Dead Alive: RENFIELD and EVIL DEAD RISE

Quite fitting that the horror genre is our most proficient at resurrecting dead franchises. Sometimes it’s a lively jolt. Other times, though, are just as gross and unnatural as the metaphor implies. Take Renfield, a noxious reworking of the Dracula mythos. It’s got exactly one good idea: casting Nicolas Cage as the famous vampire. Explicitly nodding toward the original Universal Monster performance by Bela Lugosi, the movie allows Cage to gnash into his lines with a grinning menace and a blasé affectation. You get the sense that Cage and Dracula alike have been involved in outsized phantasmagorias for so long now that they can do it in their sleep. Unfortunately, the movie never matches Cage’s potential, and ends up dulling his ability to go gleefully over-the-top by sticking him on the sidelines of a manic, hollow, formulaic antihero story. His familiar undead assistant Renfield takes center stage. He’s played by Nicholas Hoult in another of his failure-to-launch leading man roles. Renfield is now little more than a meek serial killer serving up victims for his master, until one day, through unconvincing love-at-first-sight with a cop (Awkwafina) and some vague self-help talk, he decides to kill the old vampire instead. There’s also a whole mess of flimsy story about a preposterous New Orleans mob family and their hair-trigger son (Ben Schwartz) mucking around town that mainly exists to populate the picture with more undifferentiated victims. It’s such a boring slop of a picture, that it can’t even muster the energy to give its setting any real local color among its other unimaginative faults.

The result is waves of gunfire, and goons dismembered in geysers of blood by the lead character as he aw-shucks assures us that he’s doing it for the right reasons. The result is a grindingly predictable movie with smirking attitude toward mayhem and murder that nonetheless asks us to imagine its characters are good and right. Seeing Renfield stand atop a pile of dismembered corpses and claim the moral high ground sure is something. The movie’s incessant jumpiness and inability to take anything seriously runs amok. Its discordant hollowness makes every half-hearted joke clang, every ugly shot composition or smear of muddy color and harsh light harder to watch, and ever self-satisfied cynicism wrapped in sentiment grosser by the second. To see a villain kicked so hard in the stomach that the contents blast out above and below simultaneously is an accurate reflection of all this movie has to offer. A moment like that makes me wonder what the intended reaction is. A laugh? A retch? An admiration that it’s willing to be so sophomorically scatological? In practice it’s a nonstarter, so over-the-top in a deadening film that’s never not at that fevered lack of imagination nothing lands with any impact. What a waste.

Better is Evil Dead Rise, which revivifies the eponymous cult classic series in a new setting. Instead of the cabin in the woods, we get a condemned high-rise apartment on its last few weeks before the remaining few residents have to move out. It’s a dank, creaky place full of ghost stories and dodgy electric work. And that’s before the demons swoop in from the other side. Their victims are even more sympathetic than the youths up for the slaughter in the previous outings. Here it’s a single mom with her teenaged older kids and one sweet moppet, and a pregnant aunt, too. If you think that’ll save them all from possession, zombification, and gruesome deaths, you’d be right for only two of them. Director Lee Cronin does his best to swoosh the camera around and linger on gnarly injuries here and there. A key recurring image is a glowering, brow-forward look that the mutilated corpses get when staring down their prey. It stretches tension as the baddies salivate with the promise of viscera exploding every which way. They’re eager to get to the gore, and Cronin knows how to hold back the pace and keep his few splashy effects to their most effective uses for maximum surprise.

It doesn’t have the hysterical gonzo goofball gore of Raimi’s original trilogy or the squirmingly sustained excessive bodily specificity of Fede Alvarez’s remake. It also doesn’t push as hard, settling into long stretches of suspense and fleeting splatters and queasy insert shots. But it chooses its moments wisely, and shares with its predecessors a giddy fatalism, cut loose from the expected safety. Its respect for human life comes from its willingness to see the desperation on its characters’ faces as the curse comes crashing down with bloody inevitability. Then the fun is, once more, squirming with them. When Cronin swings with a wild idea—a boy choking to death on an eyeball—it lands with the shock and awe that’s the franchise’s calling card. But truly only in an Evil Dead movie can it be a little disappointing when a whirring tattoo gun misses its sensitive mark. (At least the cheese grater hits its mark—ouch.) Still, if the least one of this series is reasonably compelling, slightly underwhelming tension and bloody release, that’s not so bad.

Dragon On:SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has a pretty good first hour. It’s bright and lively. It starts with a flashback about a devious semi-immortal kung-fu kingpin played by the never unappealing Tony Leung. (These superhero movies sure have a way of drawing in the biggest cinema royalty for paychecks and borrowed prestige.) The flashback plays out in some small amount of Zhang Yimou-inspired whooshing marital arts and flowering scenery. Then it hops a couple decades to the man’s grown son (Simu Liu), who fled his bad dad for a life as a normal bloke in San Francisco. He gets the expected call to action when attacked by some brutes on a bus and ends up proving he has moves like Jackie Chan. (He hangs out the window like a guy who’s seen Police Story’s impressive opening sequence.) This is, of course, a surprise to his best friend and comic relief (Awkwafina) who tags along on his journey back to his family where, surprise surprise, his pop is up to supernatural shenanigans that might bring about the end of the world. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, swerving away from the decent, intimate, indie-adjacent dramas he’s been making (like Short Term 12 and Just Mercy) into the bland and shiny machinery of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, nonetheless allows his performers a little bit of room to strut their stuff before the plot gears swallow them up entirely. An early highlight finds Shang-Chi fighting a kabuki-masked baddie up and down towering bamboo scaffolding, an enjoyable mix of place and space and personality juggling characters and variables. Eventually Michelle Yeoh shows up as Auntie Nan, who knows a thing or two about the deep magic of their family and how it might save us all. That’s never a bad choice, either.

But by then, that’s also where the movie's gone big and slow, trading a light touch for a sluggish trudge through exposition, backstory, flimsy family drama, thinning characterization, flat Marvel cameos, and a lengthy CG shooting gallery in which all the major players stare off at the phoniness with faux-profundity between quips. Gloopy beasties flop around and energy beams zip-zap and the apocalypse is trying to burst out of a hole in a cave (big improvement on the old hole-in-the-sky climax, eh?). It is, in other words, a Marvel movie. It has an appealing cast of movie legends, up-and-comers, and character actors trade bouncy banter and establish fun dynamics, ricochet through some clever early action sequences, and wear slick costumes. Then it lets all that dwindle down into routine resolutions involving energy beams and super-punches and swirling pixel clouds. The extent to which this one distinguishes itself is the genre skin it chooses to inhabit—reason for cinephiles to nod in recognition and critics to dutifully list off other, better filmmakers of which the movie reminds them in hopes the MCU fans choose to wander outside the franchise in a mind-expanding direction. (Here: in addition to Yimou and Chan, the fantasy epics of Tsui Hark, Wong-Kar Wai’s Leung-starring Grandmaster, and Ang Lee’s Yeoh collaboration Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.) This is like those but worse and with Iron Man references. The extent to which any of these Marvel programmers works depends entirely on how much escape velocity of affection that first hour gathers before flattening out. For my money, this one is straight down the middle: better than some and worse than others. So it goes.

Jungle 2 Jungle: JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL

These new Jumanji movies Jake Kasdan (of Walk Hard fame) is doing are big frictionless machines of weightless frivolity. They’re adventure films without stakes. They have character based comedy swanning about in broad burlesque stereotypes. They have violence without danger, eccentricities without personality, sex appeal without sex. They’re basically meaningless, and I can hardly retain details of them. And yet they’re something like fun in the moment, and I think of them only fondly. That they happen to be hugely appealing nothings strikes me as a matter of their throwback appeal to a time where a blockbuster can be premised simply on the hook of a high concept and the promise of Movie Star personas on brightest display. The first one — oh-so-loosely inspired by a slim picture book, and the Robin Williams movie of the same name about a jungle board game come to life — took a bunch of teens and yanked them into a jungle adventure video game they had to win to leave. It took obvious delight in seeing The Rock and Kevin Hart and Jack Black and Karen Gillan playing up insecurities of their inner teen players while expressing bewildered curiosity at their adult avatars’ caricature aspects. The Rock is shocked he’s strong, Hart he’s short, Black he’s fat, Gillan she’s midriff-bared male gaze fantasy, and so on. The Next Level does it one better, in the now old fashioned tradition of a sequel just redoing its predecessor with slight twists here and there. This one adds new characters and scrambles the avatars, so even though we’re once more tromping through moderately clever CG action sequences that vaguely comment on the samey repetitions of video games — rope bridge races! dune buggy chases! mountain fortress sneaking! — the personalities are funny and fresh. Now The Rock is impersonating a cranky grandpa played by Danny DeVito by scrunching his face and shouting, and Hart is a charmingly befuddled Danny Glover by lowering his voice and slowing it to just south of molasses. They’re continual delights, surprising and amusing. (And that Black plays the black teen and somehow never irredeemably crosses a line counts as a small Hollywood miracle.) It’s fun! The action is free of sense, while adhering to strict formula. The body swap silliness and jokey quips come frequently enough to keep the laughs coming and the slapstick, though still oddly underutilized for the premise, works just fine. And then where I found the movie oddly half-moving is in its earnest play with identity, a causal, inclusive, warm-hearted fluidity that makes something charmingly sweet out of The Rock looking with grandfatherly love at Awkwafina and calling her "grandson."