Who among us left 2007’s Vacancy with a burning desire to learn the backstory, e.g. “I’d sure enjoy that more if only I knew how the snuff-film killer became a snuff-film killer”? Me neither, which may explain why Sony Pictures sent the prequel directly to DVD, if not made it expressly for that medium. Here’s the thing, though: Stupid subtitle and all, Vacancy 2: The First Cut is pretty good, or at least good enough. Even denied stars Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson, not to mention director Nimród Antal, it’s as satisfying as that original sleeper hit.

Title screens inform us that Vacancy 2 depicts the demise of the inaugural batch of victims among some 200 snuff videos found at Meadow View Inn when authorities shut the place down for good. The way director Eric Bross (Vampire Bats) sets this up, you’re forgiven in advance for thinking the proceedings will play out as found footage. Luckily, they do not, charting its antagonists’ progression from mere Peeping Toms into Mansion Family members bitten by the cinema-vérité bug.

At the out-of-the-way motel, Gordon (David Moscow, Big’s mini-Tom Hanks all grown up) and partner-in-crime Reece (Brian Klugman, Cloverfield) have rigged a room to tape couples’ sexual romps, copies of which they sell on the underground market. When one “Mr. Smith” (Scott Anderson, reprising his killer role) checks in with a prostitute — only to penetrate her with a knife, as opposed to … y’know — they gain a third partner and leap from homemade porn to the only genre more despicable.

Enter two relocating Chicagoans, played by the perennially underrated Agnes Bruckner (TV’s Anna Nicole) and Trevor Wright (2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams), and third-wheel friend Arjay Smith (Be Kind Rewind). Checking into Gordon and Reece’s cheap motel under the dead of buzzing neon, they’re told, “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to scream” … and yet they stay anyway.

Suspense is kept at a mild boil for a good two-thirds of the running time. As expected — a little too expected, given the flash-forward prologue and prequel concept — the film degenerates from a perfunctory thriller into a rote contraption of who can stab and/or shoot whom first. Like father, like son. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

At least at press time, Non-Stop stands as the second of three collaborations between Liam Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra; 2011’s Unknown and 2015’s Run All Night are the others. The streak running through this thriller triumvirate? Vanilla flavoring.

On a New York flight of 150 passengers bound for London, air marshal Bill Marks (Neeson) temporarily has to shelve his ongoing love affair with booze — oh, sweet booze! — when, halfway over the Atlantic Ocean, he receives a series of threatening text messages on his supposedly secured-line phone. They aren’t your everyday threatening texts, either, like “OMG ur so fat” or “imma block u on instagram” or “saw yr mom on tinder #gonnahitdat!” Nope, these digi-missives are of the stop-the-presses, sound-the-alarms, batten-down-the-hatches variety: from a terrorist! Maybe even — gulp! — terrorists, plural!

With each superimposed onscreen in a gimmick that quickly grows old from sheer overuse, the texts warn that if a million bucks per passenger — that’s $150 million total for those of you not paying attention and/or with appalling multiplication skills — isn’t wired to an account within 20 minutes … well, the passenger count goes down to 149. Repeat for every 20 minutes thereafter. Making things worse, said account is in Bill’s name, meaning that whoever is pulling the scheme’s strings has framed the marshal for hijacking.

Simple enough, right? As a federal agent barks over the phone to our — hic! — sexagenarian hero, “We will not negotiate with terrorists,” and they think that’s you, Billy Boy! Neeson has played this part so often, with only slight variations, since his career resurgence as Aging Badass with 2008’s Taken; the difference here is that Taken took viewers somewhere.

For Non-Stop’s first half, that vanilla tastes delicious enough, with Collet-Serra unapologetically building a high-stakes, high-altitude, high-gloss, high-concept whodunit — and whosdoingit — set in the unfriendly skies. Once the tone veers into action territory, vanilla’s generic nature seeps to the forefront, leaving viewers wishing more resided on the surface: chocolate sauce, gummy worms, butter brickle — hell, even granola! By then, the film loses all its fuel, drifting into a scenario so tired and seen-it-all-before, Non-Stop could be retitled Airport 2014.

While the studio-funded flick no doubt gave the great Julianne Moore (Boogie Nights) a paycheck a few zeroes above her usual indie gigs, the raise wasn’t accompanied by an opportunity to do anything but be Bill’s eventual arm dressing. Doomed to similar standing-’round status are The Strain’s Corey Stoll and, as the nervous-Nellie flight attendants, Michelle Dockery (TV’s Downton Abbey) and Lupita Nyong’o (then a newly minted Oscar winner for 12 Years a Slave). I won’t name the one supporting character who is given a hunk of meat to chew, because his casting proves detrimental — not because he’s a bad actor (because he isn’t), but because if you’re familiar with his filmography, the minute he appears is the minute you’ll think, “Oh, he did it.” And he did. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

For a while there in the mid-2000s — a distant time when Paris Hilton was trailblazing a path for Kim Kardashian and Massachusetts remained the only state where gay couples could get legally hitched — Joseph Gordon-Levitt was one of the most exciting actors around. The onetime kid co-star of TV’s 3rd Rock from the Sun had blossomed into an intense young thespian unbowed by noncommercial projects, whether it was as a prostitute in Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin or a teen detective in Rian Johnson’s quirky high school noir, Brick.

Best of all was The Lookout, a crackerjack thriller that boasted ample smarts and style.

Gordon-Levitt plays Chris Pratt, (no, not that Chris Pratt), a young man enduring a nominal existence in small-town Kansas after a car accident left him with a debilitating head injury. Once a high school jock, Chris now copes with severe memory loss by keeping notebooks in which he jots down everything he wants to remember. He has inexplicable crying jags, too, and is incapable of filtering thoughts better left unsaid, particularly when it comes to good-looking women he meets. For him, trying to open a can of tomatoes becomes a monumental ordeal.

But the onetime big man on campus remains haunted by a nagging sense of entitlement. That feeling is putty in the hands of Chris’ new best pal, a sleazeball named Gary (Matthew Goode, Watchmen), who enlists the young man to help rob the small bank where Chris works as a janitor.

The plot thickens, as they say — and irresistibly so, thanks to a sharp screenplay courtesy writer/director Scott Frank. One of Hollywood’s top scribes at the time (Out of Sight, Minority Report), Frank had resolved to try his hand at direction after watching The Lookout’s script languish for a couple of years. His directorial debut was remarkably self-assured. The movie echoes Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Harold Ramis’ little-seen The Ice Harvest without being derivative, crackling renewed energy into the tropes of film noir. —Phil Bacharach

Buy it at Amazon.

Right away, hindsight emerges as the key theme of Poker Night — namely, its inherent benefit to sizing up one’s condition and circumstance … albeit well after needed. It’s an apt topic because I suspect the plot of Greg Francis’ twisty crime thriller wouldn’t hold up to the scrutiny of a second viewing.

But why worry about that when the first ride is fun?

Baby-faced police detective Jeter (Beau Mirchoff, The Grudge 3) recalls the advice of older, wiser cops when he’s caught in a sticky situation after trying to rescue a pretty girl (Halston Sage, 2014’s Neighbors): He’s Tasered, drugged and handcuffed by a psychopath hiding behind a reptilian mask in part sewn with dirty shoelaces. As deep as slogans on motivational posters sold at office supply stores, the words of wisdom were dispensed to Jeter during regular card games attended by fellow officers to whom he is subordinate.

Among them are Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Titus Welliver (Argo) and Super 8’s Ron Eldard (whose hair makes him look like he’s ready for trick-or-treating as Gerard Depardieu). When each cop shares his dick-measuring (metaphorically speaking) anecdote of life in the line of duty, we see it played out in full, making Poker Night a quasi-anthology of crime. Through each vignette, Jeter gleans a nugget of gumption to gain the upper hand against his crazed captor (Michael Eklund, Nurse 3D).

Since the entire movie is essentially a flashback — hindsight, ’member? — Francis shows off by continuing to dig as his characters’ recollections beget further recollections, often dipping a level or two deeper than necessary; at a couple of spots, I think we had a flashback within a flashback within a flashback within a flashback, but I can’t be 100 percent certain, and certainly you can see why. Responsible for both the script and direction, Francis is always on the move, which keeps Poker Night from becoming boring. It also makes it feel original, even though it’s not, borrowing openly from Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces, wicked sense of humor included.

Viewers may be worn out by the time the Night comes to a close, and if not, perhaps the multiple endings will expend your eyeballs’ last bit of energy for you. Francis’ flick is all over the board and as crazy as the Krazy Glue with which Jeter’s nearly nude body is affixed to the wall. But in a good way, hindsight and all. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Second in the Airport quadrilogy, Airport 1975 puts cross-eyed stewardess Nancy (Karen Black, The Pyx) in the pilot’s seat when the 747 on which she serves coffee, tea and boilermakers accidentally collides head-on with a tiny, twin-engine plane.

That’s the fate that befalls the D.C.-to-L.A. commercial flight, disrupted by the sudden, rear-projected and laughably out-of-scale appearance of a Beechcraft Baron, due to a heart attack suffered by the man behind the stick (Dana Andrews, Curse of the Demon). The resulting hole in the 747’s cockpit sucks the co-pilot — or an obvious dummy stand-in — up and out to his doom, so have your finger ready on the rewind button; the scene’s a hoot.

Because Airport 1975 taxied in an era when women weren’t let near “a man’s job,” Nancy is judged ill-equipped to navigate the terrain and put the plane down in Salt Lake City, so airlines ops exec Joe Patroni (George Kennedy, reprising his role from the 1970 original) makes the Executive Decision for a midair transfer of someone more experienced via an umbilical cord from a helicopter. Even Nancy’s he-man boyfriend (Omega Man Charlton Heston) thinks the idea equates to insanity, to which a visibly vexed Patroni yells forcefully enough to provoke an aneurysm, “Goddammit, there isn’t any other way!”

Hollywood corn rarely comes as sweet as this enjoyably self-important sequel, directed by Jack Smight (The Illustrated Man) with costumes by the prestigious Edith Head. Actually released in 1974 no matter what the title says, Airport 1975 adheres to the rules of the decade’s white-hot disaster genre, namely in casting more stars than any movie needs. In the cockpit, we have Erik Estrada as the horndog navigator, but that was pre-CHiPs fame.

No matter — the cabin is jam-packed with has-beens, never-quite-weres and a couple of bona fide legends, including:
• a quip-happy Sid Caesar;
• folksinger Helen Reddy as a nun;
• Sunset Boulevard’s Gloria Swanson playing herself in what would be her cinematic swan song;
• Myrna Loy, Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller and Conrad Janis all trying to out-drink one another;
• and, most famously, The Exorcist’s Linda Blair as a girl being rushed to her kidney transplant — an audience-manipulative element that made for prime roasting material in 1980’s feature-length spoof, Airplane! —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.