Movie Nation

In the decade of Mel Gibson’s justifiable Hollywood exile, few moviegoers have seen him outside of his cameos in “Expendables” or “Daddy’s Home” sequels.

But he’s been doing his penance, or at least finding a reason to keep hitting the gym and occasionally shave his Old Testament beard in B-movies, violent action pictures that play to his acting strengths — a glib way with tough-guy talk, a relish for playing characters bloodied, tortured and martyred in the most violent ways.

 “Blood Father” parks solitary, unshaven Mel, covered in tattoos, in the self-exile of an ex-con, recovering-alcoholic biker — Indio, California.

He’s living in a 60 year old trailer, eeking out a living as a tattoo artist and still making it to his meetings.

“I’m John…I gotta kid that I can’t find, ‘cept on a milk carton…two years sober, one in The Joint, one out.”

Living just across the desert dump of a trailer park from his sponsor (William H. Macy) helps keep him straight.

But that daughter, Lydia? She (Erin Moriarty) has been squeezing a lifetime of bad choices into 17 years. We meet her at the cash register of a big box store in NRA  America, where she can load up on box after box of 9mm ammo, but “I’m gonna need to see some ID” before she can buy those Camel Lights.

She’s hooked on drugs and on an older man (Diego Luna), a violent mid-level functionary of a drug gang, and a lover who expects her to pull the trigger when they invade a contact’s house and try to torture and shoot info out of the woman left behind there.

Lydia louses that up, and she’s on the run and on the phone, reaching out to the father she barely knows. He nurses his ’71 Nova back to life and races off to fetch her, probation officer be damned.

And when the Mexican drug gang shows up at the trailer, he embraces his “comin’ up here, takin’ our jobs” MAGA party line and defends her.

He can’t have a gun, but she’s brought one into the trailer. He can’t fire it because “I’m gonna get BLAMED for this” and thrown back into prison.

“See? I MISSED ’em for you!” he bellows after his first fusillade.

Whatever he picked up in prison, “Link” as everybody but his sponsor and his ex calls him, doesn’t realize ditzy daughter can be tracked by her iPhone. Whatever he had to offer her as shelter, “safe house” is out the door. “Luxury” never figured into his decor.

“It kind of looks like you miss the comforts of JAIL!”

And now they’re on the run in classic B-movie fashion — cheap motels (Thomas Mann plays a smitten young desk clerk) and “I gotta see an old friend” stops to get help from a combat vet/biker (the late, great Michael Parks) and his old lady (Dale Dickey, of course), and even back to prison where Miguel Sandoval reigns.

He gets an earful of his little girl’s “thinking” — “My boyfriend thought we could get married, so I wouldn’t have to TESTIFY against him!”

And he checks in with Kirby, his sponsor. Because no matter how bad things get, he can’t crawl back in the bottle.

“I’m not dying, Kirby. I’m just in El Centro!”

It’s on the map. Like Indio. Look it up.

French director Jean-Francois Richet did the “Mesrine” escaped con-on-the-lam thrillers, and he keeps this one on its feet and on the move. Those French. If they’ll forgive Polanski, they’ll forgive Mel.

The script, based on a Peter Craig pulp novel, leans on droll, hard-boiled one-liners, profanity and just a tad of dead-end biker politics.

Preacher, the Nazi and Confederate paraphernalia dealer played by Tarantino pal Parks, has glorious speeches about the world Lydia’s daddy used to inhabit, and the one he makes his living in.

“All the losers make me money,” he says, showing off the Nazi and rebel flag antiques he peddles to racists who ride without helmets, unless they’re Wehrmacht issued.

There isn’t much of a plot and isn’t much logic to the one there is. It’s too violent for the squeamish, but that’s Mel for you — always looking for an on-screen crucifixion, even if it’s by Glock.

But like some of Mel’s other B pictures, “Blood Father” delivers the goods. And that’s all it ever promises to do.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language throughout and brief drug use

Cast: Mel Gibson, Erin Moriarty, Diego Luna, William H. Macy, Michael Parks, Dale Dickey and Miguel Sandoval

Credits: Directed by Jean-François Richet, script by Peter CRaig and Andrea Berloff, based on the novel by Peter Craig. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:28

Friends don’t let friends watch soap opera-sloppy tripe like “Pretty Little Stalker,” do they? And we’re friends, right?

The plot is thick, the makeup thicker in this potboiler about a stalker with an agenda and a big ol’grudge against a gorgeous self-help author.

Worst movie ever filmed in Louisville!

Nicky Whelan is Lorna, not-exactly-a-best-seller, but a very successful coiner of chapter headings like “Self-doubt has no age limit.” Not everybody adores her, as a reading she gives early in the film makes clear.

Married twice, living large with her teen son (Parker Mack) and ever-shirtless hunk travel writer husband (Jesse Hutch), she’s gone as far as somebody with zero qualifications to give anybody advice can — unless you’re counting Steve Harvey.

Then this woman Mallory starts running into her, and then her son. And into her son’s arms.

Mallory, played without a hint of subtlety by former child actress Ashley Rickards (“One Tree Hill,” “Awkward”), is what we used to call a sexpot before we became enlightened about such things.

But that’s the nicest word for Mallory, who is a modern stalker — she uses a DRONE.

“Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

People start dying around the happy family, but Lorna gets REALLY productive as a typist (writer). And gosh, even if husband Harry’s BFF Pierce was run over by SOMEbody…

“I know things have been really hard with Pierce…but I think we should go on a vacation!”

Half-hearted tennis matches, vampy murders and a whole lot of “Wait, how’s my makeup?” acting.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Nicky Whelan, Jesse Hutch, Ashley Rickards, Parker Mack

Credits: Directed by Sam Irvin, script by Patrick Robert Young. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:23

All it takes is a silent stare from the child to startle the woman into tripping and dropping the water bucket balanced on her head.

And all it takes is an accusation from that woman to the local magistrate to put the orphan they name “Shula” (“Uprooted,” we are told.) on trial.

“She was just STANDING there! This child is a WITCH!”

Officer Josephine (Nellie Munamonga) may smirk. She makes a show of hearing out assorted “witnesses” that come forward. She even listens to the guy who tells the story of how Shula (Maggie Mulubwa) hacked him with an axe, only to admit that was in a dream (the arm she lopped off is miraculously still attached), rolling her eyes.

It’s just that the whole village seems to think the charges are true.

In “I Am Not a Witch,” the debut feature of Zambian-native/Welsh-raised filmmaker Rungano Nyoni, Officer Josephine does what bureaucrats the world over do when confronted with an official dilemma. She kicks it upstairs, where local appointed fat cat Mr. Banda (Henry B.J. Phiri) grabs it, and little Shula, and runs with it.

After, of course, “testing her.” He brings in a witch doctor to dance over her, kill a chicken and use its point of death to interpret whether Shula is “guilty” as charged.

As witchcraft is taken seriously by people rural and urban here, Banda at least wants to make a show of impartiality. And he wants to get his money’s worth out of the witch doctor, who is dancing himself exhausted to progressive jazz.

“Are you tired? Keep going!”

That’s the tone Nyoni seems most comfortable with, sort of a wry, patronizing poke at superstition with a female exploitation/oppression subtext.

Shula won’t speak up in her defense. When the witch doctor gives up, she’s locked in a shack and told to choose, either live as a witch or turn into a goat.

Seriously.

At least she takes her time with the decision. Because the witch’s life, which we sampled in an opening scene tour bus stop at the camp, is not bed of roses. They must wear long ribbons which “keep them from flying away,” and travel on a huge flatbed truck where the ribbons are rolled up, like cloth firehoses, on reels — restricting their movement.

Mr. Banda is the protector/exploiter of a local tourist attraction, the Witches’ Camp. They’re not just for the tourists. The many women, mostly old, are hired out to do day labor in the fields or rock quarry.

And they’re hired-out for traditional witchcraft, too. As there’s a drought, the littlest witch is a handy asset — rented to give a “Rain coming soon” reading to a local white landowner, showing up on the regional “Smooth Talk” chat show.

“Isn’t she just a child?” the host wonders.

Yes, she is.

“I Am Not a Witch” isn’t a line that we ever hear in the subtitled English patois of the people here. Shula lets on that she is, indeed, just a little girl. Her fellow witches take to her, though, and give her the forehead tattoo-marks that label her.

Yes, they buy outrageous wigs to cover their own tattoos, not that villagers or even city slickers are fooled by this.

Nyoni’s mostly amateur cast only have to be interesting and convincing enough to carry a scene or two as the movie progresses. More troubling for the film is its meandering narrative and increasingly downbeat tone.

It practically sprints out of the gate. But the story and energy flag at about the time Shula and Banda do the chat show. Everything after that is deflated, relying on a script that feels unfinished, ill-conceived and vaporous.

Movies from Zambia, especially one with a Welsh connection, are an exotic and rare thing. But while there’s novelty and promise to Nyoni’s little-girl-trapped tale, it tumbles into incoherence too early to merit endorsement.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Maggie Mulubwa, Henry B.J. Phiri, Nellie Munamonga,  Innocent Kalakula

Credits: Written and directed by Rungano Nyoni.  A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:33

“Twin Murders: The Silence of the White City” is a Spanish mash-up of “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The Da Vinci Code.”

It’s a stylish, solidly-acted and terribly-promising thriller that serves up a serial killer story in the striking and little-filmed “White City” of Basque country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the northeast of Spain.

This latest “methodical” serial killer is posing his victims, paired symbolically as a couple, in the historic sites of the region — below the city’s principal cathedral, in the historic House of Cordón.

The killer is leading the troubled detective nicknamed “Kraken” (Javier Rey), his partner (Aura Garrido) and his boss (Belén Rueda) through centuries of Basque history, Celtic to Roman to Catholic Christian, making each pair of victims five years older than the previous pair.

So why isn’t this as fascinating as you’d expect?

Director Daniel Calparsoro and screenwriters Alfred Pérez Fargas and Roger Danès avail themselves of striking locations  — and a church calendar festival that appears to end in a flour-based food fight (Like a similar festival in Alicante?) — but never explain anything or give the history of any location.

There is no Professor Robert Langdon to lay out the back story, explain the symbolism of the posed bodies. Or rather there is, and he — the Hannibal Lecter of the tale (Alex Brendemühl), imprisoned for the original murders that these seem to have been inspired by — is neglected for much of the movie.

Calparsoro’s film, based on Eva García Sáenz de Urturi’s novel, is choppy, hard-to-follow and filled with blown opportunities and tedious “walking and talking,” “driving and talking” or “jogging and talking” scenes of the cops going hither and yon, trying to piece together what is happening, which stunningly scenic locale the next crime might take place.

And the picture is cluttered with the cops’ own “issues” — survivor’s guilt, romance, what have you.

Many a time we see Unai/”Kraken”( Rey) retreat to the family farm where he diagrams the case, gets clues from his beekeeper grandfather (the killer hides bees in the mouths of his victims). And yet Unai doesn’t put two-and-two together.

There’s a spirited chase with the killer, who is spying on Unai and the other cops, leaving them photographs as proof that he knows what they’re up to. They sprint across the roof and through the city’s glorious 12th century Gothic cathedral. But every foot chase ends with the person trying to escape outrunning the cops whom we see JOGGING THE EMPTY STREETS AT DAWN. Every day.

We hear “It’s not very professional, to get carried away on a hunch” (in Spanish with English subtitles), before this married cop starts fooling around with that widowed one.

There’s the inevitable “I’ll need your badge and gun” moment when things get personal.

And the fascinating KEY to the whole mystery, tucked in prison, a former “Unsolved Mysteries” TV show host, is left on the shelf.

It’s all a muddle and a disappointment. Even when it finishes with a flourish, the half-attentive viewer can pick up on clues not played-up, clever angles that would more creatively connect our pursuers with the wily killer who steals much of his shtick from “Silence of the Lambs.”

“The Sleeper Killer” knows Buffalo Bob (of “Silence of the Lambs”) worked with moths. So he’d better use BEES. To be, you know, original.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, torture, explicit sex

Cast: Javier Rey, Aura Garrido, Belén Rueda, Alex Brendemühl

Credits: Directed by Daniel Calparsoro, script by Alfred Pérez Fargas  and Roger Danès, based on the  Eva García Sáenz de Urturi novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50

“Slay the Dragon” is  documentary about what happens when you let “legislators pick their voters,” and not voters choosing their elected representatives, the way the Founding Fathers intended.

It’s about Gerrymandering, and co-directors Chris Durrance and Barak Goodman open their film about a crisis created when extremists, backed by callous wealth, no longer feared being removed from office for their misdeeds.

Flint, Michigan’s water contamination crisis of 2014-onward, is laid at the feet of the “Tea Party Revolution” of 2010, when big money and Republican strategists calculated a way to capitalize on drummed-up outrage over the bailouts of the financial crisis of 2008, and Obamacare, to create “permanent” majorities in legislatures, even when they were outvoted at the polls.

Flint’s voters had control of their city taken from them, and the next thing you know, the GOP appointed “dictator” had folks there drinking lead contaminated water, being sickened and killed by callous Republican “budget cutters” nobody voted for.

Michigan, Wisconsin and to a lesser degree, North Carolina become the focus of the film, which is about the years-long grass roots efforts to take Census-mandated legislative redistricting out of the hands of partisan legislators and put it in the hands of “Citizen’s Commissions.”

In Wisconsin, a state which is almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, an extremist legislature and hard-right Koch-backed governor not only Gerrymandered protections into their majorities, but used their untouchability to carry out the test case assaults on voting rights that spread through GOP Gerrymandered states across the country.

“Project Redmap” it was called, and the film details how this coordinated nationwide effort set out, using big data “consultants” scheming behind closed doors to cherry pick into existence impregnable GOP districts, to “quarantine Democratic trash” into a handful of districts, and use the unimpeachable power this gave them to suppress voting rights to guarantee minority rule in every state where this happened.

“The biggest heist in modern political history,” one historian calls it.

Does voter suppression (closing precincts where Democrats vote, purging voter rolls, etc) work? Donald Trump won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes in 2016.

While the filmmakers interviewed journalists, academics, some displaced legislators and even a few Republicans dismayed at this corruption of democracy, it focuses mostly on efforts to get a “Voters, not Legislators” redistricting initiative on the ballot in Michigan, an under-financed grassroots effort started by Katie Fahey.

Examples of how extreme American politics became —  in an instant — are illustrated by the redrawing of the district lines of popular moderate N.C. Democrat Heath Shuler, in the mountains of North Carolina. His biggest cadre of voters, the liberal tourist and arts city of Asheville, was erased from his electorate. Corrupt, far right GOP bomb-thrower Mark Meadowswas elected in his place.

While there’s ample evidence of the under-handed and heavy-handed way all of this was accomplished — hiding the process, railroading through sweeping assaults on unions, voting rights, unpopular broadening of “gun owner’s rights” and the like — a lot has come out since the film was finished.

One of the key figures mentioned, the death of “Gerrymandering King,” GOP consultant Tom Hofeller, laid bare the nastiest part of this “nuclear” use of big data to deny the public’s right to punish extremist, corrupt and incompetent elected officials.

Think Senator Richard Burr will pay for his insider trading? Even if he resigns, the N.C. legislature rewrote laws so that no matter who is governor (a Democrat, now), a GOP task force would select his replacement.

Good luck challenging that ina court-system packed with unqualified GOP hacksthanks to Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.

“Slay the Dragon” takes its title from the first widely-known instance of Gerrymandering, the 1812 district contorting efforts of Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who created a district that looked like a salamander or “dragon.”

“Slay the Dragon” became the rallying cry of the Michigan and now national grassroots campaign to end this partisan practice. But as hopeful as the movie wants to be, it can’t help but make obvious how many steps “the people” are behind those Project RedMap masterminds.

The Supreme Court won’t make sweeping changes to the process, as Mitch McConnell, Trump and former Justice Anthony Kennedy conspired to “rig” it for the next 20 years. McConnell’s efforts to pack the lower courts aren’t even touched on here.

It will take dogged, exhausting state-by-state campaigns to wrest control of state and national legislatures from the Koch Brothers/WalMart/Chamber of Commerce/Wall Street crowd that owns them.

Be optimistic at your own peril.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language (profanity).

Credits: Directed by Chris Durrance, Barak Goodman. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:44

You kids probably don’t remember “The Cross and the Switchblade,”a 1970 faith-based film that leaned heavily on “West Side Story” for its setting, Pat Boone and Erik Estrada as its preacher and gang-bangers, and every movie Billy Graham ever made for its story arc.

“Victor” is a similar tale of a Puerto Rican gang-banger/drug dealer’s redemption thanks to an inner city preacher and a mother (Lisa Vidal) who eventually starts questioning all the appliances her violent, sometimes addicted son (Patrick Davis) provides to their struggling family in early 1960s Brooklyn.

It’s a drab pastiche of “West Side Story” cliches missing one pivotal ingredient. Where’s “Officer Krupke?”

All these gang “pops,” all the zip guns, poolhall rumbles, drug dealing (not really shown) and shoot outs in the diner, or in the middle of the streets — never a cop in sight.

Kid fires a pump shotgun in a crowded diner, threatening to blast the title character, and all the owner of the joint can do is yell, “You boys get OUTTA here or I’m gonna call THE POLICE!”

Which he doesn’t do. Teenager in a leather jacket has just shot a hole in his wall in front of a lot of paying customers, nothing happens.

Not indoors, anyway. The shootout in the street — blandly staged, filmed and edited — follows that. No cops there, either.

At least that takes the “story” further down the hole that only our inner city preacher (Josh Pence, every bit as dull as Pat Boone in “Switchblade”) can save Victor from in this “inspired by a true story” movie.

There’s the girl from the “other” gang (Haley Ramm) who can never be Victor’s “girl.” Even though his gang is integrated.

Victor isn’t an interesting character in the first place, and a colorless performance and rote situations — losing a job, losing a pal to violence, rehab — give us little to latch onto here.

Poor, ineffectual Dad (José Zúñiga) comes off worse, the man who brought his family to New York from PR, but cannot keep a job, cannot “stand up for yourself” when he’s mugged, can’t allow himself to question where his kid is suddenly getting all this cash.

The “true story” here is of Pastor Victor Torres, who preached in Richmond, Va. But that doesn’t change its sad, worn “Cross and the Switchblade” borrowings.

There are plenty of inspiring faith-based stories worth telling. Why recycle the worst of the worst?

At least the soundtrack, peppered with (mostly) original pop, jazz and rock from the era, makes this clunker sound like an A-picture, when C is the best it can manage otherwise.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material involving drug abuse, and some violence

Cast: Patrick Davis, Lisa Vidal, Haley Ramm, Josh Pence, Rick Gonzalez, Matt Angel, Nick Eversman and José Zúñiga.

Credits: Directed by Brandon Dickerson, script by Brandon Dickerson, Thomas Ward. An Ocean Avenue/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

I’m looking over, a bomb named “Clover,” that you all should sure ignore…

Man, just when you think a bloody-minded mob comedy can’t get any worse, here’s one that lowers the bar, time and again.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph Mantegna, this one. THIS one.

It’s a film where they lined up a few names, cooked up a couple of speeches for the “names,” and never figured out a way for any of it to make a lick of sense.

There’s an opening framing scene where Ron Perlman (“HELLboy!”) pontificates about “APEX predators” like wolves, and it is implied, himself.

Two Irish-American brothers (Mark Webber and Jon Abrahams, the film’s director) curse and wrestle over a “stupid STUPID” hand of blackjack that was their last, lost hope to save a dumpy bar that’s been in their family for “almost a hundred years.”

Chazz Palminteri plays the 464th mobster in his fettucine-flavored career. The brothers “owe everybody in town,” but Tony is the one who threatens them with the hammer in the back of his bowling alley/bar.

As payment, they have to go with the mobster’s son, Joey to lean on “another deadbeat.” Who is killed. But so is Joey (Michael Godere). And by the deadbeat’s teen daughter (Nicole Elizabeth Berger), no less.

The guys bicker over their lucky four-leaf clover. The girl’s name is Clover. That’s as clever as naming your mob boss “Tony.”

The movie is a slow-walking “on-the-lam” tale with the guys, saddled with the girl, calling in favors from old pals (Tichina Arnold) and old flames (Jessica Zhor), an uncle (Jake Weber), an old pal, and so on and so forth.

Because Tony’s boys are on their trail, stumbling just half a step behind, shooting up streets and subway stations trying to get at them. Never a cop in (Greater New York? I think.) when you need one.

“I want this done in the most painful way…”

There’s even a pair of lesbian hitwomen (the eternal “Swimfan,” Erika Christensen, “Twilight’s” Julia Jones).

Jesus, Mary and Ellen DeGeneres!

Clover_12.02.2017_#53.raf

It’s meant to be a comedy, with a lot of gunplay and arterial spray. It’s not funny.

The dialogue, most of it shouted, is a torrent of misplaced threats and mob bravado.

“Nobody’s gettin’ killed in MY bar unless I want them killed!”

Every new character is introduced with a flourish, every scene degenerates into a screaming cuss-out and shoot-out.

And precious little of it connects, makes sense or leads anywhere.

Cast: Mark Webber, Nicole Elizabeth Berger, Jon Abrahams, Jessica Szohr, Chazz Palminteri, Erika Christensen and Ron Perlman

Credits: Directed by Jon Abrahams, script by Michael Testone. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:41.

“Waldo on Weed” takes its title and its tone from its host and star.

Brian Dwyer starts the film as a media-savvy Philadelphia pizza entrepreneur, a thin ginger-bearded goofball who knew how to get attention for Brain Pizza, his landmark pizza paraphernalia-bedecked eatery, and for his big whopping baby.

Waldo James Mysterious Dwyer was over 13 pounds when he was born. Yeah, that made the local news.

But when Brian and wife Danielle’s little boy was diagnosed with retinal cancer at six months of age, Dad’s demeanor turns determined. And the giddy slice-of-life documentary becomes a years-long odyssey, documented via “dad-cam,” seeking treatment for their baby, hoping for a miracle, “smuggling drugs” cross country to put “Waldo on Weed.”

Dwyer maintains his affable, enthusiastic presence throughout. But as the journey from joy to worry, desperation to activism plunges on, he grows more subdued as the film progresses.

“Waldo on Weed” evolves into an upbeat story about a family, and a very little (OK, he started big) boy who have been through the wringer.

Talking directly to the camera, taking it into his (former) business, the OB-GYN, and then into doctor’s offices, chemo and everywhere else the movie goes, Dwyer narrates “Waldo” as if he’s talking to the adult child, born in 2014, diagnosed with “a crazy rare childhood eye cancer” the same year.

“We’re gonna save that eye,” he tells the camera, and the kid.

A turning point? Waldo’s pot-enthusiast/post-proselytizer uncles have a word with Dad. CBD oil might help with the chemo of traditional cancer treatment, and — anecdotally — with the cancer itself.

As they live in Philly, where strict anti-marijuana drug laws were still in force, that means they’ll have to travel to early-adapter/early-legalizer California to buy the pot-extract and figure out a way to get it home.

Yes, they use the good ol’U.S. Postal Service’s help “smuggling” their “illegal” drugs cross-country — packed in kiddie birthday party supplies.

Tommy Avallone’s film shapes Brian’s quixotic journey into a life quest, complete with medical experts, politicians and family members who figure in the larger story of a long-legal medical remedy, made illegal in the last century and only just-now being re-legalized and researched for its “natural” medicinal properties.

None of that was the case when Waldo got sick. The Dwyers couldn’t tell their doctors, and even as Waldo improved, it wasn’t a subject Brian’s conservative family approved of.

“Waldo on Weed” pokes at the politicization of marijuana and more or less embraces the “miracle drug” mania that has surrounded CBD and “legalized weed.”

Harvard’s Dr. Staci Gruber of Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) program at McLean Hospital in Boston is here to legitimize the research, and remind us that “every great discovery began with anecdotal evidence.”

And Snoop Dogg’s “Dr. Dina,”a California advocate for CBD treatments and legalized pot everywhere, was on hand to help Brian with his original hook-up. Pot entrepreneur Matt Rize figures prominently in the narrative, too.

Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania is here. And stay through the closing credits. Which hostess of “The View” executive produced “Waldo on Weed?”

We miss the cute, upbeat tone of the film’s opening chapter in its latter stages, as the family becomes CBD refugees (people move where the legal drug that’s helping them is). But “Waldo on Weed” is still the most adorable piece of cinematic advocacy for legalizing pot ever filmed.

Everybody lobbying against that — one such lobbyist is interviewed — should be sentenced to watching “Weed” and looking in little Waldo’s eyes before they make one more self-justified argument against legalization.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Brian Dwyer, Danielle Dwyer, Matt Rize, Dr. Dina, Dr. Staci Gruber, Governor Tom Wolf

Credits: Directed by Tommy Avallone. An Endeavor Content release.

Running time: 1:26

The trouble with buying into “dog eat dog” social Darwinism, the sort of mindset it takes to become a survivalist, is making that leap to accepting and becoming a “dog” yourself.

That’s subtext of many of “Man Hunts Man” thriller, from the good (“The Most Dangerous Game”) to the the humorous (Robin Williams and Walter Matthau ARE “The Surivors”), and even the hilariously bad (“The Hunt”).

And that’s the point pounded home in the French Canadian thriller “The Decline,” a lean, slow-starting survivalist tale that turns pulse-pounding for its final act.

The plot is similar to that 1983 Williams-Matthau comedy, a bunch of hand-picked survivalists are invited to a training compound in snowy northern Quebec by their Youtube Guru, Alain, played with dead-eyed verve by an actor ironically-named Réal Bossé. Because, being a no-nonsense survival expert and something of a cult leader, he pretty much is…REAL bossy.

Stop laughing. This is serious.

We’ve met one of the invited “prepared, enlightened citizens” — Antoine (Guillaume Laurin) — in the opening scene, running a “bug out” drill with his wife and little girl in the middle of the night.

Now he’s among eight fellow wannabe soldiers on Alain’s 500 acres of snow, trees, greenhouses, solar panels and booby traps for an intense immersion in rabbit hunting and gutting, living off the grid and commando training.

He’s created a “Temporary Autonomy Zone,” and make no mistake — Alain is no fool. He can make his own maple syrup, hunt, raise chickens and self-sustain on those 500 acres, which keep “the world at bay,” he says (in French with English subtitles).

They’re all white, mostly men — with an Army wife and another woman — and they stay in a heated barracks-tent, eat together, share their thoughts on “gun control,” a coming “economic crash,” the potential for a “pandemic” and Alain’s favorite boogeyman.

Imagine holding off “5000 migrants with 5000 machetes,” he enthuses. But don’t be quick to say you’ll kill a lone interloper. Suppose he’s a doctor, an extra pair of hands for needed labor?

That Alain, always planning ahead.

Of course, it all comes apart when the truly unexpected happens. A bunch of motivated amateurs, practicing bomb-making with black powder? What could go wrong?

Let the cover-up begin. Let the factions form. Let dog begin eating dog.

For such a short film, this one takes a while to get to the meat of the matter. The only real novelty to THIS version of “survivalists forced to kill to survive” story is the French Canadian setting and accents. Even a compassionate democracy with socialized medicine has its gun-nut outliers.

The violence of the long third act comes in a rush — a series of jolts. And it is visceral and as personal as it gets.

Maybe this isn’t the best movie to watch to “escape” the current shaky state of Western Civilization. None of the characters are much more than sketched in “types.”

But it’s an entertaining variation on a worn-out “self-reliance” theme, even if it won’t discourage a single Netflix user to put off that next trip to the AK-47 dealer down the street.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast:Réal Bossé, Marie-Evelyne Lessard, Guillaume Laurin, Marc-André Grondin

Credits: Directed by Patrice Laliberté, script by Nicolas Krief, Charles Dionne. A Netflix original.

Running time: 1:23

The extras sit at a table in the shadowy foreground of Rick’s Cafe Americain. She sees him doodle in a sketchbook, an image of a man in a strange uniform with distinctly pointy ears.

What’s his connection to the movie? He points at the director, Michael Curtiz, his adoptive father. But what this fellow named “Lucas” really wants to do is write.

His real name is John Meredith Lucas, and he’d go on, 25 years after “Casablanca,” to work on the original “Star Trek” series. Yeah, I had to look him up because that’s such a dumb thing to shove into an ostensible “historical” movie. And no, that moment on the set of “Casablanca,” sitting with a young woman (Evelin Dobos) never happened.

There’s a lot a lot of balderdash of this nature in “Curtiz,” a film about the tyrannical, guilt-ridden Hungarian emigre filmmaker at the helm of the retitled, rewritten, “troubled” production that became one of the most beloved films in cinema history –“Casablanca.”

Yes, it’s true studio chief Jack Warner floated the idea that Ronald Reagan (and Anne Sheridan) should star in the script that Warners bought, a play titled “Everybody Comes to Ricks.” No, producer Hal Wallis (who only considered Humphrey Bogart for the lead) never said Reagan was “Serving (in the military), like everybody else. Making America great again.”

No, Curtiz wasn’t saying, “Vot eez zees, a comedy?” Or “Vere izz Ron (Reagan)?”

But yes, Curtiz was famous for his temper and his too-thick-to-understand accent, something star Ferenc Legyel masters.

This Hungarian co-production didn’t have the rights to use the song “As Time Goes By,” doesn’t show the no-name actors playing “Casblanca’s principals — Bogey, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre or Sidney Greenstreet — in closeup. Because they hadn’t the budget.

Did Curtiz like to practice skeet shooting on the back lot, even after hours? Have sex with anything on two legs? Struggle mightily, with screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein, with the script and especially, “the ending?”

Sure, or at least that much of the movie’s true enough to not quibble with.

The actor S.Z. Sakall (József Gyabronka), a fellow Hungarian (along with others in the cast), was Curtiz’s pal and on-set consultant, confessor, the one he could complain to (in Hungarian) about the government censor, the studio, the actors, etc. True enough.

You cling to those little tidbits of truth and a few cute moments (inventing dialogue, composing that famous “last scene” with a model airplane, dwarf actors to make it look realistic, and a lot of smoke and fog) and try not to grind your teeth to the stump over the stuff that sticks out as “What does THAT have to do with the making of ‘Casablanca?”

The Swiss-born Hungarian director, Tamas Yvan Topolanszky, focused on Curtiz, his arrogance and personal torment, his cruelty to the “stupid immigrants” in his cast, and on beautifully atmospheric lighting and production design, surrounding his players in darkness stunningly photographed in black and white.

That, at least, is a defensible choice. The rest of “Curtiz?” Less so.

The estranged daughter “Kitty” (Dobos) is our surrogate, showing up in her father’s life (as he is copulating with a waitress who wants a career in the movies). Kitty is, added to the payroll and watched like a hawk on the set of this movie by a U.S. government censor (Declan Hannigan) hellbent on making this movie “patriotic,” making Curtiz fill out a “loyalty” questionnaire and rushing the film through production because he knows something big is happening in “Casablanca” and environs at the end of 1942.

The picture comes together haphazardly — both the movie within the movie, and “Curtiz” — as the womanizing director tries to keep his wife in her place, the pressure on an ambassador to help his remaining family in Hungary, on Jewish/German actor Conrad Veidt (Christopher Kreig), humiliating him to make him nasty enough to be a Nazi.

Don’t know that this happened either, but maybe.

If you’re not hung up on getting film history correct, on coherent plotting, on a production taking absurd liberties in the amount of “importance” attached to the movie, in production, and government interference, if you don’t mind a lot of colorless performances (save for Kreig, Legnyel and once or twice, Gyabronka), at least do yourself a favor and turn on the closed captioning.

Aside from one or two infamous “Curtizisms” — “Don’t talk to me vile I am INTERRUPTING!” — the dialogue is as banal as the picture is striking to look at. And much of that banal dialogue is in Hungarian.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sex, attempted sexual assault

Cast: Ferenc Lengyel, Scott Alexander Young, Evelin Dobos, Declan Hannigan, Andrew Hefler, József Gyabronka and Nikolett Barabas

Credits: Directed by Tamas Yvan Topolanszky, script by Tamas Yvan Topolanszky, Zsuzsanna Bak and (English dialogue) Ward Parry. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38