So you’ve been rejected by the LAPD academy for psychiatric concerns. Do you:

A) seek a psychiatrist
B) seek career counseling 
C) pick innocent people out of the phone book and kill them  
D) ask, “Father, what’s a phone book?”

In William Lustig’s Relentless, Buck Taylor (Breakfast Club member Judd Nelson) chooses “C” and lets his trigger finger do the walking. Buck’s spree as a serial killer coincides with Sam Dietz’s first day on the job as a homicide detective, mentored/bullied by grizzled veteran Malloy (Robert Loggia, Jagged Edge). As Dietz and Malloy gather clues, Buck keeps on buckin’ societal norms. The standout sequence finds him crashing through his latest target’s condo skylight, then following her to an ultimately ineffective hiding place: inside the basement’s washing machine.

Between this and Hit List, Lustig had one hell of a 1989! Ditto for screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson between this, even if he took a pseudonym, and Field of Dreams, for which he earned an Oscar nod. Highlighted by a ironic use of Norman Rockwell’s The Runaway painting in its closing, Relentless is a reliable programmer — the kind of intentional B movie that enjoyed an A-level theatrical release coast to coast, the kind of highly competent genre outing that Larry Cohen knocked out with regularity.

Upon the film’s release, Nelson playing against his Brat Pack type was neither welcomed nor appreciated, but he admirably commits to the vanity-free role of Utter Nutjob … and perhaps overcommits, rendering Buck too childlike in moments. His performance overall isn’t dissimilar from what Robert Downey Jr. delivered in that era — haircut included!  

As Dietz, the minimally appealing Leo Rossi (Lustig’s Maniac Cop II) doesn’t exactly engender viewer goodwill with his overuse of “jerk-off” as a noun in daily vocab and by threatening his child (Brendan Ryan, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) with “a knuckle sandwich.”

Now, I’m not saying you will root against Dietz in his pursuit of justice, but if not for his kind and supportive wife (Meg Foster, The Lords of Salem), you would root against Dietz in his pursuit of justice. So naturally, his character is the star of the entire franchise, from Dead On: Relentless II to Relentless IV: Ashes to Ashes. I’ll still watch them, though, having liked original-recipe Relentless this much. —Rod Lott

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In Uncaged, Netherlands genre giant Dick Maas (Amsterdamned) takes pride in his work — literally, as this loony movie is about a lion on the loose.

After an entire family is slaughtered, zoo veterinarian Liz (Sophie van Winden) gets recruited to help authorities track and prevent the jungle-king culprit from further going Dutch for din-din. Maas being Maas, any capture won’t happen until the filmmaker has his fun for moviegoers’ sake.

And what fun this film — alternately and generically known as Prey — is! To quote experts surveying the grisly mess at the big cat’s initial crime scene:

“Where’s his arm?”

“In the same place as his wife’s head.”

Because Maas’ singular sense of humor always accompanies the gore, it’s tough to take his well-choreographed sequences as anything other than an action-packed cartoon for grown-ups. If the lion chasing a delivery man on a moped through the streets isn’t enough of a ball, wait until the animal does the same to Liz’s ex: a cancer-ravaged hired hunter (Mark Frost, Faust: Love of the Damned) in a motorized wheelchair.

From golf course to public tram, Maas pulls no punches as the Uncaged lion does anything but sleep — just ask the poor kid on the playground slide! Then dig in. —Rod Lott

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As Steven Knight proved a decade ago with the Tom Hardy vehicle Locke, viewers can be riveted by a feature film set entirely within a moving car at night. Now, Mercy Road gives that concept an Aussie spin. It’s a real change of pace for John Curran, heretofore known for directing tony, buttoned-up awards bait like The Painted Veil and Stone. Here, he loosens the collar and tells the world to eat his dust.

Hardy’s luxury car is downgraded to a dirty work truck driven by Tom (Luke Bracey, 2015’s Point Break remake), who’s fleeing the site of where something bad just happened. I’ll let you learn the “what”s and “why”s as Curran intends, with hints dropped a quarter-mile at a time; suffice to say, Tom’s searching frantically for his 12-year-old daughter, who isn’t answering her phone. According to an ominous caller identifying himself as “an associate” (Toby Jones, Berberian Sound Studio), Tom has exactly 60 minutes to find her.

As the clock ticks, so does your pulse. With a recurring cameo from one of those notorious Australian spiders and Curran’s own intense score banging on the left-hand side of the piano, Mercy Road makes for a stressful ride. Bracey makes you feel it, too, selling his accelerating frustration and panic with a worn-raw throat and bursts of unplanned spittle.

I only wish the resolution were concrete. No fewer than three endings run right after the other, I assume rendering the previous one null and void. It’s unclear — and this sure ain’t Clue — as we’re left with more questions when Tom kills the ignition. —Rod Lott

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Inside, directed by Vasilis Katsoupis and written by Katsoupis and Ben Hopkins, features two taglines: “This is not Willem Dafoe” and “A solitary exhibition.” And these two phrases tell you just about everything you need to know about the film. The first is undoubtedly a reference to surrealist René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, which is a painting of a pipe with the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) written below. This allusion indicates the film concerns itself with the art world and may itself be surreal in nature (it does and it is).

The second tagline, in conjunction with the first, sums up just what the proceeding hour and 45 minutes will be: Dafoe playing a character in total solitude. And aside from a few supporting players who pop up in this character’s world (and his dreams), that is exactly what Inside is.

It follows art thief Nemo (Dafoe, of course), who breaks into a high-tech New York City penthouse owned by an art collector and dealer away on a business trip for an indeterminate amount of time. Nemo’s there to steal works by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, especially a $3 million self-portrait, which he cannot locate. When he attempts to leave with the other paintings, an alarm system sounds and traps Nemo within the home. His cohorts, circling the building in a helicopter, abandon him, leaving Nemo to find his own way out. This proves far more difficult than he could ever have anticipated, almost as if the penthouse were built to be a prison.

Days go by. The days become weeks, and the weeks become months. The solitude begins to drive Nemo mad, and in his madness he begins to create a grand work of art of his own, writing and drawing on the walls in black ink. He talks to himself and to a cleaning woman he sees on security monitors, whom he names Jasmine. He sings and dances to himself as well, all while working at the frosted glass of a skylight high above, which Nemo accesses via a makeshift scaffolding he constructed himself out of furniture and which resembles an avant-garde sculpture in its own right. It’s a combination of form and function, oddly interesting from an aesthetics standpoint while also serving as a potential means of escape, assuming Nemo can remove the glass and crawl outside.

The phrase “This is not Willem Dafoe” is especially on point here because the actor disappears into the role. We truly forget the fiction and become absorbed in this man’s quest to survive. This is achieved primarily through Dafoe giving the performance his all, but also through Katsoupis and Hopkins’ script, which constantly ratchets up the external and internal stakes, be it through the scarce amount of food available to Nemo, to the fact that the sinks in the home don’t work, forcing the character to get his water from a still operational sprinkler system, to Nemo’s crumbling sanity, which takes a toll on his ingenuity, his ability to think rationally. We’re repeatedly asking ourselves, “How will he get out of this one?”

Admittedly, the fundamental premise of Inside can at times feel flimsy — why, for instance, hasn’t the art dealer employed someone to look after his multimillion-dollar home while he’s away? But the strength of Dafoe’s performance, the taut script and the incredible cinematography of Steve Annis all combine to eclipse such questions, creating a rich, engaging and overall satisfying viewing experience. —Christopher Shultz

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A murdered prostitute. A rash of neighborhood break-ins. A ransom call from a child’s kidnapper. A thwarted robbery and assault in the subway. That’s a lot of crime for one movie — unless that movie is an anthology. 

Meet Mania, a gem of a suspense omnibus from the Great White North. Its opening-credits sequence suggests something special and very, very ‘80s. You get both from all four of its unhosted, unconnected stories. 

With the majority directed by Prom Night’s Paul Lynch, each segment concludes with a twist. If the near four decades since have rendered those conclusions guessable, you still must acknowledge and admire the cleverness in their construction. They’re not gimmicky in the M. Night Shyamalan way where you’re so focused on parsing them out rather than enjoying the journey to get there. 

Mania might be accurately called Canada’s version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents; it’s certainly more narratively successful than NBC’s short-lived revival of that time. Most of all, the Maniaical pieces remind me of the ingenious shorts HBO used to play in its infancy as between-movies filler seemingly beamed in from nowhere.  —Rod Lott