Hush (2016)

The Plot: A deaf woman (Kate Siegel, Oculus) is terrorized within her own remote home by a psychopath.

The Psychopath: He’s a stranger (John Gallagher Jr., 10 Cloverfield Lane) with a now-requisite, emotionless mask, but without a motive, backstory or explanation. He likes to stab things.

The Review: Like Wait Until Dark updated for the emoji crowd, Hush makes the most of its simple home-invasion premise until director/co-writer Mike Flanagan (Before I Wake) succumbs to wear-out, likely from leaping so many gaping plot holes. Pretty decent, until it’s not.

Emelie (2015)

The Plot: Three siblings are terrorized within their own suburban home by a psychopath while their parents are having a date night.

The Psychopath: Emelie (Sarah Bolger, The Lazarus Effect) poses as a babysitter, although she’s clearly not, what with such shenanigans as showing the kids Mom and Dad’s sex tape and changing her tampon in front of the tween boy (Joshua Rush, Mr. Peabody & Sherman). Oh, and plotting to steal the cutest, smallest tot.

The Review: The film marks the fictional feature debut of Michael Thelin. While I’d like to say I would not have suspected something this twisted from a man whose whose CV is dominated by emo-pop music videos and concerts (Paramore, All Time Low, Panic! At the Disco, et al.), the truth is I would not have suspected something this twisted from damn near anyone. A continual surprise, Emelie lets Bolger bid the family-friendly portion of her career adieu and the result sticks with you like shards of Jolly Ranchers on your teeth.

The Girl in the Photographs (2015)

The Plot: The townspeople of li’l ol’ Spearfish, S.D., are terrorized within their own quaint haven by a psychopath.

The Psychopath: He wears a now-requisite, emotionless mask. He likes to stab things — namely, young women, whose photos he snaps after killing them and posting them over town. Just wait until he discovers Instagram and Snapchat …

The Review: Delving into the “obscene and sinister” world of photography, this Girl represents a large leap upward in quality for director Nick Simon (Removal). While blonde Claudia Lee (Kick-Ass 2) is the star, Harold & Kumar’s Kal Penn steals the spotlight — and not always in a good way — as an insufferable shutterbug prick in the perv mode of Terry Richardson: “This gum tastes like garlic semen.” And despite strong flaws, this is a nasty piece of work. I dug it.

Left Behind (2014)

The Plot: Passengers of a commercial airliner — not to mention the populace of the entire planet — are terrorized by a mysterious event that makes true believers simultaneously vanish, leaving no trace but a pile of clothes (which is a funny effect to witness).

The Psychopath: In this case, it’s the film’s director, Vic Armstrong (the Dolph Lundgren vehicle Army of One), for inflicting this remake of the 2000 Kirk Cameron vehicle upon us, even if he did up the star wattage with Oscar winner Nicolas Cage as an unfaithful pilot who says things like, “If your mom’s gonna run away with another man, may as well be Jesus, huh?” Are your tax problems that bad, Nic?

The Review: Based on the crazy-popular series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind isn’t so much a movie as it is an exercise in End Times proselytization, seemingly cast with whoever happened to be in line Thursday night at Chick-fil-A and could pass a stringent affluence test. Except for the part where a one-man plane crashes into a mall parking lot, this visual sermon is abysmal, largely built upon the pilot’s daughter (Cassi Thomson, Grave Halloween) wandering aimlessly around town. Not since the previous Left Behind movie has The Rapture been this boring. —Rod Lott

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After hitting his marketable peak with the 1976 Jaws imitation Mako: The Jaws of Death, Florida-based filmmaker William Grefé (Death Curse of Tartu) latched onto Deliverance’s hillbilly-hell vibe for Whiskey Mountain, his final feature. Although its depictions of the class battle between the rural and the (sub)urban may not make you squeal like a pig, the cut-rate thriller works all the same.

Diana (Roberta Collins, Caged Heat) and Bill (Christopher George, Pieces) are on the hunt for some 200 Confederate muskets her granddaddy supposedly buried up yonder in the North Carolina wilderness, durn near ’round Whiskey Mountain; before he died, he left a map to lead her to that fortune.

Bringing along camping equipment, motorcycles and their couple friends (Preston Pierce and Linda Borgeson of, respectively, Angels’ Wild Women and no other movie ever), Diana and Bill attract the ire of the local yokels just by being in their town. Challenged mentally and dentally, the rednecks harass the quartet to no end, setting fire to their camp as they sleep, attempting drowning in a raging river and, heck, even stealing a pair of women’s panties!

Swapping dueling banjos for an original Charlie Daniels tune, Whiskey Mountain stands mighty tall by the standards of the hicksploitation subgenre and regional indies overall. In a rather good way, Grefé catches us off-guard when the danger dial gets rudely cranked in the second half; see, he doesn’t have to do much to make his antagonists seem threatening, because general skeeviness tends to achieve that just fine by itself. And yet, he throws us for an arty loop with a double-rape scene that’s doubly disturbing because technically, we only hear it. All we are shown is a stationary series of Polaroids developing before our eyes; our mind fills in the rest. The effect is unsettling and raises the movie above the usual drive-in fodder, as does its purposely bitter final shot. —Rod Lott

Get it at Ballyhoo Motion Pictures.

In 1972, a charter jet carrying a rugby team from Uruguay to Chile crashed in the snowy Andes mountain range. In 1972, a Uruguayan ruby team chartered a plane to take its players to Chile, only to crash-land in the Andes Mountains.

I share this information with you twice because right off the bat, Survive! — exclamation point theirs — does the same; as the camera pans over the faces of 40-some-odd passengers (to whom you should not get attached), the narrator relays information already delivered by an introductory title card mere moments before. This is just one way the film from Mexico’s Rene Cardona Sr. (Night of the Bloody Apes) presents itself as a sloppy, slapdash production — at least in the U.S. version, oddly shepherded by the flamboyant Allan Carr of Grease fame and Can’t Stop the Music infamy.

Cognizant of the disaster-film craze of the era (which Cardona’s son took full advantage of in his own work), Survive! wastes little time getting to the goods: the wreck of the plane, thanks to a navigation miscalculation. On a Cardona budget, the tragedy is illustrated with what looks like a toy model drifting into a mound of laundry detergent in powder form. Unspectacular the accident may be cinematically, the aftermath carries no such limitations, as witnessed by a survivor’s attempt to the stuff a goopy loop of intestines back in a fellow passenger’s gut.

As rapidly as Cardona gets to that aviation blooper, he holds back on the scenes on which the film was sold to theatergoers: those involving cannibalism. Amid freezing temps, their hope for rescue runs out as speedily as their rations pilfered from all the up-for-grabs luggage scattered about: wine, chocolate bars, fish tins, cheese and marmalade. The survivors eventually face the coldest and hardest of cold, hard facts: Eat human flesh or die. As history tells us, we know which option they select: They pick their unappetizers straight from the Donner Party menu.

Considering the name-brand source, I wish Survive! were more exploitative than it is. The picture possesses Señor Cardona’s regular hallmarks, from an unflinching eye for gore to his usual leading man in Nightmare City’s Hugo Stiglitz, yet after the initial plane-meets-mountain depiction, those elements disassemble and never quite come together again. Their failure to do so rests upon a glacial pace, as if we, the viewers, were having to trudge alongside the characters to get to the next shocking moment. In 1993, Arachnophobia director Frank Marshall told the same true-life tale with a bigger budget, with the punctuation-free Alive. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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

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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.