Although Mommy isn’t officially a sequel to 1956’s classic The Bad Seed, the idea for the shot-on-video thriller sparked from a “what if?” scenario in writer/director Max Allan Collins’ mind — namely, what would Patty McCormack’s killer-kid character be like as a grown-up … y’know, if she hadn’t been fatally fried by a bolt of lightning and all? Mommy knows best. Call it The Bad Seed: The Cougar Years.

McCormack’s titular matriarch, Mrs. Sterling, is a 40-something, double-“widowed” single woman dripping in pearls, entitlement and racism. She enters the Iowa-lensed movie like a boss, strutting into school after final bell to have a word with the teacher (Majel Barrett, 1973’s Westworld) who has decided to give this year’s outstanding student award to someone other than her daughter, Jessica Ann (newcomer Rachel Lemieux). Only one woman leaves the conversation alive, thus making Mrs. Sterling the ultimate stage mother.

As the body count increases, 12-year-old Jessica Ann’s distrust in her mom grows, boosted by the elder’s ability to open jars with minimal effort. When the girl goes snooping in Mommy’s bedroom, Collins cooks up genuine suspense, with viewers nervously looking at the open door in the far right of frame, for any sign Jessica Ann is about to get busted.

A prolific novelist — and a damned good one — Collins based Mommy on his same-named short story from the 1995 horror anthology Fear Itself. On the page, you can write anything, but on the screen, everything comes with a price tag; this being Collins’ first feature, his ambition sometimes gets reality-checked. Nowhere is this more evident than the night scenes, lit with saturated red, blue and orange gels … that get washed out on video (but are more visually pleasing than the credits’ use of Comic Sans and other egregious fonts). Collins acknowledges this limitation on the 25th-anniversary “widescream” Blu-ray set (which also contains the 1997 sequel, Mommy’s Day). By his third movie, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, he expertly had reversed the equation to make minuscule resources work in the flick’s favor.

Luckily, McCormack’s performance doesn’t depend upon a line item. She’s clearly having a ball. As much of a hoot she is to watch, not everyone else aligns to her frequency of camp. Having no acting experience at the time, Lemieux isn’t up to that challenge as Mommy’s distrustful daughter, but she does a decent job in what is the true lead. Famous faces also in the cast include The Exorcist’s Jason Miller, Mike Hammer creator Mickey Spillane and B-movie scream queen Brinke Stevens (The Jigsaw Murders), here completely clothed. —Rod Lott

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The Tall Target takes place on the eve of President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, but don’t let its 1861 setting fool you. This crime drama, loosely based on an actual plot to kill Lincoln, is more film noir than period piece, albeit with bushy mustaches and talk of secession replacing fedoras and hard-boiled dialogue.

But I digress. Dick Powell stars as New York police Sgt. John Kennedy – yes, John Kennedy (cue the conspiracy mongers) – who has caught wind of a plot to assassinate Lincoln shortly before the inauguration in Washington. Problem is, Kennedy’s supervisor doesn’t believe him, or even much care. Unable to get word to the incoming president, the intrepid detective boards a Baltimore-bound train where he plans to meet up with his partner and track down the assassin he believes is on board.

The conspiracy is already afoot. Kennedy discovers his partner has been murdered, and Kennedy’s seat is now occupied by a burly imposter claiming to be Kennedy. Luckily our hero knows another passenger, Army Col. Caleb Jeffers. The colonel promises to help Kennedy stop the plot but, then again, Jeffers is played by Adolphe Menjou, and anyone who has seen Adolphe Menjou in an old movie knows he is not to be trusted.

Director Anthony Mann helmed solidly made film noirs and Westerns, and Tall Target finds a compelling sweet spot between the two genres. Mann keeps things brisk and lean – the lack of a music score heightens the tension – and thick with paranoia. With the country on the verge of civil war, the film vividly builds an atmosphere where corruption is pervasive and tempers are simmering. It also benefits from a strong cast, particularly Leif Erickson as the bogus John Kennedy and a young Ruby Dee as a slave traveling with a brother-sister combo from the South. —Phil Bacharach

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Made for television just before the disaster subgenre began to collapse, Mayday at 40,000 Feet! — exclamation theirs — is as you would expect: a transparent wannabe member of the Airport franchise. Robert Butler, who later directed a bigger-budgeted plane-in-peril flick in 1997’s Turbulence, certainly works Mayday’s soapy suds into a lather.

On the film’s L.A.-departing flight in question, the cockpit is chock full o’ chaos. The pilot (David Janssen, Two-Minute Warning) is distracted AF with his possibly cancerous wife (Jane Powell, The Female Animal) undergoing breast surgery. The co-pilot (Christopher George, Enter the Ninja) is distracted AF after spontaneously proposing to an old flame (Margaret Blye, The Entity) among the clouds after reconnecting during the Salt Lake City layover. And the navigator (“Dandy” Don Meredith, Terror on the 40th Floor) is distracted AF by the sexy new stewardess (Airport 1975 stew Christopher Norris), even though the guys note, “she still has her baby fat.” More attentive to measurements than coordinates, he and his acts of sexual harassment make a great case for a retitling of Horny at 40,000 Feet!

And yet, the crew cries “Mayday!” after a handcuffed prisoner (Marjoe Gortner, Earthquake) manages to wrestle the gun from the old, crusty, heart attack-prone U.S. Marshal (Broderick Crawford, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover) escorting him to NYC, and promptly puts a bullet through a couple of people, as well as the lavatory wall. Oh, if only an alcoholic asshole doctor (Ray Milland, Cave In!) were aboard!

Adapted from Austin Ferguson’s novel Jet Stream, the efficiently entertaining telepic greatly benefits from Gortner’s crazed performance, closely lifting it to the theatrical atmosphere in which it wants to be. (Although I’m uncertain how Butler snuck Gortner’s uttering of the N-word past CBS’ standards and practices.) Mayday shows its seams most whenever the camera moves about the cabin, as the aircraft appears to house maybe 20 passengers. Its prime-time conception further reveals itself in external shots of the fuselage, where the production half-assedly added the fictional Transcon Airways brand with such inconsistent kerning, it reads “T R A N SCON.” Perhaps some foxy flight attendant walked by? —Rod Lott

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The need for incel-inspirational cinema is at an all-time high and, sadly, there are only so many Jokers to go around. It’s probably the perfect time in our frayed culture to finally recognize the virginal granddaddy of all sex-denied psycho-bro flicks, 1985’s The Boys Next Door.

Starring two perfectly cast Brat Pack heartthrobs (Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield) as a pair of dudes who are sick of all the fuckin’ foreigners, fuckin’ homosexuals and fuckin’ women diseasing up their Angelino wonderland. Before you can say “Don’t tread on me,” they’re laying waste to various minorities groups all over town, mostly with an ill-advised tiger-blood smirk.

Sometime between Suburbia and Dudes, this socially irresponsible gem was surprisingly directed by Penelope Spheeris for, of course, New World Pictures. While the movie aims to have “social relevance,” it’s actually somewhat troubling as Spheeris (and screenwriters Glen Morgan and James Wong of X-Files fame) seemingly wants us to sympathize with the plight of these young white males as they shoot, stab and slam the heads of every non-straight white male they encounter.

That’s not very punk rock, guys.

Released at the absolute height of the Reagan-era “Make my day” attitude that was once a loaded gun barrel of pure machismo, today, in light of the normalization of these hateful atrocities all over America, this pair of jerk-off jokers are probably better left in their smelly dorm rooms, trolling message boards and leaving racist YouTube comments. —Louis Fowler

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From first frame, depicting a serene-scened snow globe shattering under the weight of a passing garbage truck, René Manzor’s Dial Code Santa Claus lets you know it’s not your ordinary Christmas movie. And not just because it’s French.

Thomas is not your ordinary 9-year-old, either. As played by Manzor’s son, Alain Lalanne, he’s a whiz at all things technological and mechanical, a wannabe Rambo and the owner of a most unfortunate kid mullet. Living in a mansion with his toy-exec mother (Brigitte Fossey, Forbidden Games) and his diabetic, half-blind grandfather (The Double Life of Veronique’s Louis Ducreux), Thomas lives the life of Riley, worrying about little beyond whether Santa is a mere myth.

He learns the truth in the worst way possible — on Christmas Eve, no less. After Thomas’ mom fires a temp Santa for slapping a child, that creepy Kris Kringle (Patrick Floersheim, Roman Polanski’s Frantic) wastes no time in descending on the home for revenge. Truly psychotic and possibly pedophiliac, Fake Santa stalks the kid from room to room; in response, the resourceful Thomas uses the home advantage to his, well, advantage, by navigating its labyrinthian passages to lure his pursuer into booby traps.

Comparisons to Home Alone are preordained, although the clever and cunning Dial (also known under the tags of Game Over, Deadly Games and 36.15 Code Père Noël) predates that John Hughes megahit and is not a comedy, although Manzor skillfully dupes viewers into thinking it will be. Then it adopts the malevolence of the Joan Collins segment of Amicus’ Tales from the Crypt feature, with the camera often aligned at Thomas’ level to help sell the boy’s sense of terror; it works. Inevitably, Manzor cannot sustain the breakneck pacing all the way to the finish line — and that’s just fine, because in slowing down, he allows Lalanne to do something Macaulay Culkin never could: act. —Rod Lott

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