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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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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