For whatever reason*, I watched The Seduction several times after its short theatrical run on a local UHF station, where it somehow aired with Morgan Fairchild’s nudity intact. Back then, pre-internet and with no HBO, that was like striking gold. Today, naked Fairchild doesn’t hold as much excitement, but those scenes have aged well compared against things in the movie that pretty much no longer exist: pay phones, department stores, Jacuzzi sex, Michael Sarrazin.

Fairchild’s Jaime Douglas anchors the news in Los Angeles, where the 6 p.m. time slot affords her visibility in the public eye. Not all of it is wanted, particularly that of the zoom lens of nosy neighbor Derek (Andrew Stevens, 10 to Midnight), whose snooping, screwed-up head has concocted a romantic fantasy he attempts to will into reality with heartfelt gifts of trinkets and trespassing. Just not into stalkers, Jaime doesn’t reciprocate his feelings, so Derek reasons if he can’t have her, well, no one can.

An early, tamer template for the erotic thrillers that bought Stevens’ groceries throughout the 1990s, The Seduction is high-gloss trash from writer/director David Schmoeller (Tourist Trap), but blandly enjoyable as he explores the contradiction of a woman so amazingly attractive, she can’t help but garner the male gaze — in fact, she makes a living off this ability — yet isn’t always fond of the gaze she garners. This thesis is set up in the first two lines of the film (Dionne Warwick’s singing of Lalo Schifrin’s overproduced ballad doesn’t count) as Jaime’s boyfriend (Sarrazin, The Gumball Rally) tells her, “I like looking at you,” to which she breathily replies, “I like being looked at.”

By the third act, Jaime is done being the victim, turning up the heat to 98 degrees of tease in order to turn the tables on her would-be paramour. While Fairchild plays this tough-cookie portion with the same smoldering indifference as the hot-tamale preamble, the flick certainly becomes less interesting in the switch. That could be reason enough for Schmoeller’s Seduction beginning and ending Fairchild’s big-screen career as leading lady; after this, she really only connected with movie audiences in the likes of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, playing — and spoofing — herself. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as we’re all still looking. —Rod Lott

*Hormones.

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Philip Ridley’s momentarily vampiric The Reflecting Skin was a monumentally eerie film, deftly mixing homespun Americana ideals with surreal horror tropes, to beautifully cultish effect. Not nearly as known — and that’s really saying something — is the follow-up, The Passion of Darkly Noon, an even stranger film that, it seems, is still delightfully enigmatic some 25 years later.

A daring Brendan Fraser is the devoutly doctrinal Darkly Noon, the remaining survivor of a religious cult that apparently (off-screen) has just been shot all to hell by the FBI. Running through the woods and knockin’ on heaven’s door himself, Darkly is found and taken to the house of excitable sexpot Callie (Ashley Judd).

Married to a volatile mute (Viggo Mortensen), Callie’s provocative demeanor (but unwavering loyalty) is a bit too much sin and skin for Darkly, who, by the way, is as incel as they come; after numerous sessions of masturbation and flagellation, when he reckons there is no love in the world for him, he paints his body red and exacts unearned revenge.

Full of faux-poetic symbolism and heavy-handed allegories, Darkly Noon doesn’t really deliver on the promise of Skin, but with standout performances from the usually lunkheaded Fraser and dreamlike Judd, combined with the David Lynch-lite flourishes, Ridley does craft a watchable movie that is … well, still delightfully enigmatic. —Louis Fowler

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Rosy-cheeked and hair bobbed, stay-at-home housewife Hunter Conrad (Haley Bennett, 2016’s The Magnificent Seven) has it all, from the rich and handsome husband to the picture-perfect home — everything a woman could want, it seems … except purpose.

She finds it shortly after her hubs (Austin Stowell, Colossal) gets promoted and she gets pregnant, but it’s neither of these things. It’s a sudden and inexplicable compulsion to swallow random objects — a marble, a pushpin, a AA battery and so on — and, after passing them, to retrieve them, clean them and display them on a tray like precious baubles, as a reminder of what little independence and agency she possesses. As her new secret hobby progresses, the objects grow more threatening in size and shape and potential harm.

Hunter could be the next-door neighbor to Julianne Moore’s Carol White, the equally disillusioned and oppressed spouse at the center of Todd Haynes’ Safe. Looking every bit like a sexier June Cleaver in living color, the timid Hunter dresses the 21st-century part she is asked to play: the upper-class wife, doting yet subservient. She is an appendage of her self-absorbed Crest Whitestrip of a husband, a trophy for his collection, a commodity to be used and consumed and re-used, ad infinitum. That alone is a disturbing predicament — one amplified once writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis introduces the element of body horror.

Graduating from shorts to his first feature, Mirabella-Davis builds Swallow as a slow-burn story, set in antiseptic suburbia yet grounded in reality. With no flashy camera moves, the film’s frames often resemble photo spreads from Architectural Digest, with his Good Housekeeping protagonist suffering on every page.

Bennett is in the unenviable position of carrying Swallow’s weight entirely on her shoulders; its success or failure depends on her. More than up to the challenge, she gives a beguiling master-class performance. Her breathiness and mannerisms initially reminded me of Michelle Williams, which is not to say Bennett’s tremendous work here is any kind of imitation. All else being equal, if Williams were the star, Swallow would shortlist her for a fifth Oscar nomination; Bennett deserves that same consideration. Her film may not be for every palate — and it’s not — but for those whose tastes are amenable to a little arthouse horror in your psycho thrillers, it hits the spot. —Rod Lott

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As a child of the ’70s, I remember our family station wagon driving swiftly past the first hitchhikers I ever saw — “dirty hippies,” my dad called them. They looked nothing like the comely, clean-cut cuties of Hitch Hike to Hell. And for the record, my father is nothing like the disturbed driver of this exploitation crime thriller.

As the delivery driver for a local dry cleaners, slow-minded and slap-happy, Howard (Robert Gribbin, Trip with the Teacher) runs across an inordinate amount of female thumb-extenders on his route, and gladly gives each a ride in his boss’ cherry-red van. Lord forbid one of the girls self-IDs as a runaway or talks smack on her mother, because then the lift — and her life — comes to an end. Otherwise, they’re delivered safely to their destination! So don’t accuse him of lacking a moral code.

Why all the fuss? It has to do with Howard being triggered over his missing sister, who up and vanished one day, leaving their mother (one-timer Dorothy Bennett) heartbroken. That’s all the backstory director Irv Berwick and his Malibu High screenwriter John Buckley offer — and maybe even more than we need. After all, from scene one — when, between cries of “You tramp!” Howard backhands a passengers out of her bell-bottoms before raping and murdering her — we just assume Howie has mommy issues and still lives at home … and we are correct.

With its commingling of sex and violence, Hitch Hike to Hell wastes no time proving itself worthy of oozing alongside producer Harry Novak’s more notorious Boxoffice International Pictures offerings like The Sinful Dwarf and The Toy Box. Although nowhere near explicit, the scenes of Howard’s attacks remain sleazy enough to make them unpleasant to watch. Outside of these sequences, Gribbin possesses an odd magnetism, although given his character, it’s impossible to tell whether he’s terrific in the role or just a bad actor. Not up for debate: Russell Johnson (the Professor of TV’s Gilligan’s Island) plays a police captain eager to solve the mystery of his town’s new serial killer, but rarely does anything besides smoke at his desk. —Rod Lott

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As the direct sequel to his 1995 Mommy movie, Max Allan Collins’ Mommy’s Day is the superior effort on every level. This achievement is reached despite its love-to-hate lead meta-quipping, “Don’t you know the sequel is never as good as the original?” Then again, this is uttered one moment before pushing a character’s head through a plugged-in computer monitor, so perhaps she didn’t mean it.

Yes, Patty McCormack is back and The Bad Seedier than ever as murderous matriarch Mrs. Sterling — still preppy, still malicious and still xenophobic! She’s an hour away from getting the needle in death row when she’s selected to be a guinea pig for a “revolutionary antipsychotic drug” implanted within the arm, making her — in her own words — “new and improved, like a laundry detergent.” Although sprung from the pokey and into an experimental halfway house, Mommy is banned from seeing her beloved teen daughter, Jessica Ann (Rachel Lemieux, who only acted again in Collins’ next and best film, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market), now in braces and deep in training for an ice-skating competition.

Oh, and homicides soon happen.

Pulp-fic legend Mickey Spillane and scream queen Brinke Stevens reprise their supporting roles, alongside comedy improv legend Del Close and WKRP in Cincinnati program director Gary Sandy, respectively joining this second go-round as the warden and a nose-pokin’ police sergeant. Jessica Ann cedes the spotlight as Collins makes Mommy the focus. Perhaps with her coronation to front and center, McCormack dials the hysteria up one notch, and is more fun to watch as a result.

Apparently, her spirit was infectious; Collins seems more engaged with the material this time around. In particular, he adds a subplot as Mrs. Sterling appears on a daytime talk show, allowing him to satirize (if only mildly) the “trash TV” format popular at the time, à la Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, Maury Povich and their collective ambush techniques. Shot on higher-definition video, Mommy’s Day boasts a sharper picture throughout and a well-earned twist in the third act. With a meatier mélange of kill scenes than its predecessor, Mommy’s Day is often mischaracterized as a slasher film, but it remains a thrifty thriller — albeit one with a shower-set murder via ghetto blaster — from the good ol’ days when America made it a Blockbuster night. —Rod Lott

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