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.

Seven years after fleeing his Alaskan hometown, prodigal son Rowan (James Marsden, X-Men: Days of Future Past) returns, only to step in a big ol’ mess of animal instincts. “Would that,” you ask, “involve going Into the Grizzly Maze?” To that query, I respond rhetorically (and obviously), does a bear shit in the woods?

His estranged brother, Beckett (Thomas Jane, Deep Blue Sea), among them, the local po-po are busy investigating deaths in the forest caused by a giant grizzly, “portrayed” by an actual bear whose billing sits higher than co-star Billy Bob Thornton. Beckett needs Rowan’s help in retrieving his wife (Piper Perabo, Looper), who’s not only oblivious to being in danger because she’s taking nature photos at the time, but also because she happens to be deaf, thereby greatly upping her chances of becoming one super supper of all-white meat. (Admit it: It’s weird the grizzly has more lines than the damsel in distress.)

Hired by the sheriff’s department, Thornton’s straight-faced bear tapper sums up the situation at hand — and, by extension, the entire film: “This isn’t your average bear. It’s a clever bear. … You’ve never met a bear like this before. … I’m just tellin’ ya.”

What he doesn’t tell ya is that this wilderness thriller plays like a high-gloss, kitsch-stripped update of William Girdler’s 1976 cult hit Grizzly, which itself was a furry take on Jaws for the Cabela’s crowd. While adept enough at staging suspense, director David Hackl seems more interested in ending each set piece with an act of gore, each so wet and lingered upon that they would not be out-of-place in Hackl’s previous film, Saw V. Because these bits are largely (and admirably) practical rather than digital, they convince enough to wince; same goes for the clawed beast serving as Maze’s maker of mayhem.

Although unlikely to leave any lasting impressions, the movie is absorbing as a paper towel dropped on the puddle of dog urine found on the dining room floor, but without applying pressure: not ideal, but works for the time being. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Angst has bounce. That’s because for some of the running time, the camera is attached to the German-language film’s lead character. A certifiable psychopath, he’s not the kind of person to whom you would wish to be so close.

Played by Erwin Leder (Das Boot), who narrates almost the entire picture, the normal-looking man is, in actuality, an evil brute whose uncontrollable urge to torture humans bubbles over mere minutes after being released from a 10-year prison stint for murder; he had chosen a random house and, just for the hell of it, pulled a gun and point-blank executed the elderly woman who made the unfortunate mistake of answering the door.

Now freed from bars once more, he’s got that itch that really needs scratching, and finds it in a fairly secluded home occupied by a small family that includes a wheelchair-bound young man who drools uncontrollably. Thus begins the “meat” of the movie: a triple murder played out in excruciating, graphic detail and violence that escalates to vile.

It’s revolting enough early in the film to see an extreme close-up of the psychopath tear into a sausage like an animal; it’s near-unbearable — those with a weak constitution should nix the “near-” — to witness what is essentially a how-to piece. Director/co-writer Gerald Kargl never made another picture before or since, so at least his lone foray into features is unforgettable — just not in the way the populace likes. Based on real-life events, it’s tough and uncompromising and hardly “entertainment.” Aided and abetted by Tangerine Dream co-founder Klaus Schulze’s score and with astute, dark-humored details such as a dog chewing on the dentures knocked out of an old woman’s mouth, Angst has artistry that can be acknowledged while simultaneously loathing the work as a whole. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.