Four boys who look they slam pogs at recess are sitting on the beach, wieners in hand. Unprovoked, an old Indian shaman shambles over and starts rambling about warriors in the sky, which isn’t weird at all, and tells them to make a blood pact. Whipping out their respective pocketknives, they do. Kids, welcome to the world of pediatric AIDS!

Er, I mean Deep Blood. Welcome to the world of Joe D’Amato’s Deep Blood.

Years later, those four boys are four young men, each with their own problems. One is grieving a dead mom. One has to attend a military academy. One attends college, but just wants to golf. One is named Miki. One has a dad named Shelby. I may have mixed them all up, which is only natural, seeing how D’Amato (Emanuelle in America) rushes into things. It doesn’t help that each man acts with the verve of a pre-fairy Pinocchio, but it also doesn’t matter. Besides, one of them succumbs to a shark on the loose comparatively early in the film, which leaves us only three people to discern.

The first shark attack is the best, as a rafting woman is eaten while her little kid watches emotionless from the shore, as if Mom were doing something as benign as cutting the crusts from his PBJ. It’s not that her death is depicted realistically; quite the opposite, it looks as if D’Amato just had someone underwater open a jar of Ragu. Here, as throughout Deep Blood whenever shot from the shark’s POV, we can clearly make out the side of the swimming pool in which D’Amato filmed in broad daylight.

The actual shark content of Deep Blood is rather shallow, especially when so much of its stock footage comes pilfered from another Italian Jaws rip-off, Great White. Like that 1981 romp, this one includes a helicopter scene, too, but here the whirlybird is employed only to let the ever-perspiring Krupke-esque sheriff (Tody Bernard, Hologram Man) berate our protagonists via megaphone for going shark-hunting: “Get back to the harbor immediately. We know what you’re up to. Shelby, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Same goes for you, Joe! This is one of Italy’s shakiest sharksploitation efforts — and that’s saying something. —Rod Lott

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Hey, I understand we all gotta start somewhere. It’s just unfortunate Josie Bissett had to start her career not with TV’s hit Melrose Place, but a few years earlier with Umberto Lenzi’s Hitcher in the Dark. I’m guessing the movie is one she’d rather go unseen … and now that I’ve seen it, I understand that, too.

Angry at catching her jock boyfriend (Jason Saucier of producer Joe D’Amato’s Top Model) for flirting with another woman, Bissett’s Daniela ditches their campsite to return home. She happily accepts a ride to the bus station from the boyish Mark (Joe Balogh of Lenzi’s Black Demons) and his comically large Winnebago. En route, he offers her a Coca-Cola with Rohypnol — I believe it was branded “New Coke” back then — and she blacks out, eventually coming to handcuffed in the RV’s bedroom.

A less likable Christopher Atkins with T-shirts tucked snugly into belted khakis, Balogh’s Mark intends on keeping Daniela captive, because she reminds him of his beloved dead mother. To feed his own delusion, he takes scissors to his prisoner’s hair, making Daniela look like Mom — or, judging by Bissett’s terrible wig, Mary Martin in the 1954 Broadway musical production of Peter Pan. He does this as she sleeps, which is the state she’s in when he shoots nude Polaroids — an act icky on its own, but unintentionally more unpleasant since Bissett, although of legal age, looks to be about 15.

Tiresome when it should titillate, the broad-daylight film lazily trips on the low bar of being a cheap, enjoyable Italian rip-off of 1986’s crazy-popular cable staple The Hitcher. Mostly taking place inside the RV, Hitcher in the Dark is essentially a two-hander, which would be fine if either actor exhibited a kung-fu grip. It’s not that old pro Lenzi had completely lost his touch, since the same year gave us Nightmare Beach, which is nothing but fun.

The most engaging part of Dark is hearing the dated line, “Hey, who do you think are, Mickey Rourke?” and reading all the oddly named (and inconsistently capitalized) characters in the closing credits: to wit, “Big man store,” “Toyota’s woman,” “1 Greaser” and “2 Greaser.” —Rod Lott

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In Drive All Night, cabbie Dave (Yutaka Takeuchi, Battleship) does just that. This taxi driver is no Taxi Driver wishing a real rain to come and wash all the scum off the streets; he’s smart and sweet — a Travis Butterbrickle, if you will.

His passenger for the entire evening is Cara (Lexy Hammonds, 2017’s Escape Room — not the famous one), a young and semi-bratty woman with reserves of Mortal Kombat II trivia, a “We All Die Someday” tattoo and a duffel bag — here called just “duffel,” which is more enigmatic than its unknown contents. As she makes Dave chauffeur her around town for hours and hours, from arcade and café to motel, she’s being followed by a big, bad, bald dude (Johnny Gilligan, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus) who looks ready to attend a Halloween party as Ryan Gosling in Drive.

Certainly that’s not accidental, as Peter Hsieh’s debut feature arrives gorgeously soaked in the neon-hellhole California ambience of Nicolas Winding Refn’s work (notably Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon) with accompanying mood for days — er, nights). Absorbing a director’s color palette is a relatively easy task, which Hsieh pulls off, no doubt with the help of feature-debuting DP William Hellmuth.

But to also attempt David Lynch-branded surrealism is a too-tall order, especially on one’s first try; just being weird and cryptic isn’t enough. For example, a mysterious torch singer named Midnight Judy (Natalia Berger) is rumored to be a vampire, but her inclusion assumedly seems only to serve a desire to pay homage to the Club Silencio sequence from Lynch’s masterpiece, Mullholland Drive. While Berger’s slinky appearance is sure to satisfy opera-glove fetishists, her dreamlike showcase is out of the filmmaker’s ambitious reach.

Or perhaps Midnight Judy’s purpose might be due to Drive All Night’s bones simply not bearing enough meat to merit a full-length movie. Veering from his strong suit of shot composition, Hsieh’s workarounds include box-turtle pacing and dosing each performance with Dramamine. The effect is like a napping actor waking mid-scene and suddenly realizing his or her line is up — or was:

Cara: “I like you.”
[7-second pause]
Dave: “I like you, too.”

Cara: “You afraid of dying?”
[13-second pause]
Dave: “I try not to think about it.”

One wonders if all that somniferous dead air were in Hsieh’s script. Takeuchi’s built-in affability survives this curious touch; the overall vibe does not.

Hammonds comes off too young to play her Manic Pixie Dream Fare with believability; switching roles with the more experienced Sarah Dumont (Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) as a late-night waitress who catches Dave’s eye (and vice versa) would benefit both actresses and the simple story. Another would be to give more scenes for comic-relief cabbie Will Springhorn to steal with his amusing character’s sleazy braggadocio. Whenever Springhorn ambles in, which is not enough, he alights the screen; the rest of the film rarely works up such a spark — not for any considerable stretch and definitely not All Night. —Rod Lott

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I remember reading a story about Running Time in the pages of Film Threat sometime in the late 1990s and was pretty pumped to see it, especially with Bruce Campbell in the lead role. But, like many things written about in the long-gone and lamented magazine, it never came out. Sadly, I then completely forgot about it, as one is wont to do.

I was surprised to recently receive it and even more floored to finally watch the one-shot heist film. While it understandably never received a wide theatrical release, it does kind of irk me I never saw it at least once on video back then, considering all the video stores where I worked.

Campbell is Carl, a smart aleck fresh out of prison and ready to rob its scheming laundry take. Teaming up with a trio of typical cinematic losers, everything goes wrong as you might expect, from the smack-addicted getaway driver not showing up to the scummy partner’s quick-trigger finger blowing away a security guard. But it’s the shock ending after the heist from hell that truly surprised me.

At the time it was (barely) released, I admit, I was caught up in the wave of Pulp Fiction and its assorted criminal rip-offs, so I probably wouldn’t have liked Running Time all that much, save for Campbell, of course. But looking at the film now some 20-plus years later, I feel genuine appreciation for what director Josh Becker set out to accomplish, at times even being a bit amazed by it.

Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, Becker creates a flowing single-take film that manages to subvert just about every heist stockpile out there. I’m surprised this structure has barely been attempted since. Of course, I say that and think about another Becker flick, Thou Shalt Not Kill … Except, and realized that’s been largely forgotten about as well.

They never steal from the good ones, do they? —Louis Fowler

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At the very least, Lucky Bastard approaches the found-footage trend from an angle I haven’t seen tried: inside the porno industry. Its “document everything” conceit allows us fly-on-the-fly access in HD as porn producer Mike (Don McManus, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension) persuades his supposedly hottest star, Ashley Saint (Betsy Rue) to, ahem, “do” her first episode of his Lucky Bastard series.

As one may surmise from the title, each installment recruits a fan to co-star, as it were, with the female talent — STD test results permitting, of course. After Mike wears down Ashley’s misgivings and protests, she agrees to have sex with the selected regular Joe — in this case, Dave (Jay Paulson, Black Rock). Well-meaning but socially awkward, Dave looks like the kind of guy whose Velcro wallet dutifully contains a punch card for Great Clips at the ready, perhaps adjacent to a condom he may never use.

In the run-up to rolling camera, their special guest does and says things that creep Ashley out — so many that she refuses to do the scene. He snaps, in what must be the world’s biggest case of blue balls. With LAPD footage of the grisly aftermath at a Van Nuys home, Lucky Bastard’s prologue tells us right away what the poster’s tagline only echoes: “This will not end well.” We just don’t know exactly how or when (although if you pay attention to the movie’s running time, you can make an educated guess as to when the sparks will hit wick’s end).

When the group stops for a quick lunch en route to set, Dave is so antsy to get depantsy, he complains to Mike that no one watches this portion of his Lucky Bastard series; they want to fast-forward straight to the sex. The movie Lucky Bastard, however, faces a contradictory problem: I wanted them to skip the sex for the storm.

Neither portion satisfies. Moving from the venerable (as an Emmy-nominated writer and producer of TV’s Law & Order) to the venereal for his directorial debut, Robert Nathan asks some interesting questions, like “What if a mentally ill man were chosen for an amateur porn shoot?” yet answers them with less curiosity. More attention seems placed on simulating (?) explicit acts — some pixelated despite an NC-17 rating — than sharing a fleshed-out story. To that end, one can claim Nathan’s picture is perhaps most porn-realistic in the one way a legitimate feature shouldn’t strive to be: dismissive of plot.

The three leads acquit themselves. Paulson is particularly convincing as the outcast powder keg; McManus, appropriately greasy and sleazy; and Rue looks every bit the damaged, button-cute part. Best known for her not-a-stitch performance in 3D in 2009’s My Bloody Valentine, she again demonstrates remarkable bravery in her immodesty, but this time for a project that neither deserves nor rewards her investment. —Rod Lott

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