While young men play a cricket match, one team member plays with his girlfriend in an apple orchard directly across the street. After he’s called back to the field, Pauline (Tracy Hyde, Melody), bides her time wandering ’round the grounds.

A path takes her to a gnome-statued garden at a railhouse occupied by a pubic-bearded hunchback (Brazil’s Bill Wallis, almost too creepy) and a towering idiot (Clive Mantle, Alien 3), making for an even grimmer version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. And if you want me to tell you about the rabbits, George, they’re as short-lived as the perilous Pauline.

At just under 50 minutes, The Orchard End Murder is a nasty little piece of work. The British picture heralds great promise for documentarian Christian Marnham in his fiction-film debut, particularly as a practitioner of crime and suspense, but to date, he’s made one lone feature: the 1988 rape-revenger Lethal Woman.

Too bad, because rare is the thriller whose suspense lever can be plotted like a diagonal line, rising in proportion with each passing minute toward a slow-burn end more satisfying than films twice its length. Designed to unsettle, hard to shake, The Orchard End Murder proves potent to the core. How ’bout them apples? —Rod Lott

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Crime Wave is a crackerjack noir that packs a wallop and assembles an impressive array of ’50s-era character actors. While it might fall a little short of the promise of its kick-ass title, this B picture starring Sterling Hayden and directed by André De Toth is nevertheless a gem of criminal goodness.

Trouble begins when three prison escapees from San Quentin rob a Glendale, California, gas station, but not before one shoots a police officer who has the misfortune of showing up at the wrong time. Shortly after, they reach out for help from Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson), a former fellow inmate. Steve, now married and determined to remain on the straight and narrow, declines their request.

Enter Hayden as the imposing police Lt. Sims. Hot on the trail of the escapees, Sims’ gut tells him that Steve can lead him to the bad guys. There is no room for rehabilitation in Sims’ cynical mind; once a crook, he reasons, always a crook. When Sims has another officer phone the Lacey household and no one picks up, the intrepid lawman concludes that the unanswered ringing “doesn’t look good” for Steve.

Sims doesn’t know how right he is. One of the escapees, Gat Morgan (Nedrick Young), hoofs it to Lacey’s apartment after being seriously injured in the gas station robbery; Gat shows up just in time to die in Steve’s easy chair. Sims, suspecting Steve knows more than he lets on, jails the ex-con for several days before grudgingly letting the man return to wife Ellen (Phyllis Kirk). The timing is unfortunate. The two surviving escapees, Doc Penny (Ted de Corsia) and the brutish Ben Hastings (Charles Bronson, then still going by Charles Buchinsky), track down Steve and force him into their scheme to knock off a bank before fleeing the country. Steve reluctantly goes along to keep Ellen from harm’s way.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Nelson is miscast in the central role. Primarily a dancer who later turned to directing TV and movies (including two Elvis Presley flicks), Nelson is a little too pretty and self-satisfied for the part, his smug demeanor seemingly at odds with a character wound tighter than a hangman’s noose. But Nelson is surrounded by a bevy of terrific character actors happily chewing on enough scenery to warrant a bite block. The toothpick-gnawing Hayden delivers his hardboiled dialogue with machine-gun ferocity. De Corsia and Bronson are believably menacing, while Jay Novello steals his scenes as a disgraced doctor and ex-con who gets pulled into the nastiness. Dub Taylor (billed here as “Dubb Taylor”) has a memorable turn as a bumpkin gas station attendant, and an uncredited Timothy Carey appears as a gang member so batshit crazy, you half expect him to begin drooling at any minute.

Shot on location in Glendale in naturalistic black and white, Crime Wave has the lean, no-nonsense feel of the early-television crime dramas that undoubtedly were pulling away movie audiences of the time. Director De Toth and screenwriter Crane Wilbur, both of whom had also collaborated on the the first 3D picture, House of Wax, keep the pace snappy and brusque enough for a compact 73-minute running time. Crime might not pay (or so they say) but Crime Wave definitely pays off as entertaining noir. —Phil Bacharach

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Couched in the hustle and bustle of a Manhattan Christmas season, The Scary of Sixty-First is an equal-parts exercise in conspiracy-theory paranoia and art-school fuckery. Ho-ho-ho-hum.

String-bean roomies Addie (Betsey Brown, Assholes) and Noelle (co-writer Madeline Quinn) score an oddly affordable apartment, complete with two levels, bloody mattresses and one rat-infested ham in the fridge. Growing tension between the friends escalates after an unnamed and unannounced visitor (Dasha Nekrasova, TV’s Succession, making her directorial debut) drops quite the truth bomb: “Something extremely sinister happened in this apartment.”

That is this: The place was owned by financier/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who utilized it as “some kind of orgy flophouse.” Mumblecore, meet Pedobear.

As Noelle willingly gets entangled in the visitor’s rabbit-hole internet research of Epstein’s considerable misdeeds and mysterious death behind bars, Addie shows signs of possession by one of his underage victims. Just as those sex-trafficked survivors had to wonder what on Earth they’d gotten themselves into, so may the Scary of Sixty-First viewer as Addie is compelled to furiously masturbate at the stoop of Epstein’s townhouse, even fingering the negative space of the metal “E” on the wall (Later, Addie commits unspeakable acts upon souvenir trinkets of the royal family featuring Prince Andrew.)

It’s not clear whether Nekrasova intended these transgressive scenes as terror or camp, yet I felt embarrassment all the same for Brown, no stranger to willingly humiliating herself onscreen. At least she can act, which cannot be said for front-of-camera newbie Quinn, whose presence registers somewhere between monotonic and blank. Although her rhetorical, likely improvised lines provide the film’s best seconds — from “What kind of loser would fuck somebody in a twin bed?” to especially “Why does Ghislane dress like a fucking nutcracker?” — a performer, she is not.

In the opening sequence, Nekrasova capitalizes on the inherent evil of gargoyles and other statues adorning the borough’s buildings, promising something special that never arrives. By the time she appears at the apartment door to kick off a second act, her grip gives way, and the film flies off the rails. Condemning the male gaze as she actively courts it, Nekrasova seems unsure where to take her tale, so the climax acknowledges word-for-word cribbing from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In the end, The Scary of Sixty-First proves as refreshing as the warm White Claw downed by Quinn on moving day. —Rod Lott

Before I (first) got married in 1994, one of my brothers drunkenly noted I should think about the fact I was “committing to one vagina” for the remainder of my years.

Or maybe I saw that in an ’80s comedy?

I’m not for certain. Either way, the advice represents men’s primary misgiving about marriage. It’s existed maybe one day fewer than the concept of matrimony itself — and arguably never used to better onscreen effect than Jim Cummings and co-conspirator PJ McCabe have in The Beta Test.

Cummings’ Jordan, an overstressed Hollywood agent, is engaged to the lovely Caroline (Virginia Newcomb, wonderful in The Death of Dick Long). While his heart may be (mostly) in it, his eyes certainly aren’t, wandering like a hobo with ADHD. So when an unmarked invitation arrives in the mail promising a 100% anonymous and discreet sexual encounter tailored to his every fantasy, he bites.

Too good to be true? Just the opposite — and then some. In fact, the sex is so mind-blowing, he not only can’t stop thinking about it, but about the machinations behind the temptation. Who was she? Who arranged it? Why him? Why at all? Is he one of a million or one in a million? Not knowing gets the best of him, which brings out the worst in him.

As we know from decades of watching thrillers, paranoia is never a good thing for anyone — except for those on our side of the screen. Just as Jordan can’t help but keep his one-afternoon stand top of mind, nor can I keep The Beta Test away from mine. It’s one of only two releases this year to stick with me.

Those of us young enough to remember the national conversation around Fatal Attraction can picture the same post-screening hubbub between spouses and significant others: “What would you do?” You’d not be out of line to peg The Beta Test as an update of the late-’80s erotic thriller for an evermore superficial and narcissistic America, but with a ruthless and acidic sense of humor.

Built on a premise original enough to avert audiences from getting a step ahead of it, The Beta Test charms with genre-bending verve and intelligence. From Thunder Road to The Wolf of Snow Hollow to this, Cummings’ work as a director gains more confidence — and mainstream accessibility, not that our country at large yet deserves him.

As an actor, he may play slight variations on high-strung, but every time I see him pop up in films — whether the absurdist Greener Grass or the bloody Halloween Kills — I’m assured delight. Considering Jordan is unquestionably an asshole, to revel in him squirming as I root for Cummings is an odd experience, and entirely pleasurable. —Rod Lott

A Technicolor template for the Airport franchise, The Crowded Sky gets its title from two planes headed straight for one another: a California-to-D.C. Navy jet and a D.C.-to-California airliner.

The two-man military jet is flown by Cmdr. Heath (Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Hot Shots!), shortly after his hot, estranged wife (Rhonda Fleming, The Nude Bomb) eschews accountability for the fact penises not attached to his body tend to make their way into hers. Add in that Heath was responsible for a midair collision a few years prior, and one understands why an enlistee (Troy Donahue, Palm Springs Weekend) is hesitant to take the passenger seat, but being pressed for time, has no other choice.

Piloting the Trans States flight is past-his-prime Dick Barnett (Dana Andrews, ironic considering his eventual plot function in Airport 1975), who’s none too pleased archenemy John Kerr (Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum) has been assigned co-piloting duties. Meanwhile, Kerr’s distracted by his affair with the lead stewardess (Anne Francis, TV’s Honey West), who’s pushing for a ring with rather unconventional, that-settles-that justification: “I’m the ex-champ of tramps, and ex-tramps make the best wives.” Incidentally, her name is Kitty.

While much of the movie is devoted to flashbacks detailing these turbulent relationships, Crowded Sky director Joseph Pevney (Man of a Thousand Faces) and writer Charles Schnee (The Bad and the Beautiful) make a choice to grant their most notable passengers a backstory as well — exposition via voice-over. A TV scribe (Keenan Wynn, Bikini Beach) hits on his seatmate (Jean Willes, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars) without realizing they used to be lovers. On the other side of the aisle, a sad sack (Louis Quinn, Superchick) wants to hit on his seatmate (Hollis Irving, Frogs), but has no game; she’d welcome the attention, but tells herself, “Too bad I’m a dog.” Rough!

Pevney moves among these internal monologues so quickly, they unintentionally carry comic beats, as if the characters are popping out of hidey-holes within Laugh-In’s “joke wall” just long enough to deliver their lines. Although Airplane! exists because of 1957’s Zero Hour! (which also plopped Andrews in the cockpit), the parody clearly cribbed its thought-bubble bit from the Sky.

Speaking of bubbles, this one’s full of soap — like Peyton Place at 20,000 feet, back when commercial air travel was considered a novel, even glamorous venture. So why not have a society’s worth of trouble play out above the clouds? With Airport a decade on the horizon, the disaster portion is secondary — if even that high — on The Crowded Sky’s ladder of importance; had Pevney and Schnee excised the threat of physical danger, audiences still would be left with an outmoded riot.

Having said that, wow, am I thankful they didn’t! With the movie making good on its titular promise in the home stretch, the collision and aftermath are a marvel of miniature work — a sequence well worth a rewind. Inside the cabin, preparing passengers for a crash landing, Kitty instructs them to remove their false teeth. As many periled-plane pictures as I’ve seen, I’ve never seen that. —Rod Lott

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