In a rare nexus of art and commerce, Hollywood has turned a best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn into a critically acclaimed, audience-pleasing smash that’s destined to embed itself in our pop-culture consciousness for decades to come.

I speak of Gone Girl, of course. One year later came Dark Places. It premiered on VOD.

In 1985, Libby Day was just 8 years old when her mother and sister were brutally murdered in what the media dubbed the “Kansas Prairie Massacre,” for which her teen brother, Ben, was convicted. Three decades down the line, Libby (Charlize Theron, Mad Max: Fury Road) is near-penniless after book royalties and funds from kind strangers have dried up. Naturally, she’s estranged from Ben (Corey Stoll, Ant-Man), who remains behind bars.

Dire straits are the lone reason why Libby agrees to be the paid special guest at a meeting of true-crime enthusiasts not only fascinated by her case, but convinced of her brother’s innocence. While the amateur organization is called The Kill Club, Libby’s recruiting member (Theron’s fellow Fury Road passenger Nicholas Hoult) promises, “It’s not as weird as it sounds.”

That, in a nutshell, is Dark Places’ largest problem: It’s not as weird as it sounds. In fact, it’s shockingly average, venturing to locales and situations not nearly as twisted as one hopes for, given the sales success of Flynn’s 2009 sophomore book and its use of the 1980s’ satanic-panic hysteria as a major subplot. A mystery is there, which Libby initially is reluctant to touch, but her manner of investigation is less than compelling and the secrets uncovered, disappointing due to sheer implausibility. Not having read the book, I do not know if blame should be assigned to Flynn or writer/director Gilles Paquet-Brenner, whose 2010 film, the low-key Sarah’s Key, generates markedly more suspense out of its slow-cooker of a story, also blessed with a strong female protagonist.

As usual, Theron gives it her all, even if her ever-the-sourpuss character is less than likable. Doing richer work — and all in flashbacks — is Mad Men resident redhead Christina Hendricks as Libby’s hardscrabble mother. She may have had the edge, with this being her second film in a row playing a financially desperate single mom, following last year’s Lost River. —Rod Lott

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Dick Tracy! Calling Dick Tracy!

Long before Warren Beatty gave us his big-budget, candy-coated adaptation of the legendary and long-running Chester Gould comic strip, Morgan Conway and Ralph Byrd donned the yellow fedora of homicide detective Dick Tracy in a series of four films.

RKO Pictures was “true to the flavor” of the funny papers without resorting to camp. While the studio didn’t exactly nail it, it didn’t botch the job, either. Each pic clocks in at one hour, give or take — just the right length for these none-too-complex crime stories.

Dick Tracy, Detective (1945)
With Conway starring, Dick Tracy, Detective is hot on the trail of the slasher Splitface (The Centerfold Girls’ Mike Mazurki), so named for his hideous facial scar. Two die before Tracy starts to get wise, nabbing the villain with the help of wannabe-private eye Junior, and rescuing true love Tess Trueheart (Anne Jeffreys, Zombies on Broadway) in the process.

Dick Tracy’s Dilemma (1947)
Following the theft of a bunch of furs in an insurance scam, square-jawed Tracy (Byrd, who also played the hero in the serials and the TV show) is on the hunt for The Claw, (Jack Lambert, 1946’s The Killers), a burly, hulking bad guy with a metal hook for a hand, in Dick Tracy’s Dilemma. The utensil comes in handy for knocking people out and cutting up their faces. Meanwhile, Tess (Kay Christopher, Gasoline Alley) gets stood up repeatedly because Dick’s priorities are all out of whack, and has to spend much of her time with effeminate actor Vitamin Flintheart (Ian Keith, It Came from Beneath the Sea), who likes to perform Shakespeare monologues. But of course he does. All in all, it’s a painless hour of good-ol’-fashioned fun.

Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946)
Essentially, Dilemma is a carbon copy of the previous year’s Dick Tracy vs. Cueball, right down to the bumbling cop sidekick who gets hit over the head by the bad guy so often, it’s a wonder he’s alive, still on the force and without a cap in his ass. In Cueball, the main villain is the burly, hulking, bald baddie Cueball (Dick Wessel, TV’s Riverboat), thick-neck-deep in a stolen-diamonds scam. Vitamin even shows up to make some remarks about wanting to be a woman. But of course he does.

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947)
Finally, in Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, ex-con Gruesome (Frankenstein’s monster himself, Boris Karloff) leads a trio of bank robbers who commit their crimes thanks to a formula that causes people to freeze. As one might guess, Gruesome is sillier than the others, filled with jokey names like Professor A. Tomic; his assistant, I.M. Learned; and the taxidermist Y. Stuffem. And if Tracy (Byrd) works homicide, what’s he doing investigating a bank robbery?

In all four films, virtually every man wears a hat. —Rod Lott

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One from the 14-film Sherlock Holmes franchise’s middle, The Scarlet Claw is the most overtly supernatural of the bunch, but we all know Holmes (Basil Rathbone) isn’t a believer in such things. The same can’t be said for Lord Penrose (Paul Cavanagh, 1953’s House of Wax), whose wife becomes the latest victim of a rumored marsh monster that has the village of La Mort Rouge gripped in fear.

Just like the following year’s Pursuit to Algiers, this flick stands at more of a B level than the earlier pictures, yet at 74 minutes, it’s so quick, it can’t help but be fun. As with all of them, it’s difficult not to want to watch at least two in a row.

Rathbone makes an excellent Holmes, so much so that we tend to picture him when he think of the character. He enjoys a natural rapport with Nigel Bruce, too, although this Watson of the screen isn’t Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson of the page; here, the doctor is reduced to a bumbling, occasionally pigheaded sidekick, rather than the detective’s equal. That’s not really a complaint, but an observation.

But here’s one complaint: Typical of the studio pictures of their era, these films are prone to musical numbers in which a character sings an entire song — or several — apparently because audiences liked that sort of thing. —Rod Lott

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Too bad 1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles marked Peter Cushing’s one and only time to play Sherlock Holmes on the big screen, because he does a great job at it. And too bad Hound is the only Holmes adaptation undertaken by Hammer Films, because this had franchise potential written all over it.

After a 10-minute prologue that doesn’t even involve Holmes or Dr. Watson, detailing the curse of the well-to-do Baskerville family, the movie gets going with the plot, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle originally presented it: With Sir Charles Baskerville dead of fright, his nephew, Henry (Christopher Lee), inherits his estate on the moors, and Holmes and Watson (André Morell, The Mummy’s Shroud) suspect he may suffer the same fate as his uncle.

They have good reason to suspect as much, because out of his boot pops a big ol’ tarantula that immediately starts making its way toward a frozen-in-shock Henry’s face. Watson accompanies Henry to Baskerville Hall, where the sounds of the hound — a beast rumored to have killed many a man over the decades — pervade the night sky.

Not a believer in the supernatural, Holmes aims to get to the bottom of it, and naturally, he does. Only this time, Doyle’s story comes infused with spiders, scorpions, sacrifices and a suspenseful third-act descent into a dangerous mine shaft. Although the film by Hammer regular Terence Fisher (Horror of Dracula) is overly talky at times, it’s well-made in that unmistakable Hammer tradition, brimming with color and Gothic atmosphere, even on obvious sets. —Rod Lott

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Fashion model Valentina (Nieves Navarro, aka Susan Scott, The Big Gundown) agrees to be the guinea pig in a toxicology professor’s test of HDS, an experimental hallucinogen he’s developed. Scandal-sheet journalist Gio (Simón Andreu, The Blood Spattered Bride) documents her resulting trip, during which fits of uncontrollable laughter give way to visions of a young woman being brutally murdered by a man with an armored glove bearing four metal spikes.

Still shaken after the experience, Valentina soon learns that a woman actually died that way six months prior, in the office building directly across from her apartment. Not only that, but Valentina believes she’s become a target herself, as she comes face-to-face with the killer direct from her drug-fueled state — you know, that mutton-chopped dude with the groovy shades that practically qualify as Terminator goggles. Or has she? Perhaps, it’s suggested, the lingering aftereffects of HDS are to blame? It’s a not a spoiler to say the game of pursuer and pursued is not all in Valentina’s glamorous little head.

From there, director Luciano Ercoli (The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion) introduces us to so many loons, it’s too bad Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda weren’t on hand to imitate them. Working from a story by Django helmer Sergio Corbucci and demonstrating a keen eye for geometry in his frame compositions — aided tremendously by the swank ’60s surroundings — Ercoli pulls off a couple of sequences that Brian De Palma had to have absorbed before trying his hand at the same thing. With one hell of a heroine in Navarro, Death Walks at Midnight is a stylish and at times rather gruesome giallo that wrings pleasure up until its denouement, delivered in an info dump so rushed, it not only doesn’t give you time to make sense of it, but raises even more questions.

Ercoli redeems himself with the final scene, an action-packed fight atop the rooftops with at least one twisted idea for dispatching a giggling henchman. Also, let the record show that despite the title, death actually walks in broad daylight. —Rod Lott

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