Not to be confused with the utterly terrible take on the torch tune by David Lee Roth, Just a Gigolo is a highly satirical starring role for a surprisingly gaunt David Bowie, coming fresh off the science-fiction head-scratcher The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Bowie is Paul von Przygodski, a young man who, like a lesser-known Candide, seems to fall in and out of life’s foibles, such as surviving a bombing in World War I, being mistaken for a French soldier in a hospital and so on and so forth. He seems to be the king of dumb luck.

He returns home with a porcine pal in tow, only to find Berlin in a truly crumbling state of its former self, filled with beggars and other miscreants. Still, Paul makes due with a job as a walking beer bottle, befriending an American actress (Sydne Rome) and his former commanding officer, Capt. Kraft (David Hemmings).

Eventually, she abandons him for possible stardom in America and Kraft pushes forward with his plans to rule Germany with a very Nazi-like movement. Heartbroken, Paul meets the Baroness (Marlene Dietrich) in a club and sets him on the path to becoming the world’s most unsatisfying gigolo, performing the title song on a darkened set.

As he works his way through a surprising Kim Novak and other ladies of the German upper crust — almost never finishing the job, mind you — things finally stop going Paul’s way, in the highly apropos finale, where, in death, he is held up as an unknowing scion to Germany’s growing fandom of Nazism.

Of course, the coke-addled Bowie is transcendent as Paul, even if the singer described the film as Elvis Presley’s 32 films “rolled into one” when it spectacularly failed at the box office. I truly don’t see it; I would have loved to have seen Elvis as a paid prostitute pleasing the women of pre-WWII Germany. Sadly, it was never meant to be.

What tends to hold the film back seems to be Hemmings’ velvet-glove direction. He seems unsure about the tone of the film, one second making it a dark comedy with serious underpinnings and the next, a bedroom farce with sexual overtones. It makes for a far more raucous experience than expected, but, then again, maybe that’s the point, mirroring Paul’s own wasted life. —Louis Fowler

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One Way Passage’s Dan Hardesty and Joan Ames take the concept of star-crossed lovers up a few notches. These moribund lovebirds could have met on a dating site run by the Grim Reaper. But being that this gem is from Warner Bros. in 1932, there is no dating site, but rather a Singapore bar for the couple’s meet-cute.

Played by William Powell and Kay Francis (their fifth on-screen pairing), Dan and Joan fall for one another almost instantly. As fate would have it, they soon find themselves aboard the same ocean liner steaming from Hong Kong to San Francisco. The operative word here is “fate.” Dan is in the custody of a tenacious but dimwitted cop (Warren Hymer) and on his way to the San Quentin penitentiary to be hanged for murder – a perfectly justifiable homicide, mind you, but the law is the law, even in pre-Code Hollywood.

Joan is facing her own mortality issues. She suffers from one of those nebulous movie maladies where, as her doctor helpfully explains, just a shock to the system could kill the poor girl. On the high seas, however, Dan and Joan are determined to hide the tragic truth from one another, choosing instead to dance, drink cocktails and pitch woo.

Can love forestall fate? The inordinately dapper prisoner-to-be (it’s William Powell, after all) manages to elude his escort with the help of two longtime pals who are also making the trans-Pacific trip. That pair prove to be the comic ace up the movie’s proverbial sleeve. Alice MacMahan shines as a streetwise con woman masquerading as a countess, while Frank McHugh crushes his every scene as a drunken pickpocket.

To borrow a colloquialism from its era, One Way Passage is a honey of a picture. Director Tay Garnett would go on to have a more auspicious career shooting for TV in the 1950s, but his work here is altogether respectable. The camerawork is surprisingly fluid for its time, with nifty tracking and dolly shots. The pace is brisk, the laughs are genuine, and the script, by Wilson Mizner and Joseph Jackson, even serves up an emotionally resonant ending, all within a 67-minute running time. That’s always a trip worth taking. —Phil Bacharach

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Inherent Vice has all the trappings of film noir. There’s a rumpled gumshoe who lives by a seemingly quaint moral code, a mysterious femme fatale and a hard-boiled cop with whom our protagonist has an ambivalent relationship. Los Angeles sizzles with corruption and sleaze, with the threat of violence simmering just below the sun-bleached surface. But the familiarity of these tropes allows masterful writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, adapting Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel — cinema’s first adaptation of the presumably unfilmable Pynchon, by the way — to explore more trippy, atmospheric stuff.

Set in 1970 L.A., Inherent Vice inhabits a dreamy space between the horror of the Manson Family murders and the imminently pervasive crookedness of Watergate. Joaquin Phoenix is Larry “Doc” Sportello, a hippie P.I. tipped off by his ex-old lady, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald), that her current boyfriend, real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), is in danger of being cheated out of his fortune by his wife and her lover. Faster than you can say “Zig-Zag papers,” however, the case digresses into a labyrinthine plot that makes Chinatown look like a game of Chutes and Ladders. A Black militant (Michael K. Williams, Lovecraft Country) asks Doc to track down a thug who works for Wolfmann, while a recovered heroin addict (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’s Jena Malone) enlists our intrepid private eye to find her missing husband, a sax player named Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson).

That these supposedly distinct cases wind up entwined is predictable, but less so is the shambling scope of it all. Hewing close to Pynchon’s text, Anderson packs in suspicious real estate deals, a heroin-smuggling cartel, the Aryan Brotherhood, dentists, a Ouija board, Richard Nixon, a mental asylum run by cultists, a running joke about cunnilingus and an acid-fueled house party in Topanga Canyon. The results are less madcap than fuzzily hallucinogenic, although the movie’s psychedelic vibe certainly has its funny moments. Doc is so consistently stoned, he can barely jot down detective notes to himself that convey anything more detailed than “something Spanish.”

Phoenix makes a terrific foil for the surrounding weirdness, but he receives able assistance from a cast that includes Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short, Benicio del Toro, Maya Rudolph and musician Joanna Newsom. Best of all is Josh Brolin (of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thanos fame) as Doc’s LAPD nemesis, Lt. Det. Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. Sporting a crewcut and exhibiting a Freudian penchant for chocolate-covered bananas, Brolin’s perpetual rage prove a nice complement to Phoenix’s pot-addled befuddlement.

But the real standout is Los Angeles itself, or at least the one imagined by Anderson and his frequent cinematographer, Robert Elswit. Boasting saturated colors and drenched in nostalgia, Inherent Vice is sly about its visual magnificence, as typified by a brief flashback in which Doc and Shasta comb beachfront streets searching for dope as Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past” plays over the soundtrack. The scene is gorgeous, sexy and just a bit sad. Few filmmakers can capture mood better than Paul Thomas Anderson. —Phil Bacharach

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Police Academy’s success was so huge, it predictably led to a glut of slob-comedy imitators that could be pitched — and likely were — with the sentence “It’s Police Academy, but [insert training scenario here].” The best of these was arguably the screenwriters’ own Moving Violations (“at a traffic school”); the worst is a distinction among many contenders, including the leaden Mortuary Academy, appropriately late to the game.

Brothers Max and Sam Grimm are due to inherit their deceased uncle’s Grimm Mortuary & Academy (“You kill ’em, we chill ’em”) on one only-in-the-movies condition: They first must graduate from it. Having no motivation, Sam (Jocks’ Perry Lang) has nothing to lose, but Max (The Blue Lagoon’s Christopher Atkins) dreams of becoming a doctor, not an embalmer. However, once he’s rejected in short order by med schools and his pretty-but-petty girlfriend (Megan Blake, Eyeborgs), Max suddenly has no other prospects. After all, a premise is a premise!

The hallowed institution is, per the film’s not-aged-well poster, “where the dearly departed meet the clearly retarded.” Per the demands of the subgenre, it’s chock full of misfits! They include Tracey Walter (Repo Man), who “revives” dead dogs with robot technology; Stoney Jackson (Angel 4: Undercover) as the token black character — rapping, no less; and Lynn Danielson (from director Michael Schroeder’s other 1988 movie, Out of the Dark) as a good-girl love interest for Max and superfan of Radio Werewolf, a band I didn’t realize was genuine until afterward. The group’s inclusion is tied to the movie’s “Special Appearance by Wolfman Jack” — the adjective is up for debate.

In charge of the academy are Eating Raoul power couple Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel as, respectively, the nymphomaniac professor and the necrophiliac owner with eyes on keeping the brothers Grimm from taking over. Bartel also co-wrote the script with William Kelman (Beach Babes from Beyond), but the satirically dark touch Bartel is known for (baby caskets, anyone?) isn’t employed nearly enough, drowned out by the easy-lay, low-hanging fruit of sophomoric and scatological jokes. The dialogue can be so clunky, it sounds like the work of an ESL student who hasn’t stuck to the lesson plan: “Your head’s swollen with baby vomit! You listen to me, you toxic vagina!”

At least Bartel presumably penned himself into Mortuary Academy’s one good bit, in which he falls hard for — and gets “engaged” to — a deceased cheerleader (Cheryl Starbuck, Pathology). After taking her corpse to a drive-in restaurant, they have a romantic encounter on the beach à la From Here to Eternity … if Deborah Kerr were dragged out to sea while Burt Lancaster zonked out in a post-coital snooze. —Rod Lott

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Rather famously, producer Dino De Laurentiis lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the late ’80s dropping bomb after bomb through his then-new De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Among DEG’s epic critical and commercial failures? The too-late sequel King Kong Lives, the James Clavell adaptation Tai-Pan and the garbage-bag gimmickry known as Million Dollar Mystery.

As bad as those movies are, what does it say about the ones DEG deemed unreleasable? In particular, I speak of the Pat Morita/Jay Leno vehicle Collision Course, which drove direct to video in the U.S. in 1992, after sitting on Dino’s shelf for what I now understand to be not nearly long enough. My guess is De Laurentiis thought he could make Leno, then a white-hot stand-up comic, into the next Tom Hanks. In one fell swoop, Leno went from killing it on Late Night with David Letterman to killing his chances at headlining further films.

As Detroit police detective Tony Costas, the skunk-haired Leno is objectively terrible in this buddy-cop disaster opposite Pat Morita as Fujitsuka Natsuo, Costas’ Tokyo counterpart. In Japan, a rogue engineer for an automotive giant has stolen a turbocharger prototype and made his way to the Motor City to sell it to an American rival; Natsuo follows. Inevitably, cultures clash — until they team up.

Leno is laughable at playing a tough guy (!), and not at all laugh-worthy with, one assumes, improvising his dialogue. For example, surprising Natsuo by emerging from behind a door with gun drawn, Costas offers the nonsensical greeting “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees.” He may as well have just said, “Crunch all you want! We’ll make more,” because at least we have evidence Leno was comfortable with that.

In another scene, Natsuo is interrogated by Costas’ colleague (Al Waxman, Iron Eagle IV), who says, “I speak some Jap: Toyota, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, teriyaki,” which is clever and hilarious — or so say second graders on the playground at lunch. The line is not just indicative of how the script (by producer Frank Darius Namei and The First Power’s Robert Resnikoff) treats Morita’s race, but also the degree of humor at which said script simmers: the lowest possible setting.

Pity poor Morita, reduced from an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor to running around a hotel lobby with a plastic garment bag over his head. I mean, at least the guy found work between Karate Kid sequels, but ouch. Another actor who deserved better: Tom Noonan, here as a villain after embodying evil in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, one of the few DEG projects enjoying a life today. Did Dino weasel Noonan into some bad-guy twofer deal?

Appropriately opening with the sound of a car wreck, Collision Course marks an odd entry in the filmography of Lewis Teague, the Roger Corman protégé known for horror films (Alligator, Cujo and Cat’s Eye), not comedy. This dud bears no stamp of his previous proficiency. —Rod Lott

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