Not knowing where a film is going isn’t the same as not knowing what a film is attempting to do. Although that may sound like semantics, the difference is immense. The former breeds suspense and surprise; the latter, frustration and resentment.

Mystery Spot brings frustration and resentment. Written, directed, edited and produced by Mel House (Psychic Experiment), the indie pic fails hard by not properly establishing its characters or feeding viewers anything beyond bread crumbs for story. At nearly two hours of wondering when things will truly “start,” the watch is wearisome. While Josh Loucka’s score hooked my ears, other creative elements come up short in a collective overreach.

Shot in Texas, the film is set at a roadside motel in the middle of nowhere. Decades ago, the place was a bona fide travelers’ attraction thanks to the Mystery Spot, an adjacent tourist-trap funhouse. Although long burnt down, its wooden remnants are whispered to be haunted. Running contrary to the title, the movie treats the spot as tangential until need be; of the 111 minutes, most tick at the motel.

In one room, a mopey, bearded slob (Graham Skipper, All the Creatures Were Stirring) auditions young women on camcorder for a supposed movie. In another is a middle-aged photographer (a fine Lisa Wilcox, Alice of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and 5) who’s checked in to the dump for a few days. Meanwhile, a cop (Bobby Simpson II) surveils all of the above through binoculars from his completely conspicuous car in the parking lot.

The many questions raised by this slim setup remain unanswered until the conclusion. The effect is like a first date where you can’t ask the other person where they’re from, how they earn an a living or what they do for fun. Also, every now and again, a pile of sand appears. The early ambiguity of Skipper’s situation appears to be calculated misdirection, but is revealed to be either miscasting, off-key acting or poor storytelling once House’s intent — pretentious and metaphysical — finally emerges.

Psych-rock pioneer Roky Erickson once sang, “If you have ghosts, you have everything.” Mystery Spot suggests otherwise. —Rod Lott

After all those Chucky movies, seeing Brad Dourif play a sane, law-abiding citizen seems as rare as a ponytailed priest investigating a serial killer of strippers. Dourif does both in the erotic thriller Final Judgement, from Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures. (Note the title’s misspelling of “judgment”; perhaps the frugal Corman had a BOGO coupon for the vowel?)

A man of the cloth in the City of Angels, Dourif’s Father Tyrone finds himself Suspect No. 1 when a parishioner’s exotic dancer of a daughter, Paula (Kristin Dattilo, 1990’s Mirror Mirror), is found murdered after he counsels her. The true culprit is Rob (soap star David Ledingham in his lone movie), an artist living alone in one of those enormous warehouses. After convincing strippers to let him paint their portraits, Rob strangles each subject to death with picture-hanging wire — hey, like Corman, he’s resourceful.

When the police lieutenant on the case (Isaac Hayes, Truck Turner) won’t listen to Tyrone’s theory, Father heads to Paula’s club to look for a girl to pound for info. He finds her in Nicole (Concorde queen Maria Ford, Stripped to Kill 2), who at one point wears pants with a floral pattern so gaudy, it looked better as the guest room bedspread at my parents’ house.

Old pro he is, Dourif keeps Final Judgement from becoming less than perfunctory. He’s not helped by his director, Louis Morneau (Werewolf: The Beast Among Us), who lets Ledingham sail so far over the top (while Ford merely discards hers), he should have been reigned in. I doubt the script — written by then-future Hollywood Reporter film critic Kirk Honeycutt — called for such level of hysterics.

As a disciple of Andy Sidaris (read our interview with him in our book), I also wonder why Roberta Vasquez is the only woman on the poster, yet has such a small role. She’s not only a better actress than Ford, but better built for the part. The Lord works in mysterious ways, indeed. —Rod Lott

When I was around 8 or 9, an edited-for-television version of Massacre at Central High played one evening on an UHF station. A few minutes into it, my mother came in the living room and started watching. She recalled she had seen it and, even worse, that Andrew Stevens was in it.

I don’t remember anything else, except mostly that my mother knew who Stevens was; either way, this snippet of conversation was rediscovered when I watched the new-to-Blu-ray Massacre at Central High, which leads to more questions, but I digress …

As the syrupy song “The Crossroads of My Life” imbues on the soundtrack, Robert Carradine is pushed by a bunch of bullies in the school hallway, which sounds bad, but to be fair, he was drawing a swastika on a locker. Good for the bullies, I guess.

Even with that exercise of antifascism, they are pretty bad, too; their gratuitous disciplining includes a chubby student trying to scale a rope in gym class, the school’s hearing-impaired librarian being harassed and, yikes, raping some girls in the chemistry lab.

As the new student David (Derrel Maury) sees the terrorism taking place, he seeks what any student would: revenge. On my count, he takes down a rockin’ hang glider; a rockin’ surfer in a van driven off a cliff; and a rockin’ swimmer who takes to a pool with no water.

You would think everyone would be satisfied by this conclusion, but they are not, instead repeating the cycle, but with a bigger body count and so on. The characters are so strange, even with director Rene Daalder’s foreign direction skills, they act like they are in a stage play in an actual stage play. It gives the movie a real meta scenario, even if they don’t know it.

But to think my mother saw this at a first-run theater in the ’70s: What other skeletons does she have in the closet in there? More importantly, is Andrew Stevens in there? We’ll never know. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Don’t judge a movie by its cover. In the case of Express to Terror, the reason is because it’s actually the feature-length pilot of NBC’s legendarily colossal failure of a television series, Supertrain, which lasted all of nine episodes. (Okay, now you can judge it.)

Possessing a boner for rail travel, the CEO of TransAllied Corporation (Keenan Wynn, The Crowded Sky) accepts the U.S. Department of Transportation’s request to construct an atomic-powered choo-choo train with unlabeled gumdrop-button controls to make it go coast to coast in 36 hours. The end result, aka Supertrain, is so luxurious, it has everything: a bar, a gym, a sauna, a swimming pool, a discotheque, red carpet, an elevator, Nina Talbot and a flaming hairstylist with two electric dryers!

Well, almost everything — as we learn, it lacks ashtrays, Maalox and suspense.

Add “competent security” to the list, considering Supertrain’s maiden voyage is fraught with repeated attempts on the life of Mike (crooner Steve Lawrence), a gambling-addicted passenger in debt to the mob. Meanwhile, Mike falls for the ditzy, abused wife (Char Fontane, The Night the Bridge Fell Down) of his would-be assassin (Don Stroud, Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off). Mike’s dandy, Peaky Blinders-capped pal (Don Meredith, Mayday at 40,000 Feet!) condemns the romance, because she looks like she “reads Corn Flakes boxes.” (To be fair, he’s not wrong.)

Also aboard Supertrain are Stella Stevens, George Hamilton, Robert Alda, Vicki Lawrence and Fred Williamson. None sticks out because all play second fiddle — if not relegated to last chair — to Steve Lawrence’s pickle of a primary storyline. He brings all the intensity and nuance he would to his finest performance: as himself, hosting TV’s Foul-Ups, Bleeps & Blunders. Only if director Dan Curtis (Burnt Offerings) were helming a game show could his leading man fit snugly in the role’s demands.

By comparison, The Love Boat looks like James A. Michener. Strangely, this disaster-adjacent pilot is written by two people who should have known — or typed — better: soon-to-be Oscar-winning scribe Earl W. Wallace (Witness) and crime-fiction icon Donald E. Westlake. Whether they were just taking a check or network interference gummed up the works, Express to Terror is, ending aside, slow enough to qualify as a sedative. All a-snore! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Good help is hard to find. That’s true today as it was in, oh, for the sake of argument, let’s say ′74. Palo Alto tramway management finds out the hard way when a disgruntled former employee — fired for being drunk on the job — sabotages the mechanical system, leaving a cable car hovering at 8,700 feet as treacherous winds approach. Lesson learned: Terminated workers should be escorted off the property.

Inside the cable car, the guide (bubble gum popster Bobby Sherman) does his best to reassure his seven passengers. Among them are agoraphobe John Astin (Wacky Taxi), pickpocket Severn Dardin (Saturday the 14th), philanderer Ross Martin (TV’s The Wild Wild West) and old bat Ruth McDevitt (The Birds), who’s only concern is her goddamn $8 flower hat.

From director Gordon Hessler (Pray for Death), Skyway to Death was the earlier of two stranded-cable-car movies made for TV in the disaster-film heyday. At 67 minutes, it’s also the shortest; oddly, that does not work in its favor, feeling like a crawl compared to 1979’s three-hour-plus Hanging by a Thread. How the latter’s producer, Irwin Allen, got away with not citing Skyway as source material is a mystery, because Thread copies this one beat for beat, from the jinxed chopper rescue attempt to the them’s-the-brakes conclusion. —Rod Lott