Otis

It's a mystery why the wickedly black horror-comedy Otis skipped theatres and went straight to DVD. Otis is a tubby pizza delivery man who never grew up. Jealous of his moderately more successful older brother (Kevin Pollack) who had an illustrious high school football career and married the girl of Otis's dreams, our title anti-hero kidnaps teenage girls and tries to get them to play out his fantasies of the perfect prom night -- however, something always goes wrong and the girls wind up dead. His latest victim, Riley (Ashley Johnson, "Growing Pains"), is infinitely more clever than her predecessors, and she quickly learns how to play the game. Meanwhile Riley's parents (Daniel Stern, Illiana Douglas) get fed up with the offensively inept FBI agent assigned to their case (Jeri Burns), so they decide to take matters into their own hands.

The tone shifts between unsettling torture exploitation flick and searing black comedy, but that weakness is also one of the film's strengths -- it would've been unwatchable if it were straight exploitation, and unconvincingly silly if it were an all-out comedy. There's subtle and not so subtle homages to a few other classic horror films, most notably the original Last House on the Left and Carrie (and it's hard not to notice that it also bears a minor resemblance to the '06 straight to video flick Delivery), and it features a wonderful soundtrack. As mentioned, the movie's out on DVD.