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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Television scribe Guerdon Trueblood (Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo) ventured into feature-film directing once and only once, but what a movie he made: The Candy Snatchers, one of the greatest exploitation films of the 1970s.

The Candy of the title is schoolgirl Candy Phillips (Susan Sennett, Big Bad Mama), while her van-cruising snatchers are a slutty blonde (Tiffany Bolling, Kingdom of the Spiders) tired of sleeping with every third guy she meets; her brother (Brad David, Eat My Dust), whose number of kills is up to double digits, yet not high enough for his liking; and his overweight pal (Vince Martorano, The Severed Arm), who develops real feelings for their virgin hostage.

Because Candy’s pop (Ben Piazza, 1976’s The Bad News Bears) manages a jewelry store, the kidnappers hope for a life-changing payday with a ransom of whatever diamonds are placed in the safe at the close of each workday. What they don’t count on is that Mr. Phillips appears to be in no rush to follow their instructions, nor do they notice their crime has a witness in a mop-headed kid (Trueblood’s scene-stealing son, Christopher) who happens to be overly curious … and mute.

Look beyond the porno-sounding title; The Candy Snatchers may wallow in the mud with dregs of society, but I didn’t feel the need to shower afterward. Trueblood injects a sizable dose of appropriate humor to keep the film’s grim elements from overpowering all else. With clever story turns, colorful characters and an uncompromising ending, the grindhouse great is a gem of a crime-and-grime thriller whose reputation should shine brighter than it already does. —Rod Lott

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So wooden he’s petrified, Chuck Norris plays Texas small-town sheriff Dan Stevens in Silent Rage, a movie strangely lacking in action considering its Missing in Action star. Further problematic is that it moves as slow as parcel post during Christmastime.

After a man named John Kirby (Brian Libby, The Octagon) snaps and becomes an ax murderer, Stevens’ men gun him down. A few doctors try to save Kirby during emergency surgery, yet fail … until they secretly inject him with their experimental super-juice that alters his genetic structure, revives him and turns him into an emotionless — but rather sweaty — killing machine, not unlike that Halloween heel Michael Myers. Reasons one of the MDs (William Finley, Eaten Alive) after things get really out of hand, “Nobody’s gonna give us a Nobel Prize for murder.”

Eventually, yes, the cowboy-hatted Chuck gets to kick the bad guy — note that the operative word is “eventually.” Director Michael Miller (National Lampoon’s Class Reunion) takes his time, thereby robbing us of ours, staking out side trails for Sheriff Stevens to take, from rekindling the spark with a homely past lover (Toni Kalem, Reckless) to busting sleaze at a biker bar where permed skanks let their tattooed, tig ol’ bitties out for fetid air.

The latter sends comic-relief Deputy Charlie (Stephen Furst, National Lampoon’s Animal House) into a childlike frenzy of hormones as he calls for backup: “Billy, they were the biggest things I ever saw!” As silly as that is — Furst’s character is played as one step beyond the short bus — his boy-oh-boy outbursts are all Silent Rage has going for it. The movie takes a slice of slasher horror here and a chunk of speculative sci-fi there, pours a glass full of martial-arts action into the mix and yields a thriller without a single baked-in thrill. It’s a yawn stretched across 103 minutes. —Rod Lott

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Although known for movies with overgrown critters (i.e. Empire of the Ants, Food of the Gods, Earth vs. the Spider and so many more), writer/director/producer Bert I. Gordon flirted with reality — comparatively, at least — in 1973’s The Mad Bomber.

Also known by the nonsensical and inaccurate title of The Police Connection, the film casts Chuck Connors (Tourist Trap) as William Dorn, a bespectacled man with a strong moral code when it comes to keeping the city clean, showing respect for others and honoring sales in grocery circulars, yet has no problem blowing innocent strangers to kibbles and bits with his homemade bombs of dynamite sticks and alarm clocks. Placed into unassuming brown bags and dropped off at such locales as a high school, a mental hospital and a women’s lib meeting (!), the contraptions wreak terror throughout L.A.

At that middle spot, Dorn unknowingly gains an eyewitness to his crimes: serial rapist George Fromley (Neville Brand, Eaten Alive), whose M.O. is taping shut the mouths of his victims, then ripping off their tops to let their breasts fly free. For Lt. Minneli (Vince Edwards, Cellar Dweller), the key to identifying the bomber is nabbing Fromley. Pleads the lieutenant to the police chief, “Let me blanket the city with policewomen just asking to be raped! I’ll bring him in!” (Cue a montage of handsy, horny men going hormonally insane on various ladies strutting their stuff in the dead of night.)

Even with such cuckoo elements as Dorn trying to kill Minneli with a sidecar-equipped motorcycle, and Fromley masturbating to nudie loops of his own wife, The Mad Bomber is played more or less straight, especially by Gordon’s unrestrained standards. Its mix of crime-story grit and exploitation-film sleaze works exceedingly well on such low expectations. Yep, it’s dynamite. —Rod Lott

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