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

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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

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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

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From Four Rode Out director John Peyser, The Centerfold Girls depicts what happens when a holier-than-thou man with a dubious grasp on reality gets a hold of a straight razor and the special, year-end issue of the fictitious Bachelor skin mag. Played by Andrew Prine (Simon, King of the Witches), Clement Dunne fancies himself a moral guardian who rings up these nude fantasy ladies, threatens to make them pay for their sins of the flesh, works toward and achieves that lofty goal, and then moves on to the next one. Making that premise unique is its three-in-one structure that hoists each story to stand on its own. If not for the running thread/threat of Dunne, it could be an anthology film; with each segment running roughly half an hour, it plays like Sex Pervert Stalker: The Series. That’s a compliment.

After disposing the corpse of Miss January in the opening credits, Dunne puts away his trademark souvenir (one of the victim’s shoes) from the felonious act and begins targeting Miss March (Jaime Lyn Bauer, Mysterious Island of Beautiful Women). She’s a nurse en route to a job interview when an act of Good Samaritanism backfires in the form of rape-happy hippies who may beat Dunne to the punch (so to speak).

Next up is Miss May (Jennifer Ashley, The Pom Pom Girls), a model on an overnight shoot on a private island, not unlike the setting for Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None — especially since Dunne has to slay a few extra bodies to get to his intended one.

Finally, Miss July (Tiffany Bolling, Kingdom of the Spiders) is a flight attendant whose grounded exploits accidentally answer the immortal question of what to do with a drunken sailor — two of ’em, in fact. When she eventually crosses paths with Dunne, she’s been through so much that our killer just might find the proverbial table turned.

The law of diminishing returns applies to The Centerfold Girls’ troika of tales, but its one-of-a-kind architecture makes it unlike any suspense slasher you’ve seen. Peyser throws as much female nudity at the camera as he does buckets of bright-red blood, thus satisfying the baseline requirements of 1970s sleaze. Even though he didn’t have to, Prine raises that bar with an actual performance as the omnipotent (and possibly impotent) murderer who has the ability to appear at the perfect place at the perfect time; after a short while, you’ll stop wondering of whom he reminds you. (The answer is Ben Folds.) —Rod Lott

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Whereas Betsy Russell (co-star of 71.43% of the Saw films) makes an improvement over Donna Wilkes in pure sex appeal, Avenging Angel makes a massively disappointing sequel compared to its 1984 big sis. This is all the more baffling when one considers that director and co-writer Robert Vincent O’Neill remains in those roles; therefore, blame cannot be ascribed to a case of franchise takeover.

A year after the original Angel, the honor student by day has given up being a Hollywood hooker by night. Having slept with “hundreds of men,” Molly (Russell) now opts for running the 100-yard dash as a track star at college. Inspired by her L.A.-cop guardian, Lt. Andrews (Dark Night of the Scarecrow’s Robert E. Lyons, replacing Cliff Gorman), she is studying to be a lawyer. But when the police lieutenant is murdered in the line of duty in Chinatown, Molly teases her hair, whores up and drags out her Angel alter ego to get answers … and revenge. Forget it, Molly; it’s Chinatown.

There is nothing wrong with pursuing that setup. There is something very wrong with following our heroine’s intensely personal tragedy with about 20 minutes of screwball comedy, as Angel and friends try to bust ol’ pal Kit Carson (returning Rory Calhoun, Motel Hell) out of the sanitarium in which he clearly belongs. With dopey music and all, the prolonged sequence feels like a deliberate stalling tactic to reach feature-length as O’Neill attempts to navigate between the emotional tones of oil and water. Neither works.

As a result, Avenging Angel hastily becomes a sad parody of itself, one franchise entry earlier than the standard. This is best exemplified in saddling Angel’s lesbian former landlord (Susan Tyrrell, Forbidden Zone) with an infant that is not hers, and then involving that child in a hysterically edited climax that sends the tearful tot plummeting from a rooftop at half-speed. Photographed in extreme close-up so we don’t see the hands of whoever is holding him, the baby falls upright, then upside down, then upright again before — spoiler — being caught by Kit. Wouldn’t a true piece of ’80s sleaze give the old man a curious case of the butterfingers?

What, too dark? —Rod Lott

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