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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Whenever the golden age of disaster movies is discussed, 1977’s Rollercoaster often gets mentioned, which is weird, because it’s not a disaster movie. Perhaps people are confusing it with The Death of Ocean View Park? Although both were shot at Virginia’s real-life Ocean View Amusement Park, only the film sharing that name counts, beginning with a hurricane and ending with explosions aplenty.

Made for ABC prime time, The Death of Ocean View Park casts Mike Connors (Too Scared to Scream) as Sam Jackson (!), second-gen manager and one-time owner of the titular theme park now belonging to money-hungry developer Tom Flood. Played by Meteor man Martin Landau in full Murray Hamilton mode, Flood’s not about to let a little tropical hurricane and all its after-effects put the kibosh on Ocean View’s big Fourth of July event — for God’s sake, he’s already booked the Bee Gees!

But Jackson’s just Got a Feeling, which telepic director extraordinaire E.W. Swackhamer (Terror at London Bridge) accentuates more than once with a pan or cut to a “GAS LINE” sign posted at ground level of The Rocket. That’s the park’s coaster: 50 years old, wooden, rickety, shaky AF and, come Act 3, containing his new girlfriend (Caroline McWilliams, TV’s Benson) as a reluctant rider — what could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, the cotton candy counter’s ugly-duckling attendant (Geostorm’s Mare Winningham) is wooed by a socially super-awkward Navy sailor on shore leave (Alligator’s Perry Lang) just so the movie can strand them toward the Ferris wheel’s tippy-top for the climax. Elsewhere, one employee’s pregnant wife (Diana Canova, TV’s Soap) starts having terrifying nightmares and daytime visions of full-blown panic at the park, which her hub (James Stephens, Mysterious Two) coldly dismisses as the result of “sausage and onion pizza,” just so the movie can call him in on his day off — and, therefore, in mortal danger — to fix what is apparently the park’s only popcorn machine!

The precog subplot sticks out for having nowhere to go beyond the obvious foreshadowing and inspiring the plot of Final Destination 3. It also wrongly puts the viewer in the frame of mind to accept supernatural forces at play. A subsequent scene admits as much by suggesting the park has a mind of its own, as a few boys sneak in one night for an after-hours joy ride that goes wildly berserk — yet that angle is abandoned right then and there.

No worries, folks, all the movie’s machinations are the work of Mother Nature and her Physics 101 syllabus, and Swackhamer saves the biggest for last as the park is destroyed — hardly a spoiler since the name of the film promises just that. In real life, the aforementioned wooden coaster was set to be demolished, so Playboy Productions had a movie written around that. (Yes, that Playboy, although you wouldn’t know it; the only concession to Hef’s Playboy Philosophy is a beauty contest of swimsuited ladies Jackson is tasked with judging.)

To witness the Rocket basically take its own name to heart is impressive — the kind of production value any cost-conscious project would skirt union rules to get. And not only that, but unlike amusement parks nowadays, it’s a lot of fun. —Rod Lott

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Flint, Michigan’s renowned coronary specialist, Dr. James Arnold (Cal Seely), could be having a better week. The international medical community is skeptical of his research into heart transplants. His molasses-slow elderly benefactor, Mrs. Woodruff (Roz Kramer), is threatening to freeze funds if she doesn’t see results before her heart sputters out. And back home, his coulda-been-a-contender brother, Tom Arnold (!), is allowing his rentable tramps to raid the doc’s liquor cabinet.

Things look up when Tom (Dick Grimm) accidentally kills some broad, giving Dr. Arnold a chance to take that girl’s ticker and give it to Mrs. Woodruff. Cue the title: Night of the Bloody Transplant, which we see in about two minutes of footage of an actual open-heart surgery. Never mind that it doesn’t match; how a 20-something woman suddenly has the chest of an 80-year-old man is not on director David W. Hanson’s mind.

What is, one assumes, is stealing wholesale from Mexico’s then-recent Night of the Bloody Apes and hitting the magical feature-length mark. With no working knowledge of plot, Hanson (whose only other pic is sexploitation’s Judy) packs a whole lot of nothing into 71 minutes, with such filmed-in-full bar entertainments as several crooned songs, body-painting performance art and a hoochie-coochie striptease down to the pasties.

Although a few scene transitions verge on cleverness, Hanson has little business operating a camera, just as his all-amateur cast has no business standing in front of one. Given its nonexistent sound mix and predominance of wood paneling, Transplant reeks of smut, but isn’t. More crime film than horror, it also isn’t on the level of Herschell Gordon Lewis, following the man’s low-budget template of gore, but ignoring the knowing sense of humor that usually overcame all technical deficiencies. —Rod Lott

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Between the first two Smokey and the Bandit movies, Hal Needham directed one of network television’s more memorably titled prime-time pics: Death Car on the Freeway.

To clear up any potential viewer confusion, it begins with a death car on the freeway: a blue van, in fact, with windows tinted to ensure the driver remains anonymous. With murderous intent and an 8-track tape blasting what sounds like electric bluegrass music playing at double speed, the van runs a little Honda off the 405, nearly killing the bit-part actress behind the wheel (Morgan Brittany, The Initiation of Sarah) and definitely making her late for her 8 a.m. call on Barnaby Jones.

No worries, California: KXLA anchorwoman Jan Clausen (Shelley Hack, two weeks after her debut episode of Charlie’s Angels) is on the case! Repped by Peter Graves, the cops assemble the hilariously named Fiddler Task Force, but the so-called Freeway Fiddler keeps at his work in terrorizing women drivers, all in broad (no pun intended) daylight.

Victims include tennis pro Dinah Shore, who survives, and Night Killer’s Tara Buckman, who does not. Jan’s investigation takes her to the Street Phantoms biker club, where Sid Haig, ever the genial host, shames their leader into offering her a soda. Other familiar faces among Death Car on the Freeway’s cast of “Cameo Stars,” as the credits put it, are Frank Gorshin as Jan’s boss, George Hamilton’s as Jan’s ex and Abe Vigoda, who just sits in a hospital bed.

Needham’s direction may be unimaginative, but most of the driving stunts are terrific, which is really all that’s called for. Suspense is hampered less by Needham’s hand than the surprisingly clumsy editing by Frank Morriss, who expertly cut Steven Spielberg’s Duel, which this telepic does its damndest to resemble without investing much effort. —Rod Lott

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