Prolific character actor Richard Riehle has more than 400 movie and TV credits, including two of this week’s low-profile VOD releases. Can you guess which ones? (Hint: He’s not a giant CGI dinosaur.)
4/20 (VOD March 25): “Clerks in a dispensary” is a perfectly solid idea, and this ensemble comedy generates a handful of laughs from the various oddball characters who hang around an LA marijuana establishment on the high holiday for getting high. Mostly, though, 4/20 feels like a stale sitcom pilot, with gags about senior citizens getting stoned and teenagers attempting to use fake IDs to buy legal weed. Buck’s Buds owner Buck (K.C. Clyde) needs his specially designed new strain to be a hit on 4/20, otherwise his business will be shut down, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. There’s not much urgency to the story, though, and directors Noah Applebaum and Teri Fruichantie (collectively credited pseudonymously as “Bud Sticky”) give equal time to several dead-end subplots, including a cloying arc about teenage friendship. It’s tough to buy into the emotional growth of Buck and his buds, but the characters are pleasant enough that 4/20 avoids being a total bummer. Grade: C
Let the Wrong One In (VOD and select theaters April 1): It’s a bit surprising that no one has used this title yet, although there’s less of a parody element to this Irish vampire comedy than the wordplay might indicate. Writer-director Conor McMahon instead crafts an amiable story that’s closer to Shaun of the Dead. The “wrong one” is Deco (Eoin Duffy), deadbeat drug-addict older brother of teenager Matt (Karl Rice). A drunken night at a club leads to Deco waking up as a vampire, and he desperately turns to Matt for help. The brothers warily reconcile while Deco occasionally tries to suck Matt’s blood, and they spar with a bumbling vampire hunter played by Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Anthony Head. The comedy can get repetitive over 100 minutes, and McMahon makes minimal use of the entertaining villains, a bachelorette party who were all turned into vampires on a trip to Transylvania. Still, good-natured vibes prevail, both for the battling brothers and for the movie. Grade: B-
Madelines (VOD and select theaters April 1): It’s never a good idea for movie scientists to experiment on themselves, a lesson that Madeline (Brea Grant) learns the hard way after a wine-fueled test run of the time machine she’s been building with her husband Owen (Parry Shen). Thanks to a coding error, Madeline creates a repeating process that returns a new version of her every day at the same time. At first, Madeline and Owen decide that, since two versions of the same person can’t exist in the same space and time, they need to murder each Madeline as she arrives, which leads to a series of gruesome set pieces that director Jason R. Miller somewhat incongruously plays for laughs. Grant (who co-wrote the script with Miller) gives Madeline the right sardonic edge to make the morbid humor work, although the plot eventually loses momentum. The special effects can’t always match the movie’s ambitions, but there’s enough cleverness to make up for the limited resources. Grade: B
Boon (VOD and select theaters April 1): For his screenwriting debut, TV and B-movie mainstay Neal McDonough takes his stoic, fedora-wearing hitman character from 2021’s Red Stone and turns him into a boring, upstanding hero. Sick of his life of crime, McDonough’s Nick Boon is living in a secluded cabin in the Pacific Northwest, but crime finds him anyway, thanks to his neighbor and her teenage son. Catherine (Christiane Seidel) is in debt to an underworld syndicate, who are using their leverage with her to build a tunnel on her property for illicit smuggling. The sparse, monotonous movie slowly builds to a confrontation between Boon and the local criminals, whose operation is as threadbare as the production itself. Working with Red Stone director and co-writer Derek Presley, McDonough adds in some vague religious themes about redemption alongside the stock crime elements, but none of it lands. If he’s trying to build a low-budget franchise for himself, he’s not off to a promising start. Grade: C-
Jurassic Island (VOD April 5; DVD April 11): It seems like a given that a place called Jurassic Island would be home to presumed-extinct species of dinosaurs, but this mysterious, uncharted island adds in the bonus of leeches that turn people into zombies. Zombified human actors are a lot more budget-friendly than CGI dinosaurs, which may be one reason why director and co-writer Dominic Ellis combines the two unrelated dangers on the nameless island where humanitarian aid worker Ava (Sarah T. Cohen) travels to search for her missing parents. Ava and her companions make many stupid decisions in their haphazard rescue efforts, and seem remarkably unprepared for the dangers they’re facing (“Good grief, that’s a dinosaur,” one says when they first encounter the prehistoric beasts). The filmmakers are equally ill-equipped to depict those dangers, and the dinosaurs often look like they’ve been superimposed on top of the footage, rather than integrated into the action. The characters run and yell, but nobody does anything useful or interesting. Grade: D 
