The cover of Ted V. Mikels’ 10 Violent Women screams “Itching For Action!,” but “Itching with Crabs!” would be more appropriate to the Z-grade auteur’s tiresome take on the women-in-prison genre. An opening credit dares get biblical to kick off the so-called story: “In the beginning … there were 10 good girls.”

However, that’s before they move from mining jobs to a jewelry heist. Among the gems they take is an Arab’s sacred, irreplaceable “master scarab,” which puts them in his sights. Rather than laying low after such a caper, they get involved in the coke trade and, worse, nude hot-tubbing with Mikels, who’s wearing his signature, stupid-ass, boar-tusk necklace. I didn’t sympathize when one of the girls stabbed him to death with her high-heeled shoe.

Roughly halfway in, 10 Violent Women switches gears into WIP territory when the chicks get thrown in the clink. It has all the elements one expects from the subgenre — nude showers, lesbian warden — but none of the punch. The flick’s initial energy peters out right after the heist.

Mikels idea of character development is shooting the female cast in various states of dress and undress; how they look naked is the only way I was able to distinguish one from the other. The sex is as gratuitous as the disco music and Mikels’ chest hair. If you make it to the end, you’ll note such odd credits as “Other Jail Prisoners: Many Other ‘Bad’ Girls,” not to mention “Special Acknowledgements” to “The Fox Hunter (Disco)” and “Filthy McNasty (Limo).” If only the movie were as amusing. —Rod Lott

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If you should see Hero and the Terror — and I’m certainly not suggesting you do — pay close attention to the scene in which Chuck Norris works out at the gym. As he’s lifting weights, all these other muscle-bound guys gather ’round to watch him push it real good. Chuck grunts as he does so. Now, close your eyes during this part and tell me it doesn’t sound like gay porn. You can’t, because it totally does.

Pointless experiment over. Anyway, Norris stars as half of the title, and you get one guess as to which half. He’s Danny O’Brien, a cop, who once upon a time, took down the other half of the title, the serial killer of women Simon Moon (Jack O’Halloran). Danny still has bad dreams of wandering into Moon’s dead hooker depository, which doesn’t exactly bode well for the good guy — now reduced to a minimum-wage worker on a Mexican food truck — when Moon escapes and starts killing them bitches all over again.

We’re to believe, of course, that Chuck Norris could defeat Jack O’Halloran, but c’mon! We’ve all seen Superman II. Besides, Moon busts out of prison simply by bending the bars, because, after all, he is General Zod’s sidekick Non, period.

There’s a subplot about Danny inseminating his girlfriend (Brynn Thayer of TV’s Matlock). I distinctly remember that when Chuck was making the promotional rounds for this so-so, by-the-numbers effort, he appeared on The Tonight Show with the clip of him passing out at the hospital on the impending birth of their bastard child. The audience cracked up, because, as Norman Mailer once wrote, tough guys don’t faint! Or something like that. —Rod Lott

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