AUGUST 3 — As the summer movie season starts to wind down, the choices of movies opening in Malaysian cinemas have become a bit more interesting.

The past week is case in point, as outside of The Lion King remake and still-playing Hollywood blockbusters like Spider-Man: Far from Home and Men In Black: International, all the other movies opening in local cinemas have quite different flavours.

Quite a few are horror movies, with two coming from neighbouring countries Thailand and Indonesia (Curses and Kuntilanak 2 respectively), battling it out with the excellent Crawl and the still-playing Annabelle Comes Home.

A fifth one arrives in the form of the latest Blumhouse film Ma, so I’ll be talking about that one alongside another title I’ve been excitedly anticipating, the latest Luc Besson film Anna and the Elton John biopic Rocketman. Are they worth your time and money? Let’s find out!

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Ma

The trailer probably got all of us pumped to see it — a combination of an A-grade Oscar calibre actress (Octavia Spencer) with an established Oscar-bait director (Tate Taylor, who directed The Help and Get On Up) doing a horror flick for Blumhouse sounds all kinds of interesting and fun.

And it is a reasonably fun horror flick, a kind of throwback to 90s psycho thrillers like Misery and Single White Female, this time about a lonely veterinarian’s assistant named Sue Ann who befriends a group of teenagers by helping them buy alcohol, and then slowly tries to insert herself into their lives by letting them drink and party in her basement.

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Lonely people and creepy basements are never good signs if you’re a character in a horror film, so the kids here should know better than to be buddies with Sue Ann (whom they’re calling Ma, hence the film’s title), so I think you can more or less imagine what happens next.

All I’ll say is, if you’ve seen Misery and Carrie, you’ll know where the movie’s going. My own takeaway from this movie — Tate Taylor is not much of a horror director, at least not yet, as he seems to be caught between his normal dramatic sensibilities in trying to empathise with Ma’s situation, and a quite apparent hesitation to provide the kind of campy violence that this kind of film calls for.

Anna

Let me just be frank, I’ve long been a fan of Luc Besson’s, even long after the generally accepted glories of his first few films.

Like the Wachowskis, Besson has this simple and naive conviction in telling his normally illogical stories that I just find irresistible, especially when he reaches the giddy heights (or cheesy low, depending on which film critic you’re reading) of films like The Fifth Element. I even loved The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec and Lucy, which I don’t think a lot of people loved.

So even if he’s simply rehashing his early hit La Femme Nikita with Anna (which has already been rehashed by Red Sparrow and even Atomic Blonde), it still doesn’t dissipate the effect that his energetic filmmaking has on its audience as Anna remains an exciting, giddy exercise in action filmmaking, with lead actress Sasha Luss convincingly pulling off her action moves as a female super spy trying to fight her way to freedom using her espionage skills.

The film’s centrepiece, a sort of “audition” for her job as a KGB agent as she fights off a whole roomful of men armed with guns, knives and whatnot, as familiar as it may seem, is a gloriously shot and choreographed bit of movie mayhem, a sort of “Jane Wick” caught in that Kingsman church scene.

But to talk about this film will also mean that charges of sexual misconduct against Besson by nine women in the French publication Mediapart, dragging the film into the #MeToo debate, will also play in the viewers’ head, which probably explains the low key release of the film by its studio in the US.

This could’ve been former model Luss’ big break, but by the looks of it she’ll have to wait for whenever her next film opens.

Rocketman

Comparisons with the fairly recent Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody will most definitely be forthcoming for anyone walking in to see Rocketman, a biopic of Elton John.

Like most musical biopics that have come out of Hollywood, Rocketman again follows the tried and true rags to riches and against all odds formula, with the framing device here being a rehab session in which an older Elton recounts his life and musical journey from a talented piano-playing little kid in England to the global superstar that he is now.

All the ingredients you expect from such a journey, from family issues to the typical sex drugs and rock n roll problems are all here, which of course sounds exactly like Bohemian Rhapsody, doesn’t it?

Where this film differs is that it’s actually a full-blown musical fantasia at times, with plenty of song and dance musical sequences used by director Dexter Fletcher as ways to express Elton’s inner state of mind.

As skilfully shot as the whole film is, for me there’s just something lacking emotionally here, as the whole thing feels a bit too episodic and perfunctory. So while I enjoyed the songs, I just wasn’t moved much by the film, which was something that Bohemian Rhapsody at least managed to do for me.

But in terms of visual extravaganza, Rocketman and director Dexter Fletcher’s inventive staging is the clear winner here.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.