April 17: Party Over, Whoops — Select a movie from 1999.

Dick Maas is known for his Dutch language films like The Lift, Amsterdamned, Flodder, Prey and Sint, but this is in English and finds American pharmaceutical executive Walter Richmond (William Hurt) taking his wife Cathryn (Jennifer Tilly) and their 10-year-old mute ever since a major trauma daughter Melissa (Francesca Brown) to Amsterdam.

Melissa gets lost and sees Bruno Decker (Corey Johnson) kill Simon Van der Molen (David Gwillim), the attorney of her father’s boss Rudolph Hartman (Michael Chiklis) to keep the side effects of a new medication secret. She’s saved by a homeless man named Simon (Denis Leary) but is soon being menaced by Decker and Hartman, as well as Billy Boy Manson (Michael A. Goorjian), a rock star who tries to assault her. And she’s not even a tween yet.

Do Not Disturb flirts with giallo, perhaps not as much as Amsterdamned, with the stranger in a strange land idea of a girl who can only communicate by dry erase board lost in a foreign country. I read a great thought on Maas by Letterboxd user Dan Prestwich, who said that the director makes films that are like a “children’s film except with an R-rating.” He excels when it comes to getting past the plot and all those contrivances and getting down to chase scenes and action.