Movie Nation

“Nobody ever said abortion was pretty,” the cynical, corporate Planned Parenthood director (Robia Scott) tells her protege, Abby Johnson (Ashley Bratcher) in “Unplanned.”

Indeed. “Unplanned” shows you everything from the ultrasounds necessary to properly carry out the medical procedure, to the actual “vacuuming” of the uterus — with as much blood and gore and violence as its fevered creators can imagine.

If ever a subject deserved an R-rating in an explicit film treatment, it’s this.

It’s more pure propaganda from Pure Flix, this time about the subject that has roiled America for the better part of a century — for 50 years of Catholic backed illegality as women’s rights groups fought them, and for 50 years after the famous Supreme Court case, Roe vs. Wade, that took abortion out of back alleys and into medical practices across America.

It’s a heavy-handed sermon pitting clear-eyed, clear-skinned and perfectly “reasonable” protesters against those profiteering, murderous “corporate” butchers at Planned Parenthood.

Sure, the faithful bring up George Soros, the favorite rich whipping boy (with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, also mentioned) of the Sold Our Souls to Foreigner-Founded Fox News set.

Women are its villains, including the hypocritical opportunist whose book it is based on — Abby Johnson. In incessant voice over narration she (Bratcher) insists “This could change everything.”

It already has. Abortion has so divided the country as to make the allegedly God-fearing endorse a criminal, pathological liar and whoremonger into the White House, where his Kentucky and South Carolina Senate minions can steal Supreme Court seats and at long last return control of women’s bodies to a theocratic leaning State and the Red State pinheads who back them.

Like-minded judges have lied their way into the courts, railroaded there by the most cynical politicians the country has ever produced — men who are not men in any meaningful sense of the word.

You did this. Take a bow.

So yes, “Unplanned,” about a Planned Parenthood clinic director (Johnson, played by Batchner) who “saw the light” after having two abortions herself, and facilitating thousands at Ground Zero for careless sex (apparently), Houston, Texas, has the feel of a victory lap for the myopically self-righteous.

Filmmakers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon pound their points home like Madison Avenue vets, worried if they don’t use a ham for a cudgel, their audience might miss their meaning.

Medical professionals and birth control counselors are to a one, callous, unfeeling beasts. The scowling, money-grubbing doctor who oversees abortions in the film’s Texas clinic has a wisecrack at the ready when he turns on the pump that sucks a fetus out of woman experiencing a “crisis pregnancy.”

“Beam me up, Scotty!”

The screaming, name-calling, poster-waving protestors — the ones who make the evening news — are lightly glossed over and passed over in lieu of fresh-faced “40 Days for Life” preachers, who range in shrillness from passive aggressive to aggressive, smug in the assured rightness of their cause, dealing from a stacked deck in every argument the movie deigns to depict.

At this stage of the debate, nobody is going to have his or her mind changed by a lop-sided screed on the Big Screen, or a lopsided review ridiculing their dull, uncharismatic and colorless actors (save for Scott), pedestrian direction and script that is more rhetoric than dialogue. Voice-over narration is the laziest, most-heavy-handed cinematic storytelling device there is, and “Unplanned” is wallpapered with it.

Plainly, they were worried about being too subtle.

The fact that the movie is unintentionally patriarchal, showing a clinic run by and for women, with even the fanatical men baying at the fences surrounding it depicted as at least being “right,” is worth a laugh.

I used to visit an allergy clinic located next to a women’s health care provider in one state where I lived. The scary cranks shrieking at everybody coming in the door there were far enough down the rabbit hole that I was never able to hear of a doctor’s murder or the motives of an Atlanta Olympics bomber after that without saying, “Yeah, nobody saw THAT coming.”

Pure Flix, the Scottsdale studio that released the angry Christian victimhood Jeremiads “God’s Not Dead I and II,” is behind this one. They weren’t satisfied showing the women escaping problem pregnancies as weeping, the people who do the work as saleswomen meeting “quotas.” They use the rhetoric and images of violence to encourage violence. And they will be the first to go “Who, us?” when violence results.

For the sentient, the film’s “truth” in depicting Abby (a real person, her widely challenged –OK, debunked — book was the basis for this) suggests the holes one can most easily drive a truck through in her “true story.” The Texas-sized cow-patty of contradiction and hypocrisy doesn’t end with “I had two abortions, you can’t have any.” Abby, we’re led to believe, a middle class white Texan in a two-income home (her husband is, laughably, anti-abortion and stridently so) is helped to find another job by the zealots protesting outside her clinic’s fences.

Black and brown women? You’re on your own, kids. The abortion debate was racist long before Pat Robertson made that nakedly obvious.

For the blinded by faith? I just hope Pure Flix hasn’t gone out and actually made a violent, self-righteous propaganda film that incites its fans to violence. It’s not like there’s no precedent for that concern.

There’s blood all over the screen, here. Don’t be surprised if it spills off that screen.

MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing/bloody images

Cast: Ashley Bratcher, Brooks Ryan, Robia Scott, Jared Lotz

Credits: Written and directed by Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon . A Pure Flix release.

Running time: 1:46

Out of town much of last week and all weekend, aged parent issues.

But I’m back, baby. So let’s see what we momiss. *Unplanned,” “Hotel Mumbai, “Aftermath” and “Beach Bum.”

All before, or after “Shazam,” which previews here tonight.

Some of these I am looking forward to. All will get at least a fair shake. Here we go.

Between this and “Pet Sematary,” we’re getting a mini-John Lithgow Renaissance.

Blythe Danner always works.

A semi-crank survivalist, no doubt stocked up with Glenn Beck bullion, meets a woman broken by the past — grief. Looks lovely. But as “The Tomorrow Man” is slated for May 22 release, the height of summer blockbuster season, and Bleecker Street (most incompetent movie studio marketing), nobody will see it.

Come for the introduction to Bollywood, stay for the dancing.

That’s the selling point of “His Father’s Voice,” a Westernized “Bollywood Lite” treatment of a middling musical melodrama in that distinct Indian style.

“Voice” has the basic Bollywood elements — a plot of pure hokum, a chaste romance, lots of singing and dancing. But it’s mostly in English. And the songs have an organic, intimate and diegetic feel. They’re not big production numbers. The same goes for the dancing, which is generally performed solo, or in duets as part of rehearsals for a dance recital that tells the Ramayana, the ancient epic of the mythic Indian figures Rama and Sita.

A young man, Kris (Christopher Gurusamy) shows up at a remote Indian ashram, looking for his father. The young woman, Valli (Sudharma Vaithiyanathan) recognizes him. So does her mother (Ashwini Pratap Pawar). He brushes their warm welcome off. “I’m looking for my father.”

But his father, a Westerner named Jon, is away. And Kris is touchy about waiting for him to come back. Still, the women and their fond memories of him convince him to stay.

Kris finds himself watching this performing arts ashram debate and rehearse their planned take on the classic Indian tale, the Ramayana, written “in Sanskrit, the language of the gods!” The debate is over whether to update the sexist story and their traditional symbolic dance (India’s version of ballet, opera and Noh theater) or to give the people what they want.

The story of “His Father’s Voice” is told in three time frames — 17 years ago, when Kris and his parents Jon and Clara (Jeremy Roske and Julia Koch) settled into this life of music and contemplation, mostly at Jon’s insistence.

Jon’s a post-hippy blonde European with a little guitar, a lot of songs in his heart as he makes a sort of spiritual quest. His Indo-Austrian wife puts on a brave face, but this isn’t her idea of an exciting life.

Valli’s parents Pavarthi (Pawar) and Nagarajan (Narendran Pangathody), must be of independent means to have such a lovely place to practice their art, make music and dance.

The West meets East dynamic comes together with Jon, a hippie minstrel singer-songwriter who bends Western traditions to fit Eastern musical modes and models as he croons “I’ll fly without wings, with only truth to change my shape.”

Some of the best scenes in “His Father’s Voice” demonstrate this with jam sessions, Jon playing along to whatever rehearsal music the dancers (mainly Pawar, sometimes Pangathody and others) are mastering.

But the way to engage the film on its own terms is through the dance, stunningly disciplined stylized movement, poses and gestures, as demanding as the any the world offers.

You’ve guessed the “plot,” even though the movie takes its sweet time to get around to it. Kris is estranged from his dance, and has lost his desire to dance– almost. Something happened long ago with the parents, and you can guess that, too.

In all honesty, I found the story and the timid Valli/Kris “romance” tiresome. “His Father’s Voice” lacks the bubbly sense of fun Bollywood musicals deliver, and the performances are, almost to a one, stagey, theatrical and flat.

But the dancing dazzles as we watch the story of Rama and Sita pieced together by gestures, perfectly-struck poses and elaborately refined movement.

MPAA Rating: unrated, PG-ish.

Cast: Christopher Gurusamy, Ashwini Pratap Pawar, Sudharma Vaithiyanathan, Jeremy Roske , Julia Koch

Credits: Written and directed by Kaarthikeyan Kirubhakaran. An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:45

The idea is a clever one, and IMDb and Amazon.com aren’t the first to think of it.

Put vintage titles that are no longer Netflix draws — films, TV shows etc. — and not exactly “classics” — available on a streaming service.

Sony’s takeover of Crackle pioneered doing this, and other streaming websites are doing this with classic movies.

Sites you’d expect do it, like Turner Classic Movies, and even Open Culture.

The catch, of course, is that you have to watch movies broken up by commercials, like all those HDTV channels (Movies!, Grit, Get TV, This, etc.) that broadcast TV stations put on their subcarriers. or Tubi and Pluto and Roku.

Unlike the TV channels, though, the online streaming services are using machines to edit in the commercials and commercial breaks — popping algorithm-based breaks right in the middle of action, or at odd breaks in the action.

The ads have the potential to be cookie-based customized for your personal viewing pleasure, as in based on your recent searches for used cars, marine varnish etc.

So yeah, there’s still money to be made off “Tootsie,” “Groundhog Day” and thousands of other 60s-90s titles.

IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, as the Internet’s most popular movie research website, has been trying to morph into an entertainment company in its own right, lots of video components (video ads pay more), lots of stuff hosted by Kevin Smith, of all people.

IMDb Free Dive is their venture into streaming. And coming from the last word on film credits and bulk data and trivia on movies, a research and movie review site visited by millions, you’d expect it to be the best. It’s not. It’s awful. When I visit my Luddite mother who refuses to get or allow cable to be installed in her home (not high speed internet, although Century Link, her provider, advertises speeds it cannot achieve), I test out these streaming services so that the HDTV I gave her doesn’t go to waste.

I have no trouble getting films and TV shows to stream, or watching screener links provided by studios whose movies are about to come out. But IMDb’s software, chopping whole chunks of movies, the payoffs and punchlines to comic scenes of “1941” (a guilty pleasure) for instance, with every abrupt, jarring “commercial break,” is a joke.

Crackle has the same arbitrary commercial placement, but they don’t delete content.

Content is removed from the film on FreeDive, quite arbitrarily and seemingly by accident. The flow of the picture isn’t just interrupted, it is gutted.

Considering who you are, you’d think you’d treat movies more seriously, with more care and respect. Oh. Right. You hired Kevin Smith.

IMDb FreeDive sucks. Make it better.

It’s a summer AM in the middle of Pennsylvania Trump country, but Donnie is wearing his fur cap.

“It’s my work hat,” he explains, shrugging off the odd attire question.

His colleague in the garbage truck, Donna, is just grinding through another day. She hops back in the seat and Donnie just stares.

“You didn’t flip the lid down.”

That’s our second clue. A few minutes later, we see Donnie dig through a mountain of saved pens and magic markers — hundreds and hundreds of them. A character trait is underlined for us. Donnie’s “on the spectrum.” A little obsessive-compulsive, not quite picking up social signals, he’s one awkward conversation after another waiting to happen — squirrelly, maybe a little creepy.

Donnie is a most unusual character to serve as our tour guide to “A Dark Place.” British character actor Andrew Scott (“Spectre,””Pride” and TV’s Moriarty in “Sherlock”) utterly immerses himself in this “town weirdo” character who becomes obsessed with a little boy on his route who disappears, and then is found drowned in a local creek.

Director Simon Fellows (“Malice in Wonderland”), screenwriter Brendan Higgins and Scott have concocted an unsettling mashup of “Monk” meets “Gone Baby Gone” whodunit, a British production filmed in Georgia and awfully fond of showing all the “Trump” posters and yard signs in this corner of rural, Steelers-obsessed Pennsylvania.

Donnie’s back-story is layered, with no layer pointing towards him turning amateur sleuth when little Ryan Ziegler vanishes. Donnie drives a garbage truck because it’s the only work he can get, and his off-putting oddness makes you wonder if he should even be entrusted with that. He lives with his aged mother, collects sports memorabilia for his 11 year-old daughter (Christa Beth Campbell) who lives with her mother. The mom (Denise Gough) lets us see with just a glance how much she regrets every minute since a drunken one-night-stand with the town character.

Work partner Donna (Bronagh Waugh) shrugs off Donnie’s weirdness until he starts asking questions about the little boy who used to wave from the window of his parents’ house on Donnie’s route. She’s as shocked as we are at this turn.

What’s driving it? Did Donnie have something to do with the disappearance? He’s tactless enough to ask the grieving mom questions, and she’s not the first person whose social signals he misses. He hacks into his daughter’s Facebook and queries the missing boy’s foul-mouthed tweenage brother. The waitress at the diner (“Any strangers in here the past couple of days?”), the town’s lone detective (Griff Hurst), all get the Donnie third degree.

What the hell is up with him? The sheriff (Michael Rose) isn’t the only one wondering.

We scratch our heads, or maybe shake them at how implausible this garbage dump “Monk” is as a sleuth. But Donnie is used to poking through people’s trash. And he’s not an idiot. He just has problems with distractions, breaks in routine and questions left unanswered.

Scott makes a great tour guide, leading us down the rabbit hole of Donnie’s latest obsession. The plot includes confrontations and lines crossed that should land Donnie in jail, or dead. But something keeps those who might take drastic measures from pulling the trigger.

There’s always something or someone (Donna serves as a “Deus ex Donna” in this) who saves him.

Fellows immerses us in this world, focusing on the decay and despair in this corner of America where the “old mill” is long shuttered and the locals have been “left behind” by the rest of the country, underlining that with several images of Trump signs seemingly left over from the election.

Donnie, “A Dark Place” suggests, is that corner of America incarnate — off-putting, maybe creepy, uncertain in motive, but not someone we should discount, ignore or take for granted. He makes a most unusual big screen sleuth, and Scott’s unbalanced portrayal of him keeps us guessing what Donnie is thinking, what Donnie’s involvement in all this might be and most worryingly, what socially unacceptable, dangerous or extreme thing Donnie might do next.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, some of it committed on a child

Cast: Andrew Scott, Bronagh Waugh, Griff Furst, Michael Rose, Christa Beth Campbell and Denise Gough

Credits:Directed by Simon Fellows, script by Brendan Higgins. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:29

The tracking on Tim Burton’s live action remake of “Dumbo” has been all over the place. I have read numbers as low as the mid-20s and and high as $58 million for the “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/Alice in Wonderland” director’s grim and depressing take on the little elephant with the big, big ears.

Deadline.com is projecting something in the $57+ range, but pre-release tracking has been terrible — no web searches for the trailer and title these past two weeks, for starters. IMDb searches of the title in preparation for going? Pre-sales? Fuggedaboutit.

Read this Box Office Mojo analysis. They won’t come right out and say it, but tracking on “Dumbo” domestically is right about “Christopher Robin” (well under $30 million). Reviews have been downright downbeat for this dark and glum remake of a much-loved musical with a sad undertone. Burton kept the sad, made it the overtone and stripped the music and comedy out of it.

And what Burton does to the film’s version of Disneyland in the finale doesn’t take a shrink to analyze.

“Us” could conceivably beat “Dumbo” if the CGI “live action” mashup underwhelms. But I wonder if Mojo’s $40 million take for Jordan Peele’s sophomore venture into horror isn’t generous. When too many of the more overly sympathetic reviewers are saying “You need to see it two or three times to get it” (maybe, probably not) you know it’s not exactly clicking the way “Get Out” did. Cinema Tracking scores of B- from audiences suggest it’ll drop below $40 on its second weekend, even if the curious show up to see what all the fuss and confusion are about.

An anti-abortion drama “Unplanned” was shown to true believers (not critics) pre-release, and could make a few million. I will try and get to that tonight. And Matthew McConaughey’s “The Beach Bum” looks like a bomb.

Sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes to see the harsh beauty in something that’s become commonplace, or at least over-familiar.

Documentaries such as “The Wild Inside” and “The Wild Horse Redemption,” and endless TV news magazine feature stories have frequently re-acquainted Americans with programs in the Western United States’ prison system program of rehabilitating hardened convicts by having them train wild mustangs.

But it took a French filmmaker and Belgian star to create a story that’s stark, intense and beautiful out of that.

“The Mustang” stars Matthias Schoenaerts, the rugged romantic of “Far from the Madding Crowd” and “The Danish Girl.” Here, shorn of most of his hair and his air of romance, he is Roman Coleman, a hard man doing hard time in Eli Penitentiary in Nevada.

When we meet him, and long after we’ve met him in Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s spare, minimalist tale, he comes off as a walking balled-up fist. The tension is in his eyes, the rage in every tattooed step, gesture and look.

Roman has impulse control issues and anger management issues. A no-nonsense counselor (Connie Britton) isn’t scared, even when he twitches and lunges at her word association quiz. We’re scared for her, though.

“I’m just trying to find out what is important to you,” she says, grasping for some sort of verbal response from this stoic thug.

“I’m not good with people,” he confesses, finally. Well scary guy convict, you just might be in luck.

That “outdoors” work crew he’s put on earns him a pitchfork. Somebody’s got to to shovel the manure, the old man in charge of the prison’s wild mustang rehab, growls. He’s played by Bruce Dern. Every word out of his grizzled mouth is a twinkling growl.

Roman is curious at the furious, buckskin-colored stallion pounding at the walls of the isolation shed he’s imprisoned in. Roman feels his pain. A man of violence himself, he knows what solitary confinement can do to you.

That curiosity will change his life. Boss Myles (Dern) says, “You’re in the program…if you can stay in there (the corral) more’n five seconds.”

Thus begins a long journey from violent mistrust and hostility to empathy. That’s what killers and other violent offenders learn, not so much from the prison’s group therapy counseling programs, but from looking an animal in their care in the eye and finding compassion and common ground.

We’ve seen the stallions rounded up off Federal lands, a culling of the herds that extend over the West, with those captured to be trained by convicts and auctioned off to pay for the program’s costs.

Roman has six weeks to go from punching the horse — an ugly, frantic scene full of rage and blows (the horse punches back) — to loving it, from rejecting counseling to embracing it, from keeping his pregnant daughter (Gideon Adlon) at a distance, to reaching out to her to mend the wounds that they share.

So much about “The Mustang” is conventional and predictable that the real marvel in Clermont-Tonnerre’s film is how much she is able to move us, even without much in the line of surprises.

She uses silence, limited Schoenaerts’ dialogue, letting us hear his furious breathing in the presence of that therapist/evaluator, which echoes the equine panting of the horse.

We’re treated to long takes of the training, with Roman getting trained even more by the horse, mainly by veteran convict-trainer Henry (Jason Mitchell of “Straight Outta Compton, adorable here), a joker and sometime drug dealer (horse drugs).

“If you’re to control your horse, first you’ve got to control yourself,” Henry counsels. “Respect his space” and “NEVER look him in the eye.”

Which of course, is EXACTLY what Roman does, something Clermont-Tonnerre captures in big, quiet close-ups.

This horse and that convict have to “get in sync,” old man Myles instructs. But we can see they’re already exactly alike — afraid, bitter, angry and prone to lashing out.

Schoenaerts gives a performance of steel-eyed stares and clenched teeth, clenched fists, clenched everything. The transformation we know if coming isn’t over-sold or obvious, but Schoenaerts makes it moving. As for the man’s violent bonafides, a prison fight we see coming a mile away is as shocking and real as his consequences for it are shocking and unreal (he’s not punished).

Any director would have approached this material emphasizing the “freedom” the vast, open skies from the valley to the far off mountains, the beauty of magnificent horse flesh and the Old West ethos — become somebody other somebodies, including animals, can rely on — that drives this program in prisons all over the West.

But it took a French actress (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) turned director to find the beauty, even in dusty thunderstorm, even in the terrified faces of the animals that the inmates have to calm and move to safety.

Clermont-Tonnerre never surprises with “The Mustang,” but in stripping the story to elemental visuals that tell a simple, touching story, she’s announced herself as a cinematic storyteller to watch.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence and drug content

Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruce Dern, Jason Mitchell, Connie Britton

Credits: Directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, script by Mona Eastvold, Brock Norman Brock and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre . A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:36

Michael Winterbottom maintains his rep as Britain’s most peripatetic filmmaker with “The Wedding Guest,” a somewhat conventional kidnapping thriller that leans on some fairly predictable twists to take it from Point A to Point K.

It’s another “road” picture, but this time it isn’t a Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon “Trip.”

It’s not an adaptation, as so many of his films are — re-settings of “Tristram Shandy” or “Brief Encounter” or the works of Thomas Hardy. But as always, the director of “Welcome to Sarejevo,” “The Trip to Spain,” “The Claim” and “A Mighty Heart” finds an arresting setting, and makes the most of it.

The novelty here, as it was with his “Trishna,” is that those twists and turns take his couple-on-the-run through much of wide expanse that is the Subcontinent — India and Pakistan.

Dev Patel (“Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) stars as a guy who stuffs his luggage with passports and flies to Lahore, Pakistan. The driver he walks up to is holding a sign for “Jay,” so we’ll call him that.

We watch him hit the rent-a-car places, renting first a Toyota, then a Honda.

We see Jay weave his way through the bazaar, little shops that can serve as tiny factories, or hardware stores (“Duct tape?”) or gun shops.

No, he doesn’t want the shiniest pistol in the case. The matte black one will do. Two.

“Jay” doesn’t speak Punjabi, but he’s here for the wedding. He’s friends with the groom. Or was it the bride? He cases the joint, finds out where everybody is sleeping, chats up the night guard.

And in the dark of night, he stages his two cars, dons black mask and gear, sneaks in and kidnaps the bride. Duct tape and pull ties, stuff her into the trunk, change cars to throw any pursuers off the trail.

Winterbottom loses himself in the travelogue detail and the logistics of how such a heist could be pulled off by a lone gunman. Motives? They become clearer the moment Jay tears the duct tape off and cuts the pull ties binding her hands.

“You know who sent me?” Samira (Radhika Apte) nods. He’s there to give her a choice, or so he says. This arranged marriage? In or out?

She’s…OUT. The London-educated Samira is being rescued by the man she loves! OK, it’s a guy PAID by the man she loves.

“How do you know Dipesh?”

“Never met him.”

“How much are you getting PAID?”

But as they wait for Dipesh (Jim Sarbh) to make the rendezvous, there are…complications. There’s more travel. There’s more to this than “love.” Or less.

Or is there?

Winterbottom gets so caught-up in putting his mismatched duo in assorted cars, buses and trains, taking them across the border into India, up and down the Subcontinent, that he barely takes the time to let them develop chemistry.

We’re treated to endless scenes of Jay locking Samira in this or that 2 star or four star hotel room, trekking out to acquire another car, more passports, to make deals and wrangle with Dipesh.

Who is, as we say in the states, “wussing out.” Or hesitating. He offhandedly remarks about how Samira is always “looking for an angle,” and Apte — a relative newcomer to Western cinema (she was in “The Ashram”) — lets us see that in Samira’s eyes.

We think she’d be panic stricken, fearful or at least wary. She never lets that show. She’s mulling over each new wrinkle, seeing which way the chips fall.

There are abrupt shifts –shortcuts — in the plot which are treated cavalierly by the screenplay, callously by the characters.

It’s the nuts and bolts Winterbottom is worried about, getting the characters and the production on the road to the next location. Patel and Apte cannot make their characters anything more than good-looking cut-outs, puppets yanked back and forth by the plot, the travel demands and unseen writer-director.

The characters connect in ways more Western than Eastern (Indian thrillers and romances are still fairly chaste), but the action is pretty lukewarm by conventional thriller standards.

“The Wedding Guest” is no “Bourne” or “Run Lola Run,” or “The Getaway.” It’s just an ambling “antic” dash through the New India, forced to deal with Indian train and bus timetables (many rental car counter scenes) and the region’s sea of humanity, “where anyone (who looks Indian or Pakistani) could get lost.”

And if that’s the case, what’s the hurry?

MPAA Rating:R for language, some violence and brief nudity

Cast: Dev Patel, Radhika Apte, Jim Sarbh

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Winterbottom. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:37

Don’t wait for the phone to ring, “make your own work,” actors are told. Stage a play with a part for you in it, write yourself a star vehicle and find the financing to get it filmed.

Veteran character actress Madeleine Wade took that advice, scripting a low-budget horror tale for herself, the similarly oft-cast Augie Duke and others, a picture that required just a handful of sets, limited special effects and a generous budget for fake blood.

It’s pretty bad, as a script and as an acting showcase. But if you’re reading this review, you’ve found “Blood Craft” — maybe on VOD or wherever. And if you’re hellbent on watching it, here’s what “Blood Craft” is about.

Two long-separated sisters (Wade and Duke) reunite when their hateful, heckfire and brimstone preacher pop (Dave Sheridan) dies. The film opens with Minister Hall inveighing against “the un-righteous; fornicators, drunkards, effeminate, homosexuals.”

Sisters Grace (Wade) and Serena (Duke) remembers what he was REALLY like. He beat and molested them both, lied to each about what happened to the other, thus causing their separation for years.

“Where did you go?
“What do you mean? Where did YOU go?”

Their rage (tepidly acted out) drives them to seek a solution their mother (Dominique Swain, who began her career decades ago as Adrian Lyne’s “Lolita”) taught them. German mother Hilde kept a book of spells and taught the siblings how to cast them.

“Nothing is EVER gone for good!”

As dastardly Dad is buried “right out back,” Serena has a thought. “”We can bring him back! We can make him pay!”

They will bring him back from the dead to torture and punish him for who he was and what he did. They never thought of Twitter shaming the dead. Apparently.

“Blood Craft” is a simple-enough exploitation picture, which means it has cheap frights, gratuitous gore and random sex scenes to raise the kink factor.

As we’ve already seen that Grace is a sex worker (“private dancer”), and heard titillating (That’s the intention, anyway.) tales of the incestuous nature of their abuse, we know this isn’t just about revenge, digging up Dead ol’Dad and putting him in a pentangle they draw on the floor.

“We call forth the power of air! We call forth the power of Earth! We call forth the power of water! We call forth the power of fire!”

No, there might be money hidden on the property, and the creepy kid they knew long ago, Tyler has grown up to be the county clerk (Michael Welch) who wants that money.

A couple of sequences stand out in this tedious, icky thriller.

Sheridan makes us understand how the preacher could have talked his flock out of enough money to create a scandal. He works up a fine spittle in the pulpit, smacks his head with his Bible and pleads, “Donate your conscience, save your soul!”

Grace’s troubled childhood put her at the mercy of the sex trade, as an adult — donning bustiers in a booth, dealing with pervy clients on the other side of the window, creeps with their “unreasonable” requests.

“Take your belt and CHOKE yourself!”

The kink here feels shoehorned in (ahem), nakedly pandering to the audience Wade and her director and co-writer James Cullen Bressack figure they want.

Sister on sister action? Preacher Dad “really liked it when I kissed you softly…like this.”

Wade and her cohorts took that “Make your own work” advice to heart and got their film made. Nothing’s more empowering to an actor than that.

But “Blood Craft” isn’t much to proud of, aside from that. Ineptly written, often poorly-acted and directed with little style or sense of how you build suspense, terror or even revulsion, it’s a make-work project the horror cinema could have done without.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence (bloody torture), sex, profanity

Cast: Madeleine Wade, Augie Duke, Michael Welch, Dominique Swain

Credits:Directed by James Cullen Bressack, script by Madeleine Wade and James Cullen Bressack . A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:35