Dennis Quaid channels Tony Perkins in Martin Guigui's BENEATH THE DARKNESS

What is it with these murderous morticians? A year or so back we had Liam Neeson's low-key, subtle and very funny ("Oh, you people!") version in After.life. Now, Dennis Quaid takes on the emblematic embalmer, coming at you like gangbusters and appearing to want to channel the late Tony Perkins as nutcase extraor-dinaire. Of course, Perkins had Psycho and the talents of Alfred Hitchcock surrounding him. Quaid has a little number titled BENEATH THE DARKNESS and the Argentina-born director Martin Guigui (shown below) to serve his needs. The result has its moments, all right, but it's not what you'd call memorable.

It's hard to make a good thriller. Something as fine as Wes Craven's Red Eye (or the recent Point Blank from France) comes along maybe once a decade. Mostly, these would-be scare-fests reply on dumb character behavior to result in mayhem. This is indeed a problem with Beneath the Darkness, and the problem is made even worse by a screenplay (from Bruce Wilkinson, which he evidently has been trying to bring to fruition for quite awhile) that conflates would-be ghosts with a cuckolded husband, jealousy, revenge, murder, insanity and some very silly teenagers. I suspect that if Wilkinson has just dropped the "ghost" angle from his screenplay and concentrated on the mortician/revenge and the interloping teens, he'd have had a tighter, shorter and more riveting thriller.

But we must take what we're given, which is Quaid (above) -- hamming it up quite nicely, even affectionately, as the villain -- and our set of teens, brought to life by a quartet of attractive youngsters who are believable enough actors (mostly from TV) but are asked to do some rather unbelievable things. Oh, those kids!

After their first bit of idiocy (breaking into the Quaid character's house, above) results in one death and an entire town that seems to side, as dumb towns will do, with the villain and against our heroes, what do these young troupers do? Go back into that house, of course. And not just once, but twice! Well, teenage nit-witery knows no bounds.

Things get sillier -- but also, I must say, with some nice moments of suspense and jolts (that's Quaid with our heroine played by Aimee Teegarden, above) -- ending up in a cemetery, below. Well, where else would any reputable mortician be -- although perhaps not in the dead of night.

This cemetery scene will put you in mind of, among many other movies, I Know Who Killed Me (not one you'd want to be put in mind of), the film that seemed to begin Lindsay Lohan's long slide into public service. That's our hero, played by Tony Oller, above (digging up a storm) and below, right, with Ms Teegarden and Stephen Lunsford, left, who plays his friend/competitor.

Beneath the Darkness, from Sunset Pictures and Image Entertainment (98 minutes, and a little too long for what it has to offer: good B-movie thrillers usually come in under the hour-and-a-half mark), opens this Friday in New York City at the Village VII and in the Los Angeles area at the AMC Citywalk Stadium 19, the Regency Plant 16, and the Krikorian Buena Park 18. The film will also be appearing in another half dozen cities here and there around the country. Click here to see the complete list of playdates.

IN HEAVEN, UNDERGROUND: Britta Wauer gives us Jewish history in a Berlin cemetery

Reading about a film's subject mater is often the least precise or helpful manner by which to understand what you're about to see. TrustMovies notes this because he's just viewed a documentary -- IN HEAVEN, UNDERGROUND -- that tracks the history of a particular burial ground, the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery in Berlin. Prior to viewing and reading what he's just told  you, he could never have imagined a film so lyrical and lovely about a topic so fraught with, well, history and Holocaust. And while the filmmaker, Britta Wauer (shown below), certainly doesn't ignore history, what she does here is to stick with this very special cemetery over more than a century, in seasons warm and chill, and takes us with her on a trip that proves full of humor, sweetness and emotion. Her movie's a genuine surprise.

"Nothing can stop me from getting that coffin in the grave, notes Ms Wauer's sort-of narrator, a charming senior citizen, below, with a near-constant smile who, I guess, is the grave-digger. He sits and chats with us from time to time, beginning and ending this unusually brisk, frisky and novel, 90-minute documentary. We hear the history of the place via the staff and from descendants (from all around the world) whose forebearers are buried here. We're even privy to a visit by the Israeli military.

We hear more about the place from a local police inspector and from a couple who, along with their small child, move into a home which seems to be located right in the midst of things.

We see the cemetery in all four seasons, in color and black-and-white, archival and present-day and especially before, during and after the Nazis and the take-over of anti-Semitism. And yet -- and this, as much as anything, is what makes the movie so special -- even during the worst of times, Ms Wauer manages to keeps things full of charm and interesting surprises.

For instance, we learn some differences between German Jewish customs and Russian Jewish customs; how the suicide rate among German Jews increased once they had received their deportation orders. (Yes, that would be expected, but I don't recall hearing about this before.) A group of present-day high school students visit and then design their own gravestones, including the year in which they imagine they might die. We also learn why this particular Jewish cemetery was not desecrated under Nazi rule.

In one of the molt affecting scenes, visitors from the USA come to find the graves of their parents, and a British citizen tells of the very late discovery of his own Jewish roots.  Then, one fine postwar day, our cemetery suddenly lies in East Berlin -- which changes everything. Official government "birders" show up to band the young in a Goshawk's nest. And we learn all about tomb restoration from a smart but diplomatic woman who notes, apropos which tombs are chosen for this, even as the camera pans some rather odd-looking choices, "We never use words like ugly, beautiful or kitsch."

There is so much that's delightful here that I suspect I could have sat listening and watching for another hour. But like any smart performer, Ms Wauer beats her retreat while we're still eager for more. In Heaven, Underground, is like a breath of fresh air in the Jewish Holocaust documentary genre. All the odder, then, that the air is wafting in from a cemetery.

The movie, from Seventh Art Releasing, spoken in German, Russian, English and Hebrew (with English subtitles, when necessary), opens this Friday, November 18, in New York City at the Cinema Village. A limited national release will follow.