Had I known Dead Man Down were a WWE Studios production, I would not have put off seeing it. The fake-wrassling empire’s movies can be loads of fun — that is, when they don’t take themselves too seriously. This one takes itself too seriously.

Set in the chunk-strewn melting pot of New York City, the glossy thriller unspools as a twisted romance of sorts between Hungarian engineer Victor (Colin Farrell, Seven Psychopaths) and French beautician Beatrice (Noomi Rapace, Prometheus). They’re cross-the-way apartment neighbors, each of whom thirsts for personal revenge. He’s been working undercover in the criminal enterprise (led by Prisoners‘ Terrence Howard) that killed his wife and daughter two years prior, and it’s only a matter of time before his co-workers figure out his true identity.

Meanwhile, Beatrice isn’t above blackmailing Victor to kill the drunk driver who served only three weeks’ time for an collision that left her face a map of scars. As befitting a Hollywood film with $30 million behind it, Rapace still looks beautiful with her character’s “disfigurement,” one that makes her a target of neighborhood kids who throw rocks at her and scream, “Monster!” Frankenstein, she is not. Also in true Tinseltown fashion, the opening set piece is one of those slow-motion shoot-outs in which gunfire is exchanged amid a downpour of Benjamins.

Overlong by half an hour and burdened with a script (by The Mexican‘s J.H. Wyman) that doesn’t connect all its dots, Dead Man Down imperceptibly but surely wears down the viewer with its averageness. Reunited with Rapace after 2009’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Danish director Niels Arden Oplev makes a bid for American success, only to be suffocated by the system’s needless excess. At least he did his job by making it look slick. —Rod Lott

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Seemingly made with whatever loose change was found on the streets where it was shot, Ray Dennis Steckler’s The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher is a real trial by ire. Remember, you can’t spell “Ray Dennis” without “ADR,” because the entire movie is dubbed — the least of its troubles — and as if embarrassed of its inherent shoddiness, he directed under the nom de plume of Wolfgang Schmidt. Rhymes with what he made.

The title serves as a near-encapsulation of what little happens within its 72 interminable minutes. The Hollywood Strangler (Pierre Agostino, Steckler’s Las Vegas Serial Killer) spends his days answering sex ads in sex newspapers so he can photograph weather-beaten women in shorts so short, one practically can see the STDs. After clicking off a few shots, he strangles them to death.

Meanwhile, the Skid Row Slasher (Carolyn Brandt, Steckler’s Rat Pfink a Boo Boo) works in a pitiful used bookstore where the occasional — which is to say “daily” — wino stumbles in clutching a bottle of hooch and bothers her scant few customers. After following the drunks outside, she slashes them to death.

Eventually, after a little stalking, the two killers face off in a fatal duel. Who wins? Not the viewer, that’s for damn sure. —Rod Lott

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Dedicated to those “who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment,” House of Whipcord demonstrates why a woman never should agree to embark on a weekend getaway with a man she has known for less than a week: Girl, you’re so going to get hurt — and I don’t mean just your heart.

This lesson is learned by Ann-Marie (Penny Irving, Old Dracula), a 19-year-old French model smart enough to know who the Marquis de Sade was, yet dumb enough not to run far, far away when a man named Mark E. Desade (Robert Tayman, Vampire Circus) talks her up at a party. After one real date, he wants her to accompany him on a trip to see his parents. We call that a “red flag,” luv.

Immediately upon arrival at the isolated countryside estate, Ann-Marie is stripped (of both clothes and possessions), bathed and “checked for vermin” by the manly matrons in charge of the place, which actually is an illegal correctional house for crimes against the moral code. Ann-Marie’s offense? Appearing nude in public as part of an advertisement. Punishments doled out by the loyal Whipcord staff include 40-lash floggings, rat-infested accommodations, uneven haircuts and, if you’re lucky, a good noose ’round the neck.

From Pete Walker (House of the Long Shadows), Great Britain’s brand-name practitioner of pulse-quickening, the film occupies a strange place of its own, somewhere between the Naziploitation subgenre and the women-in-prison picture, being too buttoned-up to belong to either. Heavier on suspense than scares, Walker seems more interested in the ladies’ attempts at escape than in depicting more salacious sequences. While the somewhat restrained (but still shocking) approach widens the film’s appeal and, yes, depth, it cannot stave off the Act 3 blues. Like its blind, old man with a cane (Patrick Barr, The Satanic Rites of Dracula), House of Whipcord plods slowly toward an inevitable conclusion once Walker strategically has set up all his chess pieces. Finally, he catches up to the viewer. —Rod Lott

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Freshly retired from a school in Rio de Janeiro, history professor James Anders (Edward G. Robinson, see?) will not go gently into gardening and bingo games. Instead, he returns to New York with a proposition for a childhood chum who’s grown into an über-wealthy corporate criminal (Adolfo Celi, Thunderball): Let’s steal $10 million in diamonds from the place across the street where I used to work, whaddayasay?

Twice a year on the dot, as Anders has noted across three decades of observation, such shimmering loot arrives for lock-up. The upcoming transaction happens to coincide with Rio’s annual Carnival celebration, which could provide welcome distraction for a team of hired experts to carry out the mother of all heists. One of the young guns is an arrogant prick played by real-life arrogant prick Klaus Kinski (For a Few Dollars More).

The value of any heist film, needless to say, resides in its heist sequences, and here and elsewhere, Grand Slam delivers on the promise of its title. Our master thieves have allotted themselves nary one second beyond 20 minutes to crack the safe. It’s newly equipped with a series of super-sensitive microphones that trip an alarm upon the slightest sound, and their way around it involves toilet plungers, shaving cream and, in a roundabout way, Janet Leigh’s genitalia.

Directed with an inordinate amount of superimposed frames by Machine Gun McCain‘s Giuliano Montaldo, Grand Slam could have gotten away with letting Rio’s sunny backdrop do the legwork, but chooses to go all in, thereby establishing a solid framework for many a colorful caper to follow. It’s not perfect — from one character’s immediate about-face, the twist is evident in the first hour — but it comes damned close, placing it among the all-time heist classics. It also contains what is, for my money, Ennio Morricone’s all-time greatest theme. To hear it is to know joy. —Rod Lott

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There’s really no need for you to give Stash House a try; after all, Warner Home Video sure didn’t. The name of star Sean Faris is misspelled on the back of the DVD package, and when the disc is inserted into your player, you’ll be presented with two menu options: “Play” and “Languages.” Choose the latter, if not “Eject.”

Faris (Never Back Down) is David Nash, a douchebag banker who buys his veterinary wife (Briana Evigan, 2010’s Mother’s Day) a house without showing her first, much less telling her about his plans. Contrary to real life, she loves it anyway. While in the middle of christening the gated residence, they discover a loose wall that hides kilo upon kilo of heroin.

Showing up to reclaim it and eradicate witnesses is well-armed assassin Andy Spector (Dolph Lundgren, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning). Andy and his right-hand man (Jon Huertas, Right at Your Door) want in; the Nashes want out.

In hands more skilled than director Eduardo Rodriguez (Fright Night 2: New Blood) and first-time screenwriter Gary Spinelli, the cat-and-mouse scenario could be molded into something — if not something great, at least something worth watching. To start, the Nashes would have to be recast and/or rewritten to become likable; as is, viewers are inclined to root for Spector … and for Lundgren to find better vehicles for his quirky brand of he-man charisma than predictable, color-by-numbers thrillers of low wattage and lower intelligence. —Rod Lott

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