Movie Nation

Is there a house style to Spanish horror films, a common thread that they share?

There’ve been so many, covering every genre, it’s a wonder they don’t have their own nomenclature, like “J-Horror” (Japanese), K-Horror” (Korean) and the like. A simple translation will have to do — Horror Español.

Yes, if the movie’s dull enough, your mind wanders to such arcana. Mine does, anyway.

The one thing the ghost stories, zombie tales, vampire thrillers and witchcraft cinema of Spain have in common? Design. They’re all about the gloom, almost all set in gloomy old houses in an ancient country where “gloom” isn’t the rule. Sunshine is.

“The Influence” is as gloomy as any of them — well, not “The Orphanage,” “The Others” or “The Devil’s Backbone” —  even if there isn’t all that much that’s new or novel in it. It’s about two daughters struggling to cope with the end-of-life instructions of their mother. She (Emma Suárez) may be in a coma, with her “living will” ordering her nurse and daughters to keep her alive, no matter matter. But Alicia (Manuela Vellés), the nurse-daughter who has returned to help, remembers she was a witch. Alicia even told her husband (Alain Hernández).

It’s just that sister Sara (Maggie Civantos) can’t manage the inert, evil crone on her own.

Childhood flashbacks recount the trauma of their childhood, something Sara seems to have pushed back into her memory. Alicia? She’s annoyed at being here, enraged at “everything she did to us,” at her mother’s family for allowing this long-ago abuse to happen. But Alicia is strapped for cash because electrician jobs for husband Mikel are hard to come by in this corner of coastal Spain. They are as trapped as Sara has been.

And then the old woman on life support upstairs starts making a play for Alicia’s ten year old daughter, Nora (Claudia Placer).

“Mum wants Nora to stand in front of the mirror,” Sara guesses (in Spanish, with English subtitles). Which mirror?
“THAT mirror.”

The effects or “gimmicks” here include trapping Nora in granny’s room where objects rise from shelves and attack her, another room filled with talismans, ritual objects, magic books and the like, including a deer’s skull and antlers and particularly potent locket.

Nora takes the rage she’s absorbing at home with her to her new school. “Acting out” creates a body count.

You know. The usual.

Mother Alicia and Daddy Mikel will do what they can to protect. Auntie Sara? We’ll see.

First-time feature director Denis Rovira van Boekholt throws a lot of gruesome stuff at us in this adaptation of a Ramsey Campbell novel. Is any of it scary? Not so much.

There’s little mystery in play when everybody seems to know Victoria was and is a witch, even if they’ve chosen to forget or ignore the evidence her kids witnessed long ago.

The tropes of the genre demand a lot of spooky rooms and a cellar to get lost in and mother-daughter bonds that will be tested across generations.

If you think you can guess what happens, you’re probably right. If you think you know who lives until the closing credits, you’re dead on the money.

MPAA Rating: TV:MA, graphic violence, some sexuality

Cast: Manuela Vellés, Maggie Civantos, Alain Hernández, Claudia Placer and Emma Suárez

Credits: Directed by Denis Rovira van Boekholt, script by Michel Gaztambide, Daniel Rissech and Denis Rovira van Boekholt, based on a Ramsey Campbell novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

The building blocks of a really good heist picture are in place in writer-director Corey Stanton’s “Robbery,” an indie thriller from The Great White North.

There’s an old ex-con suffering from dementia, played by respected character actor Art Hindle, whose credits go back to 1980’s “Porky’s” and 1974’s “Black Christmas.”

His kid, Richie (Jeremy Ferdman, a younger Aaron Paul) is a clumsy newcomer to stocking-cap capers. He’s interested in learning.

“The only reason I’m here is you’ve got fifty years of serious experience floating aroind that dying brain’a yours!”

There’s a female crime boss (Jennifer Dale) in this “lawless, Godless” corner of rural Canada. And she’s not to be trifled with.

“You have sticky fingers. I need to take them.”

The dialogue is hard-boiled and spot-on.

“Sometimes,” a stolen goods “fence” (Andy Morgan) lectures naive young Richie, “the price of poverty is a conscience.”

And there are twists and double-crosses aplenty, a couple of doozies that flip the script in the third act.

The cast isn’t bad. The fact that “Robbery” doesn’t pay points more to editing tweaks (it lacks suspense, first frame to last) and script-workshopping than any single fundamental flaw. Sell this to a major studio and the remake could be gold.

Frank (Hindle) is introduced in a doctor’s office, stumbling through mental acuity tests. His dementia has taken away his short term memory.

“Who ARE you?”

But he has a decent handle on the past. That’s why Richie is taking care of him, shoplifting and holding up the occasional convenience store to keep Frank fed and gas in their battered 1980 Chevy Malibu.

The “past” is one clue about this relationship. Frank and his late partner used to steal big — art, jewelry, cash. The “meeting” is another. Richie has a gambling addiction, but at least you meet the nicest people there. Winona (Sera-Lys McArthur) is a Native American bartender at the local casino.

Might she have the $50,000 Richie needs to keep the hoodlums who keep showing up at the garage where he works, making throat-slitting and trigger-pulling gestures to his face?

His coming-on-strong boss (Tara Spencer-Nairn) sure hopes so.

The heists Richie enlists his father’s advice about are routine and inept. He’s grabbing electric toothbrushes and the like. He needs a lecture from the fence. Writer-director Stanton makes the thefts so dull you wish he’d spent months watching how such sequences are put together in classics of the genre.

Not that “Robbery” is really about the work. Clock ticking down on Richie, the rising level of threats (that “take” his “fingers” bit), the need for cash and the places they might find it, the complications of all these peripheral characters, all take a back seat to Frank’s memory, which comes and goes, and Richie’s relationship to it and reliance upon it.

When you’re leaving Post-It notes on the steering wheel so that your demented get-away driver remembers who you are, you’re up against it. Richie quizzes Frank to keep his mind as sharp as it’s going to get, Frank keeps quizzing Richie on what to grab once he’s gotten in the door.

Neither inspires much confidence.

The whole affair veers into one “surprise” topping the next one in the third act, when compact simplicity would have better served the picture. The twists are all headed towards the inevitable, so what’s their point, anyway?

“Robbery” feels like a solid, promising first draft of a pretty good heist picture. A good agent could shop this one around, get the right aging star’s attention, and produce a remake that works. The generic, forgettable title is just one reason no one will remember “Robbery” after that happens.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Art Hindle, Jeremy Ferdman, Sera-Lys McArthur, Jennifer Dale and Tara Spencer-Nairn and Andy McQueen

Credits: Written and directed by Corey Stanton.  An Indiecan Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:33

“Lucy in the Sky” is a Lifetime Original Movie-style melodrama puffed up into a would-be “Gravity,” a “serious” movie with the weight of an Oscar contender.

It’s been over-thought, over-scripted and over-directed into something spacey, ethereal and trippy by the guy who gave us TV’s “Legion.”

He gets so caught up in impressing us he loses track that he’s losing us with his tedious tale of NASA, the mental pitfalls of spaceflight, sex and competition.

You get why director and co-writer Noah Hawley did it.  The true story that “Lucy in the Sky” jumps off from is lowdown, common — almost sordid. And tragically funny.

This is a highly-fictionalized version of the love triangle with the astronaut who flipped out and went on a cross-country dash to commit a kidnapping — wearing adult diapers to save time. The overreach here is trying to explain how “touching the void” plays on the mind of those recruited for job. The real story is a lot harder to see in a woman-experiences-the-limitless-cosmos-first-hand-and-snaps terms.

Hawley wanted to make a movie with Oscar winners, with Natalie Portman — who won every honor under the sun as a warped ballerina in “Black Swan” — competing with rising star Zazie Beetz (“Joker”) for the attentions of “a divorced action figure who likes to go fast” astronaut (Jon Hamm), and also competing for spots in the spaceflight rotation because Lucy (Portman) has spacewalked and “changed.”

He wanted the overwhelmed astronaut’s name to be “Lucy,” so it could be a play on the Beatles tune, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

He REALLY wanted to use drones for all sorts of overhead shots, mimicking the perspective of things seen from “above,” in the heavens. He wanted soft focus scenes capturing Lucy’s increasingly fragile mental state.

And he wanted to take his sweet time getting around to that epic cross-country quest, a Houston to San Diego run, rather than the real-life dash to Orlando — which is inherently funny.

Lucy Cola (Portman) is a brassy, on-task Texan, “a winner” who experiences rapture when she spacewalks on a mission to the International Space Station. “Best two weeks of mah lahff,” she drawls.

She doesn’t want platitudes from her boss, barely hears “I missed you” from her not-particularly-butch husband (Dan Stevens of “Legion,” more in wussy “Downton Abbey” guise here). She’s not concerned about the NASA shrink’s (Nick Offerman) concerns.

“I never felt so alive.”

All she wants, and as soon as possible, is to go back. The Shuttle is winding down, Orion is still down the road. She’s frantically training and lobbying, in a manic hurry for something that won’t happen overnight.

The one guy who gets it is Astronaut Mark (Hamm), who gives her his “You’ve seen everything, the whole universe…seen the face of God” bit, welcoming her into “the circle of the rolling ball,” the exclusive club of humans who have traveled in space.

He’s hitting on her. And in her space-drunk state, she lets him.

Her hard-drinking, hard-cursing Nana (Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn) made her tough and drove her to compete. So when her spot in the flight line is threatened and her affair means more to her than the swinging “action figure,” the woman who lives for checklists, planning, rattling through spacesuit prep and mission prep lists as she jogs, tumbles into another plan, another mission.

Portman makes a more convincing ballerina than astronaut. Space suits make even the bulkiest of us look like sticks stuffed into a Michelin Man suit. But she’s such an interesting actress she makes you forget the petite sprite lined up with other NASA Type As.

The pairing with Hamm is similarly out of proportion. But Portman brings an intimidating intensity to Lucy that makes him shrink in her presence in the later sccenes.

“I’m Good. A-OK. All systems are GO!”

Never has “The Right Stuff” seemed so wrong.

Hawley overwhelms the movie as the story takes on clutter it doesn’t need, and that includes extraneous characters. And I could have done with a lot fewer overhead views. Lucy’s fascination with butterflies coming out of their crysalis is a metaphor that doesn’t neatly fit here.

But the funereal pacing suggests they were sure they had a movie of weight and awards season importance on their hands. On the page, the whole package probably looked that way.

Save for the TV show runner ham-handedly over-directing it all.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content.

Cast: Natalie Portman, Jon Hamm, Zazie Beetz, Dan Stevens, Tig Notaro and Elle Burstyn.

Credits: Directed by Noah Hawley, script by Elliott DiGuiseppi, Brian C. Brown and Noah Hawley. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:04

Seems a tad on the nose, which is why many of us thought, “ure. I can totally see that.” She can be scary, although action is outside her normal range.

Via Variety
Zoe Kravitz to Play Catwoman in ‘The Batman’ https://t.co/iN4jfw5yzu https://t.co/Hw1b0vyfNb https://twitter.com/Variety_Film/status/1183852111630495744?s=17

The statistics are shocking.

In the decades of commitment to the “War on Terror,” millions have served, and a whopping twenty percent of those who have say they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from the experience.

Twenty-two veterans a day kill themselves.

One image in the new documentary “From Shock to Awe” sums this disaster up just a few seconds of screen time. Army veteran Matt Kahl shows us his double-sized bathroom medicine cabinet, stuffed to the gills with prescriptions.

“Everything in this cabinet right here almost killed me, multiple times,” he says. He’s attempted suicide, and of course, he’s not alone. The horrors of what many lived through and witnessed is devouring a generation of patriotic young men and women who volunteered for service.

What can be done for them? Because whatever the VA and the medical/pharmaceutical establishment are trying is failing.

As a piece of advocacy filmmaking and movie rhetoric, “From Shock to Awe” takes its sweet time getting to its “solution step,” which we’ve seen teased in the opening scene. Bearded, tattooed veterans gather around a fire pit, being served “the medicine” and wished a pleasant “journey” by a top-knotted shaman, or priest and drug-trip tour guide.

The answer for many of these men, apparently, is the Amazonian herbal tea mental and digestive purgative known as Ayahuasca.

“Shock to Awe” takes us into the shaky lives of Matt and Aimee (his wife) Kahl, the flashbacks (illustrated with combat footage of Matt and others), and Michael and Brooke Cooley (both traumatized veterans), Coloradans struggling to get back to square one years after their tours of duty ended.

Michael lets filmmaker Luc Côté (“Four Days Inside Guantanemo”) ride with him to school at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, and we hear the myriad things that trigger panic attacks in this former MP. Cities, with rooftops which he used to scan for snipers, traffic jams where any tailgater is a potential convoy ambush tend to freak him out.

Loud noises, flashes of light in the dark, the veterans here  — and the sample Luc Côté documented is VERY small — share triggers and after-effects, struggling to keep marriages and families together in the face of an illness that has almost killed them and is killing a score of their comrades in arms every day.

All that changes when the PTSD victims travel to Orlando. It’s not the magic of a theme park they seek, but the faddish “miracle” enlightenment cure-all of the moment, administered in a safe space (out of doors) provided by Soul Quest, led by the top-knotted Ayuhuasca expert Chris Young.

“Feel the medicine,” Young, of the Ayuhuasca Church of the Mother Earth, counsels. You will feel “connected to everything,” he says, coaching them and basically providing the language they will use to describe their experiences later.

And in these two cases (Matt and Michael), the hallucinatory tea seems to work. You would hope, even in our seriously retrograde times, that this substance and this “cure” would undergo rigorous study as psychotherapy tries new drugs to use in conjunction with therapy. Some of that is happening, although not that we see this in the film.

Anything to stem to flood of suicides, right?

But Côté’s film screams out for words like “cure” and “medicine” to be slapped in quotation marks. There is not only no contrary voice here, no skeptic suggesting that maybe this is just this year’s LSD substitute and PTSD victims are merely switching one dependency for another.

No academics or scientists appear, pro or con. Like other Ayuhuasca documentaries I’ve reviewed, there’s a built-in credulity that spending too much time thinking about the self-annointed “expert” we see here invites. It’s not wrong, no matter what anecdotal evidence the film provides, to question where dude went to shaman school.

The alternative is spelled out on Brooke Cooley’s t-shirt in an early scene. “Cannabis cures cancer. Google it!” Maybe it does, but “Google” isn’t proving that, any more than a couple of veterans who ask for multiple ayahuasca trips to calm their anxiety — and that treatment seeming to work — proves the thesis of “From Shock to Awe.”

We can collectively recognize the crisis, urge the study and testing for therapeutic value and do it in all haste, realizing how desperate suffering people are for some relief.

Limiting your arguement to a couple of guys tripping around a fire in Orlando isn’t making your, even if it makes that sale.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with drug use, profanity, accounts of violence

Cast:Mike Cooley, Brooke Cooley, Matt Kahl and Aimee Kahl, Chris Young

Credits: Directed by Luc Côté. An Adobe International release.

Running time: 1:27

This Nov. 1 release (VOD soon after) is about an alcoholic comic artist who loses it in her journey into Amsterdam’s dark side.

“Sin City” and “Terminal” lurid, Susanne Wolff has the title role.

Blondie fans will remember the “Sunday Girl,” whom Deborah Harry described thusly in song.

“I know a girl from a lonely street
Cold as ice cream but still as sweet…Live in dreams Sunday girl.”

In Peter Ambrosio’s witty, biting and amusingly inconsequential indie comedy, Natasha (Dasha Nekrasova) is a woman with shades, a red trench coat and a mission.

“Sunday Girl” follows her through what we guess is a Sunday as she motors in her vintage VW Beetle from house to hipster house in Lafayette, Louisiana, dumping guys.

She’s dating five. Four have got to go, because she’s decided the bearded hipster, George (Brandon Stacy) is the one.

“Sunday Girl” is a movie of those conversations. Natasha knocks on a door, often having to approach it several times, building up a little more nerve each time.

She’ll say something like “You’re not ‘it’ for me.” Usually, that’s before she offers breakup sex. At some point, she’ll angle for the door. Maybe she’ll ask for gas money before popping on her shades and moving on.

“I have a busy day.” Indeed she does.

The guys? Most of them aren’t even identified in conversation. Neither is the film’s location. I stared at the cute, older Southern Arts & Crafts houses, sitting on cinderblocks, caught the name of a restaurant, “Eat Leauxcal,” and tracked it to Louisiana. Nobody here has an accent.

The guys — some of whom quake or break down — struggle to cope with the news. One has a good old fashioned tantrum.

Victor (Bilal Mir) is a poet, so he has her best description.

“I don’t really think of you as a person, more a feeling.”

Jack (Dave Davis) lights into the “cheating, lying blonde nightmare.” Sorry, he’s just “venting.”

Natasha? In writer-director Peter Ambrosio’s eyes, she’s “Sunday Girl” chilly. A suitor says “Sometimes I just want to kill myself,” and her eyes light up.

“How would you DO it? That always hangs me up!”

But she plainly has something — charisma, sex appeal, libidinous tendencies. Even if she’s just “Lafayette hot,” they’re all drawn to this artist who photographs people in tears, “usually in hospitals or cemeteries.”

In an earlier age, she’d have taken her ’71 Beetle to Austin. The rents are lower and the competition to stand out thinner in little Lafayette.

Here, she’s the best game in town. Even her boss, the older art photographer Anton (Anthony Marble), makes a play, an offer to take her abroad for some “assignments.” She’d…like to.

“It’s not what people claim they want,” he huffs. “It’s what they actually do.”

Nekrasova, an indie film actress and writer (she turned up in “Mr. Robot”) makes an entertaining locus of all this comical angst and upset. There’s an unpolished quality to her performance, the affected way Natasha dons and removes her sunglassses, smokes a cigarette as if the only times she touches one are on a film set.

She isn’t the new Greta Gerwig, even if “Sunday Girl” smacks of Early Greta “Mumblecore” (it’s awfully chatty) fare. She’s her own deal, playing Natasha as a young woman fronting her “confidence” while confused, impulsive, scared to death people will see through her pose.

As Anton suggests, it’s not what she says she wants, but what she does that counts. And for this “Sunday Girl” (limited release, Nov. 8), her drunk dialing tendencies give away the game.

MPAA Rating: unrated, smoking, smoking, profanity

Cast: Dasha Nekrasova, Brandon Stacy, Dave Davis, George, Evan Holtzman, Morgan Roberts, Ashton Leigh, Anthony Marble.

Credits: Written and directed by Peter Ambrosio. A Subliminal Films release.

Running time: 1:18

Good to see a fine actor take on meatier roles once he’s made bank wearing a metal flying suit.

So it opens at over $96, and you’ve got to figure, “Well, it’ll lose 55-60% of that on its second weekend, right?”

No, “Joker” did not. A $55 million weekend is a mere 42.5% (or so) drop from weekend to week. For a two hour long hard R-rated comic book adaptation with violence, not bad.

“Joker” will clear the $200 million mark at the US box office by first or third showing on Tuesday.

The big opener this weekend was MGM’s latest reboot, animated this time, of “The Addams Family.” It works well enough to appeal to the kids, and the fact that it’s on over 4,000 screens has nothing to do with the fact it managed $30.3 million or so.

Will Smith’s cloned assassin thriller “Gemini Man” isn’t a total bust. It cleared $20. Barely.

“Abominable” pulled in nearly $7 million, “Downton Abbey” another $5 or so.

Adam Devine’s big screen bust “Lexi” managed $3.1 million.