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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With their parents perishing in a car wreck, military-base teens Loren (Shannon Presby, Trackdown: Finding the Goodbar Killer) and Abby MacWilliams (Lori Loughlin, Back to the Beach) move to Florida to live with their slovenly Uncle Charlie (Eddie Jones, Invasion U.S.A.). They earn their keep by helping get his decrepit, two-bit amusement park, Santa Funland, off the ground.

They earn something else, too: the ire of the local gang of high school hick thugs, led by the drug-dealing Dutra (James Spader, Avengers: Age of Ultron), all for one unreasonable reason: Abby won’t go out with them. Outraged at this affront to their rapey overtures, Dutra and his fellow detritus pledge to make the MacWilliams siblings pay — quite literally with their lives, after a couple rounds of garden-variety vandalism fail to convince Abby to put out. It all culminates as the viewer would hope: on the after-hours grounds of Santa Funland, with the villains using shotguns and our heroes using jerry-rigged carnival rides.

This late left turn into terror shouldn’t surprise anyone, seeing how The New Kids is directed by Sean S. Cunningham, he of the landmark slasher Friday the 13th. Now, James Spader is no Jason Voorhees, which is to say that while the former’s villainous turn failed to achieve the latter’s icon status, the actor is absolutely slimy to the point of serpentine — a petulant, entitled alpha male whose assholiness resonates even more today with a realism the supernatural slayer Jason can’t even hope to match (not that he would).

As intense as Spader is, treating the B movie as A material (as was his wont), Presby is nearly as magnetic – a surprise since The New Kids marks his film debut, and doubly a surprise since he never did another. In fact, his acting career — all four years of it — ended with the ’85 calendar. Slow-motion shots of his athleticism aside, presumably to showcase his package, Presby has more presence than his ultimately famous screen sister. Among the supporting cast in too-small parts are Eric Stoltz (Anaconda) as a super-dweeb and Tom Atkins (Halloween III: Season of the Witch) as the ill-fated MacWilliams patriarch.

Cunningham’s instincts have always been stronger as producer than director, so he seems mostly disinterested in Stephen Gyllenhaal’s script until the finale places him back within his comfort zone. Viewers will not only sense it, but may think likewise. —Rod Lott

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One of the weapons utilized in Scream for Help is a Swiss Army knife — fitting for the film’s all-purpose refusal to commit to one genre. Ultimately, it’s a thriller, as sleazy as it cheesy. Would you expect anything less from Death Wish director Michael Winner?

At 17, Christie Cromwell (Rachael Kelly) is a regular Nancy Drew in Guess jeans. As she details in her diary (and narrates to us), she’s convinced her stepdad, Paul (David Allen Brooks, The Kindred), is trying to kill her mother (Marie Masters, Slayground) for her wealth. As becomes irrefutable with each increasingly ludicrous scenario, she’s not wrong.

After the film devotes about an hour to Christie’s snooping and sleuthing, screenwriter Todd Holland (1985’s Fright Night) turns the tables into a siege picture, as Paul and his posse trap the Cromwell ladies in their own house. Luckily, Christie holds the home-court advantage, although throughout Help, the girl is at turns crafty and clumsy, per the needs of the story beats, and Kelly (who never graced a movie before or since) makes an impression as the bratty but well-meaning heroine.

Having recruited Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page to score Death Wish II two years prior, Winner this time procures Zep’s John Paul Jones to provide the soundtrack. But it also finds Winner returning to the well for his reputation of being cruel to his female characters. The nudity required of Lolita Lorre (as Paul’s mistress) is udderly utterly humiliating, and when Christie loses her virginity (to her BFF’s BF, played by How I Got into College’s Corey Parker), she emerges from the sheets in horror at the amount of blood — and no wonder, as it appears she has pressed her palm into a full tray of red paint. One wonders if Winner cackled at himself for costuming the underage girl in a shirt emblazoned with the word “MUFFS.” (Probably.)

There’s another thing one wonders, as Christie relies on a bicycle and Polaroid camera as her tools of reconnaissance: What would Brian De Palma do? Better, to be certain, but I’d be lying to suggest I didn’t thoroughly enjoy Scream for Help as is. —Rod Lott

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As the son of an abusive backwater prostitute, Wheeler (John King III, Alien Zone) can’t help but be a Psycho from Texas. With hair not unlike a witch’s broom, he works odd jobs here and there — in this film’s case, it’s to kidnap oilman William Phillips (Herschel Mays), who lives in a mansion with his hot daughter (Candy Dee) and appears to drive the Family Truckster from National Lampoon’s Vacation.

Wheeler succeeds with the help of his not-so-slick partner, Slick (Tommy Lamey, Timestalkers), he of the poo-log mustache and habit of chewing strike-anywhere matches. Post-abduction, Wheeler goes to town to cash a big, fat Phillips check and score some weed; meanwhile, Phillips wrangles loose and runs and runs and runs, through woods and wild hogs, with Slick right behind him.

It’s not exactly roiling with plot. However, being a low-budget hicksploitation effort, no one demands it be. The only movie written, directed and produced by stuntman Jim Feazell, the El Dorado, Arkansas-lensed Psycho from Texas is an entertaining single serving of sleaze and a marvel of atonality. The soundtrack’s boing-boing-boing of a jew’s harp is squarely at odds with the homicidal action onscreen. Same goes for the original song “Yesterday” — not that one — which gets needle-dropped in the oddest of places, possibly to justify whatever Feazell paid for it.

If the regional thriller is remembered for anything, it’s as the debut for scream queen Linnea Quigley (Witchtrap). She plays a barmaid to whom Wheeler brings a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken and demands she dance for him. She refuses. He forces her, with the howler of a line, “Now, bitch, let’s dance!” As she tearfully gyrates, he keeps screaming, “Dance! Dance!” and dumps a pitcher of beer over her fully nude body. With this scene, King goes for broke and kick-starts a career — just not his. —Rod Lott

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Undoubtedly one of the most controversial films ever made, William Friedkin’s provocative tale of a homosexual killer on the loose in the sultry sexual playground of New York City in the 1980s is constantly being re-evaluated and reinterpreted through far more educated eyes than mine, but time has aged it well enough for me to at least admit that it’s an incomprehensible serial-killer flick that you just can’t look away from.

When a human arm is found floating in the harbor, Al Pacino — who resembles a then-current Lou Reed, oddly enough — stars as a New York City police officer that goes undercover in the extremely sensual gay leather underworld to hunt down the brutal killer who sing-songs a nursery rhyme when engaging in his deadly deeds, mostly thanks to a dead father that gave him the worst (imagined?) parental advice possible.

Becoming a well-liked regular in the highly sexual bars and clubs around town — the beautifully graphic leather-daddy scenes are still legendary for pushing the boundaries of the MPAA — Pacino quickly finds himself questioning his own heterosexuality as he gets deeper and deeper into his supposed undercover character, going out into the night, hanging around the park while dressed in leathers, shorts and a handkerchief hanging out of his back pocket.

When Pacino finally does track the killer down in said park, it’s hard to exactly say if the movie ends on a typical Hollywood ending or, as he breaks the fourth wall and stares directly at the audience, something darker has happened inside him that were not privy to just as the credits roll, blasting Willy DeVille’s “It’s So Easy”; either way, it’s an enthralling mess that I could watch again and again, possibly even questioning my own aesthetic draw to the subcultures in the film.

The Arrow Video Blu-ray has a brand-new commentary from Friedkin that explores many of the themes above, if you’re at all interested; additionally, a pair of archival featurettes document the still-relevant controversy surrounding the movie and, up until that point, its (justifiably) tarnished legacy. Cruising is a disturbing, challenging film that some will like, some will hate, and some will totally get off on — maybe even a combination of all three, if you’ve got the time. —Louis Fowler

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