Although he’s second-billed, Jim Hutton (TV’s Ellery Queen) plays Arnold Masters, the Psychic Killer in question. Wearing red-rimmed glasses that likely make him the least popular man behind bars, he’s institutionalized for a murder he swears he did not commit. And he didn’t. But give the man some time.

After a fellow mental patient commits suicide, Arnold learns the man willed him some sort of voodoo necklace, which enables him to astral-project into others’ bodies and do some crimes. Once the murder charges are dropped and Arnold his free, he uses his new jewelry as often as a teenage boy does erections.

Anyone responsible for the death of his mother and his wrongful imprisonment are at the top of Arnold’s shit list. A rapey doctor goes kablooey; a hot nurse is scalded to death in the shower, as its head cranes to follow her around the tight space; a cop drives his car off a cliff; a contractor is smashed by a cement block; a butcher is chased by slabs of meat until he gets caught in a machine that turns him into ground round. It’s tough not to think of the Final Destination series since the culprit is nowhere present at these grisly deaths.

Because Hutton was such a likable actor — or perhaps I’m just a sick bastard — I was rooting for Arnold, and not for the gruff detective (Paul Burke, Valley of the Dolls) eager to get his goat. Directed and co-written by Ray Danton (Deathmaster), the film alternates between police procedural and speculative fiction, with some surprising gore sprinkled about, and topped with one of the screen’s oddest stripteases (courtesy of Love Me Deadly’s Mary Wilcox). Yet for some reason, it doesn’t feel like a mess; it feels like an undiscovered gem of weirdo ’70s cinema. —Rod Lott

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Stephen King never should have been allowed to direct, but we have Maximum Overdrive in our lives anyway. It’s about how machines get minds of their own during a nine-day period in which the tail of a comet passes over Earth. And the movie is trash — occasionally enjoyable trash, but trash nonetheless.

If you were to judge Overdrive from its first 15 minutes only, it’d be an awesome spectacle of technology gone mad. A drawbridge opens on its own without warning, causing a major car smash-up and Marla Maples getting smashed by a watermelon. A steamroller bursts onto the field of a Little League game, shortly after the coach is felled by a soda machine violently shooting out pop cans like cannonballs. A waitress is attacked by an electric knife. A black guy gets turned extra-crispy by a video game.

But then there’s the rest of the running time to contend with, as fry cook Emilio Estevez and company — including Yeardley Smith, the voice of The Simpsons‘ Lisa Simpson, best heard and not seen — hole themselves up in a truck stop while the semis — including one with a Green Goblin face on its front grill — circle outside without drivers, awaiting fresh prey.

This is where Overdrive — remade for TV in 1997 as the inferior Trucks — downshifts into severe repetition, drawing out its scenario to the point where it ceases to be fun, even the mindless kind. Although I like the clever touch of the runaway ice cream truck eerily playing “King of the Road,” the bombastic AC/DC score is enough to make one pull out his hair. —Rod Lott

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In the near future, Jennifer Jason Leigh is Allegra Gellar, the world’s best game designer. The controls for her game look like pulsating handheld vaginas, and they attach directly to your spine with an umbilical cord. As the film opens, Leigh and a dozen others are test-driving her new virtual-reality game for the first time when she’s nearly assassinated by a man with a gun made of flesh that shoots teeth.

In case you couldn’t guess by now, eXistenZ was written and directed by David Cronenberg.

With various people wanting her dead, Allegra goes on the run with her company’s PR trainee, played by Jude Law. He’s never played her games before, so they get the necessary “bioport” installed in his back at a local gas station by attendant Willem Dafoe. Now Jude and Jen can play the game together to make sure it works.

The game plants Jude on the assembly line, cutting open mutated frogs for parts to make mini gamepods. This, incidentally, is where the movie starts to go south. Jen worries about her own gamepod, because it’s sick and diseased, and you wonder how the actors were able to keep a straight face.

Both Law and Leigh are fine, even if I suspect the latter is convinced she’s playing Elisabeth Shue. What’s Cronenberg trying to say in the Möbius-strip eXistenZ? Hell if I know! But for a while, I liked how he said it — gory amphibian parts, clitoral joysticks and all. —Rod Lott

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Hammer Film Productions was and is known for horror, but give the group credit for its one and only attempt at a sci-fi Western in Moon Zero Two. In the year 2021, the moon is inhabited; its residents play a circular-shaped board game called Moonopoly; and social life amounts to hanging out at the Lazy B Saloon, where the drink of choice — distilled rocket fuel, of choice — runs $35 a shot.

Our hero is Capt. William H. Kemp (James Olson, The Andromeda Strain), who specializes in retrieval of satellite scrap, and doesn’t want to shuttle interplanetary tourists: “I’m a space pilot, not a mechanically minded wet nurse.” However, when safety violations threaten to ground him, a guy’s gotta look long-term.

For Kemp, that means listening to Hubbard (Warren Mitchell, Jabberwocky), the purple-cloaked, eyepatch-sporting baldie about illegally mining the sapphire from a 6,000-ton asteroid. Total fox Clementine Taplin (Catherina von Schell, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), searching for her missing brother, shows up to provide much sexual innuendo.

The film’s highlights are a gravity-free bar brawl, however brief, and cartoon opening credits in a loony spirit not exhibited by the mostly serious story that follows. Directed by Roy Ward Baker (Quatermass and the Pit), Moon Zero Two certainly looks cool — and sounds it, with a swingin’ ’60s score — but feels forever set at quarter-speed. Good thing that in space, no one can hear you snore. —Rod Lott

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Imagine if The Terminator were a made-for-TV movie. And instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killer robot with an authority problem, what if they cast a guy who looks not unlike Gopher from The Love Boat? Voilà! You have Assassin, written and directed by cathode vet Sandor Stern (Pin).

As the telefilm opens, government-created android Robert Golem (get it?) goes nutzoid and kills two fellow agents before going on the run, in search of more government agents to kill. In order to stop him, the team has to recruit two ex-agents now in the public sector. One is star Robert Conrad, bringing to Assassin all the verve and intensity of his Duracell commercials. The other is Karen Austin (Markie Post’s Night Court predecessor), because with Conrad in the lead, they needed someone to balance that out and lend the action film some testosterone.

Austin explains to Conrad that she helped create the cyborg (Robert Young, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), who has two built-in weaknesses: His brain is in his stomach and he has to recharge his power supply every 72 hours by plugging into an air-conditioning unit for 30 minutes, which he does by removing a cord implanted in his ankle. He also has a detachable tummy for working on his insides and is prone to jumping out of high-rise windows to escape capture.

Assassin has no forward drive, nor anything resembling pure action. It’s mediocre in every way, right down to the costumer’s decision to clothe Conrad in butt-hugging khakis. It’s not intended for laughs, but generated a fair share for me. —Rod Lott

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Trailer provided by Video Detective