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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To borrow a phrase from Oprah Winfrey, what I know for sure about director Sean S. Cunningham is how lucky he was to strike gold with Friday the 13th. Because having watched three of his other films recently — The New Kids, DeepStar Six and his Friday follow-up, A Stranger Is Watching — a throughline bubbled to the surface: Directing just isn’t his thing. His gift — one arguably more valuable — is commercial instincts; the creative execution is best left in the hands of others, like Wes Craven with The Last House on the Left and Steve Miner with House.

A Stranger Is Watching seals my thesis with a pat of the cement trowel. Based on a huge bestseller by Mary Higgins Clark, queen of the PTA-mom-approved thriller, the movie opens with a little girl named Julie Petersen (Shawn von Schreiber) watching from the stairs as her mother is murdered by an unknown male assistant with a hammer and point-and-shoot camera. A couple years later, Julie is living a normal life with Dad (James Naughton, The Birds II: Land’s End); Dad is getting serious with a TV anchor (Kate Mulgrew, Star Trek: Nemesis); and Mom’s supposed killer (James Russo, 1988’s Freeway), who proclaims his innocence, is about to be put to death. Then the real killer (Rip Torn, Dodgeball) shows back up to terrorize the Petersens once more.

So much of Stranger seems like it’s been grafted from Friday the 13th’s still-fresh corpse. With Friday creator Victor Miller co-writing this script, perhaps that’s to be expected. But one also can imagine the MGM executives asking Cunningham to do what he did with that smash-hit slasher, but this time for grown-ups, so you can still ventilate a throat, but don’t make it look real — just have the actor push his chin as hard as he can to his neck to hold the fake weapon in place.

And instead of a summer camp, set it at a homeless camp. And instead of the bad guy in a hockey mask, put him in Eric Von Zipper’s get-up from Beach Blanket Bingo. And instead of someone going to the restroom and being met with an ax to the face, have someone be confronted by a thug who bops in time like he’s going to burst into song. And instead of depicting people having sex, can you just have William Hickey play a bum who asks to see Rip Torn’s “pecker”? (You can have him yell “Pussy!” with each hammer blow he takes to the head; it’s okay.)

Oh, one last thing: Instead of sending chills up the spines of audience members, can you make it really, really boring?

He could and he did. Stranger’s true legacy is a move it made from page to screen: flipping the kid’s gender so the world may be introduced to von Schreiber. The girl had an empty filmography before this big debut, anchoring a feature from a major studio, and never added another. Why? It’s as if she were so good, everyone told her afterward, “Shawn, you did it! This performance can never be topped — not by you, not by anyone. You should stop acting now.” Because you can’t tell a kid like that the truth, which would be “Your acting style is completely unnatural. I ask for tears of sadness and you give me an impression of a losing struggle with a painful grumpy.”

A Stranger Is that awful. —Rod Lott

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From the Republic of Cyprus, the adventure thriller S.O.S. Survive or Sacrifice boasts all the twisty plotting of its titular string of Morse code. In the Mediterranean, young American woman Kate (Jeannine Kaspar, 2014’s Hidden in the Woods) meets her younger Russian sister, Liz (a debuting Ksenia Pinch), an emo ginger who leaves their passports at an airport bench like a total dum-dum. Get used to that behavior; I’m sensing a trend.

Stranded at a hotel, an infuriated Kate leaves Liz in their room and goes to get completely blitzed at the bar. There, she’s befriended by Myra (newcomer Marianna Rosset), a sexy local who’s actually 50% of a con-artist couple; Myra’s other, definitely lesser half (Backdraft 2’s William Baldwin, formerly “the hot Baldwin,” now fully transformed into Daniel) raids and ransacks their targets’ rooms while Myra keeps them occupied on the dance floor. Of course, Kate’s room isn’t empty at all, which a bow-tied Baldwin soon discovers. While Liz evades capture and worse, she has a tough time convincing hotel staff she’s not making up a story, much less communicating with them in a common tongue.

Meanwhile, back at the main story, Myra convinces Kate to take a late-night joyride in a hot air balloon with two random dudes, because that’s exactly the kind of activity to which drunk beautiful people stumble. Things quickly go south, in that they’re unable to control the balloon. Winds blow it over the ocean and out of cellphone range. As night turns to day, one guy is wind-turbined outta there when a blade slices through the basket; the other guy’s leg gets pierced by a splinter the size of a wooden vampire stake, prompting Kate to remove her shirt to fashion a tourniquet.

With that, Cypriot director and co-writer Roman Doronin (Portrait of God) introduces S.O.S.’ other throughline: increasingly desperate reasons for the two ladies to disrobe, one piece of clothing at a time. His camera is so pointedly leering, the movie begins to resemble a game of strip poker merged with disaster-scenario role-play as foreplay.

With red lipstick ready to write on the balloon basket’s ad banner, Kate asks, “What’s something that everyone can understand?” After some thought, Myra replies with little confidence, “S.O.S.?” Perfect! But Kate uses the entire tube on the first letter, so she scissors her hand open for blood — an act that looks slightly less painful than Myra thinking seconds earlier. Once “S.O.S.” is properly smeared for distress-message purposes, Kate needs to bandage her hand, so it’s Myra’s turn to lose her shirt.

After relighting the balloon’s flame MacGyver-style with a vodka-filled condom and €10, Kate wants to block off the hole in the basket’s side for safety, thus requiring her to use her black leather pants for rope. Myra’s pants follow shortly, to lessen their weight load. With both rescue-ready damsels now clad solely in bra and panties, Doronin more or less marks things as “mission accomplished.”

Through the actions of his characters and those of Doronin as a filmmaker, S.O.S. Survive or Sacrifice exhibits a level of stupidity so aggressive, it’s almost admirable. From one shot to another, the balloon is consistently inconsistent in its proximity to water — especially egregious considering the level of control green-screen shooting affords him. On the subject of previous credits, most of the cast members have between zero and next to that, which shines through every scene — especially egregious considering how many do little more than gaze toward the sky and say, “Look! A balloon!” (or some variation), while for balance, our hot-air heroines point out watercraft in similar expository declarations.

A viewer may feel genuine embarrassment for Kaspar and Rosset having to wrestle with such material, and at least double that amount for doing so while passively modeling lingerie. The same viewer may wonder if Doronin planned that for distraction or is simply delusional. My vote is cast for the latter, as S.O.S. Shit on a Shingle’s closing credits crawl to the tune of a howler of a theme song with no underwire visuals to divert your attention from the ballad’s priority in conveying a cogent message finishes second — or maybe sixth — to forcing a rhyme: “Oh, baby, can you hear my S.O.S. / I just can’t stand my loneliness / Want to say no more, no less / I’m sending you my S.O.S. / And you’ll see me when you hear it / I will be impressed.”

Yet you will not. —Rod Lott

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