Don’t judge a movie by its cover. In the case of Express to Terror, the reason is because it’s actually the feature-length pilot of NBC’s legendarily colossal failure of a television series, Supertrain, which lasted all of nine episodes. (Okay, now you can judge it.)

Possessing a boner for rail travel, the CEO of TransAllied Corporation (Keenan Wynn, The Crowded Sky) accepts the U.S. Department of Transportation’s request to construct an atomic-powered choo-choo train with unlabeled gumdrop-button controls to make it go coast to coast in 36 hours. The end result, aka Supertrain, is so luxurious, it has everything: a bar, a gym, a sauna, a swimming pool, a discotheque, red carpet, an elevator, Nina Talbot and a flaming hairstylist with two electric dryers!

Well, almost everything — as we learn, it lacks ashtrays, Maalox and suspense.

Add “competent security” to the list, considering Supertrain’s maiden voyage is fraught with repeated attempts on the life of Mike (crooner Steve Lawrence), a gambling-addicted passenger in debt to the mob. Meanwhile, Mike falls for the ditzy, abused wife (Char Fontane, The Night the Bridge Fell Down) of his would-be assassin (Don Stroud, Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off). Mike’s dandy, Peaky Blinders-capped pal (Don Meredith, Mayday at 40,000 Feet!) condemns the romance, because she looks like she “reads Corn Flakes boxes.” (To be fair, he’s not wrong.)

Also aboard Supertrain are Stella Stevens, George Hamilton, Robert Alda, Vicki Lawrence and Fred Williamson. None sticks out because all play second fiddle — if not relegated to last chair — to Steve Lawrence’s pickle of a primary storyline. He brings all the intensity and nuance he would to his finest performance: as himself, hosting TV’s Foul-Ups, Bleeps & Blunders. Only if director Dan Curtis (Burnt Offerings) were helming a game show could his leading man fit snugly in the role’s demands.

By comparison, The Love Boat looks like James A. Michener. Strangely, this disaster-adjacent pilot is written by two people who should have known — or typed — better: soon-to-be Oscar-winning scribe Earl W. Wallace (Witness) and crime-fiction icon Donald E. Westlake. Whether they were just taking a check or network interference gummed up the works, Express to Terror is, ending aside, slow enough to qualify as a sedative. All a-snore! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Good help is hard to find. That’s true today as it was in, oh, for the sake of argument, let’s say ′74. Palo Alto tramway management finds out the hard way when a disgruntled former employee — fired for being drunk on the job — sabotages the mechanical system, leaving a cable car hovering at 8,700 feet as treacherous winds approach. Lesson learned: Terminated workers should be escorted off the property.

Inside the cable car, the guide (bubble gum popster Bobby Sherman) does his best to reassure his seven passengers. Among them are agoraphobe John Astin (Wacky Taxi), pickpocket Severn Dardin (Saturday the 14th), philanderer Ross Martin (TV’s The Wild Wild West) and old bat Ruth McDevitt (The Birds), whose only concern is her goddamn $8 flower hat.

From director Gordon Hessler (Pray for Death), Skyway to Death was the earlier of two stranded-cable-car movies made for TV in the disaster-film heyday. At 67 minutes, it’s also the shortest; oddly, that does not work in its favor, feeling like a crawl compared to 1979’s three-hour-plus Hanging by a Thread. How the latter’s producer, Irwin Allen, got away with not citing Skyway as source material is a mystery, because Thread copies this one beat for beat, from the jinxed chopper rescue attempt to the them’s-the-brakes conclusion. —Rod Lott

Having sent two young women to the sea floor in 47 Meters Down, the enterprising producers flip that sleeper hit’s script by sending two young women to the tippy-top of a TV tower for the vertically challenged, survive-or-die suspenser Fall.

In its Cliffhanger-reminiscent prologue, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey, Shazam!) watches her husband (Mason Gooding, 2022’s Scream) plummet to his doom in a rock-climbing accident. One year later, Becky is basically a barfly unable to get to that fifth stage of grief, until her fearless friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner, 2018’s Halloween) proposes they climb a 2,000-foot-tall tower in the middle of nowhere.

As Becky and Hunter scale it rung by rung, director Scott Mann (2015’s Heist) skillfully wrings every step for maximum viewer discomfort. (From my perspective, the metal contraption stands at such great heights, it’s a real testicle-retreater.) Despite the prologue’s ropey green-screen effects, this main section looks more real and, therefore, harrowing. And that’s even before the girls get stuck at the spire, thanks to the laziest bolt-tightening in construction history, causing the ladder to come loose and collapse. The acrophobia! The wind! The vultures!

Look, Fall is imperfect. At times, it’s cheesy, plus Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” is used as a plot point. But here’s the thing: It would be hypocritical to knock a movie too much when it prompts your palms to perspire for an hour. As escapist, so-glad-that-ain’t-me entertainment, it got on my nerves in the good way. It works. —Rod Lott

As the near-robotic, deplorable driver-for-hire Dawn of Dawn, Jackie Moore (Verotika) is all crazy-eyed and lead-footed, picking up rides and taking their lives as her fare. (Among her early victims is Eric Roberts, in one of 37 movies he’s made as I wrote this sentence.) Then she uploads the homicidal results to her dark-web channel, as one does.

Nearly all of Nicholas Ryan’s directorial debut follows the backseat travails of a newly engaged couple: salesman (Atlantic Rim: Resurrection’s Jared Cohn, redefining “simpering”) and a first-grade teacher (Sarah French, Death Count). Dawn menaces them with mind games — not to mention schools them on wealthy white privilege — before threatening bodily harm. Neither spouse-to-be (Cohn especially) is interesting enough to follow for a feature. Nor is Dawn.

“The audience loves tension and drama,” says Dawn, yet her namesake film, despite a slick look, is inert. Unless you’re Locke, constant talking in a moving car makes for sluggish, über-dull cinema. Halfway through, respite looks to arrive when Dawn pulls into a gas station, where a demented fan (Nicholas Brendon, Psycho Beach Party) asks for the honor of being stabbed to death, but it’s a nonsensical scene. Dawn fulfills his wish, but not ours. Later, she’s pulled over by a sheriff (Michael Paré, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich). He’s the best part of the movie, so of course he’s swiftly dispatched.

For a raucous rideshare gone wrong that achieves everything Ryan aims for — thrills, dark humor, social commentary — see Spree. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

For Love Crime, Nicole D’Angelo blamelessly jumps aboard today’s true-crime gravy train with her telling of Jodi Arias’ 2008 murder of boyfriend Travis Alexander. Not only does D’Angelo (The Awakening of Emanuelle) direct, but brings her irresistibly wispy lisp and chameleon-like quality to portray Arias as well. Barely over an hour, the movie does more time-shifting than a full season of Quantum Leap.

Her Jodi is devout, virginal and clingier than flypaper soaked in Gorilla Glue. After a couple of dates with seminar-bro Travis (Amateur Porn Star Killer’s Shane Ryan-Reid), she’s convinced the Lord’s holy matchmaking has brought them together. Travis isn’t 100% sold on divine intervention. In response, she pulls down her shirt to show her cups floweth over; immediately, his tune changes to hallelujah, He is risen, pass the plate, where do I tithe and all that. I get it.

Life-affirming cleavage aside, no scene allows an understanding of what made their relationship tick, much less tock; overall, more attention is placed on her breakfast egg preferences, a bartender’s war scars and a waiter’s cheesecake recommendation than to the nuts and bolts of their ultimately fatal attraction. However, every scene is fragmented into a montage. Reflective of the hand of frequent collaborator Gregory Hatanaka (here, producer and cinematographer), D’Angelo is unable to resist cutting to another time and place — or times and places, plural — often slowed and involving dancing and/or smooching. Love Crime has to contain more kisses than actual minutes.

Utters a police detective played by H.O.T.S. vet Lisa London, “That darkness inside of her … it operates on its own logic.” I would suggest the same is true of the film, if not for the film proving it seconds later when London adds with no certain cynicism, “If truth is bitter, my coffee should be.”

Indeed it is: Love Crime is so scattershot and undercooked, it hasn’t got a prayer. But I recommend the cheesecake. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.