One of the more memorable sketches in 1987’s Amazon Women on the Moon comes right before the end credits: A lonely guy named Ray comes home from the video store with an unusual rental: a personalized, POV tape of a super-foxy sex bomb who speaks directly to the camera, dropping his name as she drops her clothes and writhes in bed. Now, expand those five minutes by about 2,000%, don’t play them for laughs, swap the intercourse for conversation — well, most of it — and you have Rent-a-Pal.

Set in the dawn of the 1990s, Rent-a-Pal gives us a grim look at David (Brian Landis Folkins, The Creep Behind the Camera), a middle-aged beta male in dire need of a companion. Living as a stereotype in the basement of his elderly, invalid mother’s home, he tries video dating, but finds no interested parties. In a moment of despair, he purchases a VHS tape titled Rent-a-Pal from the bargain bin. Its tagline reads, “Meet your new best friend, ‘Andy.’ He talks to you, he listens to you, he understands you.”

They forgot “He manipulates you.”

As played against type by Stand by Me’s Wil Wheaton, Andy asks questions to the watcher, followed by pauses of silence as if listening. For the socially deprived David, it’s enough. He plays the tape until he wears out the heads — and wears on our nerves — because he craves the attachment, however artificial.

Or is it? Because when David finally meets a woman (Amy Rutledge, Neighbor) who appreciates his company, and vice versa, Andy doesn’t like becoming the proverbial third wheel and makes his opinion known. What writer and first-time director Jon Stevenson does best is not revealing how much of what Andy says comes from the tape or David’s head, leaving it to us to discern. Their friendship is warped and increasingly disturbing, qualifying David for membership in the same cinematic losers’ league as Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle or Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom — initially sympathetic characters who test our loyalty as they slide down the spray-butter-slippery slope of deteriorating mental health.

From the start, Folkins earns viewers’ pity, then disdain as he starts screwing up his clear chance at the happiness eluding him for so long. Rutledge is terrific in what is essentially the Rosemarie DeWitt role of the voice of reason, and Wheaton terrifying as either the puppet master behind David’s actions or David’s imagined scapegoat for such. You be the judge. With humor as dark as its tension, Rent-a-Pal isn’t trying to win friends or influence people; the right people will click with its message and see how eerily it holds true today, subbing one technological advance for another. —Rod Lott

In the VHS bonanza, Slash Dance earned an audience on the basis of a title that rode the coattails leg warmers of Flashdance and box art that promised a flesh-filled slasher film. In reality, it’s a low-wattage thriller with zero nudity and even less welding. Well, at least they weren’t lying about the lycra.

As several actresses and dancers go missing after auditions at a shoebox of a theater, LAPD cop Tori Raines (former GLOW wrestler Cindy Maranne) goes undercover there — or at least in theory, since she fails to operate under a pseudonym — in hopes of cracking the case. As luck would have it, she is one of five ladies selected for the musical, which apparently consists of one song, sounding strikingly similar to “Alley Cat.” Prepare to hear it on what may as well be a loop, as writer/director James Shyman (Hollywood’s New Blood) includes multiple rehearsal scenes — so many that the murder-mystery aspect of the plot gets bumped to subplot status to make way for his homemade, unofficial remake of A Chorus Line.

Still, Slash Dance has a little going for it, one being Maranne’s performance. Like her by-the-book cop character, it has a just-the-facts approach that suggests she’s a total pro; whether the movie turns out shoddy, she’s going to treat it as if she were playing both Cagney and Lacey. Compare her work to Jay Richardson (Illegal Affairs) as the police captain, a role he essays with just enough — okay, more than enough — of a shit-eating grin to let viewers know he knows how this thing will turn out, so why exert more than the bare minimum, atonality be damned?

Either not getting the memo or not caring in the slightest is the second highlight, Joel Von Ornsteiner (Mutant Hunt). As Amos, the theater owner’s mentally challenged brother, he steals the show with the kind of character Ben Stiller would play in various forms across the single season (1992-93) of his late, great sketch series. With all the swagger of a Sweathog and affecting a voice that fluctuates between innocence and insolence, Amos lets loose with one unfiltered and accidental bon mot after another, from “Shouldn’t you be out wiggling your butt … and not your tongue” to “Maybe he’s out someplace looking for a place to flop his dick out.” What a feeling! —Rod Lott

Get it at Verboden Video.

Centigrade comes from the long line of confined-space thrillers, in which most — if not all — of the movie takes place in one cramped spot (e.g., Buried, Phone Booth, Devil, Cube and ATM). The difference with Centigrade is being inspired by true events — no supernatural elements here, folks!

Set in 2002, the film opens with very pregnant author Naomi (Genesis Rodriguez, Tusk) and her husband, Matt (Vincent Piazza, Rocket Science), waking up inside their car, only to find it snowed under. See, touring through Norway, they chose to pull over due to freezing rain while waiting for the storm to pass. Oh, it passed, all right, leaving impenetrable precipitation behind.

Frustration boils as panic almost immediately sets in; complains Matt, who isn’t helping matters, “Can you not be so defeatist?” (Also not a calm influence? The score’s simple tinkling of a lone piano key.)

Given the demands of Centigrade’s story and setting, if you’re going to be trapped with two people for weeks — even if compressed into 89 minutes — you’d damn well better like them. In his first feature, director Brendan Walsh (TV’s Nurse Jackie) seems to make a rookie mistake by not exactly ingratiating the couple with viewers right off the bat, but this proves to be wise; with both being so flawed and fraught with alarm, the tension between them starts at a level higher than normal. While it may wane from there, one part remains constant: wondering what you would do. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

After everything from 1992’s Romper Stomper to 2005’s errant hotel phone, if you still haven’t learned Russell Crowe is not to be fucked with, let Unhinged serve as your zero-ambiguity lesson.

His newly divorced Tom is, after all, a guy who hammers in the skulls of his ex-wife and her new man in the film’s opening scene, and then burns down her house. (Take that, queen of the harpies!) With depression-level girth, a hair-trigger temper and a Ford truck to compensate, Tom is not in the mood to be honked at mere hours later by Rachel (Caren Pistorius, Mortal Engines), a freshly single suburban mom just trying to get her teenage son (Gabriel Bateman, Lights Out) to school on time.

So, when at a stoplight, she impatiently blares her horn and doubles down on her refusal to apologize, Tom takes road rage to a vengeful extreme, not only upending all traffic laws in the process, but playing serial killer with her friends and family in between rounds of their cat-and-mouse pursuits. His methods of dispatch — such as tying a man to a roller chair and setting it aflame before shoving it toward a cop — lean into the slasher territory of Jason Voorhees at his most practical (and unintentionally comical).

Directed with too loose of a grip on the part of Derrick Borte (H8RZ) to offer true escapism — his attention to spatial awareness is kneecapped and even the foreshadowing has foreshadowing — Unhinged arrives in the tradition of such white-knuckle, forward-momentum classics as Duel and Speed. Note the operative word is “tradition,” because Unhinged isn’t in their league; it belongs further down, even underneath your The Call and Premium Rush, but maybe pulling alongside the most recent direct-to-video sequel for Joy Ride if it knows how to parallel park.

Remove the A-list luster of Crowe — who’s coasting, anyway — and its below-averageness as vehicular entertainment becomes all the more apparent. That’s disappointing because when they work, simple films of a breathless chase tend to be real crowd-pleasers.

Here’s your courtesy tap: Move along. —Rod Lott

In the early 1930s, Hollywood tapped Olympic gold medalists Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe to play Tarzan. Half a century later, when high-concept action became big box office, studios wanting to shepherd the next Stallone or Schwarzenegger again looked to the middle of the medal podium; within 13 months of one another, moviegoers could see Kurt Thomas in Gymkata, Bart Conner in Rad and Mitch Gaylord in American Anthem.

Had those flicks clicked, who knows? We might have Michael Phelps defending God’s pool as Aquaman or Simone Biles crushing it as Katniss in The Hunger Games franchise. Although I have no evidence, I’d like to think Gaylord’s sophomore slump, American Rickshaw, served as the final nail in this miscasting coffin.

Gaylord’s Scott is a struggling full-time college student who works as a part-time rickshaw driver in Florida. One night, slinky redheaded stripper Joanna (one-and-doner Victoria Prouty) offers intercourse as a tip, which he accepts … until he realizes their shower romp is being videotaped by a thumbless perv (Gregg Todd Davis, Nightmare Beach) who happens to be the son of televangelist Rev. Mortom (Donald Pleasence, The Great Escape). The young Mortom is killed by a towering hulk (Daniel Greene, Hands of Steel) who frames Scott as the culprit, then sets out to kill him, too. Scott need only not get murdered, but clear his name and find that sex tape!

Conspiracy, secrets, homicide, a femme fatale, unlabeled VHS cassettes, AIDS needles — all pretty standard stuff for a thriller of that era, but Sergio Martino is no standard director. Known more for his stellar work in the giallo (The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, et al.), he introduces one weird, wild supernatural element to keep things from being too generic: an immortal Asian witch (Michi Kobi, 12 to the Moon) who helps protect Scott by teleporting a cobra and turning Rev. Mortom into a satanic warthog on live TV — but not at the same time, mind you, because that would be stupid. At least the script offers an ironclad reason for the witch’s kindness: because Scott helped her onto his rickshaw on a rainy afternoon.

Seeing as how American Rickshaw (aka American Tiger) contains nary a pommel horse, the logic in hiring Gaylord is negligible. Then just shy of 30, he looks like a preening preteen, yet is a real wet blanket on screen. His line readings are so wooden, he could have found them near the contractor’s entrance at Home Depot. He can’t convincingly act an sexual encounter in the shower, which he’s certainly had in real life; by contrast, as the antagonist, Greene sells the hell out of a magic key burning straight through his hand like Alien acid, as if he’s lived it a hundred times before, just as Pleasence commits to uncontrollable oinking — ever the professional, no matter how embarrassing. And this one is that, to all involved, to our eternal enjoyment. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.