You know folk horror has enjoyed a cultural moment when it’s earned a parody. For the UK comedy Get Away, Shaun of the Dead sidekick Nick Frost gives it just that, scripting himself in the lead role as the patriarch of a family on summer holiday. They’re headed to Svälta, a Swedish island commune days away from its decennial festival commemorating a 19th-century incident that turned its inhabitants either into corpses or cannibals. The main event: a reenactment, of course.

Despite every frickin’ red flag unfurled, hoisted and erratically waved inches from their faces, the family of four rents an Airbnb on the otherwise stuck-in-the-past isle. The cottage’s owner is a pervy, Roman Polanski lookalike (Eero Milonoff, Border) who has eyes for their daughter (newcomer Maisie Ayres).

You can see where this is going: The Wicker Man meets National Lampoon’s Vacation. Except Frost and screen wife Aisling Bea (Home Sweet Home Alone) are both Clark Griswold, with their longtime-spouse interactions giving Get Away an immediate leg up for laughs. Their marriage as well-worn as a college sweatshirt, they call each other “Mummy” and “Daddy,” much to the disgust of their son (Sebastian Croft of Netflix’s Heartstopper series). Frost may be the draw, but Bea, a deadpan delight, stakes her claim as Get Away’s winsome secret weapon.

Get Away suffers whenever those two aren’t front and center. This is especially true with the Festival of Karantän — essentially the Svältans’ bloodier, duckier version of Christianity’s passion play — which director Steffen Haars (New Kids Turbo) allows to overstay its welcome by half. The overstuffed sequence then gives way to a polarizing loop-de-loop in plotting, depicted with enough pulverizing excess — underneath Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” on the soundtrack, no less — to make your head spin in disbelief as the movie becomes something else.

With this redirect, Get Away gets away from itself. After a strong hour, that shift qualifies as a misstep. Unfortunately, the movie never regains its footing, losing not only the goodwill it worked so hard to build, but much of its sense of humor. In particular, Frost’s last line just before the credits roll is a real groaner, so many rungs lower than the film’s established place on the comedic ladder, it’s embarrassing. —Rod Lott

A contemporary adaptation of the iconic 1914 serial, The Perils of Pauline is one Hail Mary of an action comedy, patched together from three episodes of an intended TV series canceled before it could air. The production attempted to capitalize on the mad, mod, quasi-parodic pop sensation known as ABC’s Batman — and boy, is that evident, for good and ill. 

Aging out of the orphanage that’s raised her since infancy, the virginal Pauline (Blue Hawaii cutie Pamela Austin) enters the real world and gets into and out of one scrape after another. Her trouble begins in Africa, where she tutors a 12-year-old royal prince (Rick Natoli, Hang Your Hat on the Wind) who wants her for his harem. The kid’s so horny, he chases her around the palace. She’s also pursued by tigers, dangled over a pit of stock-footage sharks and kidnapped by a gorilla — twice! 

From the sewers to the high seas to even outer space, Pauline’s inadvertent adventures find her pursued by the three über-wealthy men, including Terry-Thomas (The Vault of Horror) and Edward Everett Horton (It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World). But the only one who has her heart is an age-appropriate fellow orphan (’nilla crooner Pat Boone), who spends a chunk of Perils in a block of ice floating in the ocean. Trust me; it’s a long story, figuratively and literally. 

Innocence personified, Pauline doesn’t go chasing waterfalls; they just seem to find her. Every time she faces danger, the parlor piano music kicks in and the film is sped up, all the better to ape its chapter-play origins. Pre-“talkies,” silent films, including serials like The Perils of Pauline, relied on exaggerated physicality to help impart emotions. That performative spirit haunts this update through barn-broad slapstick — a style that pays off in the whimsically entertaining prologue, then lacks ingenuity thereafter. The real cliffhanger is how much of your bat-time you’ll cede before changing the bat-channel.

Try as the producers might to cobble the individual eps into a functional feature, it just doesn’t work in the more demanding format of cinema — even the semi-spoofy kind. Prestige TV, Pauline ’67 was not. Adam West’s Batman influence notwithstanding, this flick lands amid the female-fronted, spy-fi likes of Fathom, Modesty Blaise and Deadlier Than the Male. As with Pauline, each is a sexed-up send-up of pre-existing IP … and we know how those turned out: best viewed via their posters. —Rod Lott