When Natural Born Killers came upon the scene in ’94, I was all for it, mostly for the Quentin Tarantino connection, but, even with the travesty of The Doors, director Oliver Stone was no slouch. I haven’t viewed it since late that decade, so I thought it was high-time time to reconnect. Sadly, I should have let it stay buried in Hollywood’s mass grave of pretentious cinematic outings.

What once was a kinetic path to demonic satire, is now a try-hard commentary on the beguiling mass-media pandering while exploiting its audience for Hot Topic-heavy merchandise like wall posters in this pre-Boondocks Saints era.

In other words, it had a lot to say about nothing much.

Of course, Tarantino disowned this “story by” script as Stone does what he does best: overstuffing a film with overblown, artificial characters and set pieces, veering the classic convertible to total immolation. Sure, U-Turn was terrible, but NBK made it a special viewing party for the latent arsonist in next bedroom.

With a mixtape-like soundtrack — starting with languid Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle” before double-timing into L7’s “Shitlist” — we start with a diner massacre with all the cartoon buffoons the law allows. Great?

I see what Stone does here — brutal violence with white payback, right? — but it seems too close to caustic lampoonery to take it very seriously, which I did for most of 1994. “It’s art, man!” I’d say defending it, as I would scream until I was hoarse until I became nearly mute.

Wish massive cellblock Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and dreamy nightmare girl Mallory (Juliette Lewis) as our guides, we take on criminal culture with wide-angled lenses, fish-eye perspectives, stock-footage immolation, dark parody slayings and plenty of Stone’s well-worked trampling of the Indigenous people for shock value.

Playing to crowds of preening disciples in fake blood, both Harrelson and Lewis are in a LSD trip to hell, but the acid is bits of paper to look like drugs; the psychotic conventions are too cold-blooded for the stars of White Men Can’t Jump and The Other Sister.

Even then, most of this hollow body count is on Stone’s Karo-splattered shoulders, with too much of Mickey and Mallory’s shocking exploits coming to no rhyme and no reason, with none of the characters, motivations or camera angles to justify the whole thing and its furor.

Or maybe that’s the whole joke?   —Louis Fowler

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A murdered prostitute. A rash of neighborhood break-ins. A ransom call from a child’s kidnapper. A thwarted robbery and assault in the subway. That’s a lot of crime for one movie — unless that movie is an anthology. 

Meet Mania, a gem of a suspense omnibus from the Great White North. Its opening-credits sequence suggests something special and very, very ‘80s. You get both from all four of its unhosted, unconnected stories. 

With the majority directed by Prom Night’s Paul Lynch, each segment concludes with a twist. If the near four decades since have rendered those conclusions guessable, you still must acknowledge and admire the cleverness in their construction. They’re not gimmicky in the M. Night Shyamalan way where you’re so focused on parsing them out rather than enjoying the journey to get there. 

Mania might be accurately called Canada’s version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents; it’s certainly more narratively successful than NBC’s short-lived revival of that time. Most of all, the Maniaical pieces remind me of the ingenious shorts HBO used to play in its infancy as between-movies filler seemingly beamed in from nowhere.  —Rod Lott

Clearly, Don’t Look Now is a brilliant film in the annals of mind-bending suspense, but also one that is very bizarre and outré, something that sets it apart. Even more so, this giallo precursor was the type of film you could release in the ’70s and win all the awards while being a critical darling. The last movie Nicolas Roeg directed that was a tasteful piece of erotic art was Mimi Rogers’ Full Body Massage. While it doesn’t reach the highs of Don’t Look Now, it’s a classic in its own way.

The older I get, the more Don’t Look Now confounds me and astounds me, leaving me internally terrified that the dreamlike atmosphere and disjointed pieces are so broken, similarly distorted by the sheer realism and tragic finale. And, of course, that ending is a total shocker, even by today’s exacting standards, both graphically and creepily.

Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play John and Laura, a married couple dealing with their daughter’s recent fatal accident. A few months pass, we find them in Venice, restoring an old church. Suddenly, strange occurrences take place, with troubling doppelgangers, blind mediums and, of course, the horrific killer.

An extension of the traumatic loss of the emotionally stunted characters, it plays with the conventions of the stages of grief and mourning, given a paranormal twist by Roeg. With the natural movements in an alien culture, Roeg gives you that xenophobic feeling walking along the canals.

Adapted from the short story by Daphne du Maurier, the movie finds both Sutherland and Christie remarkable in their roles, although Donald struts around like he’s going to an Italian Doctor Who convention. And with a more than shocking sex scene that feels highly animalistic, Roeg brings back my Mimi Rogers fantasies.

Don’t Look Now needs to be viewed multiple times, because I always find another piece of the puzzle—even if it not supposed to be there. —Louis Fowler

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Like you, I’m always up for a good — or even a bad — holiday horror show, no matter the time of year. At 40 minutes total, though, The Twelve Slays of Christmas amounts to an extended commercial for Full Moon merch. And if there’s anything Charles Band loves more than tiny toys, it’s shilling them.

On their way to a winter carnival, three young women (Full Moon vets Cody Renee Cameron, Lauren Nicole Smith and Dare Taylor) experience car trouble in a snowstorm and seek refuge at the nearby Full Moon Manor, home to Ignatius (Tom Fitzpatrick, Insidious: Chapter 3), an old man who looks like Chris Elliott in Scary Movie 2. To pass the time, he reads to them from a Yuletide Tales of Terror book.

Presumably, the tome numbers a dozen chapters, each allowing this repurposed anthology to cut to clips of death from the Full Moon catalog. For example, from Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust, the titular cookie fucks a puppet, then chainsaws a puppeteer. From Subspecies, you get the hot-dog fingers of vampire Radu. From Evil Bong and Baby Oopsie to many Puppet Master sequels, the entries have zip to do with Dec. 25, unless your family traditions entail burning babies, puked leeches and sex with Nazi commanders.

Nothing against clip shows, but Ignatius’ “stories” are more montage than anything. It came upon a midnight clear that Twelve Slays is a lazy, shameless bid to move memorabilia outta Band’s storage unit. —Rod Lott

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Like David Fincher’s Zodiac, Jeremy Hoenack‘s Killer’s Delight draws from case files and follows San Francisco police detectives in search of a real-life serial killer. Here, the maniac in question — based shoelace-loosely on Ted Bundy — clearly has a type: beautiful teenage girls hitchhiking home from bowling alleys and public pools. After use and abuse, he dumps their nude bodies like trash; a freeze frame of one victim in free fall serves as the title card’s backdrop.

As lead investigator Sgt. De Carlo, James Luisi (1980’s Fade to Black) makes for a reasonable John Saxon substitute, especially with the easy rapport he shares with his partner on the force (Martin Speer, Exo Man). Once they suss out the ID of the murderer (John Karlen, Daughters of Darkness), the guys set a trap involving a radiant psychiatric doctor (Susan Sullivan, Cave In!) specializing in the criminal mind. Said trap requires her to go undercover as a nightclub singer, which works, by gum — both for the characters and for us, the viewers.

The lone directorial credit for Emmy-winning sound editor Hoenack, Killer’s Delight looks, sounds and acts like a made-for-TV movie, full-frontal nudity excepted. As the story unfolds, however, you’ll find yourself surrendering to its mighty grip. It’s top-shelf El Lay pulp — comfort-food viewing for the armchair detective.

Also released as The Sport Killer and The Dark Ride, it’s a film ahead of its time. If made today, it’d be a Netflix miniseries stretched across eight or 10 episodes; I’m thankful it exists as is, shock ending included. Imperfect though it may be, I wouldn’t change a moment. —Rod Lott

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