Gossip columnist Walter Winchell appears in the prologue of Single Room Furnished to heap praise upon its late lead actress, Jayne Mansfield, calling it the work of “the dramatic star she always hoped to be.” Strong words coming from a man whose last name is now equated with libel. In other words, don’t you believe him. She’s not good, but the movie is awful.

Mansfield stretches more than her shirts by daring to play a woman with three different hair colors. Her sad story as Johnnie/Mae/Eileen — all the same character, just in different stages in a miserable life — is told to an angry teen girl (“Oh, you … foreigner!” she barks at her mother) by her father in the apartment building where it all went down. You get three stories in one, none of them worth your time, all in community-theater monologues you’d walk out of.

In the first, Frankie (Martin Horsey) and Johnnie recall the night they met, and she mopes over unmade egg salad sandwiches. He talks like Dustin Hoffman after getting kicked in the head by a horse. Twice. In the next tale, Mae finds herself pregnant and seeks the solace in Charley (Fabian Dean), her lumpy schmo of a neighbor.

He’s got his own girl troubles, as the marina fishmonger Flo (Dorothy Keller) has the hots for him. She’s quite a catch: “Charlie, where do clouds come from?” It’s like watching a courtship between Richard Kind and Frances Farmer. She gives him crabs (from the ocean), and he goes and plays with his balls (on a pool table). Then he proposes marriage, even if they’ve never gone on a date. So does the young john of Eileen, now a prostitute, until he breaks her doll and she makes fun of his monkey ears.

It’s the most heavyhanded melodrama imaginable. You could tell Mansfield thought she was truly going to win an Academy Award. Where was her head at? —Rod Lott

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If the thought of watching a low-budget slasher/Goth musical co-starring Paris Hilton makes your blood run cold, you’d do best to stop reading now, because you won’t find a truer example of this incredibly rare sub-genre than Repo! The Genetic Opera, from Saw sequel director Darren Lynn Bousman. If, however, you find yourself intrigued, by all means read on … and please seek some obviously much-needed psychiatric help.

Joining the hotel heiress are The Devil’s Rejects’ Bill Mosely and Skinny Puppy’s Ogre as the scions of Paul Sorvino, the ruthless owner of Geneco, the medical corporation that essentially rules a future world where elective organ transplantation is the norm. Diagnosed with an inoperable fatal disease, Sorvino sets in motion his plan to gain his final revenge on a past romantic rival (Anthony Head), which involves the corruption of the man’s sheltered young daughter (Spy Kids’ Alexa Vega).

Also along for the ride is a still-fetching Sarah Brightman as Blind Mag, Geneco’s spokeswoman, whose upcoming retirement comes at a significant price. The film’s title references Head’s day job, which requires him to repossess the organs of unlucky Geneco customers unable to make their payments.

Bloody and over-the-top, the film plays like an oddly compelling combination of Ken Russell’s Tommy and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, and while it doesn’t measure up to either of those films, it does feature impressive production values for what was obviously a very low budget, and a wordless cameo from Joan Jett, which is the best kind of cameo there is. —Allan Mott

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Times Square is the kind of movie I love not despite its flaws, but because of them. Rather than be put off by its lack of authenticity and enormous leaps of logic, I find myself instead pulled into its fantasy and want to stay there for far longer than I am allowed. It’s not great. It’s probably not even good. I don’t care.

Directed by Allan Moyle, who also made Pump Up the Volume (which is great), the film follows two mismatched young girls who meet in a hospital room while being tested for their psychosomatic fits. Pam (Trini Alvarado) is the daughter of a well-known New York councilman. Nikki (Robin Johnson) is a charismatic delinquent who likes to cause trouble. The two run away together and become famous, thanks to a popular radio DJ (Tim Curry) who relishes the irony of the councilman’s daughter being a street kid on the very street her father has been tasked to transform.

In reality, the girls would have been torn apart by the titular location within minutes of their arrival, but Times Square is a fairy tale. Viewed as such, it is a well-made and moving one, thanks especially to a stand-out performance by Johnson (who should have gone on to much bigger things, instead of her only other film, Splitz). Equally important is the amazing soundtrack, which features not only the best music of the era, but also two great original songs performed by the leads.

I can’t recommend that you check Times Square out, because you’ll probably hate it, but I love it all the same. I’ll take uplifting musical fantasy over gritty, depressing reality every single time. How does that not make sense? —Allan Mott

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If you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing a movie at Austin, Texas’ Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, then you know what to expect from the fifth entry in Synapse Films’ 42nd Street Forever compilation series: namely, some of weirdest and wildest trailers and other pre-show miscellany unknown to mankind. After Chuck Heston takes time out from his tennis game to explain the MPAA ratings system, the hour-and-a-half fun gets started, roughly organized into categories like martial arts, sex, sci-fi, action, movies with black people in them and super-shitty children’s films.

Highlights include Lucky Seven, full of kid ninjas with names like Little Fatty and Bumpkin; Birds Do It, Bees Do It, David L. Wolper’s animal-fucking doc with a kangaroo fetus crawling up its mama; Chatterbox, the infamous “talking vagina” comedy; Danish Love Acts, which shows just that; and Caged Virgins, which will make you wonder, “Hey, why is there a bat on her bush?”

Italian actioners and/or James Bond rip-offs abound, as do boobs, especially in Jack Hill’s Sorceress and Stacey!, which established Andy Sidaris’ trademark 60 JPH (jugs per hour) formula. Oddly, some of the strangest trailers are for the few comedies, such as The 3 Supermen in the West (man, I’d kill a hobo for a box set of this slapstick superhero series); a musical number for Putney Swope, Robert Downey Sr.’s race satire in the ad world; and Norman … Is That You?, in which Redd Foxx copes with the realization that his son is gay, and Wayland Flowers and Madame are in it, for some unexplained reason. Probably the gayness.

It’s hard to believe any youngster ever wanted to see The Magic Christmas Tree — “and to add to the fun,” says the narrator, “there’s a happy witch! The runaway lawn mower!” — or Pinocchio’s Birthday Party. But I can imagine they’d go apeshit for the Tarzan knock-off Karzan, Master of the Jungle, not to mention a crispy, piping-hot Flavos Shrimp Roll! Mmm-mmm! —Rod Lott

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With that credo that “Any movie can be great at 2 1/2 minutes,” director Joe Dante’s Trailers from Hell website makes the leap to DVD with The Best of Trailers from Hell!: Volume One. Dante and pals John Landis, Eli Roth and Edgar Wright all take turns providing commentary for the coming attractions to their favorite genre pictures — not Mystery Science Theater 3000-style, but purely informational. It’s like the coolest film class in the history of ever.

B-movie fans will come away from the hourlong free-for-all with two frames of mind:
1. “Man, that reminded me a lot of stuff I really need to see again.”
2. “Man, that reminded me a lot of stuff I really need to check out.”

For me, that latter camp includes the proto-slasher Horrors of the Black Museum, Paul Bartel’s giallo-influenced Private Parts, David Cronenberg’s biological horror of Rabid, Roger Vadim’s lesbian-vampire outing Blood and Roses, and the possession picture The Sentinel. Of the four hosts, Roth is the most enjoyable, simply for how infectious his spirit is, whether the clip is for a grindhouse cheapie like Three on a Meathook or Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Birds.

To provide bang for your buck, the disc also includes a full-length feature — well, 67 minutes, anyway — of the Lionel Atwill/Fay Wray cheapie The Vampire Bat, plus two vintage cartoons from the 1930s — including Ub Iwerks’ “The Headless Horseman” — that my 5-year-old went ape-shit over. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Trailers from Hell!