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

Buy it at Amazon.

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

Buy it at Amazon.

Are You in the House Alone?! is the question posed over the phone to straight-A student Gail Osborne (Kathleen Beller, The Sword and the Sorcerer) while babysitting. While anonymous and unsettling, the connection is not as iconic as the one a year later When a Stranger Calls, asking Carol Kane if she’s checked the children.

The tele-terror is merely one piece of a multitiered plan of harassment from an unknown admirer/stalker who also places threatening notes in Gail’s school locker. It puts the damper on a burgeoning romance between her and new beau Steve (Scott Colomby, the Porky’s saga), who is disliked by Gail’s high-strung mother (Blythe Danner, Meet the Parents) for breaking curfew. Worse, the badgering escalates into rape. I didn’t spoil anything, either; director Walter Grauman (Paper Man) does that in the first scene before segueing into an hour-long flashback.

This being the late 1970s, it’s suggested that Gail’s case against her attacker is a losing proposition due to her not being a virgin — an attitude every bit as dated as the atrocious hairstyles and fashions on display.

For being made for television, Are You in the House Alone?! does a fair job of building some suspense, but once the narrative circles back to the beginning, it makes a complete tonal shift from thriller to drama — and not just a drama, but one with an overly moralizing Afterschool Special feel. Viewers practically can see the seeds of many of a Lifetime movie being planted before their eyes; ultimately, the pic is most notable for giving Dennis Quaid one of his earliest roles. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

In Bangkok, 32-year-old Yamaha instrument salesman Phuchit — “Chad” in the English dub — is fired at the most inopportune time: when he is in debt to the tune of tens of thousands. Potential salvation arrives in the form of an anonymous cellphone call inviting Phuchit (Krissada Sukosol, The Adventures of Iron Pussy) to play 13: Game of Death.

With a baker’s dozen of challenges, the mild-mannered Phuchit has the opportunity to win $1 million, all or nothing. Early rounds seem simple enough — swat a fly, make three children cry, rob a bum — then balloon in complexity to demented extremes, including — what else? — murder. For all the wrong reasons, the most memorable mission is the fifth, in which our desperate, depressed hero must consume a plate of feces drizzled in a beef gravy. At least I hope that was gravy; either way, the scene is a true stomach-churner, made further disgusting by the protagonist’s face and clothes bearing stains and smears from his lunch for the rest of the movie.

You may not proceed beyond that, and I can’t say I recommend anyone do. The “let’s play a game” scenario has fueled dozens of fine, credibility-stretching thrillers, but 13: Game of Death squanders its massive potential even before Phuchit’s visit to the restaurant (for which I’d love to read his Yelp! review).

Matthew Chookiat Sakveerakul (writer of the 2008 girl-powered martial-arts movie Chocolate) begins the Thai-language film in earnest, then suddenly introduces comedic elements that are not present in the initial quarter. In high-stakes stories of life or death, you can’t go from slapstick to samurai swording a dog and expect to keep the audience to stay alongside you. It just doesn’t work, especially when the running time overstays its welcome by a good 30 minutes of nearly two hours — a bane of many Asian genre pics, Thailand included.

Throw in an ending that’s terrible and two people have lost this Game: Sakveerakul and the viewer. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

After nailing down a cool half-mil on his debut, novelist Paul Martin (Udo Kier, Flesh for Frankenstein) is having a tough time writing his sophomore book. Even after hiding himself and his typewriter in the British countryside House on Straw Hill, he’s only slightly more productive as an author than The Shining’s Jack Torrance.

With deadline looming, Paul hires a typist to whom he can dictate, and off the train pops Linda (Linda Hayden, Taste the Blood of Dracula), a pretty young thing who packs a dildo in her suitcase — not that Paul can cast much judgment, as he dons latex surgical gloves for his sexual trysts with his shapely ginger girlfriend, Suzanne (UK sex symbol Fiona Richmond, History of the World: Part I).

Linda proves as skilled at her job as she is at self-pleasuring, which she does often throughout the picture, but having her around is not good for Paul’s fragile mental health. He keeps experiencing visions of a grisly, bloody death, sometimes during the most inopportune times (such as, say, while Suzanne writhes atop his unit like an Olympic gymnast). Just what the hell is going on?

Viewers will wonder, as writer/director James Kenelm Clarke (Let’s Get Laid) keeps the film’s secret under his hat for a little too long. It becomes evident once you realize how little story is at work, with a lot of sex and violence to pad it out — not for nothing did The House on Straw Hill stake a claim on the dreaded “video nasties” list in the regressive-repressive 1980s (often under its alternate title of the apt Trauma).

In exchange for sticking it out, audiences are rewarded with a sick little thriller in which Paul’s freakouts are so heavily laden with dream imagery and actions don’t always adhere to logic that one wonders if the entire film isn’t a facade of sorts. For example, what kind of woman is raped at gunpoint by two guys — one of whom sports a T-shirt reading, “I Am a Vampyre,” no less — yet able to brush off such an act as if nothing happened? You’ll get the answer, actually; note that I have not accused Clarke’s work of possessing good taste. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.