Adapted from one of his own short stories — this particular one featuring his comic-book creation of Ms. Tree, who does not appear in the film — Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market finds prolific author Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition) transferring his criminal mind to feature films for the third time, moving from killer-Mommy thrillers to the corner store. Viewers will end up with more than a pack of cigs and a Dr Pepper Icee.

The same year that Fox’s 24 series made split-screen vogue again, writer/director Collins took the concept further by filling his frame with as many as four screens at once, each displaying a different angle of the same scene. Presented as an unbroken story, Real Time depicts a January robbery of an Iowa convenience store by two drug-hungry lowlifes, and Collins tells his tale almost entirely through the shop’s security-camera footage, with snippets of amateur video as supplemental material. Such a structure allows the story to thrive on the lowest of budgets; so does a running time as tight the knots of a veteran yachtsman. This is a case of turning a project’s challenges into attributes.

With pop radio piped through the store’s P.A. system providing stark contrast to the deadly situation, our felonious duo takes everyone inside hostage. This includes a cop plagued by Montezuma’s revenge, a jailbait shoplifter, a mother and her ballerina child, a douche of a businessman and a very pregnant woman; the latter is played by ’80s scream queen Brinke Stevens (Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity), and it’s nice to see her in a down-to-earth role where she isn’t present strictly to disrobe.

At the time of this Siege, sales of DVD players had yet to hit their peak, and Collins makes creative use of the technology by allowing viewers to go nuts with the multiangle feature. Jumping around is hardly required to enjoy the movie, however; as I did, you may as well forget about the remote and just let the hostage drama unfold as the filmmakers intended. At once realistic and yet just pulpy enough to let you know Real is fiction, the movie boasts a uniqueness that makes up for deficiencies in the overbaked performances of the robbers (Tom Keane and Chad Hoch), who seem seconds away from screaming, “Attica! Attica! Attica!” —Rod Lott

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Hammer Films’ The Snorkel opens with a long, silent sequence in which black widower Paul Decker (Peter van Eyck, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse) methodically sets up an elaborate death trap for his wife, apparently drugged into unconsciousness on the couch. After sealing the room shut, he rigs it to flood with natural gas while he lie safely in the crawlspace, accessible via secret door underneath the carpet. He’s in no danger of asphyxiation, thanks to the scuba gear he wears, from which this psychological thriller takes its utterly silly-sounding name. (Even sillier? The credit that reads, “John Holmes’ dog ‘Flush’ as ‘Toto.'”)

The deliberate precision Decker takes suggests these steps have become a routine. He has done this before; he knows exactly what he’s doing. And so does director Guy Green (The Magus), for The Snorkel is a superb Hitchcock imitation.

The dead woman’s gangly teenage daughter, Candy (Mandy Miller, The Man in the White Suit), immediately accuses Paul as the killer, beyond a Shadow of a Doubt. She still suspects him of killing her father, too, in a boating “accident” several years prior. Thus, at the core, we have a locked-room mystery in which, privy to the solution from frame one, we’re just waiting for the other characters to catch up.

How Green manages to wring suspense from that, I’ll never know, especially since we know those characters will, given the times. In ever-noble black and white, The Snorkel presents one of the more perverse methods of murder the screen has seen to date, and that uniqueness — the posters classify it as a “gimmick,” which sounds too William Castle-esque — goes a long way in appeal. It also grants instant menace to van Eyck, who looks so evil and creepy sitting quietly in that apparatus, no acting is necessary. —Rod Lott

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