound effect of a knife plunging into flesh.

“CHUCK CHUCK CHUCK squish squish squish.”

It’s a short thriller that tosses us right into “the ritual,” blood spilled on the pages of an ancient book of Latin incantations. “The ritual” isn’t explained, and in that first scene, we have to wonder if it does anybody any good.

But then that family is “gone,” The “For Sale” sign goes up and “SOLD” is scrawled on it, and hey — the book comes with the house.

Strange noises in the walls spook Wendy (Amy Carlson), the new owner who finds it. Husband Donald (David Alan Basche) can’t hear the creaking, cracking noises or whispers. At first.

But Wendy is quickly taken over by…something. A horror moment of grim suspense? Watching her half-decide (as if she has any control) to stick her hand in a pan of frying meat.

When whatever has hold of the house gets visiting niece (Mallory Bechtel), an amateur ghost hunter, nephew Charlie (Jack DiFalco) and Wendy’s graduate assistant (Meeya Davis) indoors and traps them, “Know Fear” gets down to business.

Who will survive? Who can read Latin? And why can’t everyone “see” or “hear” what the demon is doing?

“You can’t possibly believe any of this,” is Donald’s response. But he catches on.

The bizarre selective “Why can’t you see what I see?” vs. “Why can’t you hear what I hear?” gimmick doesn’t pay off. There’s more describing than actually showing what they face and the sounds it makes.

The script leaves a lot out, the acting is competent — everybody pants in fear when appropriate — if not compelling. The direction limits the gimmicks to a single yanked-out-of-the-frame shot and the script is most concerned about not wasting a moment between the next application of that knife-plunging-into-flesh effect.

“CHUCK CHUCK CHUCK…”

To “Know Fear” is to hear that over and over again, I guess.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody, gurgling graphic violence

Cast: Amy Carlson, David Alan Basche, Mallory Bechtel, Meeya Davis and Jack DiFalco

Credits: Directed by Jamison M. LoCascio, script by Adam Ambrosio, Jamison M. LoCascio. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:17

Painter, collagist, poet, public scold, filmmaker and performance artist David Wojnarowicz cut a wide swath in the in the narrowest of narrow lanes of the New York art world of the 1980s.

He was a phenomenon of AIDS era East Village art, and a victim of it. As he’s not as well remembered as his contemporaries, Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat, filmmaker Chris McKim “(Out of Iraq,” TV’s “Sex Change Hospital”) figured a documentary might jar our memories.

McKim’s clever conceit in making a film about an artist known for graffiti, stenciling images over posters and product labels and painting on driftwood and garbage cans, is to conjure his film out of the “found objects” Wojnarowicz left behind.

This terrific and informative documentary made of home movies, friends’ super 8mm film of Wojnarowicz and the hustler-turned-self-taught-artist’s audio cassette diaries and even his home answering machine tapes. And there are interviews with those still living who remember him, most famously New York essayist and social scene observer Fran Lebowitz, sketch in the picture.

There’s also an interview Wojnarowicz did with NPR’s “Fresh Air” hostess Terry Gross, whose questions often begin with lengthy discourses on the subject’s background and career. We barely hear the artist there, but Gross tells much of his story — abusive childhood, teen prostitute, artist — in what passes for a question.

“I tried hard to be normal,” he says, “tried very hard to be accepted. And on some level, it’s just a complete waste of time.”

He also tried his hand at writing monologues, hopped freights to Jamestown, N.D., lost himself in Genet and Rimbaud, sang with a band (3 Teens Kill 4) and moved to Paris and moved back to New York in time to film off his TV a Reagan for president TV ad with its “Make America great again” message.

As he found his voice via guerilla, “outlaw” installations in the abandoned piers of NYC, AIDS and Reaganism came to define him and his work.

“We rise to confront the State,” he wrote. And as he did, and faced the “gay plague” as AIDS was labeled in its early New York days, “we confronted a diseased society as well.”

Friends and lovers pass along their recollections and give testimonials about an artist facing up to his moment, made famous when the NEA pulled funding for a show his “political” and “sexual” work was appearing in. Works such as “Science Lesson,” “Prison Rape” and one that gives this film its subtitle, “F–k You, F—-ng Fa—ts,” made his reputation.

One piece is described thusly — “It looked like tetanus!”

He showed at the Whitney and did a personal installation in the home of the rich, art-dealing/collecting parents of future Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. It was a basement mural/found-objects piece, infested with roaches. On purpose.

“David didn’t really like rich people,” one friend wryly notes.

Endorsed by William S. Burroughs, Wojnarowicz was so famous that upon his death, at the end of the ’80s, his was “the first political funeral of the AIDS era.”

McKim’s film can be seen as a fascinating overview, a peek into a guy who packed a lot of life into 37 years, and a compelling, entertaining prospectus for a feature film biography of this now largely-forgotten artist. If that’s the case, count me in. After you’ve immersed yourself in this genuine New York “character,” unpolished, smart, biting and uncompromising, you might very well feel the same.

MPA Rating: unrated, nudity, sexual content, profanity

Cast: The voices of David Wojnarowicz, Fran Leibowitz,  Barry Blinderman, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar

Credits: Directed by Chris McKim. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:48