Released many years before the absolutely terrible song by Swedish metal-lite band Europe, The Final Countdown is mostly famous for being one of the few science-fiction movies that jaded old men — particularly World War II vets — who typically only watch Westerns seemed to somewhat enjoy, as my father did whenever this came on television.

Still steel-jawed in 1980, Kirk Douglas is the tough-ish Navy captain of an aircraft carrier that, during regular maneuvers in the Hawaiian seas, appears to get sucked into an unexplained time vortex that takes the ship back to a few hours before the events of Pearl Harbor.

Between reasonably dealing with Department of Defense liaison Martin Sheen and needlessly arguing with chubby senator Charles Durning, Cap’n Douglas has to decide if he’s going to do something about Pearl Harbor or not while he’s got that burning number on the upcoming events.

What he does — or doesn’t do — leads to one of the most unsatisfying endings I’ve ever seen on film, subdued with a coda I’m sure we all saw coming.

As I watched this flick, directed by Don Taylor and surprisingly associate-produced by Troma head Lloyd Kaufman, I started to wish my dad was still alive — momentarily — so I could have asked him what exactly it was that he liked about this film, especially when he called Douglas an “ass” and Sheen a “communist” whenever they were brought up in everyday conversation.

Now that I think about it, he never said anything about James Farentino … maybe that’s the reason? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Across Latin America, you didn’t see kids lining up for the latest adventures of Batman or Superman, be it at the newsstand or, later, the movie theater. Instead, they had a reigning culture of their own superheroes who never really crossed over into North America (not that they had to), with the best example being Kaliman.

With blessed powers such as ESP, astral projection, telekinesis and, quite obviously, the martial arts, the mysterious Kaliman made his claim to superhuman fame by traveling the globe and solving dastardly crimes with aid of former street urchin and current young ward Solin, who is in training to become Kaliman’s successor — if that ever happens, honestly.

With well over 1,300 issues of the comic book and a string of popular radio dramas — not to mention a lawsuit from the assholes at Marvel — he made his motion picture debut in 1972 with Dallas talking head Jeff Cooper taking on the somewhat muscular lead to great success in many Latin-based countries.

Sadly, I have not seen it. What I have seen, however, is the follow-up, Kaliman en el Siniestro Mundo de Humanon and, man alive, is this one fun flick!

Here, Kaliman spends his time leisurely walking the beaches of Rio and driving in a car. But when his apartment is telepathically burgled and the inhabitants become murderously possessed by a cursed necklace, he and Solin somehow end up in the jungle, searching for the lackluster hideout of Humanon.

Additionally, Kaliman helps Solin form a completely NSFW drinking tube when their thirst gets the best of them, and there’s a doped-up monkey doing scared flips and tricks somewhere in there, too, among all the stock footage of dangerous animals for them to point at and laugh from a distance.

That’s nothing when compared to when we meet Humanon, the red-cloaked, pointy-capped villain (who reminds me of a rather sassy Grand Dragon) and his army of what I’m guessing are zombies to hunt our heroes down and kill them.

As expected, Cooper is completely ridiculous as a supposedly Middle Eastern mentalist, but the ludicrousness of it helped the movie move forward in a very schlocky way that seems like a lost art. Granted, as far as comic book movies go, it’s not going to blow the roof off the Avengers Tower anytime soon, but how about a big budget retelling of the Kaliman mythos? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.