After all those Chucky movies, seeing Brad Dourif play a sane, law-abiding citizen seems as rare as a ponytailed priest investigating a serial killer of strippers. Dourif does both in the erotic thriller Final Judgement, from Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures. (Note the title’s misspelling of “judgment”; perhaps the frugal Corman had a BOGO coupon for the vowel?)

A man of the cloth in the City of Angels, Dourif’s Father Tyrone finds himself Suspect No. 1 when a parishioner’s exotic dancer of a daughter, Paula (Kristin Dattilo, 1990’s Mirror Mirror), is found murdered after he counsels her. The true culprit is Rob (soap star David Ledingham in his lone movie), an artist living alone in one of those enormous warehouses. After convincing strippers to let him paint their portraits, Rob strangles each subject to death with picture-hanging wire — hey, like Corman, he’s resourceful.

When the police lieutenant on the case (Isaac Hayes, Truck Turner) won’t listen to Tyrone’s theory, Father heads to Paula’s club to look for a girl to pound for info. He finds her in Nicole (Concorde queen Maria Ford, Stripped to Kill 2), who at one point wears pants with a floral pattern so gaudy, it looked better as the guest room bedspread at my parents’ house.

Old pro he is, Dourif keeps Final Judgement from becoming less than perfunctory. He’s not helped by his director, Louis Morneau (Werewolf: The Beast Among Us), who lets Ledingham sail so far over the top (while Ford merely discards hers), he should have been reigned in. I doubt the script — written by then-future Hollywood Reporter film critic Kirk Honeycutt — called for such level of hysterics.

As a disciple of Andy Sidaris (read our interview with him in our book), I also wonder why Roberta Vasquez is the only woman on the poster, yet has such a small role. She’s not only a better actress than Ford, but better built for the part. The Lord works in mysterious ways, indeed. —Rod Lott