The Bondsman, on Prime Video

You cannot get much more Country than a singing bail bondsman. Like Charlie Daniels, Hub Halloran will have some seriously demonic encounters down in Georgia. Unfortunately, instead of beating the Devil, Halloran is stuck working for him in creator Grainger David’s eight-episode Blumhouse-produced The Bondsman, which premieres tomorrow on Prime Video.

Halloran took over his mother Kitty’s bail bond business, but at one time, he harbored musical ambitions, like his ex-wife Maryanne Dice. Her career is poised for a resurgence, but something went very wrong for him. Actually, a lot went wrong for him. Long story short, her “reformed” Boston mobster boyfriend Lucky Callahan had his thugs murder Halloran. He was Hell-bound, but the infernal organization sent him back to Earth to recapture demons that escaped from downstairs.

The bondsman’s equally damned Earthly supervisor Midge Kusatsu makes it clear this is only a temporary reprieve. Eternal torment awaits, but at least he can secure some closure with his son Cade, whose own musical talent Halloran never properly encouraged. Of course, he would also like a little payback from Callahan. Plus, there is the matter of the mysterious unforgivable sin that condemned him in the first place. Halloran is cagey whenever his mother asks, having discovered the demonic nature of his new business. Unfortunately, Callahan strongly suspects the truth.

Of course, Halloran keeps hoping he can find a loop-hole to wriggle out of his infernal dilemma, Instead, he uncovers evidence the jailbreaks from Hell are part of something even bigger that could potentially trigger the End of Days.

Kevin Bacon is perfectly cast as flinty old Halloran and Beth Grant is frequently hilarious as Grandma Kitty. They develop totally believable chemistry as mother and son. Australian thesp Damon Herrimon is also spectacularly sleazy and slimy as Callahan. Frankly, he is so entertainingly villainous, he inadvertently makes Jennifer Nettles and Maxwell Jenkins look like idiots playing Maryanne and Cade. They must be denser than diamonds not to see what a creep Herrimon’s Callahan so obviously is.

Regardless, it is jolly good fun to watch Bacon scowl, grimace wearily, and then blast demons back to the inferno they came from. However, instead of building to a big crescendo, the concluding episode sort of deflates. It also lacks any sense of closure whatsoever, which is frustrating (especially if there is no season two). Arguably, this is another series that should have been one or two episodes tighter.

Still, the mordant black humor is quite amusing, particularly the management structure for Hell’s operations, which is indeed quite Hellish. The tone of the writing produced by David, showrunner Erik Oleson, and Satinder Kaur perfectly suits Bacon and Grant.

Hover: Keep Watching the Skies

Drones—they’re not just for delivering Amazon packages anymore. They can also kill people Scanners-style. That is what you call a practical application. Unfortunately, a slow, lingering death seems to be a common side effect among farmers who adopted drone technology. When she isn’t killing people, a euthanasia specialist will try to get to the bottom of the mystery in Matt Osterman’s Hover (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Claudia and her partner John are busier than ever dispatching clients in their district. Their latest case work was especially difficult, because she just discovered the boss made her pregnant and he is dealing with the very early stages of a fatal illness. Of course, that gives the conspirators a perfect cover story when they fake his suicide to prevent him blowing the whistle on their arrangement.

Somehow the nonprofit and euphemistically named Transitions is in league with the drone company. Claudia will start to put the pieces together herself with the help of some rural conspiracy cranks and a dissident maintenance worker at the drone company.

Yes, that’s right, Hover combines two super-fun topics: euthanasia and agriculture. Hello! Is anyone still reading this? Arguably, Hover essentially reworks the premise of Michael Crichton’s Runaway, but what was cautionary speculation in 1984 is basically old news in 2018.

Still, Osterman invests the film with a moody vibe that mostly works for it, but screenwriter Cleopatra Coleman struggles to carry the film as its weak lead. On the other hand, Craig muMs Grant is worth remembering for future casting thanks to the smart and intense presence he shows as John. Not surprisingly, Beth Grant is convincingly nutty as the tinfoil hat wearing Joanna, while Dré Starks is a real standout as Victor Smith, the paranoid and anti-social son of a Transitions client. Plus, it is fun to see horror movie regular Fabianne Therese appear as Claudia’s duplicitous assistant, Tania.

You have to give Osterman and Coleman credit for their thoughtful and complex treatment of euthanasia. This is not an advocacy film by any stretch. It might even damper some viewers’ enthusiasm for the practice. It also avoids most of the dystopian clichés, setting the film in a world nearly indistinguishable from our own. Still, a little bit a future world building would have made the visuals more interesting. The resulting film is well-meaning, but probably already too late. Not very compelling, unless you are a diehard drone-phobe, Hover opens this Friday (6/29) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Midnight Swim: Three Haunted Half-Sisters

June, Annie, and Isa are three half-sisters sharing a common mother. Since they are all roughly the same generation, it is easy to conclude their childhood was somewhat chaotic. When their hippy dippy mother meets an untimely end through a diving misadventure, they are brought to together for an awkward reunion. Either supernatural forces or mortal madness (or both) will further complicate the process in Sarah Adina Smith’s Midnight Swim (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Dr. Amelia Brooks’ home is nestled right on seemingly placid Spirit Lake. Supposedly, it is so deep, divers have never reached the bottom. One day, Brooks went down to explore its depths and never resurfaced. According to legend, there is ample precedent for such tragedy. The locals tell of the Seven Sisters who all drowned as each jumped in to save their proceeding siblings.

On their first night, the half-sisters host their old school chum Josh, who is now an eligible single dad. After enough wine, he leads them in a séance trying to raise the spirits of the Seven Sisters. At the time, nothing happens, but strange incidents soon begin piling up. Dead birds start littering the grounds and mysterious time-lapse footage appears on June’s digital camera. She had been documenting their homecoming for some sort of hipster documentary and denies any involvement with the eerie sequences. However, there is something a little off about June.

Of course, it is hard to judge the half-sisters’ degrees of dysfunctionality. None of them seems all that together—and for good reason. As we know from their nostalgic lip-synching, they were raised on the happy platitudes of the New Seekers’ “Free to Be You and Me.” Since then, they have learned the world is not a place where horses run free. Nor does it revolve around their self-esteem.

Smith plays it coy, giving viewers just enough reason to maintain their supernatural suspicions. The legend of the Seven Sisters is particularly compelling, especially when retold by Shirley Venard playing a local amateur folklorist. It feels like the kind of place-specific urban legends every kid grows up with, while holding obvious resonance for the characters. Wisely, Smith is not slavishly beholden to the “found footage” aesthetic. There are times when we completely forget June (or someone or something) must be filming what we are seeing, but it would not have betrayed her Spartan approach to throw the audience a few more ambiguously paranormal bones.

The perfectly cast Beth Grant is terrifyingly crunchy granola as Dr. Brooks, seen in home movies and the like. Ross Partridge is also surprisingly engaging as Josh, despite the film’s very female-centric perspective. Yet strangely, the three co-leads never create strongly differentiated identities for the three half-sisters. Perhaps that is a function of their shared problematic upbringing. Could it be they are actually not separate entities unto themselves, but are in fact the personification of the splinters of a fractured identity? That seems unlikely in the dramatic context of the film, but it sounds cool.

In fact, Smith’s execution is quite accomplished, provided viewers appreciate genre cinema that suggests instead of shows. She masterfully creates a mood of mystery and hard-to-define dread. The backstory is also unusually effective and there is a keen sense of place. Recommended for those who prefer their ghost movies in an art house bag, Midnight Swim opens this Friday (6/26) in New York, at the Cinema Village.