Accurately, Doppelganger is not what it first seems — not an erotic thriller, that is. I mean, it is, but that’s not all it is. If you recognize the names of the KNB EFX Group founders in the opening titles, you’re given a big ol’ hint.

Playing against preppy type, George Newbern (Adventures in Babysitting) has zero game as socially awkward screenwriter Patrick Highsmith seeking a roomie to share his L.A. apartment. In walks Holly Gooding (Drew Barrymore, E.T. — heard of it?) to claim the space. Patrick’s so smitten with Holly, he can’t get enough of her … so you think having two of her around might be a plus!

Holly’s spitting image stalks Patrick around town, but this Hitchcocked double is also insatiably plunging knives into people. The first victim is a middle-aged rando played by Jaid Barrymore, Drew’s real-life mother. (Wish fulfillment much?)

Somehow, neither Patrick nor his live-wired writing partner (Leslie Hope, Bruiser) know what a “doppelganger” is. The very idea of an evil twin vexes these WGA wannabes. When she’s not trying to convince Patrick he’s in danger, Hope’s character rattles off hopelessly dopey dialogue like, “Watch your dick, pinhead!”

I can’t say how well Barrymore benefits from Doppelganger alone. But look at it as part of her haughty, naughty parade of the early ’90s (Poison Ivy, Sketch Artist and TV’s The Amy Fisher Story), and all makes sense. She worked hard to rehabilitate her rep as a coked-up child actor. Lest viewers hold any doubt and still think of her as a Firestarter (twisted Firestarter!), the opening credits play over her shrink (Dennis Christopher, Fade to Black) pawing her shirtless bod as she writhes in orgasmic glee.

Need more proof? Thrill as Barrymore dances seductively, knees Danny Trejo (Machete) in the nuts, slow-motion showers in orange-tinted blood and gets crucified on the bedroom wall. And it works.

As cut-rate (pun intended) De Palma, Doppelganger places stakes in the ground of camp and gradually grows campier, dragging your attention along with it. As incredulous as the plot gets and the level of hysterics the performances reach, you’re still ill-prepared for what writer/director Avi Nesher (Timebomb) cooked up for the climax. It’s an all-time howler I shan’t spoil. —Rod Lott

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Every kiss begins with Kay. Even the kiss of death, as Kay (Barbara Willis), the daytime DJ of an old-timey country station, learns when she’s strangled by a person unknown at the start of Boots and the Preacher. Investigating are the local do-good police lieutenant Reb (Reb Wiesener, a proto-Adam Driver) and his slovenly, meat-sweaty boss, Chief Lardas (Carl Wiesener, morbid obesity Patient Zero).

Twice does the bullying, conclusion-leaping Lardas scream at a suspect, “How’d you like some lumps on that damn head a’ yours?” I don’t think he’s being rhetoric — surely that word is alien to him, plus the man just really knows his lumps. Lest ye doubt, our first glimpse of the chief is him spilling out of his tighty not-so-whities like a broken tube of biscuit dough.

Lt. Reb thinks Kay’s co-worker, washed-up rockabilly singer Jim Arp (Arp, playing himself), might’ve had a hand in the homicide, based on two pieces of evidence: Jim and Kay’s romantic history, and Jim telling Reb, “The bitch got what she deserved.” But Jim pooh-poohs Lt. Reb’s suspicion by telling his rags-to-better-rags story from dusty hitchhiker to a gold lamé-jacketed entertainer playing to crowds of, oh, about seven.

Boots and the Preacher then switches focus to a two-bit bordello where the chief is a regular customer, Boots (Darlene Parker) is the madam and one of the girls on duty has a mentally disabled boyfriend. He’s portrayed as so childlike, he perks up at the phrase “ice cream.” (So what does that make me?)

Another loyal patron is the town drunk, who later rapes an underaged virgin in a most disturbing scene. Up until this point, the movie has avoided nudity, so the sudden ugliness throws you for a tonal loop. People show up to her funeral barefoot.

J.G. Patterson Jr. (Doctor Gore) directs this scatterbrained, yet quarter-fascinating Carolinas hicksploitation saga. Boots and the Preacher is easily one of his three best movies out of a filmography of exactly that number. The fiercely untalented Patterson’s script makes it clear he hates women, and I mean hates them. Maybe even as much as Chief Lardas hates hearing the words “empty gravy boat.”

By now, you’ve no doubt picked up on Lardas’ name as a malaprop of “lard ass,” as subtle as Boots and the Preacher gets. That’s about all you could expect of something with the budget of a bait shop register’s take-a-penny/leave-a-penny tray. —Rod Lott

The Crying Game is a well-directed, well-scripted, taut thriller about an Irish Republican Army member who, after a hostage situation ends tragically, tries to regain his foothold in society. He meets a slender chanteuse at a nightclub, and after developing feelings for her, it turns out — spoiler — the woman is, as director Neil Jordan characterized her, “a transvestite and a gay man.”

You would think that character, especially in Jordan’s able hands, would be a memorable role displaying the hope, loss and salvation the film deserves. But you forget this was released in 1992, and even worse, you’re from Oklahoma.

So, in case you don’t remember, the movie had a foreplay scene where — spoiler — Dil (Jaye Davidson) had a full-frontal nude shot, and everyone lost their damn mind. Thank God we didn’t have the internet at the time!

When The Crying Game came out, it became the weak punchline to the year’s dirtiest, lamest jokes, with everyone from Bible-beating preachers to wacky morning disc jockeys getting in on the barbed fun, upholding their own homophobia and sliding us back a few years.

My own parents banned it in our house, in case it turned me gay. I finally viewed it, thanks to the new Criterion edition. While I’m not gay yet, the movie is not only a queer milestone, but a damn good crime film as well.

The IRA kidnaps a soldier on leave (Forest Whitaker) and stores him blindfolded in a greenhouse. Fergus (Stephen Rea) brings him food and slowly develops a bond with him, something he shouldn’t be doing. The soldier tells Fergus about his lover, Dil, and, after his hostage is killed, Fergus breaks from the IRA, moves to London, finds Dil and begins a semi-romance with her. After a few weeks, with Fergus becoming more amenable to his situation, his old IRA buddies come looking for him, with Dil caught in a trap.

Encountering conventions of homoerotic masculinity as well as window-rattling domestic terrorism, the movie defies conventions, both sexual and suspenseful. Both Rea and Davidson have a sweet romance despite the world around them and the violence they encounter.

I truly love Jordan’s previous work like The Company of Wolves and especially Mona Lisa, but with The Crying Game — great title track from Boy George, by the way — he made a film about difficult choices and the will to own up to them and, even more so, to embrace them.

The Crying Game is still a controversial title in Oklahoma, but the rest of the world has moved on. —Louis Fowler

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As Batman famously noted, “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.” And some nights, as the crooks of this Brit crime corker learn, you just can’t get rid of the unconscious bookie handcuffed to the briefcase full of cash you just stole from the doggie races. 

A year before playing robbers in Vernon Sewell’s acclaimed thriller Strongroom, Derrin Nesbitt and Keith Faulkner play the robbers of/in Sewell’s The Man in the Back Seat. Harry Locke (The Creeping Flesh) essays the title character, spending almost the entire 57 minutes knocked-out — and likely handing a template to Terry Kiser to utilize nearly four decades later in Weekend at Bernie’s. In contrast, Nesbit and Faulkner, meanwhile, spend much of the movie attempting to find the proper tool to separate the gentlemen from their riches. 

Emerging from the mind of Edgar Wallace, that job is easier said than done, not to mention a fool’s errand. At every turn, their simple quest is hampered by one inconvenience or another, from a flat tire and lack of adequate parking to nosy coppers and a nosier wife (Carol White, Something Big). That qualifies it as a “one crazy night” picture à la After Hours — only not funny. 

Nor is meant to be. It’s a sober example of crime-doesn’t-pay cinema from the bottom half of the bills, with a short detour into British kitchen-sink drama when White is involved. Back Seat bends the rules of reality in its abrupt conclusion, heralded by SUDDEN! BLARING! TRUMPETS! — an unexpected kick to your movie-watching pants. —Rod Lott

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Georgia Bernstein’s first feature, Night Nurse, is heralded as a contemporary erotic thriller. Smart marketing aside, I find the label misleading, because the film doesn’t go far enough to qualify. It feels every bit as repressed as a Reagan-era housewife protesting the sale of Playboy at the local 7-Eleven she didn’t even patronize because “the clientele look dirty.”

That in and of itself is not necessarily a negative — the Night Nurse vibe, I mean, not Mrs. Risner’s racism. Just don’t expect to see anything akin to costar Mimi Rogers’ Full Body Massage. Not even a shoulder rub over the sweater.

Eleni, played by Cemre Paksoy in her film debut, is the titular health care practitioner. Newly hired at a retirement community, she’s assigned to assist Douglas Callum (Bruce McKenzie, Your Name Here), who has “maybe early onset Alzheimer’s,” which is a nice way of saying he’s an irascible, uncouth bastard. Hard-headed and impossible to please, Douglas is a devil in unwashed PJs.

Taking advantage of Eleni’s inexperience, he ropes her into a DUI-bond scam targeting fellow absentminded residents over the landline. Despite Douglas’ erectile dysfunction, first-feature writer/director Georgia Bernstein depicts this scene as a metaphorical sexual assault, which Eleni oddly, suddenly submits to like the contents of a colon to a spoonful of Metamucil. Next thing we know, Douglas has all the nurses under his chainsmoking spell and attending parties in his apartment where they ingest vitamins via IV.

Here’s the problem with the events of the previous paragraph: Why on earth? McKenzie gives such a credibly diabolic performance, we dislike Douglas immediately; we’ve all dealt with manipulative bullies like him. I might be able to comprehend the allure for the mousy Eleni if her backstory filled in enough blanks. But every nurse on staff? Bernstein supplies no impetus for that, which is where the movie lost me.

Rather than a modern twist on the 1980s erotic thriller, Night Nurse strikes me as an update of the ’50s and ’60s juvenile-delinquent flicks decrying the pitfalls of hanging with “the wrong crowd,” with McKenzie as the wild one who’ll rebel against whatever you’ve got, just for kicks. Like those movies, Bernstein’s deals in dialogue charged with innuendo, where seemingly every line holds two distinct meanings. Unlike those movies, perversity and danger hang over every frame, although too undeveloped and antiseptic for my taste. Douglas’ phone cord may coil, but tension is another story. —Rod Lott

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