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The men of THE MONKEY (2025) clockwise from top left-Theo James, Rohan Campbell and Adam Scott

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The Monkey

Horror has become writer-director Osgood Perkins canvas through which he manages to control his own past traumas by visiting similar scares upon the audience. The results can be uneven. His LONGLEGS (2024), despite a strong visual sense and good performances, has a lot of plot holes. What a surprise, then, that his most controlled and accomplished work to date, THE MONKEY (2025, Hulu), mines those traumas for comedy.

Theo James stars as twins — sensitive Hal and bully Bill — whose childhood is haunted by the presence of a mechanical drum-playing monkey. When you wind it up, the last beat of the drum coincides with an unusual death. After it kills their babysitter, their mother (Tatiana Maslany) and an uncle (Perkins), they chain the thing up and drop it in a well. Twenty-five-years later, Bill calls his now-estranged brother to inform him it’s resurfaced and is taking out the population of the town where they grew up. And he does it the one week of the year Hal has custody of his son (Colin O’Brien), from whom he’s tried to keep his distance for fear the curse will affect him.

This all sounds very serious, but Perkins treats most of the deaths as slapstick showpieces, some of which have the same complicated machinery as in the FINAL DESTINATION films. His timing is spot on in all of them, whether the sudden opening of a closet triggers a shotgun blast or a series of accidents electrifies a swimming pool. And as an added quirk, whenever these things happen near James, he’s showered in blood and body parts. This all comes from a very serious source. Perkins has said his inspiration was the shocking, headline-making deaths of his parents, his father from HIV complications the children never could have expected and his mother in one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. This is reflected in the film’s theme: everybody dies, yet we’re constantly surprised by it. As Bill says at one point, “Did you know that twenty-seven percent of all English-speaking people will say, ‘Oh, sh*t, or “Holy sh*t’ before they die. Now, it’s funny, because death is the one big thing that’ll happen to all of us, and yet we still can’t help but be somehow surprised by it.” The added joke on this is that many of the deaths are so strange you couldn’t expect them, from stampeding horses in the middle of the night to a cobra lurking in a hole in a Maine golf course.

Perkins’ cast keeps the ball in the air throughout. James is so good at differentiating the adult twins that when he shows up as Bill it takes a few shots to realize he’s playing a double role. Maslany makes the most of her limited time as the boys’ eccentric mother. There are also nice bits by Sarah Levy, who deserves more screen time as the eccentric aunt who takes them in, Adam Scott as the father who first got stuck with the monkey, Nicco Del Rio as a hippy priest not sure exactly how to handle a funeral and Elijah Wood as the stepfather who wants to adopt Hal’s son to prove he’s the parenting expert he claims to be in print. O’Brien should get special credit for not getting too mawkish as the son. He’s caught between a father who seems to be rejecting him and a stepfather who seems like a joke, and he keeps catching his biological father in lies about his past. That could be the stuff of soap opera, but the young actor manages to capture an ironic viewpoint that keeps the door open for comedy, even as the film deals with serious family issues.

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Friendship

Cringe comedy is definitely an acquired taste. It’s based on socially awkward situations with which most of us can identify, but maybe we don’t want to. It takes a very special actor — a Eugene Levy or a Catherine O’Hara — to pull us in in spite of ourselves. Tim Robinson has a great comic sensibility. His Netflix series, I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE is often inspired. He has good timing and a body that’s given to awkwardness. But he doesn’t have the grace within that awkwardness or the openness that would make him a great comic actor. That’s one of my main issues with Andrew de Young’s debut feature, FRIENDSHIP (2024, On Demand). There are some good jokes and a funny improvised scene between Robinson and his frequent writing partner Conner O’Malley, but there’s a certain emptiness at its core. You’re never pulled into Robinson’s character.

Robinson is a frustrated narcissist. He’s not as important as he’d like to think at his marketing job, and his wife (Kate Mara) takes more notice because she’s a recent cancer survivor and seems to prefer spending time with her ex-boyfriend. Then he meets his new neighbor, TV weatherman Austin (Paul Rudd), who sucks him into a series of adventures. Before long he’s totally infatuated with his new friend. Austin almost seems to be his first friend. But after one social faux pas, Rudd freezes him out, sending Robinson on a downward spiral.

De Young, who also wrote the screenplay, constructs the film as a shaggy dog story. There’s a long section after Rudd definitively ends the friendship in which Robinson tries to re-create that relationship with his son, the men he works with and even his wife. That works as a reflection of the way we often start imitating the people we find most attractive. But there’s also an underlying sexual tension the film never confronts. Rudd almost seems to seduce Robinson into the relationship, and when the friendship ends, Robinson acts like a spurned lover. At one point, Rudd and his friends even sing a love song to each other. It feels as if the film needs one more beat — something almost happening — in that direction.

Rudd is very good as the man who courts friends as long as he can dazzle and control them. It’s a role that works well with his looks and his natural charm, and he’s not afraid to look foolish or even callow.  There are also nice supporting turns by O’Malley as an angry, frustrated veteran, Jack Dylan Grazer as Robinson’s son and Billy Bryk as a cell phone salesperson with a sideline in drugs. But Robinson doesn’t seem to have a character that goes beyond the surface, nor does it help that he has the lesser Mara sister playing his wife. She also seems to be playing more of the character’s surface than her inner life. There’s no sense that she’s particularly attached to anybody. Without that core of identification with the main characters, the film seems almost more of an academic exercise than an invitation to cringe at our own social awkwardness.

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Sweet Adeline

One of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s best songs, “Why Was I Born,” turns up in one of the worst screen versions of their work. There’s a lot of talent in Mervyn LeRoy’s SWEET ADELINE (1934, TCM), but none of it seems to have penetrated the writer’s room. Erwin S. Gelsey took a Broadway show with a simple plot about a young woman defying paternal wishes to leave the family beer garden and become a Broadway star and larded it down with a labored subplot about the search for a spy during the Spanish-American War. There are places he even seems to forget what the plot is about.

Irene Dunne is Addie, the beer garden singer. She and her younger sister (Nydia Westman) would love to go on stage, but their father (Joseph Cawthorn) opposes it. He’s also against her romance with budding composer Sid (Donald Woods). When Woods tries to convince her to star in his first big show, the quarrel ends their relationship. But Elysia (Winifred Shaw) the star name cast in her place, is a hopeless singer. Woods tricks Dunne into singing “Why Was I Born” in front of the company and, with the backing of suitor Major Day (Louis Calhern), she agrees to take over Shaw’s songs while Shaw will still act the role. Westman lands in the chorus (I think, it’s hard to tell why she keeps hanging around so much) And her father is suddenly fine with it all. Then the show’s lyricist (Hugh Herbert) is appointed to the Secret Service and charged with finding out if Shaw is a spy. Confused? Well, I’ve used that line already this week, so you’ll just have stay that way. I’ll just mention there’s also a final scene that a modern viewer might think suggests the entire film was a play being staged by Woods’ producer (Ned Sparks).

LeRoy was an able craftsman who could do good work. I defy you to get through RANDOM HARVEST (1942) with dry eyes, and his visuals in GYPSY (1962) are pretty impressive. Here he seems to be defeated by the script. The first two acts feel labored, with jokes that don’t land and an inconsequential plot. The only decent visuals early on are the reaction shots when Dunne sings “Why Was I Born.” Otherwise, the film doesn’t take off visually until the show within a show opens. Then choreographer Bobby Connelly stages some decent numbers that, of course, would never fit on any stage. Dunne’s first on-stage number, “Lonely Feet,” is performed with her back to the audience half the time, and the second, “We Were So Young,” features chorus girls on swings who look better from the wings than through the proscenium.

Dunne here is in sappy soap opera mode and at that, isn’t as good as she had been in better written soaps like BACK STREET (1932) or THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1934). There’s just no dramatic meat for her to grab onto. And though she acts her songs well, her soprano style feels out of date. Whether she was out of practice from not having sung on screen in four years or the victim of poor recording equipment, her voice sounds reedy, as though there were no support in the upper register. Woods is competent but you can see how he drifted into B movies. He could trade places with David Manners or Ross Alexander between scenes, and you’d hardly notice. Experienced comic players like Herbert, Sparks and Cawthorn have nothing to work with, so their presence becomes almost grating. And Shaw, who was an accomplished singer in her own right, is wasted playing a woman who can’t sing. Westman and Calhern fare better, partly because it’s such a surprise to see them when they were younger.

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The men of LAVALANTULA (2015) clockwise from top left-Steve Guttenberg, Carlos Bernard and Ian Ziering

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Lavalantula

Do you ever have one of those nights when you keep checking everything on the streaming services and nothing looks right, so you finally just say, “To hell with it” and click on the next thing that comes up? That’s how I wound up watching Mike Mendez’ LAVALANTULA (2015, Prime, YouTube, Tubi, Plex). For the first ten minutes or so, it seemed like a terrible idea. The opening scene, that turns out to be part of a movie someone’s making, is pretty stupid.  And the scenes that follow it setting up action star Colton West’s (Steve Guttenberg) failing career aren’t much better. Then the critters show up, the action kicks into high gear, and you can just surrender to the B-movie madness of it all. It’s a SyFy creature feature that’s entertainingly tacky. After a while, even the bad jokes may make you giggle.

Guttenberghas walks off the set when the cameo he’s filming runs four hours overtime and races home (or rather crawls; this is LA) and right into a volcanic eruption spewing forth fire-breathing giant tarantulas. At first his wife (Nia Peeples) won’t believe him. It’s just another excuse for his failings as a father. And his son (Noah Hunt) didn’t even wait around. He’s off riding bikes with his friends — right into the path of the hot nasties.

The giant bug effects are surprisingly good. The fire effects aren’t.  But that’s just part of the silliness that prevails throughout. Guttenberg shoots the things. He runs over some with a tour bus he’s hijacked, whose passengers are thrilled to have a movie star kidnapping them. He even beats some of the smaller ones into a pulp. And his Peeples and Hunt get in on the action, with the latter accidentally discovering how to take them out for good. Along the way, there are cameos by director Leigh Whannel as the director Guttenberg runs out on, Ian Ziering as his character from the SHARKNADO films and a bunch of Guttenberg’s old castmates from the POLICE ACADEMY films. They even find an excuse for Michael Winslow to do his trick vocal work. It’s all highly improbable, and a lot of the jokes are duds, but it moves so quickly they’re over pretty fast. And every now and then there’s a sassy line-reading or a funny bit like a Hollywood Boulevard sidewalk character impersonating Indiana Jones and running from a giant globe dislodged by the earthquakes. What’s not to love? Every now and then, it feels good to put your critical faculties on hold.

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Old Acquaintance

Vincent Sherman’s OLD ACQUAINTANCE (1943, TCM, HBO Max) is at its best when it sticks closest to the spirit of John Van Druten’s original play, a sophisticated comedy about the longtime friendship of two women who seem opposites. But Warner Bros., Sherman and star Bette Davis were determined to make it something more sentimental, so it keeps moving into soap opera territory. Even Franz Waxman’s score lays on the schmaltz. At the same time, Miriam Hopkins’ attempts at scene stealing in the role of Davis’ temperamental friend, an author of trashy romance novels, keeps pushing the film into the realms of camp.

Davis is a novelist, a critical success who doesn’t sell much. She and Hopkins have been friends since childhood, when Hopkins’ parents took her in when she was orphaned. On a rare visit home, Hopkins announces that she’s about to give birth to a child and her first novel. It’s the first in s string of hits, and she keeps “grinding them out like sausage,” as suggested by a female reporter (Anne Revere, in a wickedly funny supporting performance that may make you wish she’d taken Hopkins’ role). Hopkins’ success and temperament drive away her husband (John Loder), who’s now in love with Davis.  But Davis refuses him out of loyalty. Eventually Davis is dating a younger man (Gig Young, who was also dating her off-screen) and trying to keep Hopkins’ daughter (Dolores Moran) under control, while Hopkins hopes for a reunion with her husband only to learn he’s engaged to another woman while still carrying a torch for Davis. Confused? You won’t be after this episode of…

Davis is actually quite good. She said Kit was closer to her than any other character she’d played on screen (but then, who would admit to being like Mildred, Leslie Crosbie or Regina Giddens), and with her loose pageboy in the earlier scenes she looks a lot like photos of her relaxing at home. Faced with Hopkins’ florid over-playing, Davis is wise enough not to compete.  The performance in the first two segments is low-keyed and even naturalistic, or as naturalistic as the contrived plot will let her be. There’s also a lightness about it that creates moments of wit, a hint of what might have been had they stayed closer to the spirit of the original. Davis develops a convincing physicality to carry Kit from her twenties to her thirties and into her forties. And in the character’s forties, Davis’ performance — the increasingly clipped diction, that fascinating combination of louche relaxation and tense erectness — looks like her acting style from the ‘50s. She’s not the whole show. Loder is quite good as the unhappy husband, and Esther Dale is a lot of fun as Davis’ outspoken maid.

But the plot at times stretches credulity to the breaking point. With Hopkins’ overstated performance (there is a difference between playing a character who wants attention and being an actor who clearly wants attention), it’s hard to believe anybody as sensible as Davis’ Kit would ever put up with her much less treat her with the warmth and sympathy Davis displays in most of their scenes. And as pretty as he is, Young’s performance is so bumptious and immature (he’d improve a lot with age), it’s hard to believe Davis would be involved with him. Of course, it’s also disappointing to see Davis wasting her talents on this weak material. The comforts of the studio system and that binding Warner Bros. contract, which, to her credit, she had tried to get out of in the 1930s, meant that when she should have been working on her first stab at Medea or Lady M. or the sophisticated ladies of Moliere and Sheridan, she was instead trying to bring life to something like this. At the same time, however, it’s important to note that this is another in a string of films in which she played strong, independent women. It’s ultimately clear she doesn’t need a man to live a full life, and that was an image that resonated with audiences during the Depression and the war years.

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The men of FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES (2025) clockwise from top left-Richard Harmon, Max Lloyd Jones, Owen Patrick Joyner and Tinpo Lee

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Final Destination: Bloodlines

Call me impatient. By rights I should be going through the FINAL DESTINATION franchise in order, but that would have meant sitting through the worst entry — FINAL DESTINATION 3 (2006), the one with the roller coaster malfunction — next. Instead, I jumped straight to the most recent, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES (2025, HBO Max), because who needs numbers. It’s bigger and deathier, which for once turns out to be a good thing. It even has scenes that strive to be about more than creative ways of killing people. It also confirmed my resolve never to visit the Space Needle in Seattle or CN Tower in Toronto.

It opens with the biggest premonition of disaster in the franchise. In 1969, Iris (Bric Bassinger) attends the opening of her small town’s new Skyview restaurant tower and has a vision of its collapse. Years later, her granddaughter (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has recurring nightmares about the disaster that never happened. Through digging, she locates her estranged grandmother (the wonderful Canadian actress Gabrielle Rose) and visits her seemingly death-proof house in the woods. There she learns that Rose/Bassinger saved everybody at the Skyview that night, but death claimed them and any children born afterwards in the order in which they had died in her premonition. When Rose is killed in yet another freak accident, death starts coming for her children and grandchildren.

The script by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor spends more time getting started than did other franchise entries. After that premonition, it takes a while to get to the first death. But they use the time looking at how the situation has affected the family. Bassinger/Rose became an overprotective mother, locking her kids away to keep them safe until child protective services stepped in. And Juana’s mother (Rya Kihlstedt) deserted her family when she realized she was starting to act like her own mother. This is aided by a strong cast that relates well to each other. There’s a great joking rapport between Juana and her kid brother (Ted Briones) that’s topped by that between her two male cousins (Richard Harmon and Owen Patrick Joyner). Those two have good comic timing, which helps keep the film from being a slog about death.  And, of course, there’s Tony Todd’s justly lauded last performance, which ties his character very neatly into the whole FINAL DESTINATION mythos and gives him a well-played farewell to his fans.

Then there are the death scenes. Lipovsky and Stein have edited them tightly and the screenplay does a good job of planting details that will turn deadly. They’re all nifty little mayhem machines. The opening is very impressive; it’s catastrophe on a grand scale with really good effects. But there’s also a lot to be said for the first death following Rose’s, which cuts effectively between Juana’s discovering what’s going on from her grandmother’s notes and the deadly details of a family cookout. Being the hairpin I am, I laughed out loud at most of these. There’s one death in the background that almost seems planned to be a joke. After a while, the film seems like a Wile E. Coyote family reunion, though I give the directors and writers credit for successfully getting more serious when they need to. Not that that’s the end of death’s magical mystery tour. As the highest-grossing film in the franchise, FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES is bound to have some offspring of its own, though it’s hard to imagine what could top this one’s opening. Nuclear holocaust, anyone?

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Nobody Lives Forever

NOBODY LIVES FOREVER (1946, TCM) may be the perfect title for a John Garfield film. That it’s not the perfect Garfield film is not his fault. It’s just that W.R. Burnett’s script, originally intended for Humphrey Bogart, isn’t as tough as the quintessential Garfield films BODY AND SOUL (1947) and FORCE OF EVIL (1948). Still, it’s an engaging film noir and a good example of director Jean Negulesco’s facility with moody thrillers before he moved from Warner Bros. to 20th Century-Fox and discovered Cinemascope.

Garfield is a con man who wants to go straight after serving in World War II. That’s not as easy as it sounds, particularly when you’re Garfield. He lets himself get talked into one last con, setting himself up in a posh LA hotel to try bilking wealthy widow Geraldine Fitzgerald. He’s hot and psychically wounded. She’s pretty and soulful. Romance is inevitable, which doesn’t sit well with his partners, led by a sweaty, desperate George Coulouris.

Negulesco and cinematographer Arthur Edeson set up a powerful dichotomy between the dark shadows of the seedier areas of Los Angeles (which looks a lot like the Warner Bros. New York street) and the sunny world in which the wealthy move. That’s a good visual correlative to the plot, which moves Garfield from crime to honesty. The art department follows suit with a collection of dilapidated bars and chic hotel rooms, and Milo Anderson dresses Fitzgerald and femme fatale Faye Emerson attractively and in character. The whole is maybe a bit too predictable, particularly if you know about the Production Code. Garfield is rarely shown breaking the law, and the action is even manipulated so that whatever the body count, he never kills anybody.

With a cast combining the Group Theater’s first star, two Mercury Theater alums and a raft of reliable studio contract players, the film seems more an assemblage of solid character actors than a star vehicle. Even the comic relief — mostly provided by George Tobias as Garfield’s assistant, with a brief appearance by Grady Sutton as a waiter in a cheap diner — seems grounded. Garfield and Fitzgerald may not generate the kind of heat he and Lana Turner had in the previous year’s THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1945), but that wouldn’t be appropriate for a film in which Garfield is influenced not by lust but rather by a more spiritual love. When each talks about their past, the scenes are deeply felt and specific. You also get nice work from Emerson as the woman who betrayed Garfield during the war (she seems to have done her best screen acting for Negulesco, who also directed her effectively in 1944’s THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS), Tobias, Coulouris and Walter Brennan as a sympathetic aging conman.

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Although best known today as aging Lothario Roger Blaystock on EMMERDALE, Patrick Mower started out as an engaging young thing in British horror films like THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968) and CRY OF THE BANSHEE (1971).

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The Devil Rides Out

As the Satanist Mocata, based on Aleister Crowley, Charles Gray would like, if he may, to take cute young Patrick Mower on a strange journey, but French duke Christopher Lee keeps getting in the way, clearly because he wants Mower for himself. That’s my take on Terence Fishers’ THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968, TCM), and I’m sticking to it. Although it’s rather dialog-heavy for a horror film and the period sense is often lacking, the adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s 1934 novel has a certain Hardy Boys charm to it. It moves well and at times seems more civilized adventure film (there’s even a car chase) than horror flick.

In 1929, Rex (Leon Greene) flies to England for a reunion with an old friend, the Duc de Richeleau (Lee), and the man’s protégé, Simon (Mower). Only Simon isn’t there. On visiting him, they discover he’s joined a Satanic cult run by Gray, so they try to save him and the pretty young Tanith (Nike Arrighi) from becoming bonded members on the Sabbath. They’re aided by Lee’s niece (Sarah Lawson) and her skeptical husband (Paul Eddington), but can they stand against a villain who can control minds and send the Angel of Death after them?

Fisher keeps the whole thing clipping along with some tight editing and a lot of movement, even though it’s another piece where the script seems to be making up the rules of magic as it goes along, and the special effects are sub-standard. It’s hard to get worried about characters threatened by a badly matted tarantula or phony looking flames, and the Angel of Death’s horse keeps losing its wings. And though the cars look right for 1929 (a good thing given how much driving the characters do), the women’s clothes are only vaguely in period, and their hair doesn’t come within spitting distance.

The film has been interpreted as a heavily Christian story, with the forces of good using a cross along with quotes from the Bible and the mass to fight against the powers of Satan. Much of the plot also seems determined to protect the patriarchal family order, with Greene almost forcing Arrighi into coupledom while the one married couple battles to save their daughter from the Satanic villain. Yet there are also hints of subversion. Without going into spoilers, I’ll just say it takes a woman to win the day. And there’s also the curious absence of female love interests for Lee, Mower and Gray. No wonder it reads as though Gray were trying to steal away Lee’s boytoy, with the forces of Christianity aligned to support the young man’s original daddy.

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The Tenant

Roman Polanski’s THE TENANT (1976, On Demand) may be his most personal work. Like the other films in his loose Apartment Trilogy, REPULSION (1965) and ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968), it deals with the paranoia of apartment life, a feeling far from alien for a concentration camp survivor and expatriate like Polanski. The theme of identity loss can also be seen as reflective of his status as a Jew in an anti-Semitic world. And there’s also a sense of guilt running through the film that could relate to the Manson murders and the loss of his wife and unborn child while he was out of the country. Could that intense identification of auteur and subject be partly responsible for the film’s loose, sometimes unsatisfying structure?

The picture combines two major plot elements. Trelkovsky (Polanski), a Pole living in Paris, rents an apartment and finds himself continually accused of breaking the rules about noise. At times, he deserves the complaints. A party for co-workers from an architecture film does indeed become too noisy too late at night. But at other times, it seems the other tenants and the landlord (Melvyn Douglas) want him to do nothing in his living space. Just moving a chair triggers angry knocking on the wall. The other plot strain concerns Trelkovsky’s fighting his own transsexual nature. He becomes fascinated with Simone, the previous tenant who committed suicide. When he discovers her makeup kit left behind in the apartment, he tries painting his nails and later wakes up to discover he had put on her makeup in his sleep. Eventually, he buys a wig and high heels and dons a dress she had left behind so he can sit around the room as her. And he has problems relating sexually to women. When one of the female guests at his party drapes herself over his legs, he pretty much ignores it. At another point he gets drunk and goes home with one of Simone’s friends, Stella (Isabella Adjani), but can’t respond to her advances. There’s even a visual joke when he wakes up the next morning with his shirt still buttoned all the way up. He only makes love to her much later, when he's fighting his desire to become Simone.

Polanski loads the film with atmosphere. You can almost smell the paranoia radiating from each frame. There are also very funny absurd moments that link this film to Polanski’s early shorts and CUL-DE-SAC (1966). Trelkovsky’s first meeting with the concierge (Shelley Winters, whose every line seems to have wandered in from an Ionesco play) and his attempt to dispose of trash after his party become exercises in comic futilit6y. Yet Polanski’s so concerned with creating atmospheres he never gets around to developing a coherent plot. There are fascinating episodes, but there’s no real sense of dramatic movement. Although he lays the groundwork for some kind of gender dysphoria in Trelkovsky, the move toward becoming Simone doesn’t surface until late in the movie. There’s an attempt to link it with the character’s paranoia when he claims the other apartment house residents are trying to make him become her, but that never registers as more than an excuse for desires he can’t handle. It’s almost as if the dysphoria were simply tacked on to give the paranoid plot a slam bang finish.

For me, there was also a problem in the way Polanki the director handled Polanski the actor. He uses himself primarily as an object. There are no efforts to get inside his psyche. He’s more of a lab specimen than a character. By contrast, the veteran actors cast as his neighbors are very real, very human. Even with her absurdist dialog, Winters creates a fully realized human being as the put-upon concierge, and the performance is very different from the stock character work she was getting away with at the time. Also notable are Douglas, Lila Kedrova as a persecuted tenant, Rufus as a man in love with the late Simone and, in her last feature, Jo Van Fleet, whose main scene as a snooty tenant is almost a textbook lesson in how to personalize every syllable of a script. After a while, you may wish the film would forget about its main character and just focus on the periphery.

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The men of FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003) clockwise from top left-Michael Landes, Shaun Sipos, David Paetkau, Jonathan Cherry, T.C. Carson

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Final Destination 2

I have contradictory responses to films like David R. Ellis’ FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003, HBO Max, Tubi). I cringe, squeal and look away at many of the grisly bits, particularly the protracted “death as Rube Goldberg” ones in this franchise. Yet I also laugh at the twistsed, sometimes forced workings of fate. And of course, when they get really bad, I laugh at the inept filmmaking. There’s less of that in the franchise’s second installment, though the absence of too much monkey dump doesn’t necessarily make it a great film.

This time out the averted disaster is a multi-car pile-up triggered when a truck hauling lumber starts to lose its load. And the prophet is a young woman (A.J. Cook) whose realization of what’s about to happen saves herself and ten other people from death at least for a while. And for a change of pace, death decides to reassert itself in reverse order. Eventually, she calls on Clear (Ali Larter), the only survivor from the first film, to help herfigure out how to avoid various colorful and often stomach-churning demises. If you’re wondering how that works out for them, you’ve probably never seen any films in the franchise.

In terms of the series’ development, this one has a much more elaborate opening premonition. It takes something like seven minutes for Cook to see a variety of shocking deaths, and they’re very persuasively shot and edited. You could, if you wished, just watch that sequence on YouTube and have done with it. This is also the first film in which the protagonist has additional premonitions, though these aren’t all that elaborate. The film also has more humor than the first while also introducing the gratuitous nudity and drug jokes what would provide cheap laughs in later entries.

There are lots of logical lapses. Cook only directly witnesses a few of the deaths in her premonition yet seems to know the order in which most of them took place. And there’s nothing made of the fact hunky police officer (Michael Landes) was the first to go. That might seem a rather important detail when you’re trying to keep track of who’s next on death’s dance card.

Still, Ellis, a former second-unit director and stunt man, keeps things moving well and points all the elements necessary to build suspense in the more elaborate death sequences. And the make-up, if you can pry your eyes open, is quite effective. The cast is better than one might expect, with Cook — caught between her lovely, ethereal role in THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999) and her workmanlike and occasionally quite good work on CRIMINAL MINDS — hitting all her beats effectively. Jonathan Cherry as a cokehead and Justina Machado as a pregnant woman about to give birth pull off some of the better comic moments. The real standout, though, is Tony Todd, returning as William Bludworth, mortician and voice of death. He gets to inject a little more humor into his role and seems to be relishing his position as horror icon. You will, too, if you can get through the rest of the film to catch his one scene.

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Payment on Demand

Bette Davis and Barry Sullivan grab a weak script by the neck and wrestle it into something resembling a serious motion picture in Curtis Bernhardt’s PAYMENT ON DEMAND (1951, HBO Max). Originally titled “The Story of a Divorce,” the film follows husband and wife Sullivan and Davis through an acrimonious break-up, with flashbacks explaining how they got there. But despite Davis’ star presence, it’s very much a male view of marriage and a woman’s place.

The film opens in the present, as wealthy lawyer Sullivan asks his ambitious wife (Davis) for a divorce. She reflects on the earlier years of their relationship, leading to flashbacks depicting the tricks she used to put him in place as a member of a powerful steel company and a leader of San Francisco society. Before they get to the final settlement, it’s clear the thirst for success has turned her into a manipulative monster who doesn’t trust her husband to make the choices for their family.

Curtis, who co-wrote the script, was a proficient director who knew how to keep things moving smoothly and create images that reinforce the action and characters. He also chose to shoot the flashbacks in a stylized manner reminiscent of DEATH OF A SALESMAN; the walls of memory are transparent, creating a visual distinction to balance the rather schematic development of Davis’ character. He’s so determined to make her the villain, it’s rather hard to believe anybody would have anything to do with her. Nor is there a hint of anything Sullivan did wrong except to give into her while she made him rich. The film even seems to justify his affair with another woman (Frances Dee). And when Davis reforms, it’s not because she’s learned the error of her ways but rather because once the divorce goes through, she’s lonely.

And somehow or other, Davis makes this claptrap work. One of the great misfortunes of the American entertainment industry is that our film and theater centers are on opposite sides of the country. Where great British and European actors could move easily between film and theater, with people like Maggie Smith, Ian McKellan, Louis Jouvet and Vittorio Gassman playing the classical works, an actress like Davis never got to take on the roles she was born for. She certainly got to play some great characters on screen — Mildred in OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1934) and Margo Channing in ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) chief among them — but she spent much of her career shoring up weak scripts. Here she uses her clipped delivery to capture her character’s growing hardness as she becomes steeped in her acquired social standing. But she also uses it with wit in early scenes. And her silent reactions, simply walking through her room after being asked for a divorce, are bits of screen poetry that generate a sympathy the script fails to develop.

In a role with less screen time or acting opportunities, Sullivan more than holds his own. He’s a match for Davis in the fight scenes and, though his age makeup isn’t as convincing as hers, captures the physicality of a man worn down by an unfortunate marriage. There’s also a wonderful supporting turn by Jane Cowl, in her last film. The stage legend is a social leader courted by Davis early on, and she plays their scene with wit and restraint. Later, Davis meets the now divorced Cowl, who’s living in the Caribbean with a kept man, and she manages to capture the sense of a woman who knows she’s become vaguely ridiculous without ever seeming ridiculous herself. It’s a gem of a performance that, like Davis’ and Sullivan’s work, deserved a better script.

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The Pact

The ads for Nicholas McCarthy’s THE PACT (2012, Shudder, AMC+, Tubi, YouTube) warn “Some doors should never be opened.” To that, I’m tempted to add, “Some films should never be seen.” I’m only tempted, because the picture has its supporters. I, however, do not happen to be one of them.

Annie (Caity Lotz) was not intending to attend her abusive mother’s funeral, but when her sister, Nicole, goes missing in the family home, she has to find out what happened. After the funeral, the cousin who was caring for Nicole’s child also disappears from the house, and an invisible force sends Annie flying around the place. The police suspect she did something to the missing women, but sympathetic detective Creek (Casper Van Dien) helps her search the house, where they find a room Annie never knew existed. There are various other ghostly goings on that lead Annie to a terrible discovery about a family member she had never even known about and a series of unsolved murders.

I’ve missed seeing Lotz’s work since the CW unceremoniously dumped DC’S LEGENDS OF TOMORROW, but unlike THE MACHINE (2013), a horror film that gave her a good deal of range to play as a sentient robot killing machine, this picture sticks her in an enervating state of sullenness until almost the end. The only chance she really gets to display any talent comes when something starts throwing her around the house. Her dance training makes for some convincing moves, and the film almost seems about to take off and become something.

But I don’t think McCarthy knows what that something is. Is it a ghost story or a serial killer saga? There’s no clear focus, particularly since the ghost’s behavior is rather inconsistent. Why does it throw Lotz around the house but later try to help her. What’s changed? Does anybody know? Does McCarthy? There’s also an issue with pace. THE PACT originally was an acclaimed short that premiered at Sundance. That won the writer-director the chance to expand it, but getting it to feature length often seems to mean having characters make choices designed to draw the action out. The ghost pins a location on Lotz’s phone that leads to a picture of a park. Lotz goes there and then takes forever just walking up to a bench she’d seen in the picture before she goes back to the shot and finds an important clue. Why does it have to take her so long? Why do we spend so much time watching her draw a Ouija board’s layout on a floor in the house when we can tell what she’s doing right away? It begins to feel the answer is to get the film up to almost 90 minutes, and frankly, those are 90 minutes I’ll never get back.