Long derided for ripping off Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma instead entered the new millennium with an erotic thriller that looks like he’s ripping off Brian De Palma ripping off Alfred Hitchcock. I generally love the guy, but Femme Fatale is one of his worst pervo-mysterioso efforts (but not at bad as the utterly flaccid The Black Dahlia).

Rebecca Romjin (then using her brief “-Stamos” tag) stars as a double-crossing diamond thief who escapes her Parisian partners by assuming the identity of a dead woman. As that ruse starts to unravel, she attempts to use disgraced paparazzi photographer Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas, Desperado) to protect herself and make off with millions of dollars.

The plot is overly complex for a script so simple-minded, and seems to exist only for the clever, it-all-comes-together ending, rendered in De Palma’s usual slow-motion style. It’s a set piece that, like Fatale‘s opening bathroom seduction at the Cannes Film Festival, is the kind of thing that De Palma does so damned well. It’s everything in between that he does not so well, and as writer and director, he has no one to blame but himself.

Romjin actually acquits herself quite admirably and manages to bare her breasts. She gets a lot more dialogue than she did as blue-skinned seductress Mystique in the X-Men franchise; unfortunately, a lot of that dialogue is along the lines of “You don’t have to lick my ass — just fuck me!” —Rod Lott

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Dressing down a pesky journalist in the first scene of 10 to Midnight, Charles Bronson’s Lt. Leo Kessler proclaims, “I’m a mean, selfish son of a bitch. And I know you want a story, but I want a killer, and what I want comes first!” I felt like cheering right then and there, and the title hadn’t yet appeared onscreen. The serial-killer police thriller comes from Bronson’s underrated ’80s run with Cannon Films and his fourth of nine collaborations with Conquest of the Planet of the Apes director J. Lee Thompson.

In this film’s case, the murderer is Warren (Gene Davis, The Hitcher), a young, creepy guy in a Members Only jacket who fixes typewriters for the office secretarial pool. He fancies himself quite the martial artist and ladies’ man. He’s definitely not the latter, because he gets rejected all the time, but gets his revenge by stabbing his busty jilters to death.

Examining the corpse of Warren’s latest victim, Kessler theorizes, “Well, if anybody does something like this, his knife has gotta be his penis.” Indeed, Warren’s M.O. is stripping nude before each and every kill, holding a sharp blade at genital height, all rapey-like. As Kessler inches closer to nabbing the scumball, said scumball targets the copper’s daughter (Lisa Eilbacher, Beverly Hills Cop), a student nurse — convenient for a cinematic massacre’s sake.

What makes 10 to Midnight great is not just Bronson being Bronson, but that his Kessler is deeply flawed. He’s not a supercop, but an imperfect man more interested in doing what’s right vs. what’s legal, which irks his idealistic, by-the-book partner Andrew Stevens (The Seduction). It’s also as if a slasher movie focused not on the Final Girl, but the investigating police detective, and Davis is absolutely hateful in his robotic-perv role.

Look for short bits by Kelly Preston in her movie debut and an artificial vagina. —Rod Lott

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The UK thriller Eden Lake enjoys the fortune of having cast two leads just prior to their big breakouts: Kelly Reilly (Mrs. Watson of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes franchise) and Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds). She’s Jenny, a preschool teacher with a radiant smile and bad hairdo; he’s Steve, her slick boyfriend taking her away for a romantic weekend of camping, during which he intends to pop The Question.

He takes her to the picturesque Eden Lake, a beautiful beach surrounded by miles of forest, soon to be leveled to make way for executive homes. While sunning in their swimwear, they encounter the worst kind of hoodlums: asshole teenagers. There’s six of them, animal abusers all. Their bad behavior escalates from purposely playing their music too loud and leaving dog droppings behind to puncturing Steve’s back tire and later stealing his car.

And that’s just child’s play compared to the horrors these attention-starved demon kids have in store for the couple. Needless to say, Eden Lake plays like Deliverance with villains cast from juvie hall, and you wish that our heroes would Hulk out and kick in their teeth. When Steve and Jenny get separated, we wonder what might save their hides: her child-psych training or his knocking the teens senseless with his python-esque penis?

Neither. Jenny’s forced into Wrathful Ginger mode, rendering her as much as an animal as her predators, and you’ll be glued to her every step, whether she’s walking or running. She and Fassbender and excellent actors, so the film is not some garden-variety genre trash, even if its setup sounds so familiar. Writer/director James Watkins (The Woman in Black) wasn’t about to let it be average, as the work is not only taut, but plays for keeps. Even a viewer as jaded as I had to wince a couple of times. That’s high praise. —Rod Lott

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Road to Perdition novelist Max Allan Collins’ signature hit-man character of Quarry blasts his way onto the big screen in The Last Lullaby. But debuting director Jeffrey Goodman’s little film isn’t quite the pulpy bag of sex and violence from the books and short stories. Abound in atmosphere, this Lullaby is a low-key, low-budget crime thriller that plays for mood, not mayhem. In doing so, the whole thing sneaks up on you, subverting your expectations, digging under your skin and having genuine staying power.

Tom Sizemore (Heat) plays Quarry — here named Price — a former freelance assassin who lives a lonely, empty life. One night, he happens upon a young woman (Sprague Grayden, Paranormal Activity 2) being held hostage inside a shack of a house in the country. One “holy shit!” moment later, Price saves her. She wrongly assumes he’s been sent by her big-shot father (Bill Smitrovich, Eagle Eye), who is so grateful for his daughter’s return that the jogging-suited papa offers Price a job — the temporary kind.

Price is not interested; he’s recently retired from the killing game. But $1 million is tough to turn down. His target: Sarah (Sasha Alexander, TV’s NCIS), a nonthreatening librarian. Why would someone so mild-mannered have a price on her pretty little head? Price is intrigued enough not to off her right away, just to find out.

The movie’s biggest detriment going in turns out to be one of its greatest assets: Sizemore. Given his tabloid antics of recent years that have made him known more for his public life than his performances, no one ever says, “I can’t wait to see Tom Sizemore’s next!” Through his own fault, it’s easy to forget how good of an actor he can be, yet within just the first few minutes, all the media-circus baggage that surrounds him just melts away. Alexander nearly matches him, and their last scene together — the film’s final shot, incidentally — gave me chills. Goodman does a great job with limited funds, managing suspense while also purposely maintaining a walking pace — a nice antidote to the usual, pedal-to-the-metal approach of the thriller genre. —Rod Lott

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David Fincher’s brilliant Zodiac suggested that the unsolved mystery of the San Francisco serial killings of the late 1960s and early ’70s could be penned on suspect Arthur Leigh Allen. Wrong! According to Tom Hanson’s The Zodiac Killer, the murderer was just that mailman named Jerry — you know, the hick one who lives with all those rabbits in his living room. Or maybe it’s Hanson who’s not to be trusted; his psycho-thriller is so inept, it plays as if Fincher were kicked in the head by a horse, and then let the horse write the screenplay.

And yet, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery lends it credibility in opening titles that read in part, “If some of the scenes, dialogue, and letters seem strange and unreal, remember — they happened.”

All of them? Really, Paul? Because then that would mean that, among other things, the Zodiac Killer:
• wept uncontrollably over dead bunnies;
• was sexual dynamite to suntanning honeys on his route;
• was best buds with a truck-driving, divorced, fat baldie who fancied himself quite the catch (“Bitch, I told you a thousand times: Don’t touch my hair!”);
• set up a weenie roast on the beach to catch prey with delicious hot dogs: “I’m so very thrilled you like them. Stick around, it’ll get greater”;
• stalked MILFs at the playground, in broad daylight;
• offed a random teenage girl on a suburban street, in broad daylight;
• smashed an elderly woman’s noggin with her own spare tire, in broad daylight;
• pushed a rolling bed-ridden retirement-home resident down one of SF’s super-steep streets, in broad daylight;
• ambushed swimsuit-clad lovers with a friendly “I’m gonna have to stab you people!” in broad daylight;
• laughed when he called the police to report his own murders, in broad daylight; and
• eventually donned a black superhero-esque costume, complete with a draw-no-attention zodiac insignia on the chest, which he wore in broad daylight.

All those, Paul? Perhaps Avery — played by Robert Downey Jr. in Fincher’s 2007 film — made that statement while high on coke. But back to Hanson’s Zodiac Killer, whose narration includes an angry “Why? Why don’t you idiots ever learn?” He could be talking about Hanson and cast and crew. I, for one, am glad they didn’t learn a thing, because this flick is a hoot. —Rod Lott

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