Brian De Palma sure loves exploring the idea of doubles, duplicates and just plain dupes, and Sisters is one of his finest and earliest such ventures. Opening with a sly trick pulled on his viewers, the psycho thriller centers on French-Canadian model/actress Danielle (Margot Kidder, so good I temporarily forgot she was Superman’s Lois Lane), who’s struggling to make it in New York.

She’s also struggling with the guilt piled upon her by her twin sister, Dominique, especially when Danielle brings home a date (Lisle Wilson, The Incredible Melting Man), which also irks Danielle’s jealous ex-husband, the odd-looking (to say the least) Emil (Bill Finley, Eaten Alive).

It’s difficult to discuss Sisters without spoiling the story’s several twists, so I won’t go beyond details further than Danielle’s across-the-street apartment neighbor, journalist Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt, TV’s Soap, saddled with horrible ’70s hair), witnessing a murder through the window. This allows De Palma to explore his other cinematic obsession: voyeurism.

Call him a Hitchcock rip-off artist if you like, but to do so would be to short-change yourself from a gripping mystery made all the more disturbing by Bernard Herrmann’s score. De Palma established his split-screen storytelling device here — not just a gimmick, but an effective tool to tighten the screws of suspense on his audience. And that he can wield a considerable amount of tension out of a simple act of icing a cake is … well, icing on the cake. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

In this odd but enjoyable thriller (aka The Beasts’ Carnival) from Spanish hyphenate Paul Naschy, he plays Bruno Rivera, who’s hired by an organization affiliated with his Asian girlfriend (Eiko Nagashima) to snag some diamonds. Syke! He double-crosses them and takes the jewels for himself, but the ruse is not without bloodshed.

Injured, Bruno awakes in the sprawling countryside chalet of Don Simón (Lautaro Murúa), whose two hot daughters (Silvia Aguilar and Azucena Hernández) climb Mount Naschy — but at least at separate times, mind you. While the chalet affords Bruno some safety (and much sexy time), the criminals still come calling for their bling, despite rumors that the place is haunted.

One unfortunate guy gets fed to the family pigs, in a scene that predates that ever-so-controversial one from Hannibal by a full two decades. Strangely, it’s intercut with a sex scene. Other animals at play and in danger in the film include a beetle and a scorpion.

I wonder if Human Beasts refers to the white character who patronizes and hits on his African-American maid/mistress with, “Be a good black girl and light my fire! … Sweet little Raquel, save me some of that stew you make. The one from the other day was finger-licking good. … And you are the best cook in the world, black momma!” (I took three years of Spanish; I know what “negra” means without having to read subtitles.) —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

A little game for you. Read the following, and think of who could best personify such a monster: “When he grins, birds fall off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad, and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. … He has the name of a thousand demons.”

Did you answer Christian Slater? Of course you didn’t. You thought of Al Pacino, or maybe Javier Bardem. Gary Oldman? But in the no man’s land of direct-to-video fare, you get Slater, the poor man’s Jack Nicholson, hardly an untalented actor but hopelessly miscast in portraying such devastating evil.

But then, most everyone involved in Dolan’s Cadillac is vastly out of their depth. Wes Bentley, the very poor man’s Tobey Maguire, can barely summon a passable hissy fit, let alone the rage of man whose wife was killed by Slater’s human trafficker. Director Jeff Beesley has done plenty of Canadian TV comedy work, but is nowhere near talented enough to capture any of the tension of Stephen King’s original short story. The ending, on the page a pleasingly ironic tale of revenge with healthy dollops of righteous anger, is, onscreen, kind of silly.

It’s best to look at Cadillac not as another DTV release, but as a guide to some of the best Canadian character actors working today. Greg Byrk (Immortals) would have made a far better Dolan; Aidan Devine (A History of Violence) classes up the joint; Eugene Clark (Land of the Dead) is always a commanding figure; and Emmanuelle Vaugier (Mirrors 2) is way too smart and classy to end up with a sad sack like Bentley. They all deserve better. —Corey Redekop

Buy it at Amazon.

I have a theory that any movie opening with an attractive swimming nude in the ocean can’t be bad at all. You know: Jaws, this. In his opening sequence, director Pavlos Filippou (Black Aphrodite) goes where Steven Spielberg didn’t, couldn’t and wouldn’t: ass massage! After all, this Eurocrime obscurity hails from Greece, so expect sinning, shooting and sex, sex, sex.

The potent posterior belongs to Cristina (Sasa Kastoura, The Abductors), a MILFy member of the Latin American Revolutionary Movement who uses her feminine wiles to convince George Evans to put his hands to one other good use: namely, smuggling a casino’s security plans from his employer. Cristina’s group isn’t exactly flush with cash currently, and could use some serious bank to buy weapons. With said security plans in their possession, she and her cohorts plot to break into the casino vault, conveniently when a bunch of oil tycoons are in town throwin’ around dough.

Using the ol’ short-circuited computer trick (mind you, technology of the era equalled blinking light panels) and a VW bus with an IBM sticker as getaway, the revolutionaries succeed. They learn how to hide their Benjamins in cigarettes in order to travel inconspicuously, but what if they get caught? It’s then that the title finally comes into play, as Ransom Baby suddenly turns on its head from heist film to kidnapping thriller.

For an obviously rushed production — the very nature of the genre called for it — the film holds high value in the departments of music (Yannis Spanos’ sticky jazz score), direction (Filippou owns an eye for interesting angles, notably with spiraling staircases) and story, which isn’t as simple as one may assume. The ending’s well-staged shipyard shootout plays for keeps, which may infuriate some viewers. However, in Eurocrime, it’s welcomed with open arms. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Dr. George Dumurrier (Jean Sorel, Belle du Jour) puts his San Francisco clinic and publicity tricks over everything, from his credibility to his homely, heavily asthmatic wife, Susan (Marisa Mell, Danger: Diabolik). While Dr. G is off administering, ahem, gynecological treatment to nude photographer Jane (Elsa Martinelli, Hatari!), he receives news of Susan’s death. Although she hated her hubbie, Susan leaves him with a surprise $2 million insurance policy, which would fix the clinic’s financial problems, except it sure looks fishy to the authorities.

At a topless club with a built-in ceiling swing, one performer/prostitute Monica Weston (also Mell) proves a dead ringer for Susan, but with blonde hair, green eyes and healthier lungs. Mell stuns as unbelievably, lip-biting sexy in this role; during their first lovemaking session, she has to unclamp George’s hand from her breast and force his digits southward.

But just what is going on? Can George figure it out before the cops find enough evidence to put him behind bars and possibly on death row? And since this thing is titled Perversion Story — and comes from ’69, haw-haw — how much nudity can we expect? Enough, my horny readers, as the flesh of the movie’s ladies are as curvy and on display as San Francisco’s famously steep and winding roads, but this is no porno.

The aforementioned coupling between George and Jane is shot ingeniously from the mattress’ POV, with flesh pressed right up against the screen. But Perversion Story has much more on its mind than mere pumping and pulchritude — writer/director Lucio Fulci has cooked up a corker of a plot at the film’s chewy center, even more complex than the thriller genre generally demands. It proves the man could do much more than gross us out, and that it’s a shame he didn’t do it more often. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.