After writing an article about a sheep birthing a human baby, Populous magazine reporter Jill Weatherby (Jodi Russell, Blind Dating) and her shoulder pads thirst for “a shot at some real news.” She finds it in sleepy Edmond, Missouri — a town that’s “fictious,” per the misspelled credits — where the elderly, married owners of a mini-mart have been murdered by a trio of traveling hoodlums. While one of the the bad guys (Kenny McCabe, Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2) remains at large, rogue cop Cliff Madlock (Larry Williams, 2001’s Heartbreakers) fatally shot the others at the scene.

What Jill doesn’t know initially is that one of Madlock’s kills was a straight-up execution — Miranda rights, schmiranda rights. Edmond boasts a crime rate 40% lower than the U.S. average, yet almost never convicts a criminal. She learns why after witnessing Madlock break into a drug dealer’s house — warrant, schmarrant — and force-feeds spoonfuls of cocaine to the dealer as if it were Cheerios.

Maybe it’s the experience of watching Lethal Justice through a 21st-century lens, but it’s not clear whether Madlock is supposed to be its hero or villain — until the ending, when Weatherby watches Madlock blow away the elusive criminal (“Damn! There goes my exclusive!”) and decides to let the good ol’ boy in blue keep shooting first and asking questions later never. Hey, it was a very different time.

It was also a time when anything could churn profits on VHS, no matter how homegrown. Lethal Justice represents the second and thus far final film from writer/director/producer/editor Christopher Reynolds. As with his debut, the Johnny-come-lately slasher Offerings, it was shot in the Oklahoma City area (including the actual city of Edmond) using its fair share of overemoting locals and exaggerated extras, but also with Russell believably exhibiting that journalist’s pluck, just as Williams does with hotheaded authority; however, they fail to click in the chemistry department. All one can really ask of such cinematic pursuits is an effortless watchability, which Lethal Justice provides, no matter how hard its secondhand-synthesizer score — appropriately referred to by the closed captioning as “sleuth music” — works against it. —Rod Lott

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Not a slasher movie no matter what the title leads you to believe, Slayground is one of more than half a dozen films based on Richard Stark’s (aka Donald E. Westlake) crime novels featuring professional thief Parker. Like all but one of those, the character’s name has been changed — in this case, to Stone, played by Peter Coyote (Femme Fatale).

Stone has masterminded a three-man job to rob an armored truck of cold, hard cash, but when his driver doesn’t show up on time (understandable, due to murder), he’s forced to hire a hothead punk (Ned Eisenberg, The Burning) to fill the role. That’s a choice Stone soon regrets when, in the post-heist flee, the wheelman gets too cocky and ends up causing a wreck that kills a child. The dead kid’s wealthy father puts out a hit on all those responsible by hiring a shadowy man known as Shadow Man (Philip Sayer, Xtro).

Sounds interesting enough, and it is in setup. Then, maybe 20 minutes in, Terry Bedford, the Monty Python cinematographer trying his hand at directing, and screenwriter Trevor Preston (What the Peeper Saw) manage to take the whole enterprise south — and fast — not unlike the driver who gets Stone into this fine mess. Considering the wreck had no witnesses, how the Shadow Man learns the identities of Stone and company is a mystery — one the filmmakers completely gloss over, just as they do the killer’s ability to know his prey’s location at any given point in time.

Slayground opens with the familiar strains of one of the most overlicensed rock songs in movie history, George Thorogood’s future jock jam “Bad to the Bone,” which immediately establishes a rowdy tone the film just as quickly ditches. No fun is to be found, and I’m not sure Bedford wants you to have any, brushing every scene in bleak coats of oil and dirt and all-around grime. By the time the movie jumps an ocean to take Stone to jolly ol’ England, I was long checked out. Being set in an empty amusement park, the final confrontation is at least visually interesting, but also a case of too little, too late. —Rod Lott

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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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