Master hacker Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman) was busted by the FBI for infecting their Carnivore program with a computer virus. He can’t even look at a computer ever again. He can’t see his ex-wife Melissa (Drea de Matteo) or daughter Holly (Camryn Grimes) because of a restraining order.

Then, Gabriel Shear (John Travolta) offers him $10 million for one last hacking job.

Ginger Knowles (Halle Berry), who gets him into this, may be a DEA agent. Gabriel could be the boss of Black Cell, a secret organization created by J. Edgar Hoover to battle terrorists. Or he could be dead and the Gabriel we’ve met is someone else.

It could be both, to tell the truth, because Gabriel loves misdirection.

With support from Don Cheadle, Sam Shepard and Vinnie Jones, this starts with a 135 camera-filmed explosion that has CGI elements. It starts strong and keeps moving, a film that really got Jackman and Berry noticed by audiences.

The Arrow Video release of this movie has commentary by director Dominic Sena, interviews with composer Paul Oakenfold and production designer Jeff Mann, the promotional HBO First Look: Swordfish, another feature on the effects, a music video, conversations with the actors, two alternate endings and a theatrical trailer. It comes inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket. The sleeve includes a double-sided fold-out poster and an illustrated collector’s booklet. The booklet features new writing on the film by Priscilla Page and an article from American Cinematographer about the film’s opening sequence. You can order Swordfish from MVD.

In 2010 — 9 years in the future from when this was made, 15 years in the past from when this was written! — Jason is captured by the U.S. government but can’t be killed, so government scientist Rowan LaFontaine decides to place the killer in suspended animation. Of course, a bunch of soldiers screws the whole thing up and Jason kills everyone in his path before he stabs Rowan and freezing both of them.

445 years later, Earth is ruined, so everyone moves to Earth 2. So why not send some students back to the old Earth on a field trip? Why not send their Professor and an android, too? While exploring the Crystal Lake facility where Jason was experimented on? And why not put the still frozen bodies of Jason and Rowan on the Grendel, their ship? Nothing bad can happen, right?

Well, it turns out that Jason is dead and his body could be worth plenty. The Professor calls his money man, Dieter Perez (Robert A. Silverman, who has been in five Cronenberg* movies and the two episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series that he directed, too), and they discuss how Jason’s body could be worth something to collectors. Luckily — or maybe not — they bring Rowan back to life.

Of course, kids keep having sex around Jason, which brings the maniac back to life. He wipes out nearly everyone on the ship, including all the soldiers on board. He even takes out an entire space station!

The teens upgrade their android, KM-14, which wipes out Jason. Or so everyone thinks — a medical station brings him back as Uber Jason, filled with cybernetics so powerful that he can punch the android’s head off. Not even a holographic simulation or a shuttle crash can slow him down! It takes flying him through re-entry and burning him up to take him out.

That said — two teens see his mask land on Earth 2, so he could always return. He can come back, right?

This was written by Todd Farmer (Drive Angry, the remake of My Bloody Valentine) and directed by James Isaac (House 3). I have a real weakness for this film as it goes places none of the others did. It’s the Abbott and Costello school of running out of ideas and doing something completely off the wall. It’s been a punchline forever, but you owe it to yourself to watch it again!

*Cronenberg shows up in a cameo as Dr. Wimmer, too!

The Arrow Video UHD release of Jason X has an introduction to the film by Kane Hodder, three audio commentaries (film historians Michael Felsher and Steve “Uncle Creepy” Barton; writer Todd Farmer and author Peter Bracke; director Jim Isaac, writer Todd Farmer and producer Noel Cunningham), an interview with Harry Manfredini, a making of, archival interviews with Farmer and actor Kristi Angus, archival docs on the history of the character and the making of the movie, cast and crew interviews, behind the scenes footage, an electronic press kit, trailers and TV commercials and stills, behind the scenes and poster galleries, all inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gary Pullin with a double-sided foldout poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gary Pullin and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Matt Donato and JA Kerswell. You can get it from MVD.

Also known as Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Sex Attraction and Poison, this stars Kari Wuhrer, who from 1988-1989 was the it girl on MTV’s Remote Control (but not the first or the last; the show has Marisol Massey in season 1, Wuhrer was replaced by Alicia Coppola and the last episodes had Susan Ashley in the role). By 1999, she’d been on the Swamp Thing TV show and appeared in several horror movies. By the time she was added to the cast of Sliders and had an album on Rick Rubin’s American Records, Shiny, she was at the top of the world.

This led to a disaster of an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s first talk show. It started when she insulted comedian Stephen Wright, and it only got worse from there.

She’s still acting — doing voice work often — but she never achieved those heights of the late 90s again, where man’s magazines like FHM and Maxim — remember those? — fawned over her. And hey, she’s in many of my favorite movies of that era, like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time. But after that? The Prophecy sequels, the Hitcher sequels, movies where she fights spiders and erotic thrillers.

Yes, back in 2000, this was a viable career path. If you had the internet, you had dial-up. Cable and video store softcore was still a thing.

Wuhrer is Ann Stewart, whose husband, Chris (Larry Poindexter), has burned out at work. When he doesn’t get the promotion he feels he is owed, well, he kills himself. Am I supposed to be like the kids and say he unlived himself? And this is after she slept with an old man named Ian McMillan (Michael Cavanaugh) just to ensure that he finally made a sale!

After her husband drives his car off the road to Deathsville, she becomes Anna Johnson and takes over as the live-in au pair for Nicole Garrett (Barbara Crampton), the woman who took her husband’s promotion. Will she turn daughter Darla (Melissa Stone) against her mother? Well, that’s already been done, but yes, she does. She also scuffs her knees in the laundry room pleasuring teen son David (Seth Adam Jones) and has her sights set on husband Scott (Jeff Trachta). Yes, if she has to sleep with every member of the family to get revenge, she will. After all, she had already killed the big boss, Mr. Slider (John Henry Richardson).

Even the way that she got this job comes from revenge. Ann wanted to kill Nicole and accidentally murdered their housekeeper, Karina (Peggy Trentini). This creates a job opening and a way for her to get close to her enemy, who doesn’t even know she is one.

Jay Andrews directed this, but come on, that’s Jim Wynorski, the same as co-writer Noble Henry. He’s joined by writers Sean O’Bannon (Mom’s Outta Site and Mom, Can I Keep Her?) and Al Sophianopoulos, who also write Interlocked: Thrilled to Death. I could be convinced that he’s also Wynorski. Just like the Giallo that inspired these erotic thrillers, they have filmmakers who have plenty of other names and come in so many titles.

And that’s why I already reviewed this as Thy Neighbor’s Wife. 

However, I am not sad. Why wouldn’t I want to watch Kari Wuhrer and Barbara Crampton fight one another one more time? Isn’t that one of life’s simplest pleasures?

Maybe Ann/Anna did Nicole a favor. The last housekeeper, Karina, was about to bone out Scott. Perhaps these two women are close to being one another, and it will take a near-death experience to finally understand her daughter, who is a vacuous cipher of a character.

This is the movie your grandmother would have bought you for Christmas if you asked for The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. She would say, “I don’t know all those erotic thrillers you kids are into today.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this Saturday, January 11 at 7 p.m. at the Sie Film Center in Denver, CO. (tickets here). It will be hosted by Keith Garcia, Sie FilmCenter Artistic Director. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

Valentine is a post-Scream slasher that feels closer to a giallo than an American slasher at times, with elaborate death sequences and a masked killer who wears the face of Cupid. It’s packed with the hottest actors of the early 2000’s and directed by Australian Jamie Blanks, who also made Urban Legend and remade Long Weekend in 2008.

The movie starts at a St. Valentine’s Day dance in 1988. Jeremy Melton, the school geek, asks four different girls to dance. Three of them — Shelley, Lily and Paige — instantly reject him while Kate at least gives him a break and says, “Maybe later.”

He finally hooks up with Dorothy, an overweight girl, and they make out in the bleachers. A bully finds them and everyone starts to laugh at the two of them until she claims that he is raping her. This removes Jeremy from school and their lives.

One by one, these girls are stalked and killed. Shelley is now Katherine Heigl and a UCLA med student. After getting a Valentine in her locker, a killer in a trench coat and Cupid mask stalks her and slices her throat. As she dies, his nose begins to bleed. I’m assuming that the people who made this hoped that none of us had ever seen Alone in the Dark.

At her funeral, Kate (Marley Shelton, Grindhouse), Lily (Jessica Cauffiel, Legally Blonde), Paige (Denise Richards), and Dorothy (Jessica Capshaw, daughter of Kate) are questioned by the police. They all get the same Valentines, like the one Dorothy gets that goes so far as to say, “Roses are red, Violets are blue, They’ll need dental records to identify you.” She’s no longer heavy and is part of the in crowd, with a boyfriend named Campbell — who may or may not be a con artist but is definitely a giallo-style red herring.

Lily gets chocolates, but they’re filled with maggots. And at the exhibit of Lily’s boyfriend Max (Johnny Whitworth, AJ from Empire Records), Lily is chased by the killer through the exhibits until she is shot multiple times with arrows — ala the real Saint Valentine — and falls to her death inside a dumpster.

They all realize that the initials on the cars are JM, which means that the killer could be Jeremy Melton. Dorothy admits her lie that sent Jeremy to reform school. It’s at this point that the lead cop, Detective Leon Vaughn (Fulvio Cecere, whose movie 350 Days is all about the life of a pro wrestler) hits on Paige and she strongly rebuffs him.

Kate’s neighbor breaks into her apartment as he has been stealing her panties and is killed with an iron. And as Dorothy plans a huge party, Campbell is killed with an ax. Her friends all assume that he has simply dumped her as she’s still the fat girl in their eyes. Of course, if she listened to Ruthie, Campbell’s crazy ex, she’d know the truth. But she gets brutally killed at the party in a kill that’s reminiscent of Deep Red.

At the party itself, Paige is electrocuted in a hot tub and the power cuts out. Dorothy and Kate begin to argue over who the killer’s identity, with Kate saying that its the mysterious Campbell, while Dorothy accuses Adam (David Boreanaz of TV’s Angel), Kate’s alcoholic ne’er do well boyfriend. They then learn that Lily never made it to California and that she may be dead. After a call from Detective Vaughn, they start to investigate further. As they worry about their safety, they try to call him back but get no answer. Suddenly, they hear a ringtone and follow the sound of it until they find his severed head outside the house.

Kate is absolutely convinced that Adam is Jeremy and runs back inside the house to find him waiting for her. He asks her to dance, but she gets freaked out and runs from him — right into the corpses of Paige and Ruthie. That’s when the Cupid killer runs right into her but is shot by Adam. The mask falls off to reveal Dorothy.

Adam finds it in his heart to forgive Kate, explaining how if you have enough childhood trauma, like how Dorothy dealt with the abuse of being overweight, that anger can stay with you and cause violence. They wait for the police to arrive as he embraces her, telling her that he always loved her. She closes her eyes and we notice that his nose has begun to bleed.

There are plenty of red herrings along the way, like Dorothy’s cherub necklace that could point to her as the killer. And then there’s the fact that that necklace really belonged to Ruthie. But after that gets dealt with, it’s pretty obvious who our killer is.

I liked how each of the murders ends up corresponding to the horrible things that the girls said to Jeremy at the dance, like Paige’s claim that she’d “rather be boiled alive” actually ends up happening.

It’s also refreshing that the women in this, by and large, are aware of how men try to use them and respond in modern ways, such as Paige shutting down the main detective.

Valentine isn’t the best movie you’ll watch, but you can get it for $3 at most streaming sites and for around $2 or less at most used DVD stores. That’s a decent enough price to spend — it goes down as easily as a Valentine’s chocolate but won’t stay with you much longer than a summer fling.