For many people, just the term “Black Friday” is enough to give them the shivers. Whether they’re put-upon retail workers thrust into the breach or the exhausted shoppers single-mindedly devoted to doorbusters and deals, hearing those words together makes them break out into a cold sweat.

Now imagine that, only with alien zombie monsters.

That’s the gist of “Black Friday,” a new horror comedy written by Andy Grekoviak and directed by Casey Tebo. It’s the story of a motley crew of retail workers at a big-box toy store who must face down a mysterious alien menace that transforms all who come into contact with it into monstrous zombie-like creatures. With little to defend themselves but their own wits (such as they are), the group is forced to confront these monsters while also dealing with their own dysfunctional dynamic.

Gleefully gross with over-the-top practical effects, the film is a goofy, blood-spattered romp through a world where not even the approaching end of the world is enough to shift priorities away from the accumulation of profit. Well, not immediately anyway.

Sometimes, all you want is a big dumb action movie. You’re not interested in IP-driven blockbusters or massive franchises or any of that. You don’t want to worry about how this movie is impacted by what you’ve seen and/or how it will impact what you’re going to see. You just want explosions and movie stars and gunfights and quips and car chases and general big-budget tomfoolery.

That said … be careful what you wish for.

See, “Red Notice” – currently streaming on Netflix – has all of those things. It’s got an A-list trio at the top of the call sheet – The Rock, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot. It has a huge budget – reportedly coming in at $200 million. It is an original idea, from a script penned by Rawson Marshall Thurber, who also directs the movie. Things blow up. There’s a heist AND a prison break. The Rock is strong and Ryan Reynolds is snarky and Gal Gadot is sexy. Fistfights and gunfire and explosions, double- and triple-crosses. It’s all in there.

It just doesn’t really work.

“Red Notice” is made up of a lot of pieces that should fit together, but don’t. There’s a flatness to it all that is prevalent to the point of distraction, with a vague feeling of disconnect permeating the entire film. The performances come off as a bit shoulder-shruggy, with everyone coasting on their preexisting personae; it feels surprisingly phoned-in in a lot of spots. The action sequences are so-so, with a couple of solid ones surrounded by some duds. The twists are telegraphed and characterizations are thin to the point of nonexistence. Rarely has such a big-time action film felt so sedentary.

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that intrigues me for reasons that I can’t quite articulate. These tend to be films that are very much not for me – stylistically, tonally, demographically, you name it. I am not the intended audience, and yet I find myself genuinely curious to see them.

So it is with “Clifford the Big Red Dog.”

I have zero connection with the source material – a series of children’s books by Norman Bridwell – and the general look of the thing seemed kind of meh. The titular Big Red Dog’s CGI rendering looked a bit off. I’m no hater of kiddie flicks, but this one seemed a bit blasé. The director hadn’t made a feature since an “Alvin & the Chipmunks” sequel six years ago.

And yet, I still wanted to see it, for reasons that I myself still don’t quite understand.

As it turns out, “Clifford the Big Red Dog” – which did a simultaneous release in theaters and on streaming via Paramount+ – manages to be quite entertaining despite the fact that I was pretty much justified in my concerns. It does have a so-so look, with the occasional unsettling venture into the uncanny valley. The messaging is standard-issue kid movie stuff. The direction was workmanlike at best and the story makes very little sense if you think about it for even a moment.

I still had fun. Do I feel great about that fact? Not particularly. But I did. And while you may not, I’m betting your kids will.

Remember when “Home Alone” was the biggest box office success of the early ‘90s?

It’s easy to forget, what with its nigh-ubiquity on the airwaves during the holiday season, but when the Chris Columbus-helmed, Macauley Culkin-led film hit screens back in mid-November of 1990, it was a massive hit. Like, nearly half-a-billion worldwide box office massive. It spawned a couple of sequels, etc. You know the drill.

So it only makes sense that, in this era of reboots and remakes, prequels and sequels, that we’d be revisiting that particular piece of intellectual property.

And so we get “Home Sweet Home Alone,” streaming exclusively on Disney+. Technically, the film – directed by Dan Mazer – is a sequel, with a couple of very deliberate nods to the original, but in terms of the way it feels, it’s more of a remake, with a slightly different set of circumstances overlaid atop the same story beats with which we are all familiar.

It doesn’t really work.

Now, it isn’t terrible – the sheer talent of the cast ensures a fairly high floor – but the film itself can’t really push beyond that baseline level of performance competency. The elements of the experience that aren’t utterly rehashed feel bloated and padded, a series of plot points intended to get us to the slapstick lunacy that also seem to meander toward their destination with little to no urgency. The end result is a movie that labors toward a payoff that ultimately isn’t really worth the time spend to get there.