Jacob Oller

Wadlow has proven that he has the range to make both clumsy horror that accidentally operates as comedy and clumsy comedies that fail to lampoon horror. The Devil’s Mouth, with its grating dialogue and doggy-paddle pace, is the former. Not only is it a bad movie, it seems like it was a bad vacation.

Sheep In The Box takes the Nerf shotgun approach to the robot-kid movie, where even its scattered moments of impact are soft, plastic, and more annoying than anything else.

Less of a direct spoof than either Wet Hot American Summer or They Came Together, Gail Daughtry And The Celebrity Sex Pass gestures at larger Hollywood mythos, but its humor gets lost along the way—even though it’s equipped with a map to the stars.

Moana’s quest—to restore health to her island by returning a magic stone to a disgruntled island goddess—remains strong, as does the reprised soundtrack of soaring songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda. But that very strength means that watching Lagaʻaia and Johnson go through the motions is like watching a drama club production of a well-loved favorite. You know what Moana could be, so it’s easy to see what this Moana lacks.

It’s director-star Olivia Wilde’s tight, warm control of her ensemble that keeps the awkwardly horny dinner party moving forward through its clunkier courses.

Even the third-act pivot, which pushes Unidentified further into campy, confused daytime TV territory, can’t rouse an audience nodding off after a stakeless, thrill-free whodunnit. But it does help undermine whatever social message al-Mansour might’ve offered about the way women live and die in modern Saudi Arabia, without even tapping into the joyous tastelessness of some of its peers.

This is lizard-brain ass-kicking, done about as well as you could hope, with a variety of martial art styles, ridiculous weaponry, and oddball characters for flavor.

Mumenthaler accesses both sides of Lina’s uncanny dissociation, the lonesome and the sublime. It’s a captivating assessment of a hypersensitive mental state, nonjudgmental yet clear-eyed about the power it holds over its subject. But what allows The Currents to sweep you away is its understanding of impermanence.

It’s a slow drip towards the end, reality running out like blood from a vein, leaving only a body of stories behind. But without a compelling narrative or affecting emotions at its core, the subversion is often as shallow as the legend.

Savage House is caught, then, in a conundrum like that posing its characters: It’s too respectable to entirely ignore, yet too obvious and coarse to entertain those whose attention it courts.