The AIP teen/horror/comedy/racing quickie Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is barely over an hour, and yet the plot doesn’t kick in until the 40-minute mark, and then promptly hightails it 10 minutes later. It’s about — and maybe I should put that word in quotation marks — a group of drag-racing gearhead high schoolers with cool, souped-up cars, and they unwind at the local malt shoppe where they sing and dance.

Following this “big story” is a some old-guy reporter in a three-piece suit. He talks like he has chestnuts in his mouth, barely moves his lips and takes copious notes on a notebook no bigger than a Post-it. I’m not sure why hanging around kids who play with chassis (“I dreamt I was a 12-shaft drive motor! It was wonderful!”) and do the jitterbug qualifies as a scoop for any print outlet, but hey, that’s overthinking it. No wonder the newspaper industry is fucked.

After more dancing and a pajama party with even more dancing, the teens go to a house that’s supposedly haunted so they can do more dancing. (Hey, at least the film commits to something.) Plot: There’s a monster lurking around the rooms, causing all sorts of dust-ups. End plot.

At the end, the would-be creature is unmasked as AIP special-effects man Paul Blaisdell, playing himself, saying he did it because AIP didn’t hire him for such-and-such movie. It’s totally Scooby-Doo, with lots of dated dialogue like “She’s the ginchiest!” It’s also the kind of movie that’s not satisfied with having a talking parrot, so it has to throw in a talking car, too. Can’t blame it. —Rod Lott

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Not to date myself, but I remember a time when Joe Piscopo told punch lines instead of being one. He was great on Saturday Night Live, very funny in Johnny Dangerously and surprisingly endearing in Brian De Palma’s criminally ignored comedy, Wise Guys.

Dead Heat, however, provides ample evidence for the continued absence of Joe on the celebrity stage. If there is a prize for Comedian Who Should Be Least Allowed to Improvise One-Liners, Joe wins hands-down, besting even the immortally awful Pauly Shore. Every single line Piscopo grunts out falls to the ground and dies an ignoble death. As a cop who becomes a zombie, poor Treat Williams suffers death, rebirth and decomposition, but that’s nothing compared to having to smile at every ill-timed goddamned gag that slips out of the witless jokesack that is Piscopo. When Joe finally gets murdered, the feeling is not one of sadness, but utter relief.

The rest of Heat’s a mixed, low-rent bag. A routine tale of buddy zombie cops (seriously, why should that be routine?), it has some pleasingly goopy gore, wastes appearances by Darren McGavin and Vincent Price, and at least gave Williams a paycheck to feed him until Deep Rising.

Other than Piscopo, the main claim to fame for Heat is being written by Terry Black, brother of writer/director Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). On the spectrum of movie people with more talented siblings, Terry is far from a Tony Scott, Beau Bridges or even Eric Roberts. He’s not even a Charlie O’Connell.

No, Terry’s a Stephen Baldwin. I didn’t want to go there, as there are just some things you can’t take back, but Dead Heat forced me to. —Corey Redekop

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A decade after a string of serial rapes and murders of men who are dads comes to a close, it appears to star back up again, in the film Father’s Day. The perpetrator is obese cannibal Chris Fuchman (Mackenzie Murdock), and as if that weren’t gruesome enough, themes of incest, suicide and genital mutilation also come into play.

Did I fail to mention it’s a comedy?

This delightfully demented flick comes from Astron-6, a five-member group of VHS-obsessed filmmakers from Canada responsible for heaps of genre-skewering shorts, almost every one a gem of ingenuity. Because the same year’s Manborg is only an hour, Father’s Day marks the troupe’s first full-fledged feature. Not abandoning its ’80s-movie sensibilities, Astron-6 has structured it as a late-night movie airing on ASTR-TV 6, complete with tracking troubles and a commercial break advertising the film to follow it, Star Raiders.

The latest victim of Father’s Day Killer Fuchman (pronounced “fuck man,” of course) is the dad of teenage trick-turner Twink (Conor Sweeney), who vows vengeance. Joining him on his mission of madness is Ahab (Adam Brooks), the one-eyed hunter who thought he defeated Fuchman all those years ago, and Father Sullivan (Matthew Kennedy), a priest who’s about to be corrupted to the nth power. There are also strippers.

While a revenge homage/parody on its surface, Father’s Day also dips its infected foot into cesspools of horror, action and fantasy. And yet, above all, it’s very, very funny … if you possess an open mind and a strong stomach. One of Astron-6’s calling cards is going over-the-top, and often with buckets of gore, but doing so with crack comic timing unholstered. As always, the guy use their microbudget to their advantage, and the end result is so creative, it looks like several million bucks’ worth. My one and only complaint: I wish it had more than one fake trailer sandwiched within. —Rod Lott

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Like a redneck version of American Graffiti, the relatively obscure comedy Drive-In chronicles one crazy day and night in the humdrum life of several residents, mostly high schoolers, of an unnamed rural Texas town. Beyond a ramshackle skating rink, the main source of entertainment appears to be the local Alamo Drive-In, where the movie takes place after roughly half an hour of setting up its characters.

Usually terrible director Rod Amateau (The Garbage Pail Kids Movie) constantly jumps between their stories. They include two lunkhead car-strippers (one of whom is Trey Wilson, Raising Arizona‘s unpainted furniture king) plotting to rob the drive-in manager, a senior planning to propose to his girlfriend, and a rivalry between the town’s “gangs.” The focus, however, is on cute Glowie (Lisa Lemole), who’s so tired of being treated like dirt that she dumps her abusive boyfriend to make moves on nice boy Orville (Glenn Morshower, TV’s 24), who thought she didn’t even know he existed.

If there’s a real star to Drive-In, it’s the nostalgic experience of going to the drive-in, most of which is captured in the opening montage, then lovingly spoofed for the remainder. Debuting on the Alamo’s single screen is Disaster ’76, an Irwin Allen-esque epic that allows Amateau to directly parody Airport, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure and Jaws in one fell swoop.

Quite the time capsule, Drive-In isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but loaded with such goodhearted charm that I didn’t want it to end after 96 minutes. I suspect what kept it from clicking with the public at large is its flyover setting. So wall-to-wall are the country radio tunes and thick hick dialects, it may strike coastal viewers as intruding on an alien land where everyone speaks in similes, from “trickier’n diaperin’ Siamese twins” to “busier’n a belly dancer with a case of the crabs.”

Trust me: No matter where you live on the map, it’s a movie for people who love the movies. —Rod Lott

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Having Botched a French diamond heist through no fault of his own, professional thief Ritchie (Blade’s Stephen Dorff) is given one more chance by his crime boss to square his debt. That chance is stealing a priceless artifact that once belonged to Russian czar Ivan IV, located in the penthouse suite of a high-rise building in Moscow.

That act goes off fine until the hotheaded thug Peter (Jamie Foreman, Layer Cake), one of Ritchie’s Tweedledum/Tweedledee Russian sibling accomplices, needlessly shoots a maid. Worse, the crowded elevator they attempt to make their escape in gets stuck on the 13th floor, unfinished and seemingly abandoned.

That number is not coincidental when one takes in the challenges that await the felons and their hostages. While I leave it to you to discover just what they’re up against, it spoils little to say that the floor is equipped with booby traps that quickly turn a lighthearted crime thriller into a lighthearted gore comedy.

If you can stomach the sight of blood, especially in the name of laughs, Botched offers gruesome and gruesomely funny rewards that verge on outright slapstick. One on hand, you have a urinating rat; on the other hand, you have … well, a chopped-off hand. Everyone — but especially Dorff, who’s a better actor than he gets credit for — plays these modestly budgeted proceedings with an arrow-straight face, which is what makes them work as well as they do. —Rod Lott

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