When her uncle is gunned down by the mob, Katie (the utterly ravishing Cara Burgess) inherits his business, the Loving Touch “massage parlor” offering “special handling,” if you get the drift. (And if you don’t, maybe the photo of W.C. Fields on the wall helps? No?)

Kicking the working girls and their johns to the curb, Katie vows to turn the fleapit brothel into a legit rubdown provider. For help, she recruits two gal pals: a sexually harassed secretary (Judith Brown, Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off) and a failed vaginal-spray commercial actress (Rosalind Miles, Shaft’s Big Score!). They reopen the place as Soft Touch — a terrible name, if you ask me, but their matching caveman-cheerleader outfits accentuate enough cleavage that I’m willing to let it be.

At any rate, the syndicate tries to muscle its grubby paws back into Katie’s honey pot of a biz, even enlisting the kingpin’s nephew (Vince Cannon, 1967’s Trackdown) to seduce her into submission. Each woman gets a romantic subplot, none more entertaining than Miles’ cherry-popping a virgin customer (Peter Fitzsimmons, 1987’s The Principal) so inexperienced, his response to her kiss is, “Sure was slippery, wasn’t it?” (Moments later, as she doffs her top, his agog line is, “Breasts!” And it’s stated not with joy, but with the shock one might reserve for stumbling across a corpse.)

Lee Madden, whose career would crater two films later with Ghost Fever, directs The Manhandlers with little to no verve, opting for about two angles unless it’s time for a sex scene, which suddenly sees him get all dark and arty. At least he knows the ol’ exploitation-pic axiom of when in need of production value, shoot the climax at an amusement park. Or perhaps he’d just already had his fill of paisley and wicker, and needed to get outside.

Cribbing elements from soaps and sitcoms to pad the running time, the movie rides the Ms. magazine wave of feminism by presenting its leads as take-no-guff ladies with sharp minds … except when they fail to comprehend the true intentions of the gregarious and gargantuan Texan bursting through their door as their inaugural patron, with all the hypothetical bluster of Joe Don Baker invading a Hometown Buffet on Fried Shrimp Fridays. Oh, well, girlbosses gotta start somewhere, as Burgess does here in her first film. Unfortunately for us, it’s also her last. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

By name alone, Pete Walker’s Die Screaming Marianne sets you up to expect one of his signature horror films that pushed boundaries in Great Britain. Instead, it’s a crime thriller, but it does contain a Marianne — in the shapely shape of Straw Dogs’ Susan George, no less. Bikinied and barefoot, she go-go dances her way through the opening credits, demonstrating why she’s billed as “The Hips” by the nightclub employing all her parts.

On the cusp of turning 21, Marianne has been estranged from her family for more than a half-decade when father (Leo Genn, Walker’s Frightmare) hires her freshly spurned boyfriend to retrieve her. Marianne believes dear ol’ Dad and Sister (Judy Huxtable, Scream and Scream Again) are plotting to kill her for her portion of her dead mother’s inheritance. Which they absolutely are.

And yet, brought against her will to the family’s oceanside estate in sunny Portugal, Marianne accepts an invitation to join her sibling in the sauna. What could possibly happen? A line Marianne gives her lover-cum-kidnapper (Christopher Sandford, Walker’s also comma-less Cool It Carol!) could be thrown right back in her face, not to mention the uneven film itself: “You really are quite unstable, aren’t you?”

Die Screaming is not “The Ultimate in SUSPENSE” as its poster proclaims. Heck, it’s not even the ultimate in Susan George vehicles by any measure. In Walker’s first three years of making features, from The Big Switch to Marianne, what he gained in production values, he lost in storytelling tightness. For example, I’m unable to work in Barry Evans’ (Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush) role as the ostensible second lead because the mechanics of his character’s introduction are so convoluted, it would take more space to share than you’re willing to read. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

The Judgment Night soundtrack was (and still is) one of my favorite soundtracks of all time, with rock/rap collaborations between Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul, Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill, and Helmet and House of Pain. Pick up a copy!

That being said, I’d never seen the actual movie Judgment Night until one recent afternoon. And you know, it’s not bad. If I had watched it in 1993, like I should have, I would have liked it quite a bit.

The plot is extremely simple: Emilo Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Stephen Dorff, and, ugh, Jeremy Piven rent a luxury camper for a title fight in the big, bad, unidentified city. Looking for a shortcut to the bout, they come across Denis Leary and his goons trying to kill them, turning the dangerous streets in a small-time bloodbath, with the climax in a rundown department store or a Chinese warehouse — I can’t be sure.

With the exception of Piven, who is mercifully taken out in the middle of the film, it’s a good little urban survivalist film, with Estevez, Dorff and even Gooding on the top of their game — whatever that game is — with Leary playing against his acerbic comedian persona as a real menacing figure.

Sure, Judgment Night’s at the bottom of my list of great good action films list, but it is pretty darn entertaining with some real playful setups, like the whole scene at the apartment slums, and enough white-knuckle suspense to keep you on your toes. And even though it won’t be remembered for anything but the insane soundtrack, it’s a pretty good watch overall. Give it a try.

Earlier that year, Estevez and Leary were also in National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1, a pretty perfect rip-off of the ZAZ formula that I happen to love. So Judgment Night should have been at least a rental — why did I miss this? And were Estevez and Leary the Hope and Crosby of their day? We’ll never know. Either way, get that soundtrack. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Nothing against crime films in which the bad guys share names with subs and pizzas — your Fat Tonys, your Big Frankies — but it’s nice to see one that uses a simple Benny. That makes the movie feel more realistic. Not that I know anyone with an allergy to loud sounds as Leo Woodall’s protagonist suffers throughout Tuner, but hey, take your cinematic victories where you find them.

Woodall’s Niki is a piano tuner whose sensitivity issue requires him to wear noise-killing headphones. What the world sees as his disability actually provides him with a superpower: perfect pitch. It may also be his Kryptonite, once he accidentally finds his gift extends from Steinways to safecracking. Soon, a security company owner (Lior Raz, Glaidator II) for the toniest of clients hires Niki for freelance gigs that aren’t exactly — how to put this? — legal.

That’s great for Niki’s cash flow, but potential dynamite to his burgeoning relationship with a composition major (Havana Rose Liu, Lurker) he meets at one of his appointments — the on-the-up-and-up kind. In his fictional feature debut, Academy Award-winning documentarian Daniel Roher (Navalny) had me so invested in their fireworks, I was legitmately thrown for a second when the criminal element kicked back in.

If Tuner weren’t fantastic, the headline would be Dustin Hoffman’s return to the big screen in a high-quality project, here as Niki’s mentor and father figure. Instead, the news is three performers turning in breakout work that knocks Hoffman off said screen. Woodall (HBO’s The White Lotus) brings a sad, quiet intensity, while Liu brings feistiness and distrust to what could been a thankless window-dressing part, giving her character dimension and spark. And Raz is believably chummy one moment, terrifying the next, and back again.

If forced to pick a fourth standout, it’d be one unseen: sound. It — and often the lack thereof — is not merely integral to the story, but immersively so. The auditory experience is reminiscent of 2019’s Sound of Metal, but with a rap sheet. Sharp, tense and unexpectedly moving, Tuner is a thriller in the key of excellence. —Rod Lott

In theaters May 29.

After a bank closes on Easter Saturday, three men burst in to clean out the safe. To help ensure a scot-free getaway, the trio locks the bank manager (Colin Gordon, The Pink Panther) and his cashier (Ann Lynn, A Shot in the Dark) in the vault.

Because the vault is airtight, the looters risk their simple robbery being upgraded to a double murder. One of the thieves (Derren Nesbitt, The Playbirds) has enough of a heart and soul to return to the scene of the crime to free the employees before they run out of oxygen. Through a series of extraordinary circumstances best left to your discovery, that proves easier said than done.

All of 80 minutes, Strongroom qualifies as a ticking-clock thriller, even though director Vernon Sewell (The Blood Beast Terror) approaches the material with a low-key manner typical of the British film industry’s buttoned-up B pictures of the era. In the second half, it even takes something of a sojourn into pavement-pounding detective work to allow a police sergeant (John Dearth, ITV’s The Adventures of Robin Hood) to assemble the puzzle. It’s confidently taut without breaking a sweat.

None of that is to be taken as a weakness. But if you’re looking for one, allow me to point you to the bank manager unwilling to dial or answer a telephone on his own, because that’s what women were for. Anyway, Stronghold: economic storytelling without surrendering anything in return, as one hell of an ending coldly corroborates. —Rod Lott