Canada’s answer to Dirty Harry? In theory, it’s Capt. Tony Saitta, as played by the graying, mutton-chopped Stuart Whitman (Invaders of the Lost Gold) in Shadows in an Empty Room, which begins with a bank robbery and ends with a helicopter explosion, yet pains to connect the dots. The thriller is rendered bizarre not by design, but the incompetence of director Alberto De Martino (Puma Man), working under the Americanized moniker of Martin Herbert.

Saitta is a seemingly invincible supercop with a trigger finger that’s likely been used so often, its movements now are involuntary. When his sister (Carole Laure, Naked Massacre), who is in college — and thus, young enough to be his daughter — is poisoned and declared dead on the scene by a nervous doctor (Martin Landau, Ed Wood), Saitta seeks revenge. Although a missing necklace is something of the only solid clue he has, actually solving the case feels secondary to shooting holes into people.

Nothing wrong with a mystery, unless it’s not treated like one. De Martino wants Shadows to be everything to everyone, as it veers from crime drama to action film to giallo; not for nothing is its most common alternate title Blazing Magnum, which tonally sits on the opposite end of an Empty Room. More of a collection of scenes than a narrative, the in-shambles script includes transvestites, a little person with a French accent, a limping man, a blind roomie, a John Saxon and the erect nipples of Marlowe’s Gayle Hunnicutt.

Despite all those ingredients thrown into the mix without being measured, Shadows in an Empty Room wakes only for a high-speed car chase, notable because Saitta doesn’t give a fuck about the condition of his car or the safety of others. The vehicles achieve liftoff — a sight akin to striking gold, which De Martino clearly knew, because he presents it in full from a variety of angles. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

What Mark Robson built in 1967’s Valley of the Dolls — a quintessential L.A. — he tore down less than a decade later with Earthquake, his penultimate picture as director. Released at the height of Hollywood’s disaster craze, the movie beat The Towering Inferno into theaters by one month, but lost to Irwin Allen’s flame-broiled spectacle in three categories at the Academy Awards. Often wrongly assumed to be an Allen production, Earthquake has the next best thing: Jennings Lang, the man behind the Airport franchise.

Co-scripted by The Godfather author Mario Puzo, Earthquake’s main plot concerns ace construction engineer Graff (Charlton Heston, who headlined Airport 1975 just one month prior) and his sham of a marriage to a miserable, pill-popping harridan (Ava Gardner, 1977’s The Sentinel) who happens to be the daughter of his boss (Lorne Greene, Battlestar Galactica). Graff nonagressively puts the make on a co-worker’s widow (Genevieve Bujold, Dead Ringers) on the day that “the big one” hits the Golden State. (With a split-nearing couple also at its epicenter, 2015’s San Andreas practically qualifies as a remake.)

Intermittently intersecting subplots involve an idealistic cop (George Kennedy, also fresh from Airport 1975) suspended for damaging Zsa Zsa Gabor’s hedges in a car chase, a would-be Evel Knievel (Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree) perfecting a stunt on a rickety wooden ramp, and a shopkeeper-turned-soldier (former evangelist Marjoe Gortner, Starcrash) who gets all handsy and rapey with a busty customer (Victoria Principal, TV’s Dallas) for stealing a donut in the aftermath. The only thing more perverse than Gortner’s mentally unhinged character is Principal’s comically large Afro.

She’s not the only chalk-white cast member sporting a ’fro; in a pseudonymous credit, Walter Matthau appears as a drunk decked out in pimp duds. Occasionally, he awakens from his shot-glass stupor to mutter a now-dated famous name without comment, e.g. Bobby Riggs. To borrow a popular Internet phrase I cannot stand, yet is wholly appropriate, I can’t even.

While Earthquake is generally remembered today for its much-hyped, low-frequency Sensurround process that enabled audiences to “feel” the tremors, its visual effects remain impressive — well, most of them. When the earth initially starts a-rockin’, Robson warps the frame, which looks as phony as the illustrated blood spatter that later closes an ill-fated elevator ride. Luckily, those cheats are the exception to the epic rumble of rubble that retains the power to jolt. So does a rather pessimistic ending. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

You know the hoary cinematic chestnut of the retiring cop whose last day proves quite the pickle? The reality-rooted The Wave ups that finality ante with a frickin’ tsunami! Not for nothing did this taut thriller become the year’s biggest deal in its home country of Norway, where the scenario depicted is expected to happen in the not-too-distant future — all a matter of when, not if.

Reluctantly, family man Kristian (Kristoffer Joner, The Revenant) is leaving the quaint town of Geiranger behind — and his post as a shaggy geologist watching the mountains from command central at the Early Warning Center — for a move to a buttoned-up, better-paying career in the oil industry. He’s having a hard time letting go — a grip that becomes even tighter when an anomaly in groundwater levels raises an instinctual concern that just won’t settle down.

This is why: Because if the mountain were to expand enough to cause a rockslide, a 279-foot wave would result in turn and head straight for the good people of Geiranger, who would receive advance notice of 10 minutes, tops. And that is exactly what happens, smack-dab in the middle of tourist season, with Kristian’s wife (Ane Dahl Torp, Dead Snow) and kids as sitting targets, holed up at a hotel precariously not far enough above sea level.

The Wave is a disaster film of seismic proportions, but a damned fine one. Although it delivers the (damaged) goods in visual spades, it is cast neither in the all-star Irwin Allen cheese of the 1970s, nor the blockbuster-slick style of the subgenre’s 1990s resurgence (as seen in Twister, Volcano, Daylight, et al.). Plausibility trumps panache; science is practically a member of the supporting cast; subplots are kept to a bare minimum; celebrity cameos are nonexistent; and, like 2012’s true-life tsunami tale, The Impossible, the story is free of sentiment until the final scene. Nothing in director Roar Uthaug’s previous hit, the 2006 frozen-over ski-lodge slasher Cold Prey, suggests the sure hand that guides The Wave to such great heights. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

In a performance finer than required, an apelike Martin Balsam (Psycho) stars as unscrupulous police commissario Bonavia in Confessions of a Police Captain, a Eurocrime effort better known to denizens of the wonderful world of bargain-bin DVD collections as Bad Cop I. The renaming forces a nonexistent connection to Bad Cop II, which is actually 1983’s unrelated Corrupt. Got that?

Get this: Bonavia gets into hot water when he orders the release of mental patient, knowing the kook will go try to kill a crooked construction company owner. The loony tries and fails, thus opening up a whole can of worms for our cap’n — so much so that he may end up in prison, where he would risk having his food gets spat in and/or his tummy getting shivved during movie time.

Directed and co-written by Amityville II: The Possession’s Damiano Damiani, Confessions makes for a pretty competent policier, although its surplus of characters eventually wears the viewer thin. The film is very ’70s and very Italian, which is exactly what I liked about it. Sometimes incongruity — e.g. a disturbing ending against a swanky Riz Ortolani score — just works. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

With The Concorde … Airport ’79 being the fourth and final flight in the Airport series, I am legitimately saddened I have no further sequels to consume. As creaky as this franchise is by today’s standards, I find it more entertaining than most. After all, its living, breathing, connective tissue is George Kennedy’s continuing role as Joe Patroni, here promoted to pilot and squeezing into the cockpit with a shit-eating grin and an update on his life: “My boy’s starting college!” he beams with pride. “My wife’s been dead a year!”

And thus, the secret seeds are planted to score Patroni a prostitute during layover. Ladies and gentlemen, we are cleared for takeoff!

Capt. Patroni and his co-pilot, Capt. Paul Metrand (French superstar Alain Delon, Le Cercle Rouge), are tasked with taking the airline’s newfangled Concorde from D.C. to Paris, and then Paris to Moscow, partly as a PR stunt for the Russia-hosted Olympic Games. (Two flights compressed into two hours feels like two episodes of an Airport television series, which is what Airport ’79 may as well be.)

The trips fall under the category of “easier said than done,” what with Patroni busting out some incredible aerial acrobatic maneuvers — including more than one hysterical 360˚ — to avoid having the supersonic jet blown to smithereens by the drone missiles chasing it. The missiles are “accidentally” deployed by a slimy aeronautics CEO (Robert Wagner, Curse of the Pink Panther), because just before boarding the plane, his journalist girlfriend (Susan Blakely, Over the Top) uncovered evidence of his involvement in illegal arms sales. If he can down the plane, he’ll get away with greed!

On the downside, he’ll also be killing many in the process; the potential collateral damage includes the airline prez (Eddie Albert, TV’s Green Acres), his trophy wife (Sybil Danning, Chained Heat), one sexy stew Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle, of course), a Russian gymnastics coach (Avery Schreiber, those Doritos commercials) and his deaf moppet daughter, a news reporter/set of teeth (John Davidson, TV’s Hollywood Squares), the Russian figure skater he’s boinking (Andrea Marcovicci, The Hand) and a really worried parent (Cicely Tyson, Bustin’ Loose), whose carry-on is a human heart awaiting transplant into her dying child.

And those are just the subplots that make sense! So many baffling creative decisions reroute The Concorde into self-parody without director David Lowell Rich (1973’s Satan’s School for Girls) or screenwriter Eric Roth (future Oscar winner for Forrest Gump) knowing it. I speak of comedian Jimmie Walker, then coming off his “dyn-o-mite” run on TV’s Good Times, playing a jazz saxophonist who keeps sneaking off to the bathroom to get high. I speak of Martha Raye, in her final film (roughly 37,000 feet from her days sharing the screen with Charlie Chaplin), as a fraidy-cat passenger who keeps sneaking off to the bathroom because of nervous diarrhea. I speak especially of game-show staple Charo, who has one scene that exists only to feature Charo and her cuchi-cuchi shtick. Was she really that much of a “get”?

Don’t answer that. Do see ’79, the master of the disaster film — disastrous in all the right ways. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.