Title: Super Hybrid Directed by: Eric Valette Starring: Shannon Beckner, Oded Fehr and Ryan Kennedy Running time: 94 minutes, Rated PG-13, available on standard DVD A car is brought into a Chicago police impound garage after an accident. The mechanics who work there soon realize that the car has a mind of its own and is able to change its appearance to other car models to elude them, while devouring anyone who comes near. Didn’t they do this before? Oh yeah, it was called Christine…and then Maximum Overdrive. Did we really need another “killer car” movie? The mechanics pop the hood and a den of blue snakes tries to attack…

Title: Rapt Writer-director: Lucas Belvaux Starring: Yvan Attal, Anne Consigny, Andre Marcon The differences between French cinema and Hollywood studio offerings are various and sundry, but perhaps best illustrated by something like Rapt, a sprawling and inventive kidnap drama which doesn’t so much deliver an adrenaline shot of nervy thrills as steadily ooze disquieting tension over the course of its two-hour running time. Watching this superb high-wire balancing act unfold, one is struck by the myriad ways American thrillers typically angle for car chases and other jolts of immediacy, even if it doesn’t always make sense within the confines of the narrative. So when word of a planned English-language remake of Rapt broke not…

Walt Disney Pictures rolled the dice with producer Robert Zemeckis’ “Mars Needs Moms”, which was trotted out in 3-D to great fanfare earlier this year, and took a critical and commercial beating, to the tune of a meager $39 million worldwide gross. The film — produced by the same team behind “A Christmas Carol” and “The Polar Express” — isn’t quite as much of a stinker as that dismissal might indicate, but neither is it a wonderful romp or, as Boxoffice Magazine’s Pete Hammond claims on the cover, “the perfect family film in every way.” The storyline — in which nine-year-old Earthling Milo (Seth Green, but also voiced by another,…

Title: Assassination Games Director: Ernie Barbarash Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott Adkins, Kevin Chapman, Ivan Kaye, Andrew French, Serban Celea, Michael Higgs, Kristopher Van Varenberg, Bianca Van Varenberg If or when extraterrestrial aliens ever dissect the full and complete library of our entertainment options, they will surely be somewhat puzzled by our fixation, per capita, on lawyers, ER doctors and hitmen. Murder, of course, in theory represents the ultimate in dramatic stakes, but given the genre preoccupation with for-hire killings, one could be forgiven, from the outside looking in, for thinking this was a growth sector with no tangible ceiling. The latest movie to till this earth is Assassination Games, the first action entry…

If the Beatles and the Rolling Stones spawned their own dueling fanbases, connoisseurs of late 1980s and early ’90s action flicks often have their own disagreements about the merits and appeal of Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme. While the former generally smashed heads and cracked skulls with the disposition of a sullen ox, the latter had a more compact frame, and a kind of balletic karate skill set to match a slightly more engaging personality. Known as “The Muscles From Brussels,” the Belgian-born Van Damme would put his stamp on the action genre with a string of increasingly profitable hits like Death Warrant, Double Impact, Universal Soldier and Timecop,…

Title: Point Blank Writer-director: Fred Cavaye Starring: Gilles Lellouche, Roschdy Zem, Gerard Lanvin, Elena Anaya The title Point Blank is one of those perfectly generic and innocuous film monikers that indicate “thrills” without any cumbersome specificity whatsoever. One hears it and immediately envisions a dozen or more well-worn video and DVD coverboxes – with Steven Seagal, Jeff Speakman or, now, the latest WWE superstar attempting to transition into acting, clutching a handgun and mean-mugging the viewer, all underneath a font that conveys skirmish and exploit. This is one of the reasons that it’s a somewhat strange fit with this French import — an action thriller yes, but hardly a nuance-free, vengeful…

Title: Haunted Summer Directed by: Ivan Passer Starring: Eric Stoltz, Laura Dern, Alice Kridge and Alex Winter Running time: 106 Minutes/Full Screen, Rated R Part of MGM’s Limited Edition Collection, they have released a manufacture-on-demand of the 1988 film Haunted Summer. The story takes place in the year 1815 where poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, along with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon to be Mrs. Shelley) and Mary’s stepsister Claire spend the summer in opium and sexual bliss which is when Mary found her inspiration to write Frankenstein. Stoltz, whom young girls from the ’80′s adored his lovesick character in Some Kind of Wonderful released the year before, makes…

Title: Fading of the Cries Writer-director: Brian Metcalf Starring: Jordan Matthews, Hallee Hirsch, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Brad Dourif, Mackenzie Rosman, Elaine Hendrix, Jessica Morris, Julia Whelan, Lateef Crowder A hobbled sci-fi thriller that cobbles together various disparate mythologies, the independently produced Fading of the Cries clearly doesn’t have the money to compete with the genre big boys, but it also lacks an imagination in presentation or execution that might enable it to escape the downward pull of its limitations. Writer-director Brian Metcalf utilizes special effects as a sort of tech-age concealer, to try to spackle over various production cracks and shore up narrative deficiencies, but the result is a risible hodge-podge…

Title: The Ledge Writer-director: Matthew Chapman Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Liv Tyler, Patrick Wilson, Terrence Howard, Chris Gorham A tapestral suspense drama about the intertwined romantic fates of a quartet of Baton Rouge residents – each wounded in their own way, and some more freshly than others — The Ledge exhibits a willingness and desire to let its characters bat back and forth opposing philosophies of life and faith more frequently found on display in literature or off-Broadway theater. An interesting character study only half-successfully masquerading as a kind of specifically plotted romantic thriller, writer-director Matthew Chapman’s movie resembles the smart and sensitive but still gangly teenager pushed out of the door, wearing clothes…

Title: Blu-ray Review: Original Sin Directed by: Michael Cristofer Starring: Antonio Banderas, Angelina Jolie, Jack Thompson and Thomas Jane Running time: 118 minutes, Unrated MGM has released the 2001 steamy thriller Original Sin onto Blu-ray. It is the story of a wealthy Cuban coffee merchant in the late 19th century that orders an American mail-order bride whom he had only communicated through letters and photographs, and when she arrives she is not the same person. She alleges she sent false photographs so he would not be captivated by only her beauty. Their early days as man and wife are passionate, however he soon discovers it was all just a ruse…