Movie Nation

Those of you who like your hip hop Hebrew flavored better get yourself Apple+ TV. I tell you what.

I can’t speak for you, but I’m a little numb with shock at this “shelter in place/self-quarantine/lay low y’all” that has dropped on our 21st century civilization’s heads.

It’s one thing to adore the science fiction allegories of old “Twilight Zone” episodes (“Time Enough at Last”), movies old (“The Omega Man”) and new (“I Am Legend,” “World War Z”), experiences that transport us — briefly — into a situation that makes us wonder how we’d act, what we’d do to save ourselves and what part of our humanity and human civilization would be at the top of our list to save for eternity.

We think “I’d head for the hills” or “hole up in the desert/mountains” or what have you. Anything to get clear of the “Contagion,” at least until it sort of blows over. As if we’re sure that’ll happen.

I have a live-aboard cruising sailboat and half-smirked “I’ll just sail away for a bit. Someplace warm where the Corona beer is cheap and the populace is maybe Corona (virus) free.

These attitudes of “get away” and “We alone will survive” and “self-reliance will save us” are burned into our psyches from movies and TV. From Westerns onward, Americans in particular have absorbed that “I can go it alone” ethos.

Some would say our fate is tied to one American political party’s embrace of Westerns long after they went out of style that has them constantly looking for “cowboys” and “mountain men” like they’ve seen in moving pictures. But I can’t believe any Republican voted for somebody as unmanly and unself reliant as the cowardly oaf in the Oval Office because they thought he was a (movie) cowboy like Reagan.

But maybe.

Here we were, all set to dive into the “last humans standing” story of “The Quiet Place” again, and damned if it isn’t pulled from release. A little too “on the nose,” if you ask me.

Time and again, movies have presented us with an “Outbreak” which it takes pluck and luck and can-do knowhow to survive.

But what I remember from “Outbreak” is the movie theater scene. The film, which turned 25 this month, shows disease spreading from an African monkey to humans, who pass it on in a chilling moment where, in a nearly-quiet movie theater, the movie is interrupted by muffled coughs that slowly spread among the filmgoers.

I can honestly say that I’ve only gotten sick at one theater over my decades of moviegoing and reviewing,the Worst Cinema in America in Durham, N.C.

But plagues have plagued the big screen forever. Monty Python’s Terry Jones (director of “The Holy Grail”) made “Bring out yer dead” a cultural punchline.

Robert Downey and Sam Neill made plague the 17th century comeuppance for decadence in “Restoration.”

There was “The Horseman on the Roof” and a personal guilty pleasure, the Omar Sharif/Michael Caine film, by novelist and one-time director James Clavell, “The Last Valley.” In the same 1600s that “Restoration” was set in, Sharif plays a man on the run who stumbles into a village in “The Last Valley,” that the plague has not reached.

Michael Caine and his band of mercenaries shows up and mucks up primitive paradise.

I don’t recommend any of these titles — or the ON-THE-MONEY “Contagion” (I didn’t love it when it came out. Heartless, as indeed viruses are.) as “escape” while we’re holing up, riding the storm out.

But if we’re out buying up all the toilet paper and bracing for the Apocalypse, that’s how we’ve been trained — by the movies.

Accepting the inevitable, which is what the fatalistic reads on Coronavirus seems to entail, calls to mind the End Days sadness of “On the Beach,” which weighs heavily on the viewer even though the film is over 60 years old, now

Meanwhile, Kevin Costner and I are stocking the boats and getting ready for “Waterworld.” You lubbers let us know when it’s safe to come back.

We don’t need to hear the voice of William Shatner as narrator to know where the screenwriters of “To the Last Death” got their plot.

It’s an animated “Saw” movie built on the bones of “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” an episode of “Star Trek” TOS.

The animation is lurid and limited — sort of a digital bunraku (jerky motion character action in front of static backdrops — and the action is bloody in the extreme in this story of a busty animatrix voiced by Dani Lennon who becomes a pawn in a “game” some aliens are running.

It’s kind of cool, for a movie whose script is more pithy punchline-oriented than clever. And truthfully, there was no reason this story was animated in the first place, but that’s the main reason anybody would think it’s “cool.” Think of “Death” as an “Adult Swim” in a pool of gore and you’re on the right track.

Miriam (Lennon) directs a non-profit acronymed “PANAC” — Peace and Nonviolence Action Committee. You have to wonder if that isn’t because her daddy Cyrus DeKalb (Ray Wise) is a billionaire time arms manufacturer and onetime candidate for vice president.

But Miriam and her siblings rebelled against the old man and torpedoed his candidacy. No hard feelings though, right? Daddy’s invited Miriam, Ethan (Damien C. Haas), Kelsey (Florence Hartigan) and Collin (Benjamin Siemon) to his weapons-bedecked office building for a “reunion.”

Daddy’s a real piece of work, Mr. “Avarice is strength” and full of withering, profane criticism for each and every one of his offspring. Ethan? He was “far busier doing your eight grade math teacher than doing eighth grade math.” And so one.

Daddy doesn’t want hugs over his newly-announced medical condition. He wants “payback.” He has henchmen standing by to help him mete out punishment. “Death!”

Only Miriam escapes. But on her hospital bed, as she tries to recall the events of the night before for a suspicious cop, an alien entity (Morena Baccarin) materializes and offers her “a rematch.” She “warp back” 24 hours, go back into the “reunion” with new information and new purpose and foil her father and save her siblings.

The “gamemaster’s” rules? “You must and will provide amusement” as she fights her way through this predicament. Those entities gambling on the game “can stop” and “demand a replay” if things aren’t entertaining enough.

Thus Miriam must relive, “Edge of Tomorrow” style, the slaughter of the night before — figure out how to best this henchman or warn and rescue that sibling.

And here’s where this “Didn’t need to be animated” spatter film goes wrong. The gambits, “gags” in Old Hollywood terminology that allow her to get the drop on this bad guy or face imminent butchery from that one, are lame.

There’s suspense as hulking thug is about to dispatch this way or that. Yes, a chainsaw is involved at one point. But the resolutions to those predicaments fizzle and disappoint. Every. Damned. Time.

Animation should let the writers’ “reason/fight her way out of this” imaginations run wild. It does nothing of the sort. The “Do Over” moments dictated by the gamblers are just as limp.

So as “cool” as it is to have Wise doing another diabolical villain, as pointless as Shatner’s occasional plummy voice over about “The vast void between stars” is, as buxom as the assorted assertive women in this horror comic book of a movie might be, “To Your Last Death” is a gory gimmick without a decent movie behind it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic bloody violence and animated nudity, profanity

Cast: The voices of Dani Lennon, Morena Baccarin, Ray Wise and William Shatner.

Credits: Directed by Jason Axinn, script by Jim Cirile, Tanya C. Klein. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:31

SOMEbody had the very clever idea of re-imagining the compelling drama about parents worried their kid is a psychopath, “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” as a horror film.

So good on you, writer-director Tucia Lyman.

The kid’s name is “Jacob,” not Kevin. The film is still from the mother’s point of view, but this time, it’s told in “found footage” — a mom (Melinda Page Hamilton) who is “spying on” her son documents his tirades, cruelty and increasingly disturbing and dangerous anti-social behavior.

We worry for her safety as she narrates the video files she creates from assorted “spy” cameras. And maybe we wonder, just a bit, if she isn’t part of the problem.

This debut feature film from a veteran reality TV “showrunner” is called “M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters.” So at least in that sense, BAD on you Tucia Lyman for that flippant, stupid, if not quite misleading title.

Abbey (Hamilton) has been hanging on to video footage of Jeremy since he was small. We see her grilling him about something he killed — an “accident,” or “Did you mean to kill it?” Another clip has the child smirking as we hear a younger kid bawling off camera.

Now, Jacob (Bailey Edwards) is 16, still acting out, throwing tantrums. And he’s big enough to threaten his mother.

“You want to monster out,” she complains, recording his rage. Go right ahead. “I’m keeping track. I’m RECORDING it!”

She shows us, when he’s not around, exhibit A — Jacob’s gun magazines and the pellet rifle he rigged with a “bump stock.”

Abbey has the time to stalk Jacob to school, get hints of “Fake Jacob,” a socialized front he puts on to his “friends” and teachers. But he can’t maintain the facade forever. She’s sure of that.

She follows him to a local business.

“It’s not like he can GET a gun, right?” She’s putting more trust in a gun shop owner than most reasonable people would.

Hamilton makes Abbey paranoid enough to flip out herself when a shrink she Skypes (Ed Asner) doesn’t buy her version of events and her sense of her psychic state. But we’ve seen too much to have much doubt.

“Pathological liar,” she says. “N.P.D. — narcissistic personality disorder,” chronic conspiracy thoughts.” “Signs” she says.

Then we see the first swastika.

This boy is a menace and will do bad things if he gets off his meds and doesn’t merit more than an attempted “diversion” from authorities.

“M.O.M.” loses some steam in its third act as Lyman struggles to cook up an ending that comes anywhere near the suspense she’s been building. Edwards fights a not-quite-losing battle with going “over-the-top” crazy as Jacob.

And ideally, there’d be more doubt about Abbey’s sanity than what the script generates.

But Lyman, knowing her way around cutting home movies, cell phone video and closed circuit “surveillance” footage into a narrative, makes a debut thriller feature well worth checking out once you get past the title.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast:  Melinda Page Hamilton, Bailey Edwards and Ed Asner

Credits: Written and directed by Tucia Lyman. An Indie Rights release.

Running time: 1:35

With studios rushing to pull everything they have a prayer of making a buck off of from their release slate, it’s the perfect time to catch up on movies that remain in theaters because…they have nothing else to show and lure filmgoers with until that day when the cinemas themselves are closed.

I’ve never paused more than a few minutes whenever I’ve channel surfed by “Impractical Jokers,” the long-running truTV series about four Staten Island pals who play pranks on each other in front of unsuspecting members of the public.

A little too “Jersey Shore” for my taste. And I’ve an irrational dislike of people who laugh too hard at their own jokes — this or that “morning zoo” on the radio, Jimmy Fallon, and dese guys.

So yeah, expectations were low, going in. And while I wouldn’t necessarily suggest you pay first-run prices to see “Impractical Jokers: The Movie” — it’s more Netflixable — the guys did tickle me, against my will, a few times.

The set-up begins in 1994, when the guys — in wigs meant to convey how they looked in high school — crash a Paula Abdul concert using the old “Yellow Jackey with ‘Security’ written on the back” prank. They make pigs of themselves in the green room, and a mockery of the concert.

First laugh in the movie? The real Paula Abdul CLOTHESLINING one of the lads.

Cut to years later, they’re TV famous, and they run into Paula A again — who only knows them from their TV antics. Yeah, it’s in a Red Lobster, so it TOTALLY could happen. She invites them to a party in Miami and they resolve to make good on this debacle from their past (she doesn’t know they were concert-killers) by road-tripping in the car they cruised in, back in the day, the Ford “Crown Vic” that Q (Brian Quinn) has mothballed in his folks’ garage.

Joe Gatto, James “Murr” Murray and Sal Volcano are down. But Paula’s only left them three passes for the party. The guys will compete in pranks all the way from Staten Island to Miami. Loser loses out.

Their MO — they wear earpieces and “force” the “joker” sent out to pretend to need car trouble, give a really bad eulogy or convince fellow passengers on a tour boat to NOT “rescue” a stranded serviceman in a dinghy to say every obnoxious, embarrassing thing that pops into their heads as they stand, backstage as it were — stage-managing the “joke” and howling their heads off with laughter as they do.

It’s hit-or-miss by design, and sometimes the misses — the car trouble stunt devolves into a game of hide and seek with a helpful motorist — can be funny, too.

The script here is pure junk, running gags about balding Murr’s secret hotel “party” life and the like. But there’s geographic whimsy in putting these four on the road, the only Yankees dumb enough to stop at “South of the Border” where they saddle the “always late” Q with alternative transportation by taking off with the car. He has to ride a horse down the roadside to SOBorder dressed as a Roman — “SAD-iator,” one wag calls him.

The DC stop isn’t much (a Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool “eulogy” gag that never works), but just south of there — either at Luray or Dixie Caverns in Virginia (just guessing here) — they dress up Joe as a Mole Man who got separated from his “tour” and stumbles into a new bunch of underground tourists.

“I’ve been down here since 1987,” he whines. “Don’t have a COW, man.”

The guys play up their “mook” image when they hit at Atlanta strip club, and they do no pranks in Florida, damn them anyway.

But here’s the gem mixed in with all that cubic zirconia. They take turns coaching (via that earpiece) each other through the most DISASTROUS “job interviews” with assorted members of the security and facilities staff of the Atlanta Hawks hoops team.

“Immediately launch into ‘Why the Earth is flat’ instructions, or “You answer the questions WE ask you, NOT the ones from the job interviewer.”

This is one stunt that resonates. We. Have. All. Been. There. Their improvisations are convincingly daft. And their assorted humiliations, the “roll with it” confusion or dismay of those interviewing them, is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen them do.

Granted, again, I’m not an expert on these “Jokers.” But this one bit makes “Impractical Jokers” worth checking out in movie form — in a “dollar” theater, or on Netflix anyway.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for suggestive content, language, some drug references and brief nudity

Cast: Brian Quinn, Joe Gatto, James Murray, Sal Volcano, Paula Abdul — and watch for a Will Ferrell photo bomb.

Credits: Directed by Chris Henchy, script by Chris Henchy, Brian Quinn, Joe Gatto, James Murray, Sal Volcano.  A Forry or Die, truTV/Warner Media release.

Running time: 1:32

Last evening, I was An Audience of One at a showing of ‘Bloodshot’ in the coastal Florida suburb where I live.Sony didn’t preview it here. They know its a bit of a dog. A few families were showing up for “Onward” and “Sonic” showings. One family per theater. That’s de facto self-quarantining, I guess.

When will cinemas close down, simply because no one wants to risk being exposed to the Coronavirus? I don’t need corporate statements to verify this, as I have been in theaters three days this week. The major chains are losing their shirts over this incompetently handled pandemic.

Exhibitor Relations was saying maybe $7 million could be earned by “Bloodshot”– IF the cinemas stay open. That looks like a pipe dream. “The Hunt” won’t do any better.Will “take it on faith” churchgoers show up for “I Still Believe?”

Most late March and early to mid April openings have been moved.

So I guess we will all be watching streaming services and VOD releases to escape the dreary TV news. Even the liars at Fox have had to temper their lies. A bit. I guess I picked the wrong month to let my Netflix subscription lapse!https://deadline.com/2020/03/mulan-new-mutants-antlers-moved-coronavirus-1202881355/

Let’s not make too much of this, but the comic book adaptation “Bloodshot” is basically a new and improved “Universal Soldier” or “Six Million Dollar Man” variation, with a better cast, fresh effects and “upgrades.”

But throw in the fact that Sony gave away the whole damn movie in the trailers, and one is hard-pressed to come up with a reason to brave the “Outbreak” we’re living through to go see it.

Well, people who can’t wait another year for the now-postponed next “Fast/Furious” movie to get their Vin Diesel fix have their reasons. You know who you are.

Visual effects specialist turned director Dave Wilson and Diesel & Co. deliver a competently heartless action picture, a superhero movie without the tights, “Transformers” with Battle Bot Vin in the lead role.

Diesel plays a top flight commando who always gets his man, always says the hostage and always, as he tells his wife (Talulah Riley), “comes home.”

But there’s this villain (Toby Kebbell) who gets the drop on our man Ray when he and the Mrs. are on holiday on the Amalfi Coast (Italy). The bad guy tortures our hero in a meat locker, after vamping/dancing in to the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” Then he kills the wife. Ray, too.

Only Ray wakes up under the care of a one-armed scientist (Guy Pearce) with a wicked twinkle in his eye. Ray’s been claimed from the Army morgue. “It was either us…or Arlington!”

Ray’s been brought back, new and augmented — super strong, nanotech in his bloodstream fixing every injury in a flash. And there’s just enough memory for Ray to want his revenge, which his RST (Rising Spirit Technology) minder cannot prevent.

But something about the casting of Pearce summons up memories of everything the trailers to “Bloodshot” give away. This Dr. Harting (Pearce) isn’t who he seems. Ray isn’t the righteous avenger he might be, something comrades who have gone through this program (Eiza González , Sam Heughan, Alex Hernandez) hint at. We know this long before Harting’s pitiless nature comes out in a single line.

“He’s a dead soldier. America makes new ones every day.”

Like all comic book movies, there’s a whiff of “Hey, we could get a FRANCHISE out of this” here. But just a whiff. The script spends a lot of time explaining the tech, showing off some dazzling effects. It’s not just the epic fights, shootouts and blood corpuscle–sized robots that require Hollywood’s finest’s attention. We have “Matrix/Inception” styled modeling and “simulations” to illustrate.

One of those, breaking down one of the most scenic places on Earth into its component shapes, colors and textures like a computerized Leonardo DaVinci, is singularly impressive and should be taught in special effects schools.

Diesel doesn’t sleepwalk through movies like this, but neither the script nor the performance give us a sense of a compelling interior life, pathos or humanity. That’s kind of built-into the character, and it hamstrings the movie.

Pearce is similarly colorless. The movie is self-aware enough to know that the dancing, torturing Kebbell scene is over-the-top and “Hollywood.” But hell, the movie NEEDS a little of that — a lot more of it, to be honest. That’s why Brit actor Lamorne Morris, as a wiseass techie, steals the movie when he shows up in the third act.

Eiza González of “Hobbs & Shaw” and “Baby Driver” is a stunning beauty who handles what action choreography they entrust to her. She knows how to suck in her cheeks as she’s about to set off grenades in the computer room like an action bombshell badass. Very Olivia Wilde.

But “Bloodshot” is a movie filled with “Yeah, and?” moments, scenes and plot points. Covering ground this familiar in an origin story puts extra pressure on character, relationships and empathetic acting. All are somewhat less than they need to be to make this one worth the price of admission.

Netflix, maybe?

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, some suggestive material and language

Cast: Vin Diesel, Guy Pearce,Eiza González, Talulah Riley and Toby Kebbell.

Credits: Directed by Dave Wilson, script by Jeff Wadlow and Eric Heisserer, based on the comic book. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:49

April 17 VOD and streaming.

This one looks interesting and novel in approach. Pops out March 17, and I will be reviewing it shortly.

You don’t have to be drunk to appreciate the no-budget charms of “Jurassic Thunder.”

Strike that. Being drunk is pretty much a prerequisite for watching this models and DIY effects student film, streaming now.

Not a “student film?” My bad, Milko Davis and Thomas Martwick. I’ve seen a LOT of student films. Just assumed you co-directors were matriculating. Somewhere. Maybe Texas.

Anyway, “Jurassic T” — not to be confused with anything else titled “Jurassis” (characters make lame jokes about that) is based on “the Holy Grail of comic books,” or so we’re told in the almost-not-inept scene that frames the movie. That introduction is set in a comic book/cosplay gear shop, where the owner opens his “mint” copy of this comic book for a “gather round, nerds, and lemme tellya a story” opening.

This was the comic that “has it all — weaponized dinos, warlords, zombies, commandos, nukes.” Animated interstitials take us into this “world,” where African warlords are battled by a US/Russia coalition at the direction of a Donald Trump (Heath C. Heine) hologram.

He’s in “my sixteenth year in office” and he’s still insisting his people defer to the Russians.

Rather than “nuke” southern Africa, Trumpogram lets the Russians talk him into deploying “biologics” — T-Rex’s equipped with cameras and Gatling guns. But the “cosmic hair gel” serum that allows dinosaurs to romp among us is viral, and it makes zombies.

Whoopsie! Another Trumpodemic is on the loose!

The effects are gloriously cheesy — model planes and T-Rex containment crates blend with stock footage of C-130 transport planes, superimposed parachute jumps and jungle “chases” that look like “Saturday Night Live” footage of soldiers fleeing on a treadmill while mismatched footage flashes behind them.

Firefights are many, with the gun muzzle flashes added later, and on the cheap. Blood spatters are similarly drawn in after the fact.

The characters include a Col. Sanders (Jon Cotton) — Trump: “How did a guy who sells fried chicken end up running the show?”

Heine’s Trump is an impersonation of Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of Donald Trump.

And the dialogue is of the “Smooth move, Ex-Lax” caliber — juvenile and dated and almost never close to funny.

It’s terrible on every level, pretty much from comic book store to Trump-and-cast dance video finale.

But if you’ve had a few, this could be fun. Make up your own drinking games for “Jurassic Thunder” because I’m above that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, dino poop

Cast: Heath C. Heine, Rick Haak, Jon Cotton, Aga Kistler, Leon Mayfield

Credits: Directed by Milko Davis and Thomas Martwick, script by Milko Davis. A High Octane release.

Running time: 1:24