Grand Piano is the best Brian De Palma work in this millennium. It just happens to be directed by Spain’s Eugenio Mira.

Virtuoso pianist Tom Selznick (Elijah Wood, 2012’s Maniac remake) has just begun tinkling the ivories at a classical concert when he notices a threatening note scrawled on his sheet music: Do what he’s told, or die. Because the message is written in red capital letters, Tom pays attention. Well, that, and because whoever left it has Tom’s fashion-model wife (Kerry Bishé, Red State) in his gun sights.

The culprit is Clem (John Cusack, The Raven), mostly heard and not seen. He communicates via earpiece, barking do-or-die orders at Tom throughout the event, including a demand to perform an über-difficult piece on which the pianist very publicly choked a few years prior. Mira gets Tom off the bench as the concert proceeds, which is ludicrous, yet Grand Piano embraces and thrives upon just that. As preposterous as it is pleasurable, the high-concept howler achieves an operatic quality of disbelief — all the better to ape De Palma’s swipes, split screens and stabbings. For fans of impossible suspense, it hits just the right note. —Rod Lott

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One year before he nearly shot an eye out in A Christmas Story, Ralph Billingsley deliberately attempted it in Death Valley — just not his own peepers. The tyke’s target is an economically depressed waiter named Hal (Stephen McHattie, Pontypool), whose slaughter of three tourists in an RV can be tied back to him, thanks to a frog pendant the curious boy pilfered from the scene of the crime.

Billingsley’s Billy leaves New York City for an Arizona vacation with his divorced mom (Catherine Hicks, Child’s Play) and her new beau (Paul Le Mat, Melvin and Howard), a land developer for whom cowboy gear is work clothes. While at an abandoned gold mine, Billy pokes his nose where he shouldn’t, thereby earning himself the top spot on Hal’s list of precocious kids to kill today.

Directed by Dick Richards (1986’s Heat) with a dearth of visual flair, Death Valley is a rather routine thriller of the psycho-on-the-loose variety. Thank goodness Richards cast Billingsley, because the boy’s natural presence is the film’s saving grace.

There’s so little to the story — all 87 minutes of it, including credits — that screenwriter Richard Rothstein (Universal Soldier) includes a rather lengthy scene with the sole purpose of underlining how fat the fat babysitter (Mary Steelsmith, H.O.T.S.) is: She’s so fat she eats a whole chocolate bar, then inhales an entire bag of Fritos, then goes out for a banana split, only to meet her doom by being lured into the shadows by a soda machine that spits out an irresistible free pop. It’s like a chunk of cheese upon a mouse trap, and it’s needless, embarrassing, cruel, demeaning and, oddly, the movie’s only note of nastiness. —Rod Lott

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“How are you going to kill me this time?” she asks teasingly, as she takes her lover into her arms.

“I’m going to slash your throat,” he answers his mistress, welcoming the embrace.

As they undress and slide under the silk sheets, he makes good on his playful threat. That the man actually kills her is one shock. That he is also the chief of the police’s homicide division is another.

Never named, the inspector (Gian Maria Volonté, A Fistful of Dollars) is worshipped by the officers below him, whereas they view the deceased Miss Terzi (Floridan Bolkan, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) as “a libertine” for owning no undergarments. Then again, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion takes place in an era when Italy kept secret files on homosexuals and communists alike, which the inspector lords over as potential blackmail material, so the authorities are all about snap judgments.

Preaching precision and repression, he embarks on the investigation of Terzi’s murder despite being the crime’s perpetrator. He even leaves a slew of clues at the scene that point directly to him. Why? He feels he is so above the law, he never could be taken seriously as a suspect. He even informs his superior of his affair with the woman.

Investigation is not your ordinary Italian thriller, and not just because it won the Academy Award that year for Best Foreign Language Film. It is built with a heavy streak of political satire, some of which may be lost on American viewers, but hardly to a point of indifference; the mystery of the inspector’s mental state is too great a pull, and director Elio Petri (The 10th Victim) parcels out explanatory bits during many flashbacks.

Technically, the movie is imperfect — the camera shakes in the pivotal moments right after the crime, and later, the crew clearly is reflected in our antihero’s sunglasses — but all that can be overlooked with ease because its plot is so unique, even several decades after the fact. Sporting the bounce of a plucked rubber band, Ennio Morricone’s equally first-rate theme strongly hints at Petri’s playful intent, dark though it may be, dark it should be. —Rod Lott

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Adapted from one of his own short stories — this particular one featuring his comic-book creation of Ms. Tree, who does not appear in the film — Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market finds prolific author Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition) transferring his criminal mind to feature films for the third time, moving from killer-Mommy thrillers to the corner store. Viewers will end up with more than a pack of cigs and a Dr Pepper Icee.

The same year that Fox’s 24 series made split-screen vogue again, writer/director Collins took the concept further by filling his frame with as many as four screens at once, each displaying a different angle of the same scene. Presented as an unbroken story, Real Time depicts a January robbery of an Iowa convenience store by two drug-hungry lowlifes, and Collins tells his tale almost entirely through the shop’s security-camera footage, with snippets of amateur video as supplemental material. Such a structure allows the story to thrive on the lowest of budgets; so does a running time as tight the knots of a veteran yachtsman. This is a case of turning a project’s challenges into attributes.

With pop radio piped through the store’s P.A. system providing stark contrast to the deadly situation, our felonious duo takes everyone inside hostage. This includes a cop plagued by Montezuma’s revenge, a jailbait shoplifter, a mother and her ballerina child, a douche of a businessman and a very pregnant woman; the latter is played by ’80s scream queen Brinke Stevens (Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity), and it’s nice to see her in a down-to-earth role where she isn’t present strictly to disrobe.

At the time of this Siege, sales of DVD players had yet to hit their peak, and Collins makes creative use of the technology by allowing viewers to go nuts with the multiangle feature. Jumping around is hardly required to enjoy the movie, however; as I did, you may as well forget about the remote and just let the hostage drama unfold as the filmmakers intended. At once realistic and yet just pulpy enough to let you know Real is fiction, the movie boasts a uniqueness that makes up for deficiencies in the overbaked performances of the robbers (Tom Keane and Chad Hoch), who seem seconds away from screaming, “Attica! Attica! Attica!” —Rod Lott

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Hammer Films’ The Snorkel opens with a long, silent sequence in which black widower Paul Decker (Peter van Eyck, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse) methodically sets up an elaborate death trap for his wife, apparently drugged into unconsciousness on the couch. After sealing the room shut, he rigs it to flood with natural gas while he lie safely in the crawlspace, accessible via secret door underneath the carpet. He’s in no danger of asphyxiation, thanks to the scuba gear he wears, from which this psychological thriller takes its utterly silly-sounding name. (Even sillier? The credit that reads, “John Holmes’ dog ‘Flush’ as ‘Toto.'”)

The deliberate precision Decker takes suggests these steps have become a routine. He has done this before; he knows exactly what he’s doing. And so does director Guy Green (The Magus), for The Snorkel is a superb Hitchcock imitation.

The dead woman’s gangly teenage daughter, Candy (Mandy Miller, The Man in the White Suit), immediately accuses Paul as the killer, beyond a Shadow of a Doubt. She still suspects him of killing her father, too, in a boating “accident” several years prior. Thus, at the core, we have a locked-room mystery in which, privy to the solution from frame one, we’re just waiting for the other characters to catch up.

How Green manages to wring suspense from that, I’ll never know, especially since we know those characters will, given the times. In ever-noble black and white, The Snorkel presents one of the more perverse methods of murder the screen has seen to date, and that uniqueness — the posters classify it as a “gimmick,” which sounds too William Castle-esque — goes a long way in appeal. It also grants instant menace to van Eyck, who looks so evil and creepy sitting quietly in that apparatus, no acting is necessary. —Rod Lott

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