Considered a “lost classic” of sorts, Anthony Waller’s 1995 horror-thriller, Mute Witness, is now enjoying a renaissance.

A slick, Hitchcockian genre-bender, the narrative follows Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina), a mute makeup artist working on a low-budget slasher in Moscow alongside her sister, Karen (Fay Ripley), and Karen’s director boyfriend, Andy (Evan Richards). The movie’s opening scene is a brilliant film-within-a-film, whereby we see a woman terrorized by a knife-wielding escapee from a mental institution — a clear and gentle lampooning of slasher conventions that continues throughout Mute Witness, making it another meta title before Scream made the convention cool a year later.

The plot really picks up when Billy gets accidentally locked inside the film studio for the night. She hears men speaking Russian and, moving toward them, spies cameraman Lyosha (Sergei Karlenkov) and actor Arkadi (Igor Volkov) shooting a porno with a blonde actress (Larisa Khusnullina). Billy watches, at first amused, but when the action turns violent, she becomes worried. That’s when Arkadi pulls a knife from under a pillow and brutally stabs the actress to death, prompting Billy to silently scream in terror and run. She hits a coat rack on her way out of the room, making just enough noise to alert Lyosha and Arkadi that someone might’ve been watching them make their snuff film.

What follows is a classic slasher chase scene, with the men searching the building for their interloper, and Billy craftily hiding from them as she looks for a way out. It’s an extended and tense sequence executed with expertise by Waller, and it’s only a precursor to the delightful twists and turns the film packs into its hour-and-a-half runtime.

Mute Witness isn’t just a wild ride in terms of its action, it’s also by turns hilarious, in particular when involving scenes with Andy, the inept and spoiled American filmmaker whose constant gaslighting of Billy generates uncomfortable forms of horror all its own. There’s also a “Mystery Guest Star” who shows up about midway through, whose role is brief but delightfully memorable. The plot may thicken a little too much for some viewers, making the proceedings a bit convoluted, but if you remember that the point is loving homage (and sometimes spoof), rather than to create a thoroughly serious slasher-mystery-thriller, then you’re bound to have a good time with the film. —Christopher Shultz

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When we meet spouses Jesús (David Pareja) and Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), they’ve got a brand-new baby and are arguing over a brand-new table in a furniture store. Under the protest of his much older wife, Jesús picks one made of bronze, ivory and an “unbreakable” slab of glass. And thus begins The Coffee Table.

It sounds like a joke — the IKEA instructions-inspired opening credits sequence suggests as much — but I assure you, the poster’s phrasing of “a cruel Caye Casas film” is not a marketing conceit.

No spoilers here: A moment at the 20-minute mark will divide audiences — and not necessarily into nice, clean halves. Just as something really, really bad feels like it will happen, it does. We don’t see the horrific act; worse, we feel it.

At this point, The Coffee Table holds immense potential at becoming the darkest of dark comedies; Casas (Killing God) and his co-screenwriter, Cristina Borobia, need only go one way: all in.

But they don’t. Instead, almost apologetic at having gone so far so soon, they shift the tone into the realm of familial/relationship drama, as Jesús spends the rest of the movie trying to keeping the lid on What Transpired from Maria. Your nerves remain jangled, jarred and wracked, yes — and performances strong — but the Spanish film simply isn’t the same.

Until the ending, when Casas leaps out of the corner he’s backed himself into as everything — and I do mean everything — comes to a head. —Rod Lott

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Writer-director Rose Glass’ previous film, Saint Maud, made waves among those who saw it, though it remains criminally underseen and underappreciated to this day. Fortunately, she has a new movie out, Love Lies Bleeding, featuring a more well-known cast and a more rounded advertising campaign, allowing (hopefully) more people to experience this filmmaker’s idiosyncratic visions of human interaction. 

The film, co-written with Weronika Tofilska, stars Kristen Stewart as Lou, the manager of gym in 1980s New Mexico. There she meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder from a small town in Oklahoma, who is on her way to Las Vegas to compete in a bodybuilding tournament. The two hit it off immediately and begin a passionate relationship, with Lou not realizing Jackie had sex with her brother-in-law, J.J. (Dave Franco), the night she rolled into town — a tit-for-tat tryst Jackie only agreed to in order to get a job at the gun range J.J. works at.

The range happens to be owned by Lou’s father (Ed Harris, sporting a particularly hideous “skullet” — bald up top with long hair on the sides), a dangerous criminal who keeps various bugs and worms as pets. Lou doesn’t like Jackie working for her dad, with whom she has no more contact, but she’s forced into the same hospital room with him after J.J. beats Lou’s sister (Jena Malone) within an inch of her life. This act of domestic violence sets off a bloody chain reaction that puts both Lou and Jackie in danger, jeopardizing not just their lives but also their love for one another. 

Steamy, funny, gory and ultimately weirder than you can imagine, Love Lies Bleeding feels like the unholy spawn of David Lynch, David Cronenberg and the early works of the Coen Brothers (particularly Blood Simple), but with a distinct queer-feminine perspective. Glass gloriously turns the neo-noir crime thriller on its head, much as she did with Saint Maud and the religious horror film, proving once again her prowess as a filmmaker and a unique cinematic voice. —Christopher Shultz

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So you’ve been rejected by the LAPD academy for psychiatric concerns. Do you:

A) seek a psychiatrist
B) seek career counseling 
C) pick innocent people out of the phone book and kill them  
D) ask, “Father, what’s a phone book?”

In William Lustig’s Relentless, Buck Taylor (Breakfast Club member Judd Nelson) chooses “C” and lets his trigger finger do the walking. Buck’s spree as a serial killer coincides with Sam Dietz’s first day on the job as a homicide detective, mentored/bullied by grizzled veteran Malloy (Robert Loggia, Jagged Edge). As Dietz and Malloy gather clues, Buck keeps on buckin’ societal norms. The standout sequence finds him crashing through his latest target’s condo skylight, then following her to an ultimately ineffective hiding place: inside the basement’s washing machine.

Between this and Hit List, Lustig had one hell of a 1989! Ditto for screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson between this, even if he took a pseudonym, and Field of Dreams, for which he earned an Oscar nod. Highlighted by a ironic use of Norman Rockwell’s The Runaway painting in its closing, Relentless is a reliable programmer — the kind of intentional B movie that enjoyed an A-level theatrical release coast to coast, the kind of highly competent genre outing that Larry Cohen knocked out with regularity.

Upon the film’s release, Nelson playing against his Brat Pack type was neither welcomed nor appreciated, but he admirably commits to the vanity-free role of Utter Nutjob … and perhaps overcommits, rendering Buck too childlike in moments. His performance overall isn’t dissimilar from what Robert Downey Jr. delivered in that era — haircut included!  

As Dietz, the minimally appealing Leo Rossi (Lustig’s Maniac Cop II) doesn’t exactly engender viewer goodwill with his overuse of “jerk-off” as a noun in daily vocab and by threatening his child (Brendan Ryan, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) with “a knuckle sandwich.”

Now, I’m not saying you will root against Dietz in his pursuit of justice, but if not for his kind and supportive wife (Meg Foster, The Lords of Salem), you would root against Dietz in his pursuit of justice. So naturally, his character is the star of the entire franchise, from Dead On: Relentless II to Relentless IV: Ashes to Ashes. I’ll still watch them, though, having liked original-recipe Relentless this much. —Rod Lott

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In Uncaged, Netherlands genre giant Dick Maas (Amsterdamned) takes pride in his work — literally, as this loony movie is about a lion on the loose.

After an entire family is slaughtered, zoo veterinarian Liz (Sophie van Winden) gets recruited to help authorities track and prevent the jungle-king culprit from further going Dutch for din-din. Maas being Maas, any capture won’t happen until the filmmaker has his fun for moviegoers’ sake.

And what fun this film — alternately and generically known as Prey — is! To quote experts surveying the grisly mess at the big cat’s initial crime scene:

“Where’s his arm?”

“In the same place as his wife’s head.”

Because Maas’ singular sense of humor always accompanies the gore, it’s tough to take his well-choreographed sequences as anything other than an action-packed cartoon for grown-ups. If the lion chasing a delivery man on a moped through the streets isn’t enough of a ball, wait until the animal does the same to Liz’s ex: a cancer-ravaged hired hunter (Mark Frost, Faust: Love of the Damned) in a motorized wheelchair.

From golf course to public tram, Maas pulls no punches as the Uncaged lion does anything but sleep — just ask the poor kid on the playground slide! Then dig in. —Rod Lott

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