Movie Nation

No matter what obsessed fans think, sequels have to stand-alone as films, stories that work in their own right. Relying on everybody seeing your new movie having seen the original film simply isn’t cricket.

That goes for every “Mad Max,” every “Tim & Eric” outing, every “Avengers” and every “Sinister Circle,” a Peruvian horror film that references, and quite heavily, “Cementario General” (“General Cemetery”), the 2013 film this one refers back to, not-quite-constantly.

It’s about a surviving relative of one of those “taken by robed” demons in the first film, a psychotherapist whose belief in science runs up against the supernatural as she tries to get to the bottom of what happened to her sister and what is happening to her mental patient mother while keeping her little boy safe in a city he doesn’t know.

Fernanda (Milene Vásquez) questions her profession after dealing with a Mexico City patient she could never help, a man who begs her to “Help me get out of here” (in Spanish, with English subtitles). “If you don’t he’ll KILL me!”

Someone, some-THING, was coming for him. We don’t have to guess whether or not it did.

Fernanda is widowed, and has a traumatized child at home. Julio (Matías Raygada) is suffering from “selective mutism,” ever since his father died. He won’t talk, a big reason he’s as obsessed with his tablet as he is.

When his mother drags Julito to Lima from their Mexico City home, the kid’s going to have a LOT to talk, or at least SCREAM about. The wraith he sees wandering the backyard of the family apartment building is his first clue.

Director Dorian Fernández-Moris (he also did “Cementario General”) manages the basics with some skill. The kid may insist (typing his plea “FEAR” onto his tablet) on sleeping in Mom’s bed. But that doesn’t keep him from wandering the halls, seeking the source of the skittering and footfall noises he hears in the middle of the night.

Julio, pal, make up your mind. You’re either too afraid to sleep on your own, or brassy enough to seek the source of the spookiness only you are witness to.

The demons haunting him have a thing for his iPad. There’s a tug of war over the charger cord with a gnarled arm and hand, a Close Encounter from The Other Side when he drops it under his bed.

Not being able to scream suppresses the poor child actor’s performance. Never for a second do we believe he’s in mortal danger, because we don’t see it in him. He’s not skilled enough to do it with gasping, eyes-bulging mime. The director doesn’t help him get the terror across.

Fernanda’s mother (Claudia Dammert of “Proof of Life”) is a danger to herself and her daughter during her visits. But pesky journalists like Alejandro (Marcello Rivera) have questions about what’s REALLY going on. Local TV is still covering the mass deaths of “Cementario General” years after the fact.

Yes, something IS going on — with that mass death a few years ago, in that cemetery, in the hospital and with Fernanda’s family. But what in the name of Mia Farrow could it be?

There are a couple of decent hair-raising moments in “Sinister,” and a lot of dull rehashing, exposition and delays in getting to the point.

Take away the flashbacks and it might still stand on its own — teetering, not entirely upright, but not so reliant on the first film to really need all these flashbacks.

As pointless as they seem, we can guess why they’re here. There’s not enough movie in “Sinister Circle” without them. And something’s got to fill in the time before we get to the crappy cop-out ending.

MPAA Rating: unrated, horrific images

Cast: Milene Vásquez, Matías Raygada, Claudia Dammert, Marcello Rivera

Credits: Dorian Fernández-Moris, script by Adrián OchoaAn AV Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

The reason you stay through to the closing credits when reviewing a film is basic movie-reviewing ethics. It’s a rule.

Here’s another one. Never let a rom-com’s touching if obvious ending change your mind about the 90 minutes that preceded it.

“Carrie Pilby” starts feebly, soldiers on gamely and ends with the warm fuzzies. The reviewing cliche “mixed bag” was coined for comedies like this.

Bel Powley is a capable young Brit with impressive range, shining in films such as “Diary of a Teenage Girl” and “A Royal Night Out,” going amazingly trailer trashy look in “White Boy Rick.” But tackling the latest “so smart she/he isn’t socialized or connected to the real world” script — “Big Bang Theory” ruined it for everybody, kids — wasn’t her smoothest move.

She’s a rich-enough British transplant, living in Manhattan on Daddy’s dime, seeing a shrink (Nathan Lane) London dad (Gabriel Byrne) pays for, all to help her “be happier” with the life her skipped-grades, Harvard degree and 185 IQ has brought her.

A “normal” life?

“I’m NOT normal!”

The therapist wants to know if she “made any friends” this week. No, but she tore through another 17 books. He’d like Carrie to stop “rubbing your exceptionally high IQ in other people’s noses,” take the ear buds out so that she can’t drown the world’s noise with classical music warhorses (“Peer Gynt” suite, etc.) and engage the world.

“You’re such a contrarian.”

“No, I’m NOT.”

Dr. Petrov gives her a list. It’s Thanksgiving in New York, time for her to “Go out on a date, make a friend, get a pet, do something you loved as a child, spend New Year’s Eve with someone.”

Fine. Sure. Pet store? Goldfish, “two for one.” She names them Spencer and Katherine.

Dad arranges a job for her, proofing legal briefs after hours at a big law firm. That’s where Tara (Vanessa Bayer of “Saturday Night Live”) becomes almost a confidant.

And guys? That’s a cloying conceit of producer (“Mean Creek”) turned director Susan Johnson’s debut feature. Forget every rom-com about how “hard it is to meet someone” in The Big Apple. “Cute boys” are falling in front of Carrie at every turn.

Flirty waiter at her restaurant of habit, perky pet store clerk who cons her into taking two goldfish, cute neighbor (William Moseley of “The Chronicles of Narnia” films) who plays his didgeridoo in the alley behind their apartment building — they’re everywhere.

But being clinical-methodical and on that “Young Sheldon” spectrum, Carrie decides instead to “go on a date” via the personal ad that most offends her. She’ll show up the engaged jerk (Jason Ritter) who wants to “be sure” he’s making the right decision, marrying his longtime fiance in two months.

There are therapy sessions in between Carrie’s various smart girl/bad choices, flashbacks to a formative experience during her college years (Colin O’Donoghue) and Daddy issues to resolve on one side of the pond or other.

None of which distract us from the nakedly plain direction this is going. The script is so hellbent on taking us there that it underlines the big “tell” — how a young lady knows the man cares — and has Carrie utterly abandon her intellectualized moral code at the drop of a hat — or shirt.

Powley is a perky presence, and while Lane keeps his Funniest Man Alive persona under a beard, glasses and professional decorum and the assorted possible-beaus are the bland leading the bland, “Carrie Pilby” never rises to the level of hateful, or even annoying.

It never rises above mediocre, and that’s the problem.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, alcohol consumption

Cast: Bel Powley, Nathan Lane, Vanessa Bayer, Colin O’Donoghue, William Moseley, Jason Ritter and Gabriel Byrne

Credits: Directed by Susan Johnson, script by Kara Holden, Dean Craig. A Braveart Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

This is the one that showed at New York Comic Con.

Aged favorites back on CBS All Access Jan. 23.

I was never a fan of this series, but Patrick Stewart seemed to me criminally under-employed by Hollywood and British film over the decades. He should have gotten a shot at everything his pal Ian McKellen couldn’t get to.

Fascinating actor, lots of range, Man U fan. And here he is, in his most famous role, not quite retiring to a French vineyard, the way of Picards since time immemorial.

Critics with an uncommon affection for alliteration find movies like “House of the Witch” an embarrassment of riches.

It’s not that this haunted house tale is good, although it is perfectly watchable, in an empty-headed, empty-calories sort of way.

It’s the fun promised by the assorted quasi-creative ways the screenwriter and director find to dispatch the “dead teenagers” in this “dead teenagers movie.”

From boils to beheadings, drowning to — I was going to write “disemboweling,” but realized “No, that’s not accurate. We have seen nary an inch of intestines in this thing.”

And then, wouldn’t you know it? A disembowelment arrives. Several feet of intestine, “Scream” and “Dolemite is My Name” fashion.

It’s a poorly executed thriller, not wrenching any pathos out of any death, not ratcheting up suspense — ever — and failing to even get the “gotchas” to pay off.

Why show one of the half dozen teens who slip into the “haunted house” down the street for some Halloween hijinx and heavy petting reacting to seeing a ghostly woman in a mirror if you’re not going to heighten the moment with shrieking strings in the score? Just a mild mannered shriek from the coed in question.

Here are a few random lines jotted in my notes that tell the story and point to the word-processing (cut, and paste) involved in creating it.

“Get in there! Scare the crap out of some girls! You know how girls get on Halloween!”

“What’s that?” Something’s dripping from the walls.

“So, we’re like STUCK here? Ridiculous.”

“The chair…it MOVED.”

“If this place is abandoned, who’s cooking?”

A clever line can have double meaning in a horror picture. Who is “literally” cooking when you dip a ladle into that stew?

“This house is HAUNTED! And not like some Scooby Freakin’ Doo haunted!”

And then this line, shouted over and over again by the tough kid (Darren Mann) who’d rather become a mechanic than let his stepdad give him career advice.

“What do you WANT from us?”

Nobody stood out to me in this generic, young and pretty cast of “types” — the flirt, the girl who left town and came back, the prankster, the hot to trot couple, the black guy.

The “creative” ways to die are a grab bag from assorted recent horror stories, “The Ring” and “Mama” among them.

The coolest effect is the spectre of the house, a whirl of dust and smoke that manifests a soul-sucking, smoke-down-your-throat wraith.

And as somebody who hates movies with that over-exposed “LA look” from their locations, this Lexington, Kentucky film features some interesting on-site footage, and a pretty proximation of a Kentucky faux-Colonial with Antebellum flourishes 1920s mansion.

But we never feel any urgency in this story, never feel anything for the kids in jeopardy. “House of the Witch” showed up on SyFy before Netflix copped it. People probably forgot about the moment they saw it and are stumbling back onto on the streaming service. It leaves zero impression on the memory.

No wonder nobody reviewed it before now. But they were missing out on all the opportunities for onomatopoeia.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Emily Bader, Darren Mann, Michelle Randolph, Coy Stewart, Jesse Pepe, Arden Belle

Credits: Directed by Alex Merkin, script by Neil Elman. A Marvista release.

Running time: 1:27

We can look away from Syria. We have that option.

But for those trapped there, in the civil war that’s devolved into a murderous campaign of government reprisals, “There is no way out.”

Filmmaker  Feras Fayyad (“Last Men in Aleppo”) frames “The Cave,” his story of the underground world of Al-Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascas, with dreamy, almost beautiful images of caves and the sea, and the poetic voice-over narration of a young woman, Dr. Amani.

Everything within that framed opening and closing “The Cave” is grittier, pragmatic, the few remaining doctors, nurses and others struggling with triage and field surgery in DIY operating rooms and the tunnels that connect them.

As Dr. Amani treats a bloodied toddler, she asks a colleague, (in Arabic, with English subtitles) “Is God watching?”

Nurse Samaher cleans instruments and operating tables, pitches in on the cooking and copes with complaints about the food with “I’m cooking in a dangerous place,” give me break.

And every so often, they flinch, looking at the ceiling, or on a rare moment outside, at the sky?

“Russian warplane?” everybody wonders, having learned to identify their murderous tormentors by sound. “I hope they all burn in hell…May God destroy the Russians!”

Fayyad promises, with opening shots of gloomy, eerie shafts and scenes of the maps of the extensive tunnel network that was expanded and dug out after the civil war began in 2013, a movie about an underground world, lives lived in hunched over survival mode. He would up limiting his film to the underground hospital, where the injured and dying are brought every day and certain to be the most dramatic element in this subterreanean world.

Dr. Salim props his iPod up on a shelf, video of Seiji Ozawa conducting warhorses of the classical music repertoire. He tries to calm a patient who frets, “Am I going to be alright?” with “We don’t have anesthetic. We have music.”

The flinching at every alarming sound — even at a passing motorcycle — is a constant reminder of people doing righteous work by tamping down relentless danger and fear.

“Maybe the bastards will stop bombing” is but a faint hope. Still, staff copes with the stress with humor — a makeshift birthday party here, a comical threat from the surgeon to the nurse there.

“Give me something sterile so I can hit you without causing an infection!”

Their forebearance extends to the society Dr. Amani is trying to save, where the male husband of a patient demands to speak to a “male manager” of the hospital, questioning her competence and the mere fact that a lady doctor exists in the Islamic patriarchy that is much of the Middle East. A male colleague tries to calm troubled waters, but Dr. Amani finally has enough.

“No one can tell me not to work!”

She lets us hear a little of her story, the medical school education that was almost complete when the war broke out, how “men in our society” are still holding women like her back, in the midst of a humanitarian crisis.

And most encouragingly, we see her giving a pep talk to a little girl, advising her that “We don’t have to be ordinary. We need to do something important!”

The grace notes don’t obscure the ugly situation we’re shown here. It’s not  compact, perfectly organized film, but “The Cave” is an honest fly-on-the-wall/cinema verite portrait of a place and a couple of the people working in it.

As with his Aleppo movie, Fayyad’s message to a deaf world wrapped up in more crises than it can cope with is “DO something.” But there’s a resignation here as well. Nothing will be done. All that be done is to flee from Assad and the Russians and let them do what they will to those left behind, ISIS or civilian, soldier or toddler.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, scenes of wounded and dying victims of war, many of them children.

Credits: Directed by Feras Fayyad, written by Alisar Hasan, Feras Fayyad. A National Geographic release.

Running time: 1:37

The sheer savagery of the fights is the selling point of “Avengement,” kickboxer turned actor Scott Adkins’ latest thriller with stuntman turned director Jesse V. Johnson.

It’s a step up from their “Debt Collector” punch-em-up, more polished.

But if you come for the fights you have to stay for the fights. It’s just that there’s an awful lot of cockney trash talk in the endless ENDless flashbacks in this static, almost stage-bound convict-out-for-revenge tale.

Adkins is Cain Burgess, an MMA fighter who failed to throw a fight, way back when. His brother Lincoln (Craig Fairbrass), a London loan shark, was among those most burned by that blunder. The chit that brother Linc called in was a little crime he expected “baby bruvva” to do. And that’s how Cain got nicked, as they say.

Belmarsh Prison, “The Meatgrinder,” is where the fighter hardened into a kill-or-be-killed survivor. And when he escapes, who’s he looking for? Big bruvva, and big bruvva’s whole gang.

You can see why Johnson (“The Hitman Diaries: Charlie Valentine” was the first film of his I noticed) would want to mess around with story structure to make this straightforward punch your way to “Avengement” more interesting. But parking most of the action in a pub/mob-club where Cain holds assorted villains hostage while he laboriously tells them how he got all these scars on his face and body is a blunder.

“Avengement” is all action beats — a delayed account of how Cain escaped, every police beating, every prison riot started as a cover to kill him on the catwalks, in the cafeteria, in the yard — and thick-accented Cockney exposition between bad guys, threats, insults, profane dismissals.

And as much as many of us enjoy the slang — “You and your silly ‘panto’ (pantomime, a British holiday storytelling tradition), a bloke having his first pint in years engaged “in some wishful drinking,” as he tells the story of how “the prodigal bruvva returns.”

The fights are furious and occasionally logical, although there’s an awful lot of “You have YOUR turn with him before I take a swing” nonsense you see in brawling movies.

And some of the humor, much of it coming from the poseur among the mobsters (Thomas Turgoose of the skinhead drama “This is England”), brings a smirk, especially when Cain’s storytelling runs on and on and, well, they’re in a pub and yes they had several pints before he pulled a sawed-off shotgun on them.

“To be fair, NONE of us had planned on being held hostage today.”

Adkins is better here than he’s been in other leading man roles, although casting his American “Debt Collector” co-star Louis Mandylor (as a cop) just reminds us the Brit has fists of fury, hardened good looks and not a lot of screen charisma to go with them.

He’s acted and earned his way into Jason Statham C-movie territory, and “Avengement” invites a comparison with the “Hobbs & Shaw” star that still does Adkins no service. He’s still dull every time he stops swinging his fists.

Still, if what you’re looking for it fists of fury, he can provide them. And if you’re looking for signs that a guy who is playing heavies in small roles in big budget pictures is growing as a performer, that he and Johnson have gotten better since “Debt Collector,” just not all that much, “Avengement” is going to be your kind of movie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Scott Adkins, Craig Fairbrass, Thomas Turgoose, Nick Moran, Kierston Wareing and Louis Mandylor

Credits: Directed by Jesse V. Johnson, script by Jesse V. Johnson, Stu Small. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:27

The only thing new under the sun is the history we’ve forgotten.

Only the names of the tyrants and their treasonous stooges change.

“Mr. Jones” is a 1930s journalistic thriller from Agnieszka Holland (“Olivier, Olivier,” “Europa Europa”) that stars James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard and Kenneth Cranham and starts rolling out this fall in the former Eastern Bloc, in the West later. Because Poland (Oct. 25 opening) is more tuned in to what happened then and what’s going on now than the rest of us.

Let’s just say that two of the guys behind Orlando’s most famous film shot in Maryland are behind the camera in this “black hole” anthology, in theaters and on demand Oct. 25.

It’s in the tradition of “V/H/S” and other different stories/different directors horror packages.

Creepy enough for you?

Think of the simpler than simple terrors of “The Mist,” “Christine” (demonic car), “Cujo” (demonic dog), “Pet Sematary,” Firestarter.” Stephen King never had to get too fancy or complicated to find his horror hooks, and set those hooks in us.

The novella “In the Tall Grass” takes us back to the general “Children of the Corn” idea, that there’s menace in a vast grassy field that turns into a supernatural maze (“The Shining”) the moment you step into it.

Yes, his son Joe Hill co-wrote it, but there’s ground the master has covered before here. Thank goodness the film that comes from it is tight enough to let us skim by the over-familiar and find some chills.

Laysla De Oliveira plays the very-pregnant Becky in “Grass,” driving cross-country with brother Cal (Avery Whitted) to start over in San Diego, when a blast of morning sickness makes them stop in America’s flatlands.

There’s a weathered, abandoned church across the road, with cars in the parking lot. But in the field next to where Cal pulled over, there’s a child’s cry.

“HEEEeeeeeeeelllllp!”

The grass? It is tall. So when Becky answers back, the child’s “I’m LOST in here…I’ve been stuck in here for DAYS!” makes just enough sense.

Becky overhears a woman trying to shush the child, but no matter. It’s “Cal to the rescue,” as he plunges in. And disappears.

Becky has just enough time to establish that favorite trope of modern horror — darn it, “No SIGNAL?” — when she follows.

And damned if she doesn’t lose track of Cal just as Cal has lost track of the child.

Calling to each other while standing still makes no difference. They sound as if they’re wandering further apart.

Panic, darkness, and then a grubby kid (Will Buie Jr.) comes upon Cal. That’s the same moment that the kid’s dad (Patrick Wilson) stumbles into Becky.

The father is a realtor. Trustworthy?

The kid? He’s got answers, explained in Stephen King creepy child-speak. “The tall grass knows everything,” he says. There’s this big “rock.” “That’s how we got in…that’s how it works” he says, not really explaining himself.

And even less reassuring — “The field don’t move dead things around.”

How long has this child been here? How long have WE been here? The look on Becky’s face asks the most important question of all.

“WTF?”

That killer 20 minute opening segues to the arrival of Travis (Harris Gilbertson). He’s looking for Cal and Becky. He’s her baby daddy, and he’s on their trail.

And when he sees their car, covered in dust parked in that same abandoned church parking lot, he too will be drawn into the field.

I like the way “Splice” and TV’s “Hannibal” director Vincenzo Natali dangles logic and hope in front of through Travis. He mulls it over, and decides to try and climb the church steeple to look over the field, first.

He goes in with his backpack. He marks a trail, tying off the grass.

As someone who muttered all the way through “The Blair Witch Project,” Hike to WATER, FOLLOW the WATER out like good little Scouts,” I relish those “just what I would do” touches.

Of course it’s to no avail. But heck, wouldn’t be much of a horror movie if mere nature lore and hiking common sense could save you.

The film loses much of its lean, mean narrative drive when we get into group dynamics — who can you trust, who has been drinking the tall grass KoolAid — and the whole supernatural mumbo-jumbo “explaining” what they’re dealing with, and how they can escape it, takes over “In the Tall Grass.”

Wilson is the stand-out in the cast, but the kid is terrific and De Oleira makes an OK case for this being a break-out movie for her.

It’s not great, just a tad more interesting than the muddled “It” sequel and more engrossing (and brief) than TV’s “Mr. Mercedes.”

Let’s hope King passed along to his son not just a career, but the best advice he himself ever followed. KISS — keep it simple, Stephen.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Laysla De Oliveira, Avery Whitted, Patrick Wilson, Will Buie Jr.Will, Harrison Gilbertson, Rachel Wilson.

Credits: Written and directed by Vincenzo Natali, based on the Stephen King/Joe Hill novella. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Her big decade was the ’60s, when she made movies and starred in the groundbreaking African-American TV series “Julia.”

I caught up with Diahann Carroll in the ’90s, when she toured with a concert cabaret act.

Regal but modest, sure of her place in cultural history and perfectly happy with it.

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