On the coast of Norway, Sofia (Kristine Kujath Thorp, Ninjababy) works as an offshore robotics researcher. She, her lab partner (Rolf Kristian Larsen, Cold Prey) and their snake-like robot camera are called into action — and accompanying NDA — to look for bodies when an oil platform topples into the water.

After the structure explodes, the Saga oil company overlords are quick to blame a gas leak from the well. Sofia, however, is not so sure. In typical disaster-movie fashion, she believes the threat comes from underneath the ocean floor. Indeed, as fractures and slides grow in number and size, hundreds and hundreds of wells are endangered — not to mention any nearby countries.

As with The Wave and The Quake, which share several producers and screenwriter Harald Rosenløw-Eeg, The Burning Sea possesses a rock-solid understanding of what makes this subgenre work best: by establishing characters — not caricatures, Mr. Emmerich — before throwing all the Bad Stuff at them. Otherwise, you’re just a CGI lightshow with no reason to care.

Fresh from helming The Quake, John Andreas Andersen already knows this. Although that 2019 film was a sequel, The Burning Sea gives us an all-new cast of realistic people, capably led by Thorp. The second half makes the event extremely personal for Sofia by trapping the man she loves (Henrik Bjelland, Now It’s Dark), so the stakes hit close to home and her literal home. But worry not, fans of global decimation: The effects are truly incredible, too. —Rod Lott

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A Sky Korea jet airliner is bound for Hawaii — and doom — in Emergency Declaration, because one of its passengers is a terrorist. Cold, calculated and no doubt crazed, Yim Si-wan’s disgraced biochemist slices open his armpit and sews a container of a deadly virus into it just prior to boarding. Once in flight, he fishes it out and lets ‘er loose, with the intent to kill everyone aboard.

On the ground, a police sergeant (Parasite papa Kang-ho Song) is alerted to a video threat the terrorist uploaded the previous day, and races against time to learn the man’s identity. It’s extra-important considering the sergeant’s wife is on that plane.

Needless to say, Jae-rim Han’s first film since 2017’s award-winning The King is not recommended for anyone with immediate travel plans consisting of a hop over an ocean. To everyone else, however, Emergency Declaration arrives as a slick, mostly satisfactory update on the 1970s airborne disaster film, swapping out the mad bomber for a more modern antisocial scientist.

I only wish it ended around the 1:40 mark, where it felt natural. Instead, the South Korean film continues for almost another hour, as Han throws more problems at the plane’s already fucked-up flight plan. Among this final (over)stretch is a scenario that practically calls for a sweaty, white-knuckled Robert Hays to take the captain’s chair. —Rod Lott

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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

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