In mid-2019, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite stunned Hollywood as a masterstroke marriage of clockwork suspense and class-war satire, making the South Korean picture a shoo-in to win foreign-film honors at the Academy Awards.

In early 2020, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite stunned Hollywood again, not for winning that International Feature Film Oscar as expected, but for winning three other Oscars in categories it wasn’t “supposed to,” including Best Director and, most controversially, Best Picture.

On that historic night, many watching at home may have heard Bong’s name and asked themselves, “Who?” Some of us, however, had another question in mind: “What took you so long?”

Judging from the likes of The Host, Snowpiercer and Okja, Bong demonstrating considerable skill and confidence is neither new nor novel. You can see it even in his second film, 2003’s Memories of Murder, briefly re-released following Parasite fever (and during COVID-19 fever, unfortunately).

As police inspector Park, Parasite papa Song Kang Ho investigates the sexual assaults and murders of several schoolgirls in the area in 1986. Memories opens with the most recent victim discovered discarded in a cement ditch alongside a nondescript road to, seemingly, nowhere. A local mentally disabled man (War of the Arrows’ Park No-shik) is brought in for questioning — which is to say bullied, abused and coerced into a confession he doesn’t understand. It’s only after the pragmatic detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung, 2013’s The Tower) joins the force from Seoul that Park begins to look beyond the boundaries of his closed mind.

More introspective than inspective, what could have been an escapist serial-killer thriller instead feels a bit too realistic, as if actual evil were somehow captured on film, the way David Fincher did with Seven (and soon would again with Zodiac). Bong exhibits a similar command of the camera, shooting long, complicated shots with each corner of the screen crammed and carefully choreographed to bristle with the activity of chaos.

With expert performances all around, Bong manages to keep Memories of Murder at a consistent level of greatness until the final scene. In that coda, which leaps nearly 20 years forward, he not only offers no easy answers, but gives viewers a divisive final shot — one I don’t think works, even if almost all of the two hours before it does. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

After having a brain tumor removed, Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg, The French Sex Murders) hasn’t been the same. She thinks she still has cancer and cries out for a syringe filled with sweet, sweet morphine. At the psych ward where she works, the staff doctors (with Andy Warhol fixture Joe Dallesandro as a newbie M.D.) assure her that her thoughts are simply stress-induced and psychosomatic, so her jonesin’ for smack is misguided. However, out of lesbian love, Gertrude’s much-younger roomie, Sister Mathieu (Paola Morra, already a nunsploitation vet with Walerian Borowczyk’s Behind Convent Walls), procures her the fixes she desires.

Gertrude’s bad behavior hardly ends there. First, she becomes so revolted by a patient’s dentures, she crushes them under her foot. This escalates to stealing from patients, and going into town dressed all slutty to sell the fenced jewelry and then copulate with a complete stranger. As the Killer Nun title promises, worst among all her sins is murdering a few patients, most notably in a cringing scene of extreme acupuncture; those with an aversion to ocular trauma, you have been warned.

In his second and final feature as director, Giulio Berruti (who edited and helped script 1973’s Baba Yaga) weaves a wavering hallucinatory narrative of a nun on the run from her own demons. It’s not an indictment of the Catholic Church, but rather an anti-drug tale, however bizarre a route it takes. There’s nothing flashy to it, and it just kind of ends, but if you’re going to dip your toe in the nunsploitation waters, you may as well start here … unless it’s graphic nudity and sexuality you’re after, because this one is rather tame compared to its sisters. If that’s the case, venture elsewhere.

Ekberg couldn’t have been happy having to don habit in a cheap Euroshocker several leagues below fountain-frolicking for Fellini, but Berruti has nothing to be ashamed of, beyond Killer Nun’s hokey title. While not high art, the movie never was meant to be; as a B-level thriller with blood on the brain, it works — perhaps as comforting as palms wrapped in rosary beads. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

I have never seen Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, but I have seen Bruno Mattei’s Cruel Jaws close to 10 times. While I know that might make me a terrible cinephile, I have to counter with this question: Does Jaws end with the mayor getting pushed into a body of water by a wisecracking seal?

I didn’t think so.

As that famous John Williams-esque theme song plays in the background — Star Wars — a shark made up of mostly stock footage is killing the residents of Beach Town or some other wholly generic name. Shark professor Billy shows up in time to help the police solve these murders, with help from a Hulk Hogan look-alike and his handicapped daughter who run a dolphin park.

Unfortunately, the mayor and his son aren’t buying these terrific tales of shark murder because the big sailing regatta is coming up. When all hell breaks loose, he’s forced by the sheriff to offer a reward for the head of the shark, which leads to a mad, mad, mad, mad chase for this underwater monster. At one point, a character quips, “We’re gonna need a bigger helicopter!”

Did I mention that the mafia is in on this, too, somehow?

Titled Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws overseas (this time … it’s economical), this is famed director Mattei’s rude Italian hand gesture to both the sharksploitation genre and international copyright laws, with characters who scream a badly translated script at each other, usually while pretending to look at a shark.

And so, after hearing all that, once again I have to ask: Does Jaws have that? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

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.