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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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

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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

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