PULLING NO PUNCHES -- Showing a level of polish and craft rare in locally produced features, Todd Freeman's "Two Fisted" is a nail-tough thriller with a compelling lead character. A scruffy outsider, who returns home to Portland when he learns his incarcerated father is dying, gets involved in bare-knuckle boxing and other assorted nastiness. Robert Blanche and Sarah Rosenberg, familiar faces by now to regular attendees of Sabala's at Mt. Tabor, occupy secondary roles. This is the film's second engagement at Sabala's, which may have something to do with the fact that the protagonist is played by Jason Sabala. It's worth catching now if you missed it the first time as an example of solid genre filmmaking on a shoestring. (Plays Friday-Thursday.)

THE OPPOSITE OF LAUGHING GAS -- Acting as a sort of kinder, gentler Michael Moore, R.J. McHatton explores the western Oregon town saddled with the nation's largest chemical weapons depot in "Umatilla." Inspired by the fact that his grandfather worked at the facility, McHatton begins a documentary project geared toward learning more about the ancestor he never knew. He tours the depot accompanied by an Army spokesperson on Sept. 10, 2001, and in the following weeks continues to ask local residents for their thoughts on having such a potentially apocalyptic stockpile in their back yard. Most of them are blithe, but a current of fatalism runs beneath: Stories from schoolteachers struggling to run successful "gas drills" and from construction workers claiming they were exposed to toxins as chilling. (Plays Thursday at the Guild Theatre.)