Dennis Harvey

Goosed by a couple gratuitous interludes of gory amateur surgery, the movie is eventful, with a high body count. But there’s never the baseline authenticity of atmosphere or character depth that might make so much action meaningful, or even particularly exciting.

The director and star’s efforts may have lifted the German-language edition, but this static, lost-in-translation revamp just comes off as effortful, for little reward.

Michael Polish’s film gamely tries to compensate for unspectacular production values with a lot of action — but its staging is pedestrian at best. Alexander Vesha’s script never convinces, and the competent actors fail to spark, despite Sylvester Stallone’s presence as a reluctantly reunited former colleague.

There are enough formulaic elements, especially teens meeting gory deaths, to keep undiscerning viewers in their seats. But the script (co-written by Erik and sibling Carson) stumbles in its climactic revelations, with an even worse epilogue bound to send patrons out rolling their eyes in unamused disbelief.

While most performers are fine within the material’s limitations, principal villains Avgeropoulos and Montesi are notably underwhelming.

It’s a self-canceling combination of the earnest and the clueless, its technical competency shorn of any leavening style or personality.

Director Anthony Nardolillo and writer Michael Corcoran’s film strikes a pose of sly ingeniousness throughout that is uncorroborated by any actual cleverness, surprise, wit, tension, thrills or much else you’d hope for in a high-end-heist tale.

It’s bad enough that the film doesn’t have the smarts to actually satirize its inspirational source. But bizarrely, it doesn’t really send up slasher tropes, either, while lacking the skillset to take play them seriously.

Nothing gels, as the film careens from cartoonishness to violent peril to attempted satire to sentimentality and so forth, all of it hyperbolic and inorganic.

There’s enough sex and violence here to hold attention for an hour and a half, but the care or conviction to explain why it all happens — let alone why viewers should care — proves elusive.

Just when you think this nothing-burger can’t get any more exasperating, it spends a full 10 post-fadeout minutes on final credits.

While there have been worse-crafted, even more routinely formulaic Netflix horror efforts, this one takes the cake for sheer whateverness of barely-there plot, concept, character detailing and so on.

As directed by Nick Moran in obvious imitation of executive producer Danny Boyle’s most hyperbolic style, scripted by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh, this apparently loose interpretation of the subject’s memoir becomes a hyperventilating “Behind the Music” caricature, all familiar flash and precious little substance.

Its cast struggling against material with little real-world or emotional logic, the attempted “surreal” elements uninspired both conceptually and aesthetically, this is a misfire whose intentions are as murky as its results are hapless.

This quasi-horror tale of bickering vacationers running afoul of disturbed locals strings together various well-worn clichés with a notable lack of suspense, plausibility and style, while excelling in the realm of characters behaving like complete idiots.

Timlin bears a good-enough resemblance, and gives as much of a rounded performance as she can. But this conception provides no insight into any real HRC, past or present, and seems trite even as a fictionalized act of hostility toward whatever she represents to the filmmakers. Which is, in a word, murky.

It’s an embarrassing vanity showcase that’s deliberately campy without actually being fun, and whose stalled-adolescent “transgression” may only appeal to a few actual adolescents.

Worse things have happened to Oscar winners, but it’s still unfortunate to see both Richard Dreyfuss and Mira Sorvino flailing in the inept muddle of Crime Story.

Seance proves a disappointingly boilerplate retro slasher that’s pedestrian on every level from concept to execution.

Its content and execution are innocuous to the point of tedium, while the protagonist is no undervalued sweetie but the kind of grating personality that can clear a room.

Vanquish isn’t bad so much as inert — nothing here is convincing, tense, kinetic, outrageous, or silly enough to give the movie even fleeting life. The script is so by-the-numbers, the performers can hardly hide their disinterest, a feeling soon to be shared by viewers

A decent cast and fast pace make Pixie easy enough to take as disposable entertainment. Yet it also has that annoying edge unique to films that strike an attitude of rakish sophistication while actually serving up lowbrow quips about prison rape, fat people and menstruation.

Will Wernick’s film not only fails to use that format in clever or suspenseful ways, it blows the basics of maintaining plausibility and viewer interest.

“Grizzly II” never finds a rhythm — not even a giddily camp one.

It’s a slick film that’s forgettable at best, annoyingly broad and unfunny at worst.

Fans of the original will no doubt tune expecting more high-grade guilty-pleasure fun, only to get way too much of a no-longer-very-good thing instead.

At nearly 100 minutes — way too many for material this flimsy — Followed even has time for a couple clumsily maudlin bits, not excluding brief yet awesomely trite address of “the homeless issue” in downtown L.A. A movie like this doesn’t need to have a social conscience. It ought to have worried first about having a brain, period.

This overlong tale spends most of its nearly two hours as a somewhat draggy, talky mystery before finally deciding to be a thriller, with credibility lacking throughout.

Lazy Susan aims hazily between the sad-sack valentine likes of “Muriel’s Wedding” and something more satirically misanthropic, missing a target it never quite commits to in the first place.

It’s very hard to satirize things that are already inherently ridiculous, and mockumentary Reality Queen! has the misfortune of being even more vacuous — not to mention less funny — than the empty-calorie celebrities it parodies.

Even as a luxe fantasy of danger and hotness, the film falls short — though competently assembled in general, real high style is lacking. Too many scenes take place in empty warehouses or obviously dressed sound stages, budgetary concerns apparently hobbling the story’s feinted milieu of decadent haunts of the criminal-rich.

A sub-Tennessee Williams potboiler triangle between restless sexpot, impotent husband, and hunky handyman ever-so-slowly congeals into a lumpy gumbo of thriller elements in Grand Isle.

Stridently dumb action thriller.

With its general tone of inspirational uplift that’s too often spelled out in dialogue rather than felt, The Great Alaskan Race bears the same relation to “faith-based entertainment” that it does to action-adventure cinema: It gestures in that direction, yet doesn’t actually make the commitment.

Bombastically dumb new chiller that probably would have been called "Killer App" if that title hadn't already been used several times.

Beyond de rigueur jump scares, Mary has little real atmosphere or suspense, and that is at least partly due to the fact that its supernatural force is so generically ill-defined.

This undeniably slick, energetic contraption plays somewhere between grating and numbing.

Making underwhelming use of its not-bad ... conceit, Benson’s sci-fi-tinged script is not at all ingeniously plotted, insists we care about tritely sketched characters, and is never credible enough to transcend an air of escalating silliness.

Bad in ways that sometimes provoke a disbelieving guffaw, but more often stir pained embarrassment.

The fact that none of this usually-surefire mindless stimulus is remotely inspired — let alone that the plot feels like a barely-there afterthought — turns so much cheerful sound and fury into near-senseless din.

While the movie doesn’t work, it isn’t idiosyncratic enough even to hold attention as a misfired oddity.

This first feature from “Walking Dead” thesp-turned-writer/director Pollyanna McIntosh (who played the feral captive in “The Woman”) proves an increasingly wobbly mix of comedy, horror and social critique, its heavy-handed indictment of stereotypical religious hypocrisy finally dragging the enterprise into caricature.

It doesn’t strike an assertively comic tone either, resulting in a superficially colorful but hollow pile of contrivances that are neither clever nor convincing enough to achieve more than time-passing diversion.

Tweedy, dreary, and unconvincing. ... It’s dismaying that so little drama is wrung out of the tale, and that what we get too often feels like a cliché-riddled romantic pulp.

A little too imitative of “Superbad” ... Good Boys lacks that film’s wit and heart. It’s a lively, slick package, yet crude and obvious at every turn.

All evidence here suggests that Marshall-Green needs a strong collaborator — or maybe just someone else’s screenplay — the next time he gets behind the camera.

Braid does look great. But Mitzi Peirone’s debut feature is so void of any substance beyond the pretentiously pictorial that one suspects her real calling is in music videos or advertising.

All this adds up to a big “whatever.” Don’t Go isn’t sure whether it wants to be a frightening fantasy or a poignantly warm-and-fuzzy one.

This turgid fantasy thriller, boasting scant thrills or imagination, douses a mystic time-travel concept with soap operatic hand-wringing to mawkishly unconvincing effect.

Air Strike feels like a movie whose populist yet complicated narrative elements have been haphazardly pared to the nub, while the money shots — all things that go boom, as a great many do here — were left intact.

Short on thrills and energy despite its title, this slick yet sluggish feature often seems barely interested in the horror elements that are, after all, what will primarily lure viewers in.

Despite all rough edges, you want to root for a project that’s so clearly homegrown. (It was shot in Philly’s First Corinthian Baptist Church, which filmmaker Frank’s family has attended for decades.) But The Church’s problem isn’t so much that it lacks polish or spectacle, or even that its special effects look like something a kid developed as an unenthusiastic school project.

Eye candy without much to offer the brain or emotions, Hell Fest is a competently crafted slasher film rendered instantly forgettable by its disinterest in character, plot, and motivation, let alone original ideas.

There’s a big twist at the end, but like everything else here, it aims for a shock effect that the film is simply too clumsy and psychologically far-fetched to pull off.

A generically conceived horror thriller distinguished only by its belief that more hysteria equals a more frightening movie.

Despite surface polish, this indie feels like a classroom exercise that checks off the basic technical and narrative-beat boxes needed to get a passing grade, yet never develops any real personality of its own or raison d’etre.

The budget may be low, but the level of scares and imagination are lower still in Along Came the Devil, a feeble indie horror film that sometimes seems like a straight retread and other times feels like a movie aimed specifically at Christian audiences.

Blue Iguana strains to be antic in every joint, from gimmicky editorial and camera choices to a soundtrack cluttered with early ’80s New Wave tracks by the B-52’s, Violent Femmes, Only Ones — great stuff, but they can’t get a party started that’s already flatlined.

It all seems slick, intense, and unpleasant in the same hollow way “Martyrs” did, because all the cruelty is so meaningless.

Billy Boy is the worst kind of grab for “indie cred”: It’s exasperatingly undercooked and arted-up, failing on basic levels of character definition and narrative coherence, too often feeling like a classic indulgence for pretty-boy actors playing tough.

It’s the rare kind of sprawling, costly hot mess that achieves instant camp gratification other fiascos must wait decades to ripen toward.

A rote, overstuffed compilation of genre cliches with pedestrian handling of action elements and frequent notes of maudlin contrivance.

Really, it’s sad that the best Hollywood can come up with for so much seasoned talent is this stale shake-and-bake combining upscale-lifestyle porn with some tepid smirky humor.

It’s not a total wash, but the eventually dreary mix of vague religious morality and rather ponderous horror suggests Katagiri should pay more attention to script development next time out.

The humor misfires painfully even when it just tries to be charming.

Blandly competent in assembly, Baja has only pedestrian comic ideas, and even those aren’t executed well.

Instead of emphasizing tense action and atmosphere — the usual limited-budget solutions — the filmmakers here seem to think having their characters nervously chatter on about their situation in reams of clumsy dialogue will do the trick. It does not.

Its intrigue and action neither very well developed nor integrated, Showdown in Manila feels like a checklist of elements typical of such movies — hey, where’s our training montage?!? — with arthritic-level connective tissue.

Solidly pro in overall packaging yet cliched, pedestrian and indistinct in specific contributions, this thriller never finds (let alone raises) its own pulse.

This soggy stab at neo-noir finds Italian-born writer-director Emanuele Della Valle out of her element in a pretentious meller set on the Jersey shore.

Sparing no maudlin contrivance in a quest to jerk tears that remain stubbornly dry, this hokum is slickly executed by producer Mark Williams in his feature directorial debut. But the result never rises above polished plastic, formulaic, and pedestrian.

There are some unintentional laughs to be had from this hectic, silly, defiantly un-scary mashup of stock “cabin in the woods” and alien-invasion formulae. But that dubious plus won’t be enough to soften the scorn of horror fans who plunk down hard cash for this feeble, somewhat amateurish if enthusiastic retread.

The referentiality of “Kuso,” its general snark, and even its defensive self-criticism (characters state “I hate this movie!” more than once) fail to make it any more funny or inspired, let alone any less of a shapeless chore to sit through.

Though the film ultimately hinges on a “forbidden” Muslim-Christian romance, almost nothing is made of the enormous hurdles that would be present in this time and place.

Reasonably slick but empty, Eloise is no “Session 9” as far as haunted-former-mental-hospital horrors go. Heck, it’s not even a “Grave Encounters 2.”

The greasepaint-by-numbers terror is often so laughably rote, not to mention so poorly written and acted, that some viewers will find considerable entertainment value here — albeit very little of the intentional kind.

Nobody — not even viewers willing to settle for good, unclean B-movie fun — is done any favors by something as crude as (re)Assignment, which gracelessly mashes together hardboiled crime-melodrama cliches and an unintentionally funny “Oh no! I’m a chick now!!” gender-change narrative hook.

The main thing early reels have going for them isn’t any actual cleverness or wit, but Neff’s pleasant riffing within a stock slacker-bro role. When his character stops having fun, so does the audience. Though needless to say, the unimaginative references to prior/better horror flicks just keep on a-comin’.

Rob Zombie truly loves horror movies. But he still hasn’t made a good one, and “31” is a perfect encapsulation of the reasons why: It’s a fanboy’s highlight reel of homages, without any of the credibility or context that made most of the films he’s inspired by so fine.

Julio Medem’s film is a smiling-through-tears saga whose generally tasteful execution can’t ultimately salvage a whopping load of maudlin contrivance, all designed to burnish the halo around St. Penelope.

The leads are given the thankless task of maintaining grim poker faces through scene after scene of high contrivance and cliche-ridden dialogue.

The Final Project does feel like a student film, though not in a way that benefits its own found-footage conceit.

The polished, bland low-budget presentation doesn’t raise much tension, and the script springs no real surprises

A mean-spirited farce whose strenuous bad taste seldom translates into actual laughs.

Although it’s being marketed as a horror film, The Curse of Downers Grove turns out to be something else — a messy hash of teen soap opera, stalker thriller and whatnot whose titular, possibly supernatural aspect is basically irrelevant.

So little happens in The Boy, and so little suspense is effectively built around its central figure, that by the time things finally do heat up the movie has flatlined too completely for us to care.

Evan M. Wiener’s screenplay throws in too many disparate elements without developing any of them very effectively, while Grau’s direction is slick but unable to provide the tension or consistency needed.

Slick but derivative and forgettable on all levels.

Six just wants to shock, though his imagination is so primitive that the effort is strained and a bit pathetic. Initially abrasive, the whole enterprise grows simply tedious well before the now-epically-scaled titular phenom is unveiled in the prison yard.

Nothing feels fresh here — not even Christopher Plummer hamming it up as a crusty-coot grandpa — and Philip Martin’s routinely polished direction only underscores the cliche-composting of Richard D’Ovidio’s script.

While competently made, Dark Summer makes no effort to lend its characters any psychological complexity, or even much distinguishing personality. Nor are the proceedings very scary.

Flashbacks within flashbacks exhaust viewer patience in this snarky mix of crime, action and sadism.

The Toy Soldiers sports a basic competence in assembly that slightly elevates its material. The same can’t be said of the performers, though they try, some achieving a semblance of naturalism, others more inept or hammy.

The Pact 2 simply stretches out rather than elaborating on its predecessor’s already thin premise, creating holes that are poorly patched over with false scares and unconvincing character behavior.

It’s hard to imagine anyone, however, having a “Eureka!” experience watching these lame movies, this latest least of all.

[A] rather sleazy time-killer.

As willfully lowbrow dumb fun goes, it’s pretty painless.

The pic provides lots of sexy, neon-hued eye-candy but not many images of deeper resonance.