If you're in the mood for a shifty, slow-burning thriller with a couple tricks up its sleeve: The Tall Man (2012, Pascal Laugier)

The title character in Pascal Laugier's The Tall Man is a figure of legend, spun out of fear and grief by the residents of a dying mining community to explain the mysterious disappearances of several children in the area. Jessica Biel, doing well by a difficult role that hopefully points towards a more interesting future for her, is Julia Denning, the town’s doctor, a mantle she inherited from her husband. One night, the Tall Man comes for her son David, and she frantically gives pursuit. From there, Laugier keeps the ground moving violently under us. While his tricky script is the film’s chief asset, his direction is impressive in ways that may not be immediately apparent — he constructs a good sense of a dead town consuming itself in the wake of economic catastrophe and perpetuating cycles of abuse and neglect. While it should be apparent that the film has far more on its mind than a simple supernatural conundrum, the knotty moral issues it ultimately brings up leave far more to chew on than expected, and prove disturbing in ways that aren’t generally provided by the average horror movie. And even when it looks like all the answers have been proffered, the plaintive question that closes the film is left to hang as an ambiguous echo. In its own unassuming way, The Tall Man means to leave a bruise. And it does.

If you're in the mood for an over-the-top splatterfest, Aussie style: Nightmares (1980, John D. Lamond)

Is it possible for a suspense thriller to succeed if there’s no suspense in it? In the case of the Australian backstage horror film Nightmares, the answer is: “Sure. Why not?” While structurally similar to any number of murder mysteries and containing a goodly number of killer-POV shots assumedly meant to obscure the identity of said killer, there’s never any doubt who's butchering the cast of a local stage production: twitchy, sex-phobic lead actress Helen Selleck (Jenny Neumann), who's trying to make a go of getting by in normal society, but is stymied by her broken-glass-induced psychosis at every opportunity. (You’d be nuts too if you inadvertently caused your mother’s gruesome death in a car accident by trying to stop her from being groped by a male paramour and then had a doctor straight-up tell you it was entirely your fault.) So, what to do with a film that moves like a mystery but lacks the mystery component?

There’s a giveaway line from the production’s pompous director (Max Phipps) when berating a headstrong actresses’ need for justification for her dialogue: “The literal meaning of the words in this piece is unimportant! The beauty and drama is contained in the rhythm!” From the start, director John D. Lamond goes full-throttle on lunatic energy. He draws heavily from the giallo genre — there’s a pounding score, a black-gloved killer and a savagely striking compositional sense, best demonstrated by a terrific early nightmare sequence featuring roaming Steadicam photography, frantic edits timed to the sound of smashing glass and a bombastic orchestral score. Graphic sex piles up next to graphic violence, often within the same scene (more than one stalk-and-slash sequence features a nude female). Whether it’s a genuine artistic statement related to Helen’s twisted view of desire as essentially poisonous, or just Lamond’s gleeful indulgence of inflamed perversity (horror is, among other things, about base reactions and exciting the senses), it doesn't really matter. The potency is the same. As a suspense flick, Nightmares ain’t much, but as lurid stab-happy exploitation, it’s aces.

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If you’re in the mood for an emotionally wrenching drama with a barnburner of a lead performance: The Deep Blue Sea (2011, Terence Davies)

“Beware of passion, Hester. It always leads to something ugly.”

Restraint, as both something to observe and ignore, is a key component of Terence Davies’s terrific adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea. As Hester Collyer, a married woman who finds herself drawn to Freddie Page, a brash RAF pilot (Tom Hiddleston) who prefers to avoid getting, as he says, “tangled up in other people's emotions,” Rachel Weisz is spectacularly good – a sure-footed center around which the film’s drama can coalesce. As she’s caught between two men, so is her Hester the emotional midway point between her dignified, stuffy husband William (Simon Russell Beale, giving a model of stiff-upper-lip acting) and the lively but loutish and thoughtlessly cruel Page. Hester can be given to grand gestures (the film starts with her attempting suicide), yet even at her showiest there’s a lingering pragmatism, a sense that all this small and quiet desperation is just that – small. (When she proclaims regarding the situation, “Tragedy is too big a word – sad perhaps, but hardly Sophocles,” she’s not being glib.) Weisz takes this difficult task of essaying a woman in thrall to her destructive melodramatic emotions even as she logically recognizes their unfeasibility and absolutely nails it to the wall. Every freighted pause, every half-hearted smile and every swallowed sob is deployed for maximum impact; in particular, Weisz gets more mileage out of misty eyes than most actresses can manage with the most outsized histrionics in their arsenal (seriously, check out the scene in the back of William’s car after the revelation of her infidelity).

If Weisz keeps a lid on Hester’s more explosive emotions, Davies uses his camera to externalize them. The Deep Blue Sea is sumptuously mounted – expressive without being showy about it, possessed of a fluid and grace that breathes robust life into the burnished, glowing visuals. The opening ten minutes makes for a ravishing start, a gorgeous bit of reminiscence that compresses potential pages of exposition into a handful of striking shots while using matching angles to yoke the past and the present together, and that evocative style carries through to the meat of the story. If a scene calls for Weisz to pensively stare into space while smoking, Davies will light that smoke like a floating, curling avatar for the flow of the film’s timeline; when asked to have Weisz lose herself in a flashback in a subway tunnel, Davies crossfades the two events together and works with an exquisite pan across a sea of bodies until a sharp cut snaps us back to Weisz’s cracking visage. There are some moments of catharsis, some bold moments of howling rage – mostly courtesy of Hiddleston, a charming rake who becomes a raw nerve when cornered and finds a way to make a gift of a shilling into the coldest gesture imaginable – but the true force of the film comes from the contrast between the inner life of Hester and the outer world Davies surrounds her with. It’s the restraint that makes The Deep Blue Sea so damned heartbreaking.

If you’re in the mood for a truly unique movie with ghosts, gangsters and strange sex stuff: Keyhole (2011, Guy Maddin)

Cinematic ghost stories generally aim for the limbic response of fright. It’s not often given to such a film to aim higher, to capture a genuine sense of the uncanny. Yet, for all its frustrations, that’s exactly what Canadian master Guy Maddin has done with his defiantly odd tale Keyhole. Ostensibly, Keyhole is about gangster Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric, suitably affected) and his attempts to reconcile with his estranged wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) after a shoot-out with police leaves him, his gang and a few hostages holed up inside the house they used to live in together. But, for better and worse, Maddin isn’t after anything that straightforward. This is narrative as fragments of a broken mirror, oblique and reflective; if the film follows that base narrative, it does so in a glancing manner and only as a vehicle for an airing-out of some potent thematics. Absentee fathers become ghosts while dead sons haunt them. Regrets and past failures shadow Ulysses on his journey through this cavernous mansion not as emotional specters but as genuine corporeal ones. The hero’s name is no accident, though the reference, like many, is a mere signpost hinting at a deeper assemblage, a coming-together of secrets, discoveries, memories, reconstructions. As Ulysses says, “So many locked doors, and they all have to be opened.”

If I’m making this sound like a slog, I should mention that Maddin’s formal dexterity and arch sense of humor still results in some smashing stretches of exciting cinema. For every mysterious and obscure moment, there’s a bizarrely funny one, like a quick shot of a man with a feather duster cleaning off a wall-mounted penis. And while he’s working in a slower, more purposely stilted register than his more fevered recent works (appropriately, Keyhole feels like a reeling-back towards his earlier works – closer to Careful than Cowards Bend the Knee), that just makes the sequences with quick-cut flurries of spasmodic imagery all the more effective – in particular, a scene where Ulysses is zapped in a bicycle-powered electric chair, with shock cuts interweaving the grimacing gangster with leering onlookers and a French hooker dancing like Salome matching the erratic rhythm of the physical shocks, is top-drawer Maddin. Near the film’s end, a character proclaims, “I’m only a ghost, but a ghost isn’t nothing.” As diaphanous as Keyhole is, as often as it feels like hands trying to grasp empty air, that much is true – it isn’t nothing. There’s definitely a spark here that lingers.

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If you're in the mood for a hard-boiled noir with a neat twist and two great stars: I Walk Alone (1948, Byron Haskin)

Even without its unexpected narrative wrinkle, Byron Haskin’s noir tale I Walk Alone would be worthwhile for the peek it offers at the then-dawning talent of its two leads. Burt Lancaster plays Frankie Madison, a former Prohibition bootlegger who at the outset has just been released from a 14-year stint in prison, while Kirk Douglas plays Noll Turner, an unctuous nightclub owner and Madison’s former partner. When Madison gets out of the joint, he immediately comes sniffing around Turner’s territory, figuring he’s been staked in the successful nightclub via a good-faith agreement the two made during the Prohibition years. Things, of course, don’t go that smoothly. The bulk of the film, then, is the friction between the two men (with a jilted nightclub singer played by Kay Lawrence caught in the middle), and the two rising stars make a satisfying study in contrast – Lancaster boiled harder than steel, quick to anger and full of fast-talking bravado, against Douglas, a slimy and deliberate cad with a gambler’s confidence and a salesman’s snaky smile. I Walk Alone was the first time the frequent costars appeared together, and it’s easy to see why the pairing became popular; there’s a striking chemistry between the two men, a sharp give-and-take that sees both excelling but neither dominating.

While its structure and beats are familiar, I Walk Alone has a fairly inspired complication that rears its head about halfway through: Madison, after being stripped of his mistaken belief that Turner would welcome him back as a partner, scrapes together a crew and decides to muscle his way back in, only to find that times have changed and things just ain’t that easy anymore. Without giving too much away, Madison is effectively confused out of any ill intentions by the mutating nature of business; his skill set applies to a way of life long since past, and if he triumphs at the end, it’s only because Turner makes the mistake of trying to best him using those old methods. The noir genre often reflected postwar malaise and paranoia, and in I Walk Alone we have a guy who had to leave his home for a while and finds everything changed when he gets back, a fact he has a lot of trouble adjusting to. There’s a tough post-WWII metaphor if I’ve ever seen one. I Walk Alone isn’t a lost classic (Haskin’s direction is often visually flat, and Lawrence is a weak link), but it’s robust enough to be worth a watch.

If you're in the mood for a sobering drama from overseas: Oslo, August 31st (2011, Joaquim Trier)

The first thing we see recovering drug addict Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) do in Joaquim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st is fill his pockets with stones and walk into a river. His mental state remains consistent from there. Based on Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s novel “Le feu follet,” Oslo follows Anders through a day in which he’s allowed to leave the treatment center in which he resides and go back to the city for a job interview. He’s been clean for six months, but as he encounters old friends and family in the course of his day, we see this hasn’t much helped his emotional makeup; floundering in despair and self-loathing, Anders is a wreck, a throbbing raw nerve spitting out accusations and daggers of self-hate in about equal measure. He’s a man drawn towards annihilation chafing against a support system expressly designed to keep him from it, and Lie is very good at embodying the rage and confusion that consume this pained young man. His expressive eyes are key, as is his keen sense of dialogue tone; when he refers to himself as “a spoilt brat who fucked up,” there’s a latent element of pity angling there, but Lie coats it in castigatory disappointment so it feels less like an angsty whine and more like a barrel-bottom hard truth.

Lie climbs expertly into Anders’s skin, but Trier wants us in there too. The idea with Oslo seems to be to get the audience to a place where Anders’s depressive outlook can be understood and felt to a degree, and in this Trier’s empathetic direction is invaluable. Where handheld photography is often used to convey a sense of urgent verisimilitude, here it seems to reflect the unsteady, teetering nature of Anders’s emotions – realism as expressionism. Further, when Trier does go for a stylistic gamble, it tends to pay off beautifully. Especially impressive is a scene where Anders sits in a café and listens to the world around him; as his ears pick out snippets of conversations, it becomes clear that every bit he catches (a recitation of a bucket list here, a oblique discussion of Kurt Cobain there) is feeding back into his own dire outlook, with all other context pared away.

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If you're in the mood for a tale of corporate malfeasance leading to the creation of ravenous zombies that doesn't have Milla Jovovich in it: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006, Lloyd Kaufman)

Chintzy musical gore comedies about Native American chicken zombies aren’t supposed to be as melancholy as Lloyd Kaufman’s Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. The tale of Arby, Wendy, the chicken franchise that comes between them and the defiled corpses that destroy everything in sight has the energy and chutzpah of the average Kaufman production, yet there’s also an air of defeat in it — on the metaphorical battleground of American Chicken Bunker, the war is being waged for the soul of America between corporate homogeny and indie funkiness, and homogeny has every possible upper hand. His last few films have exuded a definite Us-vs.-Them attitude that reflects his towering frustration at the mainstream media and what he sees as the marginalization of truly independent media as well as a talismanic body-fluid roundelay (shit-blood-vomit-semen-repeat) that betrays some of the strangest body-horror this side of David Cronenberg, but here the frustration seems to have won out. Arby takes a job at American Chicken Bunker in order to be closer to activism-minded Wendy, and the economic compromises of this one young man cascade into a pile of bad decisions, spelling doom for him an all those around him; in a way, it’s Robert Bresson’s L’Argent, except with explosive diarrhea and by-hand castration.

That said, I have to then note that this in no way compromises the delicious surface pleasures offered up to us by Kaufman. No matter how dark the subtext gets, Poultrygeist is still a comedic gore movie (with occasional musical numbers!) about Native American chicken zombies overrunning an army-themed KFC-style restaurant and chowing down on any tender pink flesh that gets in their way. Like any good Troma-stamped production, it’s stuffed with wall-to-wall gore, exposed nubile flesh and a pronounced lack of anything resembling taste. This is a movie where bearded rednecks fuck chicken carcasses, Arby and Wendy perform a song surrounded by topless pink-shorted lesbians, a man goes through a meat grinder only to be resurrected as a talking sandwich and one character gets to deliver the line, “I don’t mean to complain, but there’s a severed penis in me sloppy Jose” in a ridiculous Irish accent. And all that happens before the chicken zombies show up, at which point things really go berserk. Bitter, offensive, idiotic and hilarious in equal measure, Poultrygeist is go-for-broke cinema at its most exhilarating.

If you're in the mood for a joyful blend of romance and violence: Dragons Forever (1988, Sammo Hung & Corey Yuen)

On paper it seems strange to admit that a work of art predominately occupied with men pummeling other men into bruised submission should be imbued with so much shameless, giddy joy. But the martial-arts genre is often a funny thing — given the right spin, a study of muscled flesh in violent motion can come off like an extreme form of bone-crunching slapstick. Jackie Chan has spent decades building film after film around this, where wonder at feats of inhuman athleticism dovetails with a healthy sense of the ridiculous, resulting in a good number of gut-laughs. Dragons Forever fits snugly into this idiom; as a showcase for the Three Brothers (Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao), it works not only as a cracking action film but as an amusing character comedy.

The film centers on a conflict between a chemical company and Miss Yip (Deannie Yip), who owns a fishery that she claims is falling victim to pollution. Into this situation comes Jackie Lung (Chan), a womanizing lawyer representing the company. He rounds up an old friend (Hung), an arms dealer, and tasks him with wooing Miss Yip in hopes of getting her to sell the fishery and drop the lawsuit while he does the same to Miss Yip’s cousin (Pauline Yueng) to acquire information. While the setup sounds convoluted, it flows surprisingly well given the number of complications and leads to a number of cute scenes (I especially liked Chan cunningly using a courtroom appearance to get a declaration of love from Yueng). The main attraction, though, is the fight scenes, and they don’t disappoint. Whether it’s Hung and Biao duking it out in Chan’s bedroom while Chan tries to keep them quiet, Chan being chased around a cruise ship by a gang of thugs or the three taking on machete-wielding adversaries in a nightclub, the choreography is top-notch. Sitting halfway between basher and romantic dramedy, Dragons Forever manages to fulfill the requirements of both genres expertly without taking away from either side. (Dragons Forever expires from Netflix Instant on September 18th.)

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If you're in the mood for a jaw-dropper of a '70s action cinema specimen featuring men climbing a mountain: The Eiger Sanction (1975, Clint Eastwood)

Climb that high up and it does funny things to your brain. Clint Eastwood’s espionage-on-a-mountain thriller The Eiger Sanction is, among other things, a daunting feat of old-school technical bravado. Eastwood stars as an art professor who used to moonlight for the government as an assassin who's been called back for one last job. Said job involves climbing a large mountain in Switzerland. The mountain-climbing action, most of it confined to the film’s second half, is terrifically rendered. Eastwood’s unfussy style of filmmaking, coupled with his insistence on making the climb look real by actually climbing a mountain, lends a slowly mounting tension to the rising action — the team of mountaineers creep up ever so slowly until, in a split second, something goes wrong. The film makes excellent use of its judicious location shooting — these are some gorgeous vistas and they’re wondrous to look at, even when Eastwood is hollering, “You AAAAASSSSSHOOOOOLLLEEE!” over them.

About that. There’s no way around it, so might as well barrel on through: In addition to being beautifully shot and satisfyingly tense, The Eiger Sanction is offensive, tasteless and completely nuts. The screenplay doubles down on laconic manly cool and ‘70s tough-guy attitude, piling up equal-opportunity offense and vulgar witticisms so high that the film breaks from sanity and flies off into the ether. No film with all its marbles intact would have an expository scene delivered while an albino is having his blood drained and replaced. (“With what?” snarls Clint.) A film with proper bearings wouldn’t have Clint say, “Yeah, I thought I'd given up rape but I've changed my mind,” and mean it as a charmingly roguish pick-up line. A film with both feet on the ground wouldn’t have a screamingly fey secondary villain with a little lapdog pointedly named — seriously — Faggot. In its combination of toxic sexual politics, striking quick-release action and unexpected cynicism towards global gamesmanship, The Eiger Sanction is a movie to watch with mouth permanently agape, wondering what amazement will stumble around the next corner.

If you're in the mood for a contemplative documentary featuring men ranching on a mountain: Sweetgrass (2010, Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor)

Sheep move in herds, thoughtlessly. Everyone knows that, right? But to watch Sweetgrass, an engrossing documentary about sheep-herders from Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor is to realize that description is inadequate. There’s a difference between moving thoughtlessly and without thought — the former implies daftness, wandering without a destination while the latter implies subservience to an implacable and unerring natural instinct, and it’s the latter we see on display here. The sheep are easy to manage when it comes down to an individual basis (we see ranchers pinning down unruly sheep and slipping dead skins over orphaned lambs in mostly successful attempt at bending the animals to their wills). But as a group, they stop being animals and become a force of nature, an undulating river of wool. There’s a striking sequence early on where the herd makes a wrong turn and gets marooned in a valley; the ranchers swear and shout and try to get the group moving, but they might as well be trying to uproot and replant the trees that surround them.

Clearly, these guys lead a tough life. Rather than tell you about this via talking-head testimonials or sympathetic narration, however, Barbash and Castaing-Taylor choose a more impressionistic approach meant to immerse you inside this world, with great emphasis on the arduous everyday tasks that have to be done just to assure the survival of the flock. The photography alternates between you-are-there handheld close-quarters shooting and enormous panoramic shots that highlight both the beauty and the vastness of the area, creating a clear contrast between the grueling routine of the men and the placid indifference surrounding them; meanwhile, the especially effective sound design is filled to the brim with echoes and howling wind and endless amounts of bleating. (I had no idea sheep had so many variant sounds in their sonic repertoire.) The effect is that of a constant sensory wearing-down, a forced exhaustion, so that when near film’s end one rancher abruptly breaks down and cuts loose with a cathartic blast of vituperative profanity, we understand exactly where he’s coming from. It’s a risky tactic, but ultimately rewarding.

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If you're in the mood for a rousing blend of testosterone and tears: Warrior (2011, Gavin O'Connor)

It’s a common thing to find a film that suffers from overindulgence in cliché. It’s another to find a film that reminds you why those clichés became accepted in the first place. Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior falls firmly into the latter camp. In this tale of estranged brothers both training for the same mixed-martial-arts tournament, there isn’t a plot point or an emotional beat played out here that you haven’t seen elsewhere before — it’s essentially a Wallace Beery wrestling movie updated to the MMA age, with family dysfunction added in for extra weepy power. It’s cheap and manipulative and hoary, shamelessly deploying every underdog trope it can scavenge. And I’ll be damned if it doesn’t unexpectedly work like gangbusters.

As well-spun as the script for Warrior is, it wouldn't fly without a capable cast to sell it. From top to bottom, the acting is as strong as the beefy guys in the cage during the climactic MMA tournament. Edgerton, as the elder brother having trouble making ends meet, is credibly scrappy and tough without being thuggish — an unassuming guy whose heart is his most dangerous muscle. Tom Hardy is a fierce ball of fire as the younger brother, a coiled bundle of furious energy hunched over like an especially angry bull and a solid counterpoint to the modest Edgerton. Nick Nolte's Oscar nomination for his role here was deserved: His portrayal of this wounded-lion, recovering alcoholic of a father figure, sheepishly trying to ingratiate himself back into the life of two men who have been too scarred by his past exploits to trust him, is a quiet marvel. Like its characters, Warrior is best when it's keeping its emotions tamped down — the climax features some outsized emotional breakdowns that push too hard to get those eyes watering. But overall, it's an unusually effective brawny tearjerker. You'll be one step of it the entire way, and you'll be into it anyway.

If you're in the mood for a creepy entry in the body-horror genre: Isolation (2005, Billy O'Brien)

Dan (John Lynch) has a cow that is obviously in a good deal of discomfort. The cow, hugely pregnant, is giving signs that it's ready to drop its calf soon, but something just isn't right. Orla (Essie Davis), the attending veterinarian, decides to delve into the poor cow to see what the problem might be. While she's elbow-deep, though, something inside the offending womb grabs ahold of her. When she manages to extricate her arm, she discovers that she's been bitten on the hand.

Billy O'Brien's queasy rural horror film Isolation has a lot of moments like that. It’s an intense shot of body horror, heavy on the cow intestines and built around shadowy glimpses of a spiny, skittering creature that should not be. Genetic manipulation is the bugbear here (Dan and Orla have accepted money to have Dan’s cows experimented on by the not-at-all ominous-sounding corporation Bovine Genetics Technology), but while some directors would use that as a cudgel against the audience, O’Brien is mostly interested in building enough atmosphere to choke a bull. O’Brien has a terrific sense of pacing and tension, exemplified (and personified) by an agonizing early scene where Dan, with the help of a standoffish squatter (Sean Harris), has to use a winch and a rope to ever-so-slowly pull out a mutated calf from inside its discomfited mother. Isolation is clearly a product of its influences – Cronenberg’s Shivers and The Brood both get visual nods, and the climax is pure Alien – but it stands on its own merits as an effectively tense bit of genre goods. (Isolation expires from Netflix Instant on September 9th.)

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If you're in the mood for a dark, disturbing, often-uncomfortable journey through a long-gone version of New York City: Cruising (1980, William Friedkin)

William Friedkin’s potent, pungent thriller Cruising opens with an echo of Taxi Driver — a beat cop (played by late character actor extraordinaire Joe Spinell) driving in his cruiser stares at male prostitutes on the streets outside and bemoans the state of things: “One day, this city’s gonna explode… Christ, what’s happening?” Shortly thereafter, the cop and his partner pick up two transvestite hookers for the purposes of indulging in the other, more prominent meaning behind the film’s title. Uncontrollable urges, whether the kind evinced by Spinell’s closet case or the more deadly kind indulged by the film’s sadomasochistic killer (who’s apt to close his killings with a hissed, “You made me do that”), are the driving force behind Cruising, as thorny and off-putting – yet compelling – a film as ever put out by the Hollywood machine.

The film certainly courts charges of homophobia – as undercover cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) delves deep into the leather-and-hankies S&M underworld of the gay underground in pursuit of a deranged man preying on pickups, one could certainly sense a level of demonization here. (Gay sex is freaky and will get you killed!) Except Friedkin’s a lot smarter than that – from the outset, he ties the club scenes together with driving punk rock, another form of brash outsiderdom that represented a break from the civilized world. Friedkin’s direction is visceral and unblinking – he only shies away from the graphic sex insofar as he needs to preserve an R rating, and the violent sequences are cut to the bone, showing death in a flurry of images and blood – and he gets an appropriately dazed performance from Pacino. Ultimately, Pacino’s climactic confrontation with the killer pales next to the confrontation of that previously unacknowledged uncontrollable urge — the terrific, ambiguous final shot shows a conflicted Pacino staring in the mirror, still feeling that urge, not knowing what to do with it now.

If you're in the mood for a clinically insane action movie where people erupt like meat balloons: Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991, Ngai Choi Lam)

There’s good versus evil, and then there’s Good Vs. Evil. The former has room for nuance and subtlety; the latter exists only to be blown up to comic-book proportions and decorated with extravagant grotesqueries. In this vein, few films come more comic-booky or grotesque than the amazing, ridiculous Hong Kong prison/kung-fu/splatter movie Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. Ricky, the hero, is pushed so far into god-mode invincibility that he stops being a person and instead feels like a brawny ideal – Pure Good made flesh.

People in this film aren’t beaten up when they can be dismembered, shattered or liquefied. Paper-mache heads are crushed, bodies are exploded and holes are punched straight through people in wet, meaty demonstrations of impossible strength. (Remember that exploding head sequence that capped the Daily Show when Craig Kilborn was still hosting? Riki-Oh.)
People turn into muscle-bound monsters, burst through walls like the Kool-Aid Man and cut their own intestines out just to have something with which to strangle an opponent. Ricky’s righteous fury renders him incapable of incapacitation – shoot him and he’ll act like nothing happened, punch him and he’ll grit his teeth and shrug it off, sever the tendon in his arm and he’ll just fucking tie it back together. The finale, set in a prison kitchen and featuring prominent use of an industrial-strength meat grinder, contains more spewing chunky tomato-paste carnage than any film not named Dead Alive. Giddily sick and energetic to a fault, Ricky is essentially kung-fu cinema if your idea of kung-fu cinema is a deranged Warner Brothers cartoon, and for a certain type of viewer, its entertainment value is astronomical.

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If you're in the mood for the kind of enjoyably doofy red-meat cinema that The Expendables films are consciously trying to evoke: Pentathlon (1994, Bruce Malmuth)

One of the hardest things I have to do as a cinephile is justify the incredible amount of junk I watch. I can come up with all manner of defenses involving culture and genre and audience desire — I’ve been doing it for years. But truthfully, it just boils down to the fact that movies like Bruce Malmuth’s Pentathlon make me happy. As much as I try to be all-encompassing in my tastes and I appreciate the highbrow and the challenging and the beautiful, there’s a huge part of me that just loves dumb shit. Which is to say, if you make a movie with Dolph Lundgren as a former East German Olympian who defects to America and finds himself set upon by his old coach, and then you go so far as to include a character shouting in all seriousness, “You’re a Nazi gone mad! You must be stopped!” as though it’s the gone-mad part that’s the problem… well, I’m all yours, Bunky.

Seriously, there’s a scene in here where a neo-Nazi dances to German hip-hop playing on his ghetto blaster while Lundgren’s trainer, a salt-of-the-earth black guy who owns a hamburger joint, grouses about the noise, and it’s played like that’s the sort of thing you see in movies all the time. It’s that professionalism in the face of low budgets and lower expectations that makes the difference, from where I stand. Pentathlon might be idiotic, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t like the cut of its B-movie jib anyway.

If you're in the mood for a very offbeat character study that includes scenes of people acting like animals and Silly Walking: Attenberg (2010, Athina Rachel Tsangari

They say you should start as you mean to go on. Taking this truism and running into the end zone with it, Athina Rachel Tsangari opens her strange and captivating Attenberg with the most awkward and least erotic lesbian tongue kissing you’re ever likely to see. With this one scene, Tsangari sets the dominant design – uncomfortable human interaction infused with the terror of fluid exchange, filmed in a consciously hermetic style favoring abrupt cuts and determined, deadpan framing. It’s an appropriate way to depict a emotionally stunted, withdrawn world, made all the more effective when the two kissing girls — protagonist Marina (Ariane Labed) and best friend/sexually open Bella (Evangelina Randou) – drop to their haunches and start to imitate warring animals. As Attenberg moves cautiously along its way, detailing Marina’s efforts to care for her dying father (Vangelis Mourikis) and maybe get to know an engineer (Dogtooth director Giorgos Lanthimos) with whom she works a little better, the animal game pops up a few times as a refuge from awkwardness.

Coupled with the recurring use of David Attenborough’s nature documentaries (the title comes from a malapropism of David’s name) and a father-daughter linguistic game involving rapid-fire rhyming, it becomes clear that Tsangari is using nonsense and imagination as a contrast to the ill-fitting, overly logic-bound human body — a popping of the bubble, if you will. That, ultimately, is the slowly dawning narrative crux of Attenberg; Marina starts the film as asexual and ill at ease with others, telling her father, “I have never desired.” Yet she’s inquisitive like a child on the cusp of puberty, and as the notion that her father is going to die looms larger, she begins to feel the need to find other sources of comfort, resulting in some painful, halting attempts at interaction. Tsangari’s visuals reflect this — many of the compositions are static, arranged, weirdly arid, oft-symmetrical. Even the shots that are off-kilter are so in a very precise, thought-out sort of way. But then there’s the scene roughly halfway through where Marina tries to get intimate for the first time, and suddenly the film, for the first time, becomes something far more wild — ragged and jarringly unbalanced, with shots framed far too tight and handheld jitteriness taking the place of meticulousness. That sense of sudden unavoidable pain lingers through the rest of the film like a memory of nausea, providing Attenberg with its true dramatic kick. Smashing through one’s self-imposed barriers ain’t easy. But sometimes, it’s necessary.

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If Bourne stoked the fires of your hunger for spy cinema: Le Professionnel (1981, Georges Lautner)

Jean-Paul Belmondo, with his easy smile and effortless charm, made for an appealing faux-badass in the seminal Breathless eventually proved that he could be a genuine, straight-up badass as well; few are the films in which he’s more in tune with that side of his persona than Georges Lautner’s Le Professionnel. As Joss Beaumont, a French Secret Service agent double-crossed and left for dead in Africa after a politically-motivated assassination falls through, Belmondo is playing a man used to thinking three moves ahead of his adversaries, a talent that comes much in handy when he returns to France after two years in exile to exact vengeance on his former handlers. (Is he the bloody phantom of past diplomatic misdeeds, or is he just a cheesed-off dude with a talent for espionage?)

His nimble-minded protagonist is a perfect reflection of the screenplay. Penned by the prolific Michel Audiard and his son, future French-cinema darling Jacques, the script for le Professionnel is a sharp-witted and two-fisted thing, a propulsive spy caper that traffics in the lightness of the Bond films that serve as a glancing inspiration while finding subtle ways to let a strain of fatalism creep in. Lautner holds a steady hand over this script, allowing room for the story to breathe without letting it go slack and keeping a baseline of clarity amid the dirty dealings and double-crossings that are endemic to the genre. It’s part action-film brawl (featuring a sharp car chase around the Eiffel Tower) part enormously satisfying and often quite funny game of verbal, mental and political chess, and all showcase for Belmondo's wicked charisma. All of that dovetails into a climax that drops irony, just desserts, tragedy, bait-and-switch tactics and one towering checkmate move into a cocktail shaker, violently shudders one last drink out of it and demands you slurp it down. Refusing such a delectable concoction would be poor judgment.

If you're in the mood for guns, fast cars, cash, sex and a terrific performance by a Hollywood icon: Big Bad Mama (1974, Steve Carver)

By a lot of standards, Big Bad Mama is pretty pedestrian. The screenplay hits its Bonnie & Clyde-inspired beats evenly and perfunctorily; Steve Carver’s direction is functional at best and occasionally less so during the film’s copious action scenes; and the lumpy pacing allows for a number of sex scenes to disrupt the build of the second half’s escalating heists so that the film wanders from one setpiece to another without a whole lot of drive. But hardly any of this matters on the whole, because from the first frame to the last, Big Bad Mama is Angie Dickinson’s show. She’s able to embody both strong and sweet without feeling insincere in either direction, a rare talent indeed and one demanded by the script; if anyone ever needed a surefire demonstration of the benefits of talent married to star power, this film would make for a terrific example.

With a steel of spine and balls of brass, her character, Wilma McClatchie, is not the kind to take any guff or back down from any challenge — especially when it comes to building a life for her two daughters that doesn’t involve being dead broke. So naturally, after a chance encounter with a hotheaded ruffian (played with clumsy, frustrated intensity by Tom Skerritt), they take to robbing banks, rounding out their gang with a seedy, two-bit hustler (William Shatner) they pick up at a race track and coerce (read: Angie humps him) into being a getaway driver. The heists, played as broadly as possible, are amusing enough, and both Skerritt and Shatner get some good moments – Skerritt, in particular, seems to be having a whale of a time essaying a role that, in another universe, was tailor-made for Warren Oates. Plus I can’t fault the copious female nudity (I am only human). But without Dickinson cutting an imposing yet seductive figure across this film, it wouldn’t be nearly as fulfilling. She’s the heart and soul of Big Bad Mama. She makes this modest compendium of genre clichés into something more than it should be – a compelling and memorable time at the movies.

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If you're in the mood for a trip down a mental rabbit hole featuring two solid, well-liked character actors in early-career roles: Brain Dead (1990, Adam Simon)

“Reality is in the brain.” This one little line, delivered offhand during a conference meeting, nails down Adam Simon’s Brain Dead quite succinctly. It’s a rubber-reality movie about brains that misfire, lose their way and generally don’t work as they’re supposed to. Initially, it’s Jack Halsey’s brain that has stopped working properly; Halsey (played in a gloriously eccentric performance by professional glorious-eccentric Bud Cort) is a mathematician who one day up and kills his wife and kids, then promptly destroys the work he’s been doing for the Eunice Corporation. Corporate company man Jim Reston (a slick, reptilian Bill Paxton) enlists brain surgeon Dr. Rex Martin (Bill Pullman), an old friend with revolutionary theories on biology and psychological brain function, to cut the crazy out of Halsey: either Halsey gets better and remembers the formula Eunice so desperately needs, or he turns into a vegetable and can’t give said formula to anyone else.

But after being hit by a car while leaving the sanitarium where Halsey is being kept, Martin gradually realizes that maybe his brain isn’t working so well, either… and hey, what’s with that blood-covered guy in the white suit he’s been seeing around lately…

You get the gist. Pullman plays this wonderfully – initially an affable, awkward fellow, he slowly lets his creeping paranoia turn him into a rambling, shouting ball of defiant scrambling energy. The deft screenplay, adapted from a script by the late, great “Twilight Zone” writer Charles Beaumont, allows certain symbols and names to recur without feeling overly insistent, and if it’s a bit on the nose at times (the Conklin Mattress Company’s slogan, seen on the side of the truck that hits Pullman, is, “To sleep, perchance to dream,”), it also has a lighter touch than expected. (There are even knowing nods in the direction of H.P. Lovecraft and Shock Corridor.)

Meanwhile, the director keeps things moving at a good clip without losing the basic thread of sense – while Brain Dead is tricky, it’s never haphazard. Simon climbs into Dr. Martin’s consciousness at one end, careens through until he tumbles out the other and wraps it up in an appropriately ironic location. It’s a fun trip.

If you're in the mood for a visually impressive piece of industrial-flavored dystopian sci-fi (and don't care if the story goes south): Hardware (1990, Richard Stanley)

Richard Stanley’s future-shock sci-fi slasher Hardware is, if nothing else, a stirring act of world creation. There’s a familiar feel to much of its broken-down grubby look – a little Road Warrior here, a little Blade Runner there, a dash of Damnation Alley for flavor – but it seems weirdly appropriate given the movie's concentration on scavenging. For a film whose male lead (Dylan McDermott) sells scavenged scrap metal in the desert, whose female lead (Stacey Travis) combines discarded machine parts to make sculptures and whose villain, an unstoppable military prototype robot portentiously named Mark-13, can rebuild itself from anything given an appropriate power supply, a piecemeal junk-shop aesthetic can only be called appropriate.

Beyond that, there are a number of tiny touches (like the reindeer steaks in Travis’s refrigerator advertising themselves as “radiation-free”) that make this decrepit world feel complete — Hardware feels more lived-in than the average dystopian flick.

It isn’t enough, though, to just construct a setting – you’ve got to have something to put inside that setting. This, unfortunately, is where Hardware falters. Stanley directs the hell out of this, coming up with a number of striking visuals and visceral setpieces (I especially liked the associative cross-fades in the shower-to-bed sex scene, with the implied voyeurism made concrete by the final cut to Travis’s perverted neighbor), and he also keeps the main thematic throughline about the contrast between the organic and the constructed as strong as he can. What he can’t do, though, is keep the movie from losing the majority of its momentum once the robot kicks to life and things get splattery. A slasher movie set in a crumbling futuristic world is still just a slasher film, and though there’s still things to watch for in the film’s back end (notably a hallucinatory sequence with McDermott), it can’t transcend the limits of its genre.

Watch it to soak in the atmosphere. The killer robot is incidental.

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If you're in the mood for a head-spinning brutal biopic featuring a breakout role for a major talent: Bronson (2009, Nicolas Winding Refn)

It’s a hell of a thing to not know yourself. Nicolas Winding Refn’s propulsive sorta-biopic Bronson gives us the figure of England’s most notorious prisoner, an unrepentant bald-headed bruiser by the name of Charlie Bronson (played in a towering performance by Tom Hardy), shows us what he’s capable of and then dumps him in our lap, unreconstructed and screaming. What could be a straightforward roll in the muck is instead transformed into something lively, jolly, almost joyful; Winding Refn gooses the frankly-dull narrative of Bronson’s rise to prominence (which can be summed up as, “I punched quite a lot of people”) with fourth-wall breaking narration, cutaways to artificial stage-bound performance pieces, blasts of opera and synth-pop on the soundtrack and one incongruously lovely animated interlude, all in the spirit of making this a good time at the cinema. The first line in the film, delivered by Bronson directly to the camera, is, “I always wanted to be famous,” and the idea of uncontrolled violence as a form of aggressive performance art is something that comes up enough within the fabric of the film that it’s easy to see why it’s often bandied about as the film’s main concern. But I’m not convinced. There’s something else here that’s being missed.

If you really examine Bronson, you’ll notice that the brutality in it is never quite explained in a consistent manner; depending on the situation, it can be beautified, macho-ed up, neutered or eroticized in both hetero- and homosexual ways. (One of the most fascinating setpieces in the film is Glass Candy’s insinuating “Digital Versicolor” spreading across a striptease routine witnessed by Bronson and a bare-knuckle boxing match participated in by him – two sides of the same coin, bodies and flesh turned into crude objects for money-making). This level of thematic breakdown in most films would smack of incompetence, but here I see Winding Refn grasping at something larger and more elusive – rather than give us a simple twist on celebrity culture, he’s chosen to show us a man in the process of figuring himself out, terrified that there’s nothing inside and aestheticizing his bad deeds in a hundred different ways to hide the fact that he can’t control and doesn’t understand his own impulses. If we don’t know Bronson by the end of the film, it’s because he doesn’t either. He only knows he’s caged, he’s screaming and he needs to hit something.

If you're in the mood to see where one of Hollywood's biggest directors got his modest start: Following (1998, Christopher Nolan)

“You can tell a lot about people from their stuff.” So says Cobb (Alex Haw), a dapper-looking thief, to the nameless protagonist (Jeremy Theobald) of Christopher Nolan’s swift, tricky debut film Following. An interest in people is in fact what sets the plot in motion – Theobald, an unemployed would-be writer, takes to randomly following strangers on the street as a way to kill time and, presumably, gather information for any future works. One day, he follows Haw into a café and has his cover blown; instead of being hostile or abusive, Haw decides to teach this aimless young man the ins and outs of breaking and entering. This simple action leads into intrigue involving a mysterious blond woman (Lucy Russell) whose flat was burgled by the two men, a bald crime bigwig she used to date, and a safe full of money. All standard noir tropes, for sure, but the thing about familiar ideas is that it’s in how you use them, and Following has a striking amount of inspiration to go with its more well-worn elements.

It’s a small attention-getter of a work, a labor of love filmed over the course of a year, and it must be said that it looks fantastic for a $6,000 film. Nolan shoots in evocative, jittery black and white (furthering the noir connection) and gets credible performances from his amateur cast. (Haw in particular does very well by the showy monologues his character gets vis-à-vis the art of theft.) But as neat as it looks, Following is foremost a triumph of writing. The script is arranged achronologically, so we’re left to compile the tale together alongside Theobald (a technique Nolan would render to even greater effect in his masterful Memento), yet we’re also occasionally given glimpses of things he couldn’t have known, which turns the tale from just a mere mind game into a ruthless crawl towards oblivion. As the film jumps back and forth in time and certain things get gradually revealed (the origin of the bruises on Theobald’s face, the blond’s debt to the bald man, Haw’s eventual role in the proceedings), it becomes clear that Theobald is careening towards a fate he can’t escape. Nolan’s sharp enough to lay out the themes and conflicts he’ll be dealing with early on and just let the pieces lock into place. Theft, in the words of Cobb, is an offbeat form of helping other people – by removing their possessions, you help them get down to what’s important (“Take it away, show them what they had.”). It’s the crucial difference between having an interest in people and actually knowing something about them.

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If you're in the mood for undemanding summer camp wackiness: Gorp (1980, Joseph Ruben)

Not much going on in the middle, but check the margins. Gorp involves the shenanigans of a waitstaff at a low-rent summer camp run by a perpetually apoplectic David Huddleston, with before-they-were-famous turns by Dennis Quaid as a gung-ho would-be military man and Fran Drescher as an unapologetic party girl. That description should openly mark it as a hybrid knockoff — the anarchic slovenliness of Animal House transported to the setting of Meatballs. As such, it’s less concerned with telling a coherent story than stringing together a series of dopey lowbrow yuks. There’s lots of vulgarity and crudity and exaggerated mugging, and most of the major setpieces (e.g. a sequence where literally everyone in the movie gets dosed with speed-laced food) are so strenuously wacky that they can’t help but fall flat. However, the inexhaustible Borscht-belt drive to make ‘em laugh at all costs means this thing is jam-packed with gags and punchlines, and eventually a few of them start to land.

It’s like watching a spitballing session in real time, where the screenwriters are so scared of losing the audience by allowing for any moments of quiet that they’re throwing everything they can think of at us, even if it’s weird or doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. This is why there’s a mind-blown Jesus-freak turned freak-hippie who’s introduced trying to eat the boobs off a centerfold and later, apropos of nothing, wanders into a scene, shouts, “LET THERE BE ORGIES!” and sprints away buck naked. It’s why there’s a scene where a wino gets into a fistfight with himself. It’s why Quaid is trying to build an atom bomb, and when it turns out to be a dud he screams, “You treasonous bitch!” at it. The spirit in Gorp is very much an old-school anything-goes exercise in silliness, and while the pacing is weird and lurching and there’s a lot of flopsweat, there’s also a looseness and an enthusiasm that ultimately proves fairly appealing. A giant wooden middle finger rolling past a group of shocked, outraged parents isn’t the joke that lands. It’s the rabbi, barely audible in the middle of the hubbub, muttering, “There’s no blessing over a finger! I can’t give a blessing over a finger!” that makes me laugh.

If you're in the mood for bikinis, beach babes and a light battle of the sexes: It's a Bikini World (1967, Stephanie Rothman)

Sun, sand and stupid people: what else does one need to make a film? Stephanie Rothman’s It’s a Bikini World provides those elements in spades — the plot revolves around cocky beach rat Tommy Kirk’s attempt to woo new-in-town redhead Deborah Walley by posing as his less abrasive bookworm brother while also competing against her in a series of athletic competitions hosted by a local surf & skate shop/teen-bop nightclub, and amid all the skateboards and surfing and sunbathing, nobody thinks to ask from where this heretofore unseen brother of Kirk has materialized. Anyone who thinks that the current crop of summer movies is as dumb as it gets need look only to the ‘60s and the vacuous beach-party genre. Show me a beach party movie with smarts, and I’ll show you an anomaly.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t also be fun. The point of this genre isn’t to inspire deep thought but to provide a genially fluffy experience, one that can be either watched in mild amusement or ignored in favor of exploring the inside of your date’s mouth. Built on a mountain of bare flesh and tiny bathing suits, its brains baked to pudding by the relentless bronzing rays of the sun, It’s a Bikini World is no different. That said, it’s an innocent and fairly charming kind of dumb, a breed apart from the aggressive stupidity of today’s nine-figure FX extravaganzas. Plus, there’s a number of likable lip-synched musical performances (including The Animals performing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”) and an early funny role for Sid Haig as Daddy, the hairy hippie shopkeeper/entrepreneur who sponsors the competitions. A film like this is akin to a summer fling — designed to be enjoyed and forgotten, sweet and wispy like cotton candy, leaving nothing but vague memories come autumn.

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If you’re in the mood for a wild and woolly back-and-forth duel: Let the Bullets Fly (2010, Jiang Wen)

The title of Let the Bullets Fly promises non-stop whiz-bang action, but the true meaning is revealed right in the first scene – it’s a statement of serene confidence, of biding one’s time until desired results are achieved. A double meaning presented at the outset sets the stage nicely for Jiang Wen’s period-piece war of wills, where everyone has hidden intentions and dual identities. The meat of the film is the battle for the small hamlet of Goose Town; the wagers of said war are Pocky Zhang (Wen), a notorious outlaw posing as a newly-appointed governor, and Master Huang (Chow Yun-Fat), a tyrannical drug smuggler & human trafficker who rules over Goose Town with a serpent’s smile and an iron fist, with the nervously ingratiating Ma Bangde (Ge You) caught in the middle. That’s the starting position for the principles, and part of the fun of the film is seeing how these identities shift, mutate and get cast off as the game progresses.

And if Let the Bullets Fly is anything first and foremost, it’s fun. Jiang’s style is hyperactive, zooming from scene to scene with breakneck pacing and cartoon logic. The action scenes are cleverly rendered, with Chow and Jiang doing everything they can to stay one step ahead of the other (lots of business involving burlap masks and smuggled bodies abound), and the whole thing is cut to a percussive internal rhythm that makes the film speed along like a rocket even as it’s mostly comprised of people talking out how they’re going to make their next move. It’s immediately obvious why this became the highest-grossing film in China’s history. The contrast between spoken geniality and barely-cloaked unspoken aggression is bracing and appropriate for a film where words and ideas are as deadly as firearms – you wouldn’t think there’d be many ways to wring tension out of someone trying to get the exact meaning of “a pleasant surprise,” and you’d be wrong. Even the political message of the film can be read multiple ways, as a rousing defense of power-to-the-people revolution or as a withering satire of same. We mean what we say, but we don’t always say what we mean. In there, Let the Bullets Fly finds the essence of drama, and does so while also providing a cracking great entertainment.

If you’re in the mood for a bleak study of systemic corruption: The Unjust (2010, Ryoo Seung-wan)

“This will give me leverage until he retires.” This line, uttered by thug-turned-businessman Jang (Yu Hae-jin) upon recording a piece of damning information about beleaguered cop Choi (Hwang Jeong-min), nails the main motivation for every character in the Korean anti-procedural The Unjust: leverage. In Ryoo Seung-wan’s film, nobody is clean and everyone owes something to someone else; thus, everyone is looking for a way to get a leg up on whoever can damage them the most. At the heart of the story is a butting of heads between Choi and strong-willed prosecutor Joo (Ryu Seung-beom) – the two are beholden to opposing interests in a real estate deal (Choi to Jang, Joo to an old-school glad-hander of a businessman who heads the TK Corporation), and this comes back to haunt both of them when Choi gets assigned to wrap up a high-profile child murder case any way he can. Even if it means implicating an innocent man.

The notion of an “innocent man” is an elusive one, though – in a system where everyone is demonstrably corrupt, who’s qualified to judge innocence and guilt? How dirty can one’s hands get in the service of the right before you’re no longer doing right? The line between right and wrong is an idea that fascinates screenwriter Park Hoon-jung (who also wrote the terrifically nasty serial-killer flick I Saw the Devil), and his exploration of this idea in The Unjust is expansive and involving – he sketches the rot of an entire society within the complementary/contrasting portraits of two men doing all they can to ensnare the other before their own sins catch up to them. “If you treat people nicely, soon they’ll walk all over you,” one character says early on. The Unjust suggests there are no nice guys once past actions threaten to unbury themselves.

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If you're in the mood for a chunk of awesome from the rah-rah Reagan years: Over the Top (1986, Menahem Golan)

There’s something to be said for playing it straight. Menahem Golan’s Over the Top is ludicrous on its face – an underdog movie about arm wrestling, festooned with a dozen father/son melodrama clichés. As the film marks the travels of the wonderfully-named truck driver Lincoln Hawk (Sylvester Stallone) and his attempts to win the love of his estranged son by winning an arm-wrestling tournament, it leaves no expected emotional beat untouched; it’s essentially a Wallace Beery movie dragged into the Reagan ‘80s, and it’s as shameless as it sounds. Sick mom, evil grandfather (Robert Loggia!), no money, jail time… this is a cute puppy away from exploding into a splattery paste of saccharine. But can you slag manipulative material if the manipulation works? Because Over the Top, as obvious and manipulative as it is, works like gangbusters, mainly because it believes wholeheartedly in its silly schematic squareness.

It helps that Stallone is tapping into a side of his persona not much seen after his ascent to superstardom. Between the Rocky and Rambo sequels and his reinvention as the stone-faced muscular all-American ubermensch, it’s easy to forget that he started from nothing. Before he was a god, he was a likeable schmuck, and he digs back deep into that hazy past to portray the itinerant Lincoln Hawk. Quiet, confident without being showy, downtrodden without being morose, Stallone radiates the kind of square-jawed dignity needed to sell this hoary corn, and he has a good rapport with David Mendenhall, who plays the young kid forced to bond with a dad he never knew. He’s back in Balboa-type palookaville, a blue-collar loser who nevertheless has freakishly huge arms and is going to use them to bring himself a little deserved glory – a big beefy symbol of the American Dream. Over the Top may not be as blatant in its flag-waving as Rocky IV, but its patriotism is difficult to miss. It aligns itself with the salt-of-the-earth Hawk, the kind of hard-working people who “make this country great,” against the heartless moneyed ways of antagonist Loggia – the real America, the one that keeps this country going, is a sea of trucker hats and steak and sweaty guys trying their best to heave their way to triumph.

If you're in the mood for one of America's finest stars in his youth: The Lawless Nineties (1936, Joseph Kane)

Before he was the most American of American stars, John Wayne was just another young actor in the ‘30s knocking out low-budget Westerns. He had to work for and grow into his iconic status just like the nation and the cinematic genre he represents. The Lawless Nineties, a fast-moving Republic B-oater, finds all three of these elements in the process of building their mythologies. The film centers around Wayne, a government enforcer, and his efforts to take down a gang of bandits intent on sabotaging the impending Wyoming vote for statehood, with the help of a local sheriff, a firebrand newspaper man and his strong-willed daughter. (There’s also an underdeveloped side plot involving two black characters and their day-to-day life, which provides lots of space for off-putting racial caricatures — an unfortunate signifier of the times.)

The daughter, played by Ann Rutherford, is told late in the film that her paper will not be allowed to publish on the day of the vote, to which she cries, “Haven’t you any patriotism?” At a trim 55 minutes, The Lawless Nineties has no time to be anything other than that blunt — it’s pro-America, pro-democracy and pro-free press. It supports the little guy and the common man against the forces of lawless frontier tyranny, with Wayne as the benevolent government representative who exists to fight the good fight (against voter fraud, no less) so all may live in prosperity. Even at this early stage in his career, Wayne is standing in for Uncle Sam, and his easy smile, undeniable charisma and flinty toughness make you think this guy must be right about the country and everything is just going to work out fine. That’s a lot to hang on unpretentious matinee fodder, but oftentimes genre entertainments, which are allowed to say things more directly, can say more about the predominant culture than the big prestige projects. During the big battle at the film’s climax, a character cries, “It’s the end of the world!” “No, it’s the beginning of Wyoming!” comes the response. It’s a violent birth but a necessary one – another step towards the icons we know today.

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If you're in the mood for a dust-and-blood genre mashup that's a lot better than it has any right to be: From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter (1999, P.J. Pesce)

Nobody expects much from direct-to-DVD sequels, with good reason – they generally exist to squeeze a few meager dollars out of a non-starter of a franchise. A film that features author Ambrose Bierce in Mexico fighting vampires alongside the Noxzema girl and the 7Up guy would be expected to fall in line with that trend. Yet, From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter has more to offer than its questionable lineage would suggest. It’s a striking example of a would-be paycheck gig that gets elevated above its station simply because most of the principals are trying to make something they’d want their names on. The delirious script, devised by Robert & Alvaro Rodriguez, is structured similarly to the other two films in this series but has at the very least the strongest tonal consistency of them. It’s also the only one of the series where the lead character complains to someone, “Your stupid friend ate my horse,” and later has to battle sentient vampire intestines.

The front-end genre being indulged this time around is the spaghetti Western, with the bulk of the plot spinning off from outlaw Johnny Madrid (Marco Leonardi), his failed execution at the hands of The Hangman (Temuera Morrison) and his kidnapping of the title character (Ara Celi). Director P.J. Pesce keeps the film moving at a quick clip while making the journey towards the expected destination ever-more foreboding (in particular, he makes effective use of scorching red filters in a cemetery scene midway through), and he gets reasonably solid performances out of his B-grade cast. He also handles the shift from stylish Western to over-the-top gore with aplomb, even finding time to drop in a bizarre but welcome sepia-toned tango interlude in the middle of the first vampire melee. And then there’s Michael Parks, veteran of the first From Dusk Till Dawn, as Bierce. A title card informs us that the famed writer has wandered down to Mexico in order to join Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army, though one wonders what use any army could possibly have for a man like Bierce. He’s sneakier and tougher than he looks, though. Amid the chaos and the hyperbolic carnage, it’s ultimately Parks’s show. He’s the whiskey-soaked two-fisted soul of the film.

(The poster for the 1956 original is way cooler, so we're showing you that one.)

If you're in the mood for an enjoyably whole-hearted homage to a faded genre: Runaway Daughters (1994, Joe Dante)

“I’ve never done anything like this!” exclaims put-upon protagonist Mary (Holly Fields) as her friends prepare to steal a car.

“Yeah, well, I’ve never gotten pregnant,” fires back brassy Angie (Julie Bowen).

With a wink and a nod, this sums up the straight-laced morality of the ‘50s teen pics being riffed on by Joe Dante’s Runaway Daughters — one moral lapse, one sexual scandal is enough to send even the sweetest girl tumbling down a slippery slope to delinquency, thievery, assault and other criminal acts.

The temptation towards sniggering irony is unavoidable with this sort of nostalgia pastiche, yet Dante (an Atom-Age romanticist if there ever was one only a year removed from his delightful Matinee) isn’t one for sniggering. He genuinely adores this mode of filmmaking, and as such has constructed it in part as a love letter to a bygone era, complete with Roger Corman cameo and sidelong nod to American International Pictures (in a brief shot of a sign that reads American International Petroleum). Rather than standing above the material, he keeps the japes agreeable while indulging his sneaky affection for these misguided youths; he lets the ineloquence of the local motorcycle tough dating Angie (played, in one of his first roles, by Paul Rudd) come off as a genuine teenaged awkwardness rather than plain stupidity. But he also allows his prankishly anarchic side free reign; this is, after all, a road picture, and the point of a road picture is to throw ever-crazier obstacles in the path of Our Heroes. It may be too self-aware to pass as the kind of melodrama it’s gently mocking, but the mockery comes from a position of sincerity rather than superiority, which makes a big difference.

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If you're in the mood for a documentary about how badly some people need to rock and roll: Heavy Metal in Baghdad (2007, Suroosh Alvi & Eddy Moretti)

The question is obvious: Why start a metal band in Iraq, of all places? “If you really want to know the attraction, look around you – we are living in a heavy metal world.” So says Faisal Talal, lead singer and rhythm guitarist of Acrassicauda, the subject of the enthralling documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Acrassicauda are very talented, very enthusiastic and going nowhere as frustratingly as possible because of the place in which they live – Baghdad during and after the fall of Saddam. Co-directors Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti drive through the crumbling, chaotic world these guys live in, showing us the hardships they have to endure just to rock out like their guitar heroes in America; a seemingly simple desire — to play music — becomes a lot more complicated when half the band has fled the country and the rehearsal space has been obliterated by a rocket. In this context, a rebel genre like metal can’t help but feel like a political statement even when one band member claims at the outset, “We are not a politic band.”

The hook embodied in the title promises a human interest of story of uplift and triumph in the face of adversity, but that’s not exactly what the directors find. Instead, they find a cycle where one adversity is vanquished only to be replaced by another. When Saddam is in power, they have to include songs that flatter him and headbanging is criminalized because it could be interpreted as Jewish religious rites. When the filmmakers first catch up with the band in 2005, the yen to put on a gig is hampered by unreliable electricity and occasional mortar explosions. Then in 2006, things get too dangerous to even think about rocking. What ultimately emerges is a sober portrait of the cost of war on a civilian populace – a ground-level look at people desperately wanting to and being prevented from doing something we would consider unremarkable, even frivolous. And as the last few moments make clear, abandoning their home city for Syria doesn’t help either. The struggle continues even outside the war zone.

If you're in the mood for solid spy action: When Eight Bells Toll (1971, Etienne Perier)

When a series of films is as successful as the James Bond films, there’s bound to be a number of imitators and Johnny-come-latelys trailing in its wake. But that doesn’t mean that all that follow an established trail instead of blazing a new one are automatically worthless. When Eight Bells Toll, sprung from the pen of Alistair Maclean, is an unusually sturdy and entertaining example of this form. While clearly indebted to the Bond films (right down to the slavish score, which stays just slightly to the left of straight theft), this Scottish-Highlands-set caper – centering around the disappearance of large quantities of gold bullion and Anthony Hopkins’s dogged attempts to uncover the responsible parties and retrieve said gold for queen and country – displays enough personality to set itself apart from the pack.

Part of that is, indeed, in the setting – rather than the typical panoply of romantic locales and colorful villains, When Eight Bells Toll has a small collection of fishing vessels amid the dreary gray fogs of the Scottish seaside. It’s an unexpected setting for such scrappy derring-do, and it goes a long way towards keeping the film grounded in a more realistic vein both witty and gritty. The tone skews less towards outsized heroics and more towards matter-of-fact moves on a chess board – a spy game with as much mental warfare as physical. (“There’s always peril in these waters,” a character remarks to Hopkins early on.) Director Etienne Perier allows the material to unfold organically, concentrating on crisp visuals (some stellar underwater photography in particular), crisper pacing and appropriately droll performances from all involved. Of special note is the interplay between Hopkins, a rugged anti-authoritarian man of action, and his superior, played by the eternally cultured Robert Morley as an old-guard law-and-order fellow with a yen for decorum and distaste for insolence or violence. The two build an appealing odd-couple vibe, with Hopkins trading bemused barbs with Morley (“Too many ifs and buts.” “With all due respect, sir, you haven’t heard an if or a but yet.”) as each tries to find ways to wrap the case up without too much trouble. When Eight Bells Toll allows enough space for wit to creep in, even in places it wouldn’t normally go, and that’s what makes it valuable.

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If you're in the mood for an exciting, bloody period action film: Centurion (2010, Neil Marshall)

The peplum genre, long thought dormant, appears to be going through a quasi-revival. The key, as evinced by 300, has been to take the stodgy costume dramas that comprise the '60s editions and pump them full of over-the-top violence — keep the beef, but serve it bloody as hell. In that regard, the high point of the recent spate of these is likely Neil Marshall's brawny blood-and-thunder thriller Centurion. Part period piece, part war movie, part splatter flick and part Naked Prey-style chase movie, Centurion stars the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender as a Roman soldier fighting in Scotland who ends up as the lone survivor when his garrison is massacred. After escaping, he hooks up with a legion led by Dominic West. This legion is promptly ambushed and slaughtered, leaving only a handful standing to try and fight their way to safety.

That's a lot of death just in the plot summary. This is the kind of film that announces its intentions and dominant tone in the first five minutes when a random soldier is speared in the crotch while urinating. Yet it never devolves into grueling monotonous bloodshed because Marshall, first and foremost, is a terrific craftsman. Where in The Descent Marshall used darkness to its full effect, here he builds a world of cold whites and slate grays, set alight by pale, ghostly sunlight. Scotland, for these soldiers, is less a land than an endless expanse of dead peaty purgatory, with eerie stillness ripped asunder whenever it comes time to fight. As such, the editing is key; the battle scenes are constructed kinetically, with each sequence building energy through its accumulation of shots and shot lasting as long as it takes a weapon to meet flesh — every cut is a connecting blow. The contrast between the ferocious action and the expansive, empty setting makes one thing clear: Centurion is a rip-snorting journey towards the inevitable.

If you're in the mood for ninjas flipping out and killing people: Revenge of the Ninja (1983, Sam Firstenberg)

"He's an American! How can he be a ninja?" Answer: White guys sure did a lot of ninjaing in the '80s. Sam Firstenberg's ass-kicking extravaganza may not be as ethnocentric as its predecessor Enter the Ninja, seeing as how it deigns to make the Japanese Sho Kosugi its lead character (Enter went with Italian-cinema tough guy Franco Nero). However, it still spends a lot of time following its lead villain Arthur Roberts, a rugged dude who looks like a cross between Peter Weller and Tom Jones, as he cuts a bloody swath through both the underworld who double-crossed him on a drug deal and any good guys (including expatriate Kosugi and his family) who dare try and stop his black-clad reign of terror. But weird racial politics aside, the main thing that Revenge of the Ninja needs to do is offer ninja-fightin' action and plenty of it. Hoo boy, does it succeed on those terms.

Seemingly every seven minutes, there's a scene where either Kosugi is roughing up random tough guys or Roberts is tossing a ninja star into a guy's face. The action in Revenge of the Ninja is ridiculous, relentless, violent and energetic. Firstenberg's coverage is occasionally awkward (a mid-film fight inside a van alternates between using its close-quarters setting effectively and being framed too tight for coherence), but the fights remain spirited and creatively brutal. There's also a scene where a blond Amazon gets her ass kicked by a 7-year-old. And one where the villain has to defeat a granny-fu slinging senior citizen. And one where Kosugi says, in all seriousness, "Only a ninja can stop a ninja!" Then there's the final mano-a-mano, where seemingly every single weapon a ninja has ever held gets dragged into play as Kosugi and Roberts hop around the roof of a building. Revenge of the Ninja is cheesy as all hell, and that's
the way I like it.

(If you happen to be in the New York City area, I'm hosting a double feature of the other two films in the Cannon Films ninja trilogy tomorrow night at 92YTribeca — Enter the Ninja and Ninja III: The Domination.)

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If you're in the mood for an unpretentious action-adventure with aliens stirred into the mix: Zone Troopers (1985, Danny Bilson)

The modern Michael-Bay-style blockbuster has flash and bombast to spare, but what's often missing amid the aggressiveness is a sense of fun — all whiz-bang, no gee-whiz. A film like Battleship, story-wise, is ridiculous on its face (aliens vs. the Navy!), and yet the finished product tries so hard to be Very Serious, as though The Navy vs. the Night Monsters had delusions of being Battleground. The WWII-era Boy's-Own throwback Zone Troopers, on the other hand, blissfully harbors no such illusions. Goofy and proud, this slice of cheeseball sci-fi milks every ounce of lantern-jawed joviality out of its premise.

That's not to say director Danny Bilson doesn't take said premise — a platoon of American soldiers stranded behind enemy lines in the waning days of World War II discover an alien ship crash-landed next to a Nazi officer base — as seriously as it needs to. It's just that it’s not ashamed of its premise, and it isn’t choked with smug po-mo irony. Rather, it functions as straight wish-fulfillment fantasy, with a black-and-white morality to match — eager recruits led by a gruff sergeant (Tim Thomerson, agreeably no-nonsense) teaming up with a benevolent otherworldly lifeform (one that looks like the Brundlefly got caught in a compromising position with a warthog) to blow the holy hell out of the Nazis. The Jewish recruit even gets to sock Hitler in the kisser. The modest ambition at work here, then, is to be corny but relentlessly entertaining Sunday-matinee greasy kid’s stuff, the kind of wide-eyed B-movie that, seen at the right age, would lead the viewer to get their friends and re-enact their favorite parts and maybe write into “Famous Monsters of Filmland” about how much they really enjoyed this little flick.

If you're in the mood for a scary alien-abduction film: Altered (2006, Eduardo Sanchez)

Stories of rednecks and alien abductions are slam-dunk fodder for easy, stupid laughs — a couple hick stereotypes, a couple anal-probing jokes and no sweat. Eduardo Sanchez’s Altered, thankfully, is more ambitious than that. Sanchez is interested in the idea of such an abduction actually happening. How would that affect you, how would you live with that, how would you carry on?

What exactly has Wyatt (Adam Kaufman) been coping with? Years ago, he and several others — Duke (Brad William Henke), snarling Cody (Paul McCarthy-Boyington), Cody's late brother and perpetually dazed Otis (Blair Witch alumnus Michael C. Williams) — were snatched up by malevolent aliens. So when Cody, Duke and Otis manage to trap and capture one of these little bastards, the tension of what to do with it, the desire for revenge crashing against the suspicion that harming this thing can only end badly, creates a compelling pressure-cooker situation that Sanchez exploits to maximum effect. Every potential complication present within the scenario is rolled out inexorably, spaced and allotted at perfect intervals to keep the tension high, with the occasional dash of rueful humor proving supremely effective in this atmosphere. Like Blair Witch, though, the ace in the hole for Altered is the characters in it and how they develop inside the situation. Sanchez pushes past initial impressions to reveal his characters as angry, scared and all too human in the face of an unearthly menace that, at times, seems to be all teeth and claws; there's a scene where a character, under attack by the alien and having his guts pulled out, whimpers, "I want my mommy..." and it's a testament to the tone that said plea comes off as genuine humanism. Sanchez is as interested in the horror of lingering trauma as he is the horror of little green monsters.

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If you're in the mood for a big ball of crazy featuring hitmen, bad sex and Cuba Gooding Jr. in a dress: Shadowboxer (2005, Lee Daniels)

Say what you will about Lee Daniels – he does not make bland films. The director of the Oscar-nominated misery typhoon Precious and this year’s Cannes pick The Paperboy first dipped his toes into the directorial waters with Shadowboxer, and it’s a doozy of a debut. Even mere plot details mark this out as a transmission from Planet What the Hell: How many films can you name that feature, as a male-female hitman team, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Helen Mirren? Wait, they aren’t just business partners – they’re also lovers! Let’s up the ante further – Mirren is also Gooding’s stepmother! And they desperately need to perform the standard-issue one last job (on a pregnant woman, of all people), because she’s dying of brain cancer.

And that’s just scratching the surface – there’s also Stephen Dorff shooting someone while naked, Mirren getting jiggy to a Nas tune, Mo’Nique and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a seedy couple, Gooding in drag and several heavy-breathing sex scenes that fly in the face of all logic, taste or decency. (The one with Mirren and her red dress is… indelible.) What makes it fascinating, in its thoroughly wrong-headed way, is how straight Daniels plays all of this. The gulf between the fact of the material and the tonal intentions of its makers is vast, yet it’s the unshakeable conviction that gives Shadowboxer its weird charge – I find it far more interesting to see this level of investment in material, even bad material, than in any number of tossed-off unloved mediocrities. This film is pitched at a level of hysteria that can only be achieved by people who aim high and dream big. It’s a fiasco of grand proportions, one where the failure is more or less total, but because of that it’s also unforgettable. You’ll never see another like this one.

If you're in the mood for a bracing shot of Russian bleakness: My Joy (2010, Sergei Loznitsa)

"They say nice people used to live here. Now it's nothing but riff-raff." An old woman bitterly lodges this complaint to no one in particular midway through Sergei Loznitsa's dark My Joy, and in doing so she provides a handy thesis statement. In an assured feature debut, Loznitsa (director of this year's Cannes entry In the Fog) shows us a Russia plagued and informed by a bloody history, filled with conniving opportunists and casual degradation — a country of scavengers.

Initially, Loznitsa's metaphorical history lesson centers around a truck driver who makes a wrong turn going through a checkpoint and the people he encounters on his detour, from a ghostly old war veteran to a teenage prostitute. But the further he drives away from the known, the less important he becomes within the narrative fabric — one of many examples of the individual being swallowed up and beaten down by the collective. There's a fluidity of time at work here, with flashbacks falling in unannounced more than once (context clues keep us oriented), and certain actions and setpieces (e.g. a knock at a farmhouse door, a confrontation with two power-tripping checkpoint cops) get doubled at crucial junctures, usually to dark ends. The point seems to be: History is impossible to escape, and its repetition is inevitable if undesireable. This easily could have devolved into a nihilistic slog, but Loznitsa keeps interest from flagging with a mordant wit (a soldier opining, "A mass grave is a happy grave") and a solid eye for darkly poetic imagery. The first shot of My Joy is from the inside of a cement mixer. The following shot shows a body being dumped in a ditch and buried. From the start, death is in the foundations and structures of Russia.

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If you're in the mood for a campy horror hoot with a bunch of old pros at the tops of their games: The Comedy of Terrors (1963, Jacques Tourneur)

Check this cast list: Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone. A lot of genre heavy-hitters show up for Jacques Tourneur's ghoulishly cheerful black joke The Comedy of Terrors. So there's something irresistibly cheeky about a film with this kind of firepower giving a starring credit to a cat.

Price takes the lead as Waldo Trumbull, a delightfully snide undertaker with a fondness for the drink and a poisonous contempt for everything else. Lorre is Felix Gillie, his long-suffering bumbler of an assistant, well-meaning yet terminally inept, and an amusingly addled Karloff plays Trumbull's father-in-law, an ancient man whose faculties are long gone yet his body refuses to shut down. The ensemble, rounded out by Joyce Jameson as Trumbull's wife, a ditzy would-be opera singer who bears the brunt of her husband's scorn, plays terrifically off each other — the majority of the early laughs come from watching these disparate personalities clash and bang together at odd angles, whether it's Price's exasperated declaration of, "I'm going out to drink myself into a state of stupefaction," Lorre's meek pride in a hand-built coffin that crumbles at the merest touch or Karloff's yammering about the burial rituals of the ancient Egyptians ("...yank their brains out with a hook!"). A story eventually emerges, and in doing so it provides a framework for more slap-happy goings-on. (Rathbone's dying burlesque on "Macbeth" is killer stuff — a gag drawn out past all logic, past of the point of losing the joke and around to where it becomes funny again simply by duration.) The Comedy of Terrors is a macabre lark — a bit weightless, but grand fun anyway, if only to watch a bunch of big names compete over who can slice the most ham.

If you're in the mood for vampires, panthers and malevolent dwarves: Vampire Circus (1972, Robert Young)

"One lust feeds the other..." Sex and death are often intertwined in the horror genre, rarely more effectively than in vampire movies. And if it's a strong shot of bloody perversity for which you're hankering, you could do a lot worse than Vampire Circus. This Hammer production leaps out of the gate with a vampire chowing down on an adorable little blonde girl, then sexing up the wife of one of the local villagers. The village doesn't take kindly to this and storms the castle, managing to slay the vamp after a bloody battle. With his dying breath, the vampire lays a curse on the town; cut to fifteen years later, and the plague is romping through the area, leaving the little village quarantined. It's about this time that a mysterious circus comes to town, featuring animals and acrobats and magic mirrors and all manner of unusual sights.

It's no secret what the circus is (hint: look at the title), and to the film's credit it's working more with the Hitchcockian definition of suspense rather than surprise — we're sitting waiting for the vampiric attacks to begin with bated breath. In the interim, the notion of the vampire as decadent, worldly sex fiend is contrasted against the good, upstanding villagers; it's an old, familiar formulation, but it's still fascinating to see how far Vampire Circus runs with it — past mere seduction into darker, stickier areas like incest and bestiality. (The tiger dance seen during the circus's first performance is one of the most sexually fucked up scenes of the '70s.) There's also the clear correlation of the swath of death cut through the town by the vampires and the similar path run by the plague. Stir in the gloomy atmosphere and the doom-laden score and the overall effect is one of a society rotting away from inside and fighting to keep the sickness at bay. All of which is to say that Vampire Circus takes its careful time setting up its conflicts and then lets the dominoes fall as they should in a creepy-cool explosion of vamp action. Wild cats eat people, evil clown-faced dwarves cackle and a good number of bodices are ripped. What's not to enjoy?

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