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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I distinctly recall an early-’80s Tonight Show episode where host Johnny Carson brought the house down by creating a fictional, raunchy tagline at the expense of his guest and his upcoming film: “Burt Reynolds is in Heat.” Alas, I’m too young to know if Carson made a similar gag about a dozen years earlier for Reynolds’ 1972 procedural, Fuzz. Perhaps the late-night king saved it for the more appropriate Raquel Welch?

That sultry sex bomb plays Detective McHenry, the newcomer to the 87th Precinct, as created in Ed McBain’s series of crime novels. On her first day, the police station gets a call that the commissioner will be killed unless $5,000 is turned over. That’s the first step of a crime spree undertaken by this hard-of-hearing man who quickly proves himself to be a mad bomber.

In other plot threads, the men (and woman) of the 87th try to crack the cases of a serial rapist in the park, and two young men who douse hobos in alcohol then set them aflame. McBain’s books in the long-running series always juggled stories this way, ranging from the seriocomic to the serious. While not the first adaptation (that’d be 1958’s sober Cop Hater) Fuzz comes closest to matching the author’s indelible tone.

Credit goes to McBain’s own screenplay (under his real name of Evan Hunter) and his game cast. Burt Reynolds and Jack Weston go undercover as nuns, while lucky bastard Tom Skerritt goes undercover with Welch in a tight sleeping bag. Yul Brynner shows up only in the final third as “The Deaf Man,” and no one delivers a line like “Marvelous, empty-headed bitch” better than he. Even Russ Meyer fave Uschi Digard shows up, albeit on a big-bust loop in a porno shop. Like such shorts, Fuzz is slight and fleeting, but enjoyable while it lasts, so it’s a shame this didn’t become a franchise. —Rod Lott

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Little work is needed by director Henri-Georges Clouzot to make you despise the antagonist of Diabolique with the proverbial fury of a thousand suns. The classic French thriller begins with talk of boarding school principal Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse) physically abusing his current sex toy, Nicole (Simone Signoret), who’s comforted by fellow teacher Christina (Véra Clouzot), who’s married to that son of a bitch.

Yes, Michel lives where he works where he fucks, openly, with wife and mistress knowing about the other, yet remaining as friends. It’s tough to be jealous when the man you share is a complete and utter prick — to you, to his employees, to his students. No wonder Christina wants to divorce; Nicole gives her the confidence to ask for one, but that’s merely a ruse for their plot to murder him.

It happens soon in the two-hour film — drugging and then drowning him in the tub — leaving the two ladies — and their audience — roughly 90 minutes to sweat it out as guilt mounts when the corpse vanishes. Threading the suspense in a methodical, drawn-out fashion of which Alfred Hitchcock was a master, Monsieur Clouzot (The Wages of Fear) eventually crafts a quilt of questions we can’t wait to see answered, just as we couldn’t wait to see Michel murdered.

With the devilishly delicious Diabolique‘s stellar rep, its big reveal scene may be known to many who’ve never seen it. That included me, and yet, I still couldn’t figure everything out before Clouzot chose to show us. Yes, its two hours run a little slow in patches, and the husband so hateful that he may as well have a swastika armband, but the overall story works so well, its continuing influence on so many other movies is simply undeniable. —Rod Lott

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In one of those palatial estates that resembles more of an art museum than a residence, an elderly, wheelchair-bound man tells grandchildren Evelyn and Kitty — naughty and nice, respectively — the legend of the spooky painting in his study: That tired of all the pranks and abuse, the Black Queen killed her evil sister, the Red Queen, only for the Red Queen to come back to life for revenge, killing the Black Queen and six others.

That’s basically the entire plot of The Red Queen Kills 7 Times, as Evelyn and Kitty embody the ladies of the legend. In one of their many scuffles started by Evelyn, Kitty accidentally kills her sibling. Older sis Franziska (Marina Malfatti, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids) helps her hide the body and spread the falsehood that Evelyn “went to America.”

Years later, a grown Kitty (Barbara Bouchet, The French Sex Murders) is a fashion photographer, and with the death of her grandfather, it appear as if Evelyn has resurrected herself, as a black-gloved, red-caped, white-masked, VW bug-cruising, dagger-wielding serial killer — all the better to milk the crimson stuff out of this gripping-enough giallo.

While no classic, the final film of director Emilio Miraglia (The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), Red Queen works on all the levels a giallo should: The mystery is intriguing, the killer is creepy, the music (by Bruno Nicolai) is swinging, the fashions are mod, the architecture is modder, the blood is bright red, the title is head-scratching, and the women are drop-dead gorgeous — sometimes literally. The running time is also a bit bloated, but since some of that entails one Sybil Danning at the beginning of her career and donning her birthday suit, I’m letting it slide. —Rod Lott

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