If we are to believe the opening titles of Cut!, the indie thriller found inspiration in real-life events. Either writer/director David Rountree took no more than a fraction of a kernel of the truth or he’s planted it as a joke as the Coen brothers did with Fargo. Whichever option is correct, credibility is the picture’s largest liability, because so cockamamie are the main characters’ actions, I was unable to suspend disbelief. That crucial scripting mistake gets in the way of one’s enjoyment.

Cast as his own leading man, Rountree (Cameron Romero’s laborious Staunton Hill) plays Travis, an average Joe who toils in the film industry. Okay, so it’s just renting equipment, but what he really wants to do is direct, man!

Cut! Credibility Killer #1: Travis enlists the help of co-worker Lane (David Banks, who co-wrote and co-produced), an ex-con who purposely alienates customers to Travis’ utter annoyance, in the creation of a low-budget project.

Cut! Credibility Killer #2: Name-dropping the ROI bonanzas of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, Travis and Lane decide to make not a piece of found-footage fiction, but a dead-serious Scare Tactics-esque prank movie consisting of scenes in which they frighten unwitting prostitutes.

Cut! Credibility Killer #3: On parole and ever-psychotic, Lane convinces Travis that it’d be a good idea to give a homeless man $100 and a really sharp knife to “wave around” one of the whores. This leads to a lady of the night having no nights left to live.

But won’t that gory “accident” make for captivating cinema? Well, no. Although Rountree attempts to explain away all the motivations that simply do not jibe with basic human behavior and logic, his resolution does not work. Cut! climaxes with the kind of ludicrous, pull-the-rug exposition dump-cum-narrative twist that since 2004 has become known and ridiculed as “the Saw ending.” As if the heap of preposterousness hasn’t been piled high enough, his own Saw ending begets another Saw ending! The rubber band of rational thought broke long before.

Removed from the film, the core premise has potential; its details just need redressing. Rountree’s donning of so many hats — he also edited and produced, in addition to the three aforementioned duties — likely was a matter of necessity in bringing Cut! to fruition; ironically, in doing so he has spread himself too thin, leaving viewers with a weak plot and weaker performances, yet also a finished product that looks great. The multihyphenate has an eye for composition, but a deaf ear for dialogue. —Rod Lott

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Also known under the far less exploitative title of Act of Vengeance, the AIP release Rape Squad is one of those strange drive-in thrillers that packs a feminist message of female empowerment, but only after giving audiences gratuitous images of the women being groped and molested.

Lunch wagon proprietor Linda (Jo Ann Harris, The Beguiled) is the film’s first and foremost victim, raped by a man dressed right out of a slasher series, what with his hockey mask and orange jumpsuit. During the assault, he creepily “requests” that she sing “Jingle Bells” because — his words here, so don’t shoot the messenger — “Music is always good with ballin’!”

When she finds other women who underwent similar trauma, she excitedly poses the hence-the-title question, “How do you feel about forming a rape squad?” Even without Linda explaining what a rape squad is or does, and what privileges its membership possibly could have, the ladies are all-in. It entails taking karate classes, followed by a nude group Jacuzzi bath, then turning the tables on predatory dudes via such methods of dying their dicks blue. Activism never felt so … I dunno, primary-hued?

Bob Kelljan of AIP’s Count Yorga pictures directs from a script credited in part to Betty Conklin. Don’t be fooled thinking a woman had any creative say on this uncomfortable revenger, as that’s a nom de plume for David Kidd, scribe of The Swinging Cheerleaders, which I’m guessing isn’t to be found on Gloria Steinem’s shelves. —Rod Lott

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Thirty-five years before Uma Thurman’s Kill Bill bride murdered her way through a five-person list to avenge the assassination of her would-be hubby, Jeanne Moreau did the same in The Bride Wore Black. The film was director François Truffaut’s homage to the suspense thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock, whom the French New Wave pioneer interviewed in the now-essential cinema-study text Hitchcock/Truffaut, published one year before.

For this stylish tribute, Truffaut brought frequent Hitch composer Bernard Herrmann (Psycho) along for the tour and tapped a crime novel by Cornell Woolrich, who wrote the short story on which Hitch’s Rear Window was based.

While the details surrounding the shooting are held from viewers too long that confusion initially reigns, brand-new wife Julie Kohler (Moreau, La Femme Nikita) watches in horror as the love of her life is shot dead on the church steps, presumably seconds after the ceremony bound them ’til death do they part.

Part!

One thwarted suicide attempt later, the grieving, perpetually frowning Julie decides to move on with life, as in getting even with the quintet of card-playing bachelors responsible for her spouse’s untimely demise. As she does so, each through a wildly different method — pushing, poisoning, whatev — she crosses off the poor bastard’s name in her little black book. (An avenger’s trade secret? Accurate, real-time record-keeping.)

Even masters of cinema have their missteps, and that’s how Bride may strike viewers who look at it strictly as an exercise in the Hitchcock vein. Without Herrmann’s score in place, the movie doesn’t feel the slightest Hitchcockian; heck, Moreau isn’t even blonde! To be fair, approach Truffaut as Truffaut. The French approach genre markedly different than the English, and Bride is his take on the thriller as Fahrenheit 451 was his take on sci-fi: an ambitious, if not entirely successful marriage of art and commerce. With an unexpected sequence of animation, the film is always interesting to look at, even when the story points lag. Don’t pay too much attention beyond what resides at the surface, because Truffaut didn’t; in fact, he left open a huge plot hole — upon which the entire work hinges. —Rod Lott

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An alternate title for The Psycho Lover is The Loving Touch — one über-creepy appellation for a movie about a serial rapist whose on-the-job face is smashed underneath a heavy layer of pantyhose.

That felonious fellow is Marco (Frank Cuva, Game Show Models), who has trouble distinguishing his fantasies from reality. Meanwhile, motorboat enthusiast (in more ways than one) and psychiatrist Dr. Kenneth Alden (Lawrence Montaigne, The Great Escape) wishes his fantasies were reality, because he’d like to shack up with his mistress, but his cock-blockin’ crone of a wife (Jo Anne Meredith, J.D.’s Revenge) refuses to grant him a divorce. That chaps the hide and boot-shaped sideburns of Kenneth so bad that he brainwashes Marco into making Mrs. Alden his next victim.

If that sounds at all icky, reserve judgment until you see the gangly homicide lieutenant (John Vincent, The Exotic Dreams of Casanova) who looks like Edgar Allan Poe discuss his police work: “You know, Doc, I’m like the proverbial bloodhound: I can smell him in this room and the hairs on my ass stand on end every time I catch his scent.”

No matter the name it plays under, The Psycho Lover is a sexploitation thriller after my own heart. Written, directed and produced by Robert Vincent O’Neill (creator of the Angel franchise), the picture has more on its dirty mind than most programmers of the era and budgetary level. By combining Dial M for Murder with The Manchurian Candidate — not to mention Hanes’ L’eggs line — he ended up with a twisty, inventive, enjoyable slice of sleaze. —Rod Lott

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At Stonehearst Asylum, the inmates are in charge. This crucial bit of info is unbeknownst to Dr. Newgate (Jim Sturgess, Cloud Atlas) when he arrives for training at the remote mountain institution, but hindsight might finger that cuckoo clock in his boss’ office as an eerie, aural clue. The joke practically writes itself. (Same goes for when the opening credits reveal Mel Gibson as a producer.)

Fetching pianist-cum-patient Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale, Underworld: Awakening) warns Newgate to leave the foggy grounds posthaste, but the young physician pays no heed to her admonition until it’s too damn late. Before long, he learns Stonehearst’s true staffers (Michael Caine among them) are locked in cages at the behest of the aforementioned “boss,” the insane-in-the-membrane Silas Lamb (Ben Kingsley, Iron Man 3).

Oh, and there’s also an ogre.

Much more than Kingsley’s presence will remind viewers of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, as this exercise in Gothic trappings plays like a prequel — think Shutter Island: Ye Early Years. Like that 2010 thriller, Stonehearst Asylum comes well-crafted, yet deeply flawed. Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s (very) short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” the film is largely inert despite sumptuous visuals and the confident hand of director Brad Anderson (The Call).

On the basis of his exquisite, highly recommended 2004 novel, the 1920s-set and similarly themed Inamorata, screenwriter Joe Gangemi would seem to be the ideal adapter of Poe’s material; unfortunately, the work is long-winded and gaseous without becoming offensive. Such an upward climb is its pacing that I gave Stonehearst three separate tries to hook me, yet I admitted defeat in that final run, throwing in the towel with one-fifth left to go. Shorn of some curlicue story turns, the film would feel far more spry, perhaps “within two shakes of a whore’s tail.” —Rod Lott

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