If Seven had more of a supernatural bent and was heavily steeped in Asian culture, it might look like Double Vision, a superb serial killer effort from Hong Kong and Taiwan. The killer first strikes when a CEO is discovered in his office dead from drowning, yet with no signs of water to be found. Later, a senator’s mistress is burned to death in her apartment, but with no indication of fire present.

Troubled cop Tony Leung (Red Cliff) is baffled, as is the rest of the force, so they call on the expertise of American FBI agent David Morse for help. What they discover in their investigation proves more complicated than anything they’ve encountered in their work before.

The reveal of the killer proves to be anticlimactic, but then the film makes up for it by throwing a huge, steel-plated monkey wrench into the plot that really shakes things up – something I would never expect. The last act isn’t as good as the setup since the focus shifts from suspenseful to spiritual, but Chen Kuo Fu’s film as a whole is extremely well-crafted and anchored by two solid leads. —Rod Lott

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If you’re anything like me, then the first page of Playboy you always turn to is the centerfold’s fact sheet. “Who is she as a person?” you ask yourself as you enjoy her witty insights regarding her likes, dislikes, ambitions and turns both on and off. It’s only then — with some reluctance — that you take a look at the photographs that represent the rest of her appearance in the magazine and appreciate them in your own special way for a few brief, energetic minutes.

Thankfully, for those of us movie buffs who truly care about who our masturbation fantasies are as people, there’s Posed for Murder, a somewhat-forgotten, late-’80s thriller dedicated to the travails of a glamour model trying to make her way in a world full of asshole publishers, sleazy agents, sleazier movie directors, sick moms, convict ex-boyfriends and psychotic, body-building stalkers-cum-serial killers.

Charlotte Helmkamp (Miss December 1982) is clearly cast against type as Laura, a hot brunette with a bangin’ body whose photos in the low-rent Thrill have paid the bills, but who longs for the kind of respect that’s synonymous with being a terrible actress in low-budget horror films. While she pursues her dream in-between workouts and photo shoots, she barely has the time to notice that all of the people around her are turning up kinda dead.

Posed for Murder is one of those movies that does nothing right, yet still manages to be a fun time. Just sleazy enough to leave you tumescent, but not so much to make you feel guilty afterward, it’s a so-bad-it’s-good fiasco that deserves to be much better known among aficionados of this sort of thing. —Allan Mott

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The Death Note manga has a story so extensive, so twisty-turvy, so dozen-volumey, I wondered how Japan ever could adapt it into a live-action feature film. Answer: It couldn’t. Instead, it had to do it in two: 2006’s Death Note and its immediate sequel, Death Note: The Last Name. Directed by Shusuke Kaneko (one-third of Necronomicon: Book of the Dead and several Gamera films of the ’90s), the first films adheres closely to its source material.

Tatsuya Fujiwara (Battle Royale) plays Light Yagami, a college student who comes across one helluva unique notebook in the rain and takes it home. Clad in black covers emblazoned with the name “Death Note,” its pages are blank. The inside-front-cover instructions explain why: Write someone’s name in the book, and they instantly die. The son of a police detective, Light at first uses this find for good, to rid Japan of its hardened criminals, especially those who’ve slipped through the fingers of Lady Justice. It’s only after he becomes a suspect in this string of serial “murders” that he uses it to save it his own hide.

After the police get nowhere — and lose a lot of their own men in the process — they lean on the candy-addicted, hermit/genius known only as L (Ken’ichi Matsuyama of Detroit Metal City). Thus begins a chess game of wits that also involves a clingy media pop tart, several skeptics and, of course, the so-named shinigami death gods, rendered here through CGI that ranges from fluid to clunky, depending upon the shot.

It’s a crisp, slick slice of crime and fantasy cinema, if a bit too long. The most amazing thing is how much Matsuyama inhabits the L character as originally portrayed on the page by artist Takeshi Obata: his quirks, his stance, his malnourished look, his everything. It’s uncanny. The film marks a killer concept, well-executed — if you’ll pardon the double pun. —Rod Lott

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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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