Think about all the things that would be difficult to do if you no longer had sight: Run. Climb. Avoid barbed wire.

All these are encountered by the protagonist of Sam Curtain’s Beaten to Death, a jarring Australian film that packs 48 hours of hell into a tight 92 minutes. Prepare to feel pummeled.

Barely surviving an assault his wife does not, the horrifically injured Jack (Thomas Roach of Curtain’s Blood Hunt) seeks help in rural Tasmania. The first person he comes across, Ned (newcomer David Tracy), an imposing side of beef, drives Jack back to retrieve his dead spouse. There, Ned sees the man Jack was forced to kill in self-defense: Ned’s brother. Awkward!

To say Ned hungers for vengeance — and gets it — is an understatement, as Jack spends much of the time blindfolded, bloodied and muddied. While Beaten to Death isn’t a case of wall-to-wall violence, its many sequences of brutality certainly knock those walls down. If any piece of Curtain’s movie will live in infamy, it’s going to be the most immersive ocular-trauma shot the screen has witnessed. Prepare to wince and cringe.

Reliance on the sparse outdoors gives the film a mythic quality. In fact, remove the smartphones, cars and other minor bits of set dressing and it’s not hard to imagine this tale taking place in the Old West, whether in a spaghetti Western or from the pages of Jonah Hex. To his credit, Curtain chops up the timeline so certain aspects of the story aren’t revealed right away. We don’t need to immediately see this cat-and-mouse survival thriller’s ignition point to get caught in its considerably tangled net. —Rod Lott

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Seeking human connection, the balding, bullied Neal finds it in the hands of Perla, a sex worker. She plies her trade at the kind of massage parlor one speaks of with air quotes.

It’s also the kind of place that attracts gang robberies. During just that, Neal, dressed only in his tighty-whities, shifts into White Knight mode, rescuing Perla not just from the scene of the crime, but her dead-end career tugging at strangers’ junk. Circumstances force them to flee town with their lives and little else.

As the unlikely couple of Rub’s sympathetic but tragic heart, unknowns Micah Spayer and Jennifer Figuereo are terrific. Neither embody the movies’ idea of conventional leads, which is honestly half the film’s appeal. Pretty Woman, this ain’t.

While Spayer has the showier role as an incel with an uncontrollable temper, Figuereo’s is, I’d argue, the more difficult to pull off: making us believe she has feelings for Neal that go beyond convenience. I wish the supporting cast members operated at their skill level. Neal’s ruthless co-workers act like they’re in a comedy, and poorly.

Rub isn’t a joke, although the tagline of “Not all endings are happy” sure has a winking tastelessness not present in Christopher Fox’s first feature. Its initial half works well, but once Neal and Perla hit the road with no place to go, the movie doesn’t seem to have a destination locked down either. A dinner scene among a table of wayward souls breaking bread in particular grates with fabricated emotion; Rub does its best trafficking in the dark, like employing psychedelic animation to convey the drug-induced panic on Neal’s face. —Rod Lott

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Wedding bells are ringing … until they don’t, when the bride decides she can’t go through with the nuptials and flees. To find her, the gobsmacked groom sends his seven groomsmen on a “containment mission” — odd word choice, if not for all of them being highly trained assassins, would-be spouses included.

Til Death Do Us Part. Get it?

From Timothy Woodward Jr., director of 2020’s The Call, the colorful thriller plays like a siege picture, as the bride (Natalie Burn, Mechanic: Resurrection) holes herself up in a house whose threshold the groomsmen attempt to penetrate. As they do, the bride goes mano y womano against them, whether using a chainsaw, a golf club or considerable martial arts skills that can’t be easy to execute while wearing a wedding gown.

These balletically choreographed fight sequences are the strongest minutes of Til Death Do Us Part; as a showcase for Burn’s pure physicality and athleticism, the film succeeds. Outside of that, it’s a mess. We’re made to feel the pain of every punch of a tussle, until the soundtrack suddenly does a tonal 180˚ by pulling a cover of “Rockin’ Robin” or a Frankie Valli soundalike single from its jukebox. In this way and others, the movie is often at odds with itself.

While many of the groomsmen look and behave like Tarantino cast-offs, best man Cam Gigandet (2017’s The Magnificent Seven) dances (sometimes literally) through his part as if he were competing against George Clooney for the lead in a comic caper set at a charm school. Meanwhile, an unrecognizable Jason Patric (Speed 2: Cruise Control) pops up in a super-sober subplot I don’t believe was designed to confuse its audience as long as it does.

One thing that is designed to pull the proverbial wool is the movie advertising itself as “from the creator of Final Destination.” While Jeffrey Reddick serves as a primary producer alongside Burn and Woodward, he’s not credited with the script. Til Death Do Us Part lives not only in a different genre, but has none of that franchise’s cleverness or entertainment ROI. Consider that a divorce. —Rod Lott

One of the last features to showcase ailing Boris Karloff and his iconic work, Targets is a long-admired, rarely seen treatise on the old-school way of moviemaking as the new school leads the way. It also predicts, sadly, the way well-armed gunmen will undertake thrill-killing by any means necessary — an entertaining blueprint, if you will.

Targets is also the debut of a kinder kind of director Peter Bogdanovich, long before Tatum O’Neal had a sip of vodka, dating soon-deceased Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten and, worst of all, making At Long Last Love. Sorry!

Based on the real-life shootings at the University of Texas at Austin campus by Charles Whitman in 1966, the film is about the unmotivated actions of the personable Bobby (Tim O’Kelly). Those include killing his entire family, shooting at drivers on the highway and then headed for the local drive-in. Meanwhile, horror legend Orlok (Karloff) has decided to quit acting, but shows up at one last event: the premiere of his new picture (depicted with Karloff clips from Roger Corman’s The Terror) at the local drive-in.

Worlds collide when the madman confronts the monster, in a scene that is stilted but emotional, especially knowing the movie uses the basis for workplace and school shootings that continue to thrive in our violent culture. The last 50-plus years have seen Targets become more chilling and downright scary, even if Whitman’s name has been lost to time.

Bogdanovich’s film is incredibly well-made, with a great script and great characters; the duality between Bobby and Orlok is apparent. O’Kelly is terrific as the mild-mannered lad with the brooding veneer of a psycho; it’s the way real killers should act on screen, instead of being a carbon-copy of Charles Manson.

Targets is a wholly engaging picture of a fictionally creative mind against the horror of a psychotic mind. Like Stephen King’s Rage or Judas Priest’s music, it targets the art, the artists and how the diseased mind works, good or bad. Either way, Targets respects the filmic past while it immolates the immediate future. —Louis Fowler

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One of Britain’s more notorious serial killers, John Christie claimed at least eight victims in the 1940s and ’50s. Thankfully, given its potency, 10 Rillington Place depicts precious few. The film by The Boston Strangler director Richard Fleischer limits itself to events in 1949, when the down-on-their-luck Evans family rents a room in Christie’s flat.

A thumb of a man in unassuming suspenders and spectacles, Christie (Richard Attenborough) redefines manipulative with his new tenants, illiterate workingman Tim (John Hurt, 2014’s Hercules) and brand-new mother Beryl (Judy Geeson, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush). Christie possesses a roving eye and accompanying urges for Mrs. Evans. When she gets pregnant again — not ideal as they’re barely scraping by — Christie all too eagerly volunteers to perform a scraping of his own.

From there, 10 Rillington Place goes to horrific places. Time has not diluted the film’s ability to shock, not even for watchers desensitized by contemporary true-crime series about Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and their sick ilk. While staged with professional excellence by Fleischer, the movie’s primary source of impact is Attenborough. His childlike psychopath will forever change subsequent viewings of his happy-go-lucky Dr. Hammond in Jurassic Park. His Christie is unforgettable. In one scene, Attenborough seamless goes from confident to terrified to calm to sexual over the course of a single action. He’s perfect casting.

Ditto for Hurt, whose beleaguered Tim undergoes a transition from boarish to sympathetic in the face of tragedy. Make no mistake, the real-life events within the Notting Hill address were nothing less. While Fleischer dares to “go there,” so to speak, Rillington never feels tacky or crass. After all, it’s just a movie, standing in front of a viewer, asking them to relive it. —Rod Lott

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