As a bad-movie fan, I find myself conflicted by the cult phenom Birdemic: Shock and Terror. I certainly can appreciate why so many people would choose to celebrate it as a jaw-dropping example of cinematic incompetence. Even if you ignore its innumerable and somewhat mind-blowing technical failures, you’ll easily find yourself captivated by the “performance” of leading man Alan Bagh.

The first actor I’ve ever seen who cannot even be counted on to walk convincingly on camera, Bagh’s fidelity to writer/director James Nguyen’s incoherent script is nothing short of remarkable, especially since much of it makes him sound like an Asian man speaking in a second language he has yet to fully master: “I’d love to see you in those lingerie,” indeed.

That said, I am hesitant to rank Birdemic among such truly classic “bad” movies as Manos, the Hands of Fate, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare and Troll 2, because they all have in common a kind of dreamlike insanity that combines with their technical incompetence to create wholly original works — something you can claim truly to have never seen before.

And I’ve seen Birdemic before — not just because I’ve seen The Birds or the countless other animal-attack movies that Nguyen laughably riffs on, but because YouTube is filled to overflowing with similarly terrible homemade efforts, any one of whom could arouse the same cruel mocking laughter Nguyen’s folly inspires. Ultimately, Birdemic is every bit as terrible as you’ve heard, but unlike other memorably terrible movies, it lacks that crucial spark of misplaced demented genius. And without that spark, it ends up just being a really badly made movie I pitied rather than loved. —Allan Mott

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Playing the title role of The Machinist is Christian Bale. Or is that Christian Rail? Yuk-yuk; the guy pulled a total reverse De Niro to shed something like 63 pounds to portray the sickly, skin-and-bones Trevor Reznik, the blue-collar worker who loses weight inexplicably and hasn’t slept for a year.

Stranger still, strange Post-it notes pop up around his apartment, like “Who are you?” and a six-letter game of Hangman. He’s a loner at work — even more so after he causes a bloody accident that costs a guy his arm — and the only real companionship he has is literally bought: regular rounds with a sympathetic call girl, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Which begs the question: Does Leigh have some sort of hooker-role punch card? There’s this, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Miami Blues — what does she get when she hits 10? An automatic Oscar? She’s good in this, as virtually always, but it’s Bale’s picture through and through. He’s totally believable as a paranoiac spiraling deeper into an abyss where reality and fantasy blur for him.

Director Brad Anderson seems to channel a good dose of Brian De Palma to drive this obsessive thriller, with Roque Baños serving as his Pino Donaggio/Bernard Herrmann for a score that has viewers on puppet strings. From an epileptic kid to a co-worker who looks Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix, The Machinist keeps you guessing for its whole; even if its twist is a bit of a letdown, all that comes before it is a stylish high. —Rod Lott

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No one writes a cop novel like Joseph Wambaugh, so it’s no wonder Hollywood has adapted so many of them, starting with The New Centurions. It follows rookie cop Roy (Stacy Keach, sans ‘stache, initially) being introduced to the night shift of the scummier areas of Los Angeles by near-retirement Kilvinski (George C. Scott, intense as always). As they make their rounds, the lonely old man imparts wisdom to his family-man protégé: “Look out the window. There’s always another asshole.”

The partners and the other cops of their division — a vanity-free Erik Estrada among them — are shown breaking up domestic disputes, rounding up street whores, working robberies big and small, hunting down a flim-flam man, making routine traffic stops, trolling parks for “fruits,” and chasing various perps.

There’s a reason they call it a beat: because it wears one down. Like Wambaugh’s excellent, reality-based novels, Richard Fleischer’s film pulls back the veil of being an officer, presenting a portrait that’s not at all gussied-up, revealing the repercussions of making an honest but deadly mistake, and the toll the job takes at home. A scene in which the wrong guy is fatally shot is powerful, but most tense is when the police attempt to wrest an abused newborn from its drunk mother.

The New Centurions isn’t your average Hollywood crime drama. When Kilvinski mentions retirement, any other movie would mark him for death before his last day on the job; instead, Stirling Silliphant’s script shows him taking a more realistic route. It’s a solid work, tonally false only with a late-in-the-game subplot of romance for Roy. —Rod Lott

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After so much post-Psycho typecasting, it’s downright refreshing to see Anthony Perkins playing someone nice and normal in Someone Behind the Door. In the obscure thriller, he’s a timid, crippled florist threatened by the — oh, who’m I kidding? I can’t pull one over on you! He’s so totally bonkers! Again!

Perkins is Dr. Laurence Jeffries, a brilliant brain surgeon whose latest patient is known to us only as “the stranger” (Charles Bronson). That’s because he’s a total amnesiac. Jeffries performs research on the stranger, but not the kind for which physicians are awarded massive grants. After assuring the stranger he’s not Victor Frankenstein, Jeffries invites him to his home, where he performs a “personality transplant.”

That’s the snazzy way of saying, “I’m going to make you think that my wife is really your wife, and then tell you that she’s been nailing some dude that isn’t me — er, you — and that you should do something about it, thereby letting me off the hook.” Oooooh, Mrs. Jeffries (Jill Ireland, of course), you are in troubbbbble!

With so few people in the cast and most of the film taking place in one spot, Someone has the feeling of a great — okay, a pretty good — stage play. It’s a game of psychological one-upsmanship in the style of Sleuth or Deathtrap, but a couple levels below in the brains department. Bronson proceeds past his acting ability’s comfort zone in the finale, but I’m sure as hell not going to tell him that. —Rod Lott

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Based upon James Siegel’s 2003 bestselling thriller — and believe me, we’ll get to that in a sec — Derailed stars Clive Owen as a happily married ad exec who nonetheless gives in to urges with a mysterious, seductive woman he meets one morning on the train to work. That woman is played by a severely miscast Aniston — not a person one to whom would readily affix the adjectives “mysterious” or “seductive.” “Cloying” and “overrated,” perhaps, but she’s way in over her head here.

Before she and Clive can do the deed, their hotel room is intruded upon by a robber-cum-rapist, who adds insult to injury by then proceeding to engage in an ever-escalating game of blackmail. This thorn in their side is played by Vincent Cassel, the wiry little laser-dancing Frenchman from Ocean’s Twelve, and thus marks the first glaring diversion from the source material. In the book, Aniston’s character is raped repeatedly over an afternoon by a black man. For whatever reason — I’ll take political correctness for $500, Alex — the race has undergone a literal whitewashing.

Otherwise, the first two-thirds stick pretty close to the book, even lifting entire scenes of dialogue. Unfortunately, what was punchy on the page drags in the hands of director Mikael Håfström, which does the abrupt, condensed ending no favors. In Siegel’s book, there were several endings, but each with a purpose, adding layer upon layer to an already suspenseful story. Here, it’s your standard revenge climax, and by cutting so much out of it, it’s bereft of the logic the author brought to it.

You may be enticed to rent Derailed by the cover tease of its “unrated” version, but all this amounts to are some quick shots of Cassel dry-humping Aniston, which is more nauseating than anything. The tagline is “They never saw it coming,” but you don’t have to see it at all. Even the less-seasoned viewers among us can guess the film’s “big twist.” –Rod Lott

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