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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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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