Intones the narrator at the start of Frozen Scream, “Immortality? Why would anyone want to live forever in a world like this?” Mind you, because he states this as we see an attractive couple making out poolside under the stars and at a presumably pricey pad, you may be inclined to say, “Me! I do!”

But then, some goon bursts forth from the bushes and hammers the head of the dude half of the lovebird equation, then drowns the girl. Okay, Mr. Narrator, you have a point.

Directed by Frank Roach, whose only other credit is the obscure ’84 biker-revenger Nomad Riders, this gore-slathered thriller’s frosty cries of terror are triggered by black-robed guys bearing pornstaches, syringes and vaguely threatening greetings such as, “Judgment day! Time to pay your dues!” — at which point they clobber or slice their victim, or simply hold him/her down for a shot in the ol’ eyeball. Watching the plot clunk along is like getting orb-needled yourself for 85 minutes, and there’s no goddamn lollipop when it’s over! Plus, you’ve suddenly got AIDS!

Providing the narration — which often speaks over great swaths of dialogue, rendering the exchanges unintelligible — is Sgt. McGuire (Thomas McGowan, Die Hard Dracula), who’s investigating the disappearance of the two med students from paragraph one. McGuire’s detective work has him cross paths with Drs. Johnsson (Lee James, Cassandra) and Stanhope (Renee Harmon of Al Adamson’s Cinderella 2000), neither of whom seems on the up-’n’-up to Sarge. His hunch is valid; they’re busy trying to turn the living into the never-dead; the word “immortality” may be spoken more times than the movie has minutes.

In one of his drown-everything-else-out monologues, McGuire says of his suspects, “A pretty bad acting job, I’d say.” And how! Because Johnsson and Stanhope and their dull X-Acto blades are up to no good. Nor are James and Harmon; he’s an Aussie character actor whose voice appears to have dubbed by an African-American, while Harmon, who doubles as producer, has an indiscriminate accent thick enough to turn her lines indecipherable — even the ones not washed away by the diarrhetic narration.

But why pick on just those two? The acting is across-the-board deplorable — in some cases, so stilted that it attracts termites. Problems with the penny-ante production exist at the core, so even an influx of financial resources would not improve things. Frozen Scream is one tough sit. —Rod Lott

Get it at Vinegar Syndrome.

Extremely limited in range, Keanu Reeves works best when the film doesn’t ask him to do much more than brood, à la The Matrix or, more recently, John Wick. Eli Roth’s Knock Knock is not one of them. Reeves is severely miscast as family man Evan Webber, and his unease in the role is apparent when he interacts with his two children. Still, he’s likable and you want to see him succeed.

Nursing a shoulder injury and busy with his work as an architect, Evan is unable to accompany his artist wife (Ignacia Allamand, Roth’s The Green Inferno) and their two children for a beach weekend. He stays home and, one rainy night, toils on a design, smokes some dope and makes the mistake of answering the front door. There stand Genesis (Aftershock’s Lorenza Izzo, aka Mrs. Eli Roth) and Bel (Ana de Armas, Blind Alley), two young women, soaking wet and radiating sexuality. Feigning a need to use his phone, the girls enter Evan’s home and, soon enough, his pants. The morning after, they refuse to go.

It’s like the classic Saturday Night Live sketch with John Belushi as “The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave” reworked into a kinky, psychosexual thriller, but really, it’s a thinly veiled remake of 1977’s Death Game, in which horny turns to horror for Seymour Cassel, thanks to Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp (who has a cameo here and serves as a producer). Overnight, Genesis and Bel do the same, morphing from fantasy tramps into nightmare fuel. Acting like the underaged children they now claim to be (read: blackmail), they wreck his house and threaten to wreck his life.

A little restraint would have been nice, but Roth lets the boorish chaos spin needlessly out of control; for instance, seeing Genesis chug pancake syrup from the bottle is one of those moments that takes viewers out of the movie. His grip on the earlier tension loosens as if he’s more interested in saying, “Dudes, look how hot my wife is!” As a result, the entire middle of Knock Knock does not work.

And then at the hour-and-16 mark, a bound Reeves is given an incredible monologue that immediately whiplashes the flick into pure camp — a perch in which it luckily stays through the wickedly funny final beat. In part, Reeves’ screamed, spittle-strewn speech: “Death? Death? You’re gonna kill me. You’re gonna fucking kill me. Why? Why! Because I fucked you? You fucked me! You fucked me! You came to my house! You came to me! I got you a car, I brought you your clothes, you took a fucking bubble bath! You wanted it! You wanted it! You came onto me! What was I supposed to do? You sucked my cock, you both fucking sucked my cock! It was free pizza! Free fucking pizza!”

I love free pizza. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Al Roberts (Tom Neal, The Brute Man) makes a miserable living in New York as the pianist of The Break O’ Dawn Club. The one thing in life that tickles his ivories — gal pal Sue (Claudia Drake, The Return of Rin Tin Tin) — now lives an entire coastline away. One day, he impulsively ditches his bench post and hitchhikes his way toward L.A.

Finding a ride with a man named Haskell (Edmund MacDonald, Sherlock Holmes in Washington), all’s swell for Al … until an accident leaves our musical hitchhiker with one big hitch: a dead driver. Afraid the police will assume Al murdered Haskell for financial gain, he takes the departed’s identity, car and — oh, what the hell — $768. Al picks up a thumb-waver of his own in the tough-talking Vera (Ann Savage, 1945’s Scared Stiff), who just happens to have made Haskell’s acquaintance.

Often called the greatest B picture in cinema history, Detour is a rear-projection classic of film noir and Poverty Row production. With Edgar G. Ulmer (1934’s The Black Cat) behind the wheel, the hourlong wonder moves with admirable efficiency and — assuming you can swallow a couple of scenes of Sue belting out on-tune standards — nary a slump.

The joy in watching Neal and Savage (appropriately named) bark and bicker is exceeded only in taking in the dour dialogue of screenwriter Martin Goldsmith (The Narrow Margin). The lines crackle in the unnatural noir style; to wit: “There’s oughta be a law against dames,” “My goose was cooked” and “You look like you’ve been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world.”

Later, Al says, “Like ya? I love ya. My favorite sport is being held prisoner.” You’ll share the sentiment if Detour works its spell correctly. It should; it’s remarkably entertaining for something the low-rent PRC studio intended only as time-filling piffle, a cardboard-constructed crime drama in which “the most dangerous animal in the world (is) a woman.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Even the world’s greatest director had his off days, and Frenzy is one of them. Despite its Psycho-tic title, Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film barely registers a pulse.

In London, women are being murdered by a serial killer whose modus operandi involves strangling them with a necktie. The crimes strike too close to home for Richard Blaney (Jon Finch, The Vampire Lovers) when his ex-wife (Barbara Leigh-Hunt, The Plague Dogs) is snuffed out (culminating in a laughable freeze frame meant to be shocking). Not only does this occur right after he’s been sacked from his pub job, but with the same style of tie that populates his daily wardrobe, so the authorities suspect Richard to be the knot-nice killer.

Like Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, Richard is not the culprit. That honor goes to his best bud (Barry Foster, Twisted Nerve). But because Hitchcock and Sleuth screenwriter Anthony Shaffer reveal this information with near immediacy, they strip Frenzy of so much of both men’s speciality: suspense. Worse, for something titled Frenzy, the pacing is markedly glacial, further marred by overexplanation — hardly the stuff for which viewers get worked-up.

What is to admire is that Hitch — a guy who began directing in the silent era — continued to push boundaries right up to the end of his brilliant career. Having courted controversy a decade prior for daring to show Janet Leigh in — gasp! — a bra, the old man goes even further here, showing not only bared breasts, but showing them being fondled in close-up and as part of an act of rape. Were mainstream audiences more shocked by that or the movie’s later glimpse of a woman’s postcoital mons pubis? That the conversation no longer takes place — yet we’re still discussing Psycho’s toilet — suggests how minor Frenzy is among Hitch’s filmography. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

On pretweens’ pie-in-the-sky wish lists, somewhere between “have a candy tree” and “travel back in time to assassinate the guy who created school,” is “drive around in a police vehicle.” In Cop Car, two troubled 10-year-olds (natural newcomers Hays Wellford and James Freedson-Jackson) get the chance to do the latter when they come upon a Quinlan County Sheriff’s cruiser in the middle of a field. While a beer bottle sits on its hood, no cop is to be found inside — but his keys and weapons are.

The reason it’s abandoned is because small-town Sheriff Kretzer (Kevin Bacon, Black Mass) is off a little ways, busy burying a dead body under nobody’s nose but his own. Returning to find his car missing, our corrupt cop panics, assuming (wrongly) that whoever stole it also stole a glimpse at his criminal misdeeds. Kretzer gives chase, once he’s able to put two and two together, thanks to communications with dispatch (Bacon’s wife, The Possession’s Kyra Sedgwick, unrecognizable in a voice-only cameo).

Although arguably a supporting player in the film that bears his name above the title, Bacon rules in one of his best roles yet. Long underappreciated, perhaps due to an unshakable Footloose teen-idol factor, he’s a rock-solid actor who continues to get even better with age. His Kretzer — a bogeyman in beige, above the law and beyond reproach — lets Bacon play several shades, most of them black and bleak. As confident as he is in his menace when warning and threatening the boys over the radio, he’s fallible to the point of cracking when glimpsed alone and then both cocky and Chicken Little in the film’s well-orchestrated climax, in which surprises await each participant.

As directed by Jon Watts (who co-wrote with Clown compatriot Christopher D. Ford), the movie makes excellent spatial use of the Colorado landscape, giving him a canvas across which his scant few characters maneuver like chess pieces toward an inevitable endgame. Starting as escapist fantasy before a cruel reality sets in, Cop Car is a ball of fun until it’s suddenly (but bravely and appropriately) not. Be careful what you wish for, kids. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.