Meet The Charisma Killers. Are they assassins by trade? They are.

Do they have cool names like Rope, Psycho and One-Hit Hustle? They do.

Is “Never have kids!” one of the group’s rules? It is.

Are they killers with charisma? Or killers of charisma? The jury’s still out!

Their de facto Professor X is an old man (Vernon Wells, The Road Warrior) who runs the team from his living room. Dying of brain cancer, he gives his seven charges one final assignment, worth $40 million: Kill the city’s incoming sleazeball police captain (Chris Moss, Sex Court: The Movie) at the forthcoming inauguration. Heck, while they’re at it, mow down anyone in attendance: “He who kills the most wins.”

Multihyphenate moviemaker Michael Matteo Rossi’s The Charisma Killers has too many killers. It doesn’t help that the only female members (Wild Things: Foursome’s Marnette Patterson and Dawn’s Jackie Moore), both blonde and leggy, look near-identical. Rather than move forward with what he spends 20 minutes establishing, Rossi (Misogynist) bides time by venturing off in several side stories, each as thin as the Twizzlers consumed by the meatheadiest of the group. Like a TV series pilot, we’re introduced to even more characters — like Kingpin vixen Vanessa Angel as the captain’s wife or Instagram eye candy Antje Utgaard in sexy swimwear — who have, at best, next to nothing to do.

Then we reach the home stretch: the new captain’s Big Public Event. Commendably delirious, this worth-the-watch sequence shows our professionals murderers making good on doing bad. We’re talking dozens of deaths, with more rounds whizzing through the air than at an explosion at the Pillsbury factory. A portion of these last 15 minutes provide a lot of rat-a-tat-tat after a lack of razzamatazz. —Rod Lott

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Several films and TV shows from the 1980s depicted punks as no-good scofflaws terrorizing God-fearing communities. From CHiPs to Police Academy 2 to Death Wish 3, these punks aren’t just misfits jaded at society — they are hardened criminals who will readily hold a switchblade to a helpless granny’s throat and rob her blind. However, venerable trash purveyors Troma may have taken evil punks to the most extreme end of the spectrum by casting them as surfing neo-Nazis in the 1987 exploitation classic Surf Nazis Must Die.

“Sometime in the future,” a massive earthquake ravages the California coast, leaving it vulnerable to roving gangs of surfers, including the Surf Nazis (they’re actually called this in the movie). Sources such as Wikipedia, IMDb and Letterboxd focus, by way of plot, on Eleanor “Mama” Washington (Gail Neely), a Black woman whose son is killed by the Surf Nazis in a hate crime; she breaks out of her retirement home to exact revenge.

While this is certainly the most concrete plot element the film has to offer, the bulk of Surf Nazis Must Die belongs to the punks themselves. We watch in a kind of voyeuristic way how they live — which entails roasting tiny pigs on the beach and lots of slow-mo surfing montages set to a pulsing synth score, not to mention the hate killings and general mockery of law and order. We even see that one of them, Smeg (Tom Shell), actually lives with his mom in the suburbs. In fact, that’s all these Nazis are, in the end: teenagers obsessed with the Third Reich.

Given all this attention devoted to the racist characters, one might assume the filmmakers — director Peter George and writer Jon Ayre — want us to sympathize with them and possibly even feel a little bad for them when, true to the film’s title, they get what’s coming to them. But no, in the end, they’re murderous scum Nazi punks, and we’re rooting for “Mama” to exact her vengeance. Those seeking a sober examination of neo-Nazism among California’s youth need look elsewhere. Surf Nazis Must Die embraces its exploitative nature completely, unashamed and uncaring if it offends.

And boy, does it offend. —Christopher Shultz

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Meth makers of America, c’mon: If you’re so paranoid that you’ve rigged your drug den with, say, a door tied to trigger a shotgun, maybe make sure the head it blows off doesn’t belong to the brother of a short-fused cop?

That’s advice from Flick Attack. First one’s free, kid.

Because if you don’t, here’s what happens: Trap House, motherfucker! Police detective Grant Pierce (Jaime M. Callica, 2021’s Hypnotic) is that cop — so fierce, he has the mystery of his dead sibling solved by minute 7. It’s the doing of the gas-masked man Lethan (Bruce Crawford, Alter), who cooks up crank in an abandoned slaughterhouse.

To dissuade authorities, thieves and basic lookie-loos, Lethan and his foxy partner (Gigi Saul Guerrero, V/H/S/85) have fashioned the place into a veritable Temple of Doom! Consider such booby-trapped built-in features as:
• a glue floor
• a room full of broken glass
• swinging cinder blocks
• spiked ceilings
• bear traps in the hallway
• mousetraps in the air ducts
• jets of scalding steam
• an invisible fence
• and more!

Aiding Pierce in his penetration of Lethan’s lair are a teenage dealer named Dibs (Peter Bundic, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), a terrifying skinhead (a bonkers Michael Eklund, 2014’s Poker Night) and a couple other tweakers who exist for the sole purpose of allowing director Nicholas Humphries (2014’s Death Do Us Part) to demonstrate the aforementioned amenities.

Let’s not pretend that anyone watches Trap House for any other reason than to see the house do some trapping. It certainly was mine. (It sure wasn’t for crackerjack background dialogue like “Oh, man, I’m high.”) Blood and gore aside, it plays like series television, but for a testosterone-laced slice of Sawsploitation, one can do much worse.

Hell, for a “Tubi original,” one can do much, much worse. Humphries keeps this one watchable and, perhaps inadvertently, closed-captioning readable; as Pierce is pursued by addicts moving en masse like cannibal zombies, “[junkies grumbling]” appears as a subtitle — my new favorite subtitle, that is. —Rod Lott

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Master criminal and master of disguise Mr. Smith (Keir Dullea, 2001: A Space Odyssey) hatches a master plan to top them all: Take over the Eiffel Tower, befit it with stolen laser weapons, and hold it for a $30 million ransom to be delivered within 12 hours or it’s detonation time. 

To carry out this felonious feat, Mr. Smith hires three professional crooks, each exhibiting a specialized skill:
• a cat burglar (Billy Dee Williams, The Empire Strikes Back)
• an ex-CIA weapons expert (Peter Fonda, Race with the Devil) 
• a woman (Ms. Octopussy herself, Maud Adams) who flees the scenes of her heists on roller skates

Who better to bring Alistair MacLean’s adventure story to the tube than Claudio Guzmán, director of Linda Lovelace for President? Hundreds, I’m sure, but he actually does a great job, yielding high rewards from a small-screen project. Thanks are due to the well-constructed plot and unique setting upon an international landmark. The Eiffel’s geometric compositions are irresistible to the eye, making Guzmán’s job that much easier.

I’m not sure why Fonda and Adams are in The Hostage Tower since their characters barely register once they arrive at Mr. Smith’s chateau for training on some scaffolding in the yard. Of the trio, Williams gets the most to do, from donning a Chef Boyardee hat to scaling down the Eiffel with an old woman (Rachel Roberts, 1978’s Foul Play) on his back. Speaking of the elderly, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (1981’s Ghost Story) mans the intelligence community’s efforts from the ground, exclaiming “Jolly good, ol’ chap! What a pip!” Not exactly those words, but close enough. —Rod Lott

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More remake than reboot, Twisters follows the story of 1996’s original Twister beat for beat. To reflect the changing times, it adds drones, influencers and merch. Instead of merely launching those silver data-capturing balls into a tornado, these Oklahoma storm chasers shoot fireworks up its hole and, with any luck, barrels of absorbent-diaper chemicals in hopes of shrinking it.

Filling the void vacated by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are, respectively, the British Daisy Edgar-Jones (2002’s Fresh) and the Texan Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick). She’s a headstrong meteorology expert with a preternatural sense for anticipating the weather; he’s a hotheaded YouTuber in a pickup truck whose shock absorbers probably get replaced as often as the gasoline. Will the two be able to set aside their differences, survive the suck zone and find love? Only one hour and 57 minutes know for sure.

Actually, that’s not true; everybody knows, sight unseen. And that’s fine. No one will see Twisters expecting complicated and unforeseen plot machinations — starting, apparently, with screenwriter Mark L. Smith (2015’s The Revenant), who resolves two points of non-tornadic conflict between Edgar-Jones and Powell and third wheel Anthony Ramos (Transformers: Rise of the Beasts) with a sentence apiece.

And that’s fine, too, because what we want from Twisters are said twisters, right? Well … although we get them, they swoop down in sloppily staged and edited set pieces. As cheesy as the OG Twister was, its cyclone sequences felt propulsive, viewers were spatially aware at all times and the shots cut together well. Here, in a big leap to blockbusters coming off the excellent, Oscar-winning indie Minari, director Lee Isaac Chung seems out of his element. Oklahoma’s waving wheat sure looks sweet with Chung’s eye for landscapes, and he certainly brings more humanity to this sequel, but at the sacrifice of action.

I equally miss Michael Crichton’s pop-science sensibilities, if only to make the clunkiest of weathersplaining dialogue exchanges swallowable. Edgar-Jones appears particularly at unease with such material, as if she’s better than it — which she is. While I’m not yet aboard Powell’s populist brand of aw-shucksness as the rest of our nation, he knows how to modulate it to fit the vibe.

Intended or not, when the F5 bursts through the screen of a movie theater in the climax, it’s hard not to read it as Chung’s subversive metaphor for the death of cinema. Twisters isn’t the nadir of modern studio-tentpole IP, but it qualifies as a disappointing follow-up — and to a movie that, being decent at best, had set a low bar. Warner Bros.’ low-rent Into the Storm (which I’m convinced comes from a rejected Twister 2 pitch) entertained me more than Twisters, and that 2014 movie is so bad, my sisters-in-law remain irate with me to this day for playing it. —Rod Lott

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