From a dark and dirty novel by Barry Gifford, Perdita was originally a minor character in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart played by Isabella Rossellini. In Alex de la Iglesia’s dark and dirty film Perdita Durango, however — originally released in the States as the heavily edited Dance with the Devil — it transforms her sweltering story in a diabolical masterpiece that, like many of his films, deserves a rabid cult surrounding it.

Rosie Perez stars as the double-dealing Perdita, a damned soul who wanders south of the border looking good in her Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! outfit while searching for — and always finding — sex, drugs and murder. She meets her infernal match when she comes upon — and on — drug dealer and cult leader Romeo (Javier Bardem). After a rather bloody Santeria service, looking for hardcore kicks before their next score — a semi full of aborted fetuses to be used for cosmetics testing — they kidnap two white-bread teens from America.

Going further than Lynch probably ever could or would — and fans know how far he’ll go — de la Iglesia’s wicked hand fleshes out, in more ways than one, the black soul of the title character, never excusing her inner darkness like any filmmakers probably would have done, giving her a heart of gold. The casting of Perez is perfect for the film and, probably, for de la Iglesia himself, maiming and killing for laughs and looking good while doing it.

Bardem as Romeo, of course, is absolutely loathsome as you’d expect, a terrific foil with an evil glimmer in his eye for an equally filthy — and wholly diverse — supporting cast that includes James Gandolfini, Demian Bichir, Alex Cox and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. It’s a collection of actors as dark and wild as the world of Durango herself. —Louis Fowler

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Strike One to SAT Eagle! Strike One to SAT Eagle! As Sgt. Michael Ransom, Strike Commando star Reb Brown establishes a four-step schtick for not only his wronged-soldier character, but for the apex of his filmography. It goes a little something like this:
1. Walk a few steps before halting with purpose.
2. Recite the first name of thy enemy with anger.
3. Emit a scream as prolonged as possible …
4. … as you unload a machine gun in a back-and-forth motion to an excessive degree — ideally in equal time to item No. 3.

It works every time. He executes this bit several times throughout Strike Commando because it’s what Sly Stallone’s John Rambo would do, and Strike Commando could not exist without that big bowl of First Blood Part II. As staged by Italy’s primo cinema imitator, Bruno Mattei (Cruel Jaws), Ransom vows revenge on his traitorous superior, Radok (Christopher Connelly, 1990: The Bronx Warriors), for sabotaging a midnight mission in Vietnam that left all Ransom’s buddies dead.

“They all demand justice!” Ransom cries, clearly in a presumption on his part.

Radok thinks Ransom is no longer alive, either, but our hero somehow survives and somehowier slowly floats his way under miles of dirty water to the safety of a village whose populace greets him in mass whiteface. There, Ransom befriends a “Frenchman” (Luciano Pigozzi, the Italian Jack Elam, reuniting with Brown after Yor: The Hunter from the Future) and gains a li’l buddy in the boy Lao (Edison Navarro, Mattei’s Double Target). Lao quizzes Ransom on all things Disneyland; the American tells his young charge that at the park, popcorn and ice cream grow on trees. The fuck they do!

As with everyone Ransom so much as glances at, these poor saps soon are drained of their lifeblood as well, with Lao’s expiration an absolute classic of ’80s he-man cinema. With these deaths at the doing of Russian meat slab Jakota (Alex Vitale, Beyond the Door III), Ransom gains two opponents, and our one movie is all the better for it, affording us a thrifty montage of Ransom undergoing various acts torture; as viewers of the DVD-multipack-bin “favorite” The Firing Line know, these are the type of scenes in which Brown gives it his all.

While he lacks acting skills, Brown gives the movie something — something I failed to notice until watching Mattei’s 1988 follow-up, Strike Commando 2, in which Ransom is played instead by human blank Gwendoline’s Brent Huff. With this switcheroo, the sequel is such a snore, it needs a CPAP machine. Venture no further than original-recipe Strike Commando and all of its Rebness. As Joni Mitchell warned — and we ignored, so Counting Crows and Cinderella had to remind us — you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. Also, there’s cockfighting. —Rod Lott

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More than one shark flick swam into theaters in 1975. Released a few months later than that other one was Sharks’ Treasure, the final film of the do-it-all director Cornel Wilde (The Naked Prey). Far from delivering an iron-hot cash-in, the aging auteur approached the oceanic adventure the only way he knew how: utter earnestness. So earnest is the film, Oscar Wilde — no relation — would look at it, nod his head and say, “Important.”

William Grefé’s Mako: The Jaws of Death, this is not.

Crusty skipper Jim Carnahan (Wilde) is approached by a young man (John Neilson, Terror at Red Wolf Inn) about chartering his boat to a spot where a Spanish galleon’s gold is rumored to be sunk in the sands of the Caribbean floor. After an initial and impulsive turndown, Carnahan agrees and takes out a dangerously large loan to fund the mission. Among the hired crew is a Black Irish diver (Yaphet Kotto, Across 110th Street).

As the title has it, the waters between the boat and the loot are shark-infested. And as the title doesn’t have it, sharks aren’t the dominant threat. That honor belongs to a dinghy full of escaped convicts who, led by the appropriately named Lobo (Cliff Osmond, Sweet Sugar), hop aboard to hold our heroes hostage. Still, if you don’t think the threats won’t overlap, you’re chum.

Featuring sharks and otherwise, the underwater footage is real and it’s spectacular — not a surprise when you consider the man-vs.-nature themes of Wilde’s No Blade of Grass and the aforementioned Naked Prey. While the fearsome finned fish clearly were the front-and-center selling point of Sharks’ Treasure, the movie would be compelling enough without it. With a character like Wilde on hand to scowl, bark and show off his sexagenarian physique — including a pre-Palance demo of one-handed push-ups, it would be hard not to. —Rod Lott

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Hutch Mansell leads an unremarkable existence. Married with two kids, his days are a blur of the mundane and the predictable. He works as an accountant for his father-in-law in a small manufacturing firm. The only suspense in his life comes on days he must hustle to get the trash curbside in time for the garbage truck. Hutch is a nobody.

At least that’s what he would have us believe. But the nobody at the heart of Nobody is portrayed by Bob Odenkirk, and as the actor has proved many times over in TV’s Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, he can be a damned compelling presence.

Hutch’s routine is forever uprooted one night when two masked intruders break into the Mansell home. Hutch arms himself with a golf club, but chooses not to escalate the situation, instead allowing the thieves to get away. That decision doesn’t sit well with his wife (Connie Nielsen, Wonder Woman 1984) and teenaged son (Gage Munroe), who interpret Hutch’s action as cowardice and treat him coldly afterward.

What his family doesn’t know, and we learn soon enough, is that Hutch has a secret past as an ex-military assassin. The home invasion awakens his old habits, however, particularly on a city bus when he sees a group of hoodlums threatening a young woman. In an inspired choreography of ultraviolence, Hutch pulverizes the baddies, including one who turns out to be the younger brother of Yulian Kuznetsov (Aleksey Serebryakov), a psychopathic killer in the Russian mafia.

Screenwriter Derek Kolstad and co-producer David Leitch, both of the John Wick franchise, infuse Nobody with brutally effective violence and a grim sense of humor. If the movie doesn’t quite match Wick-actioner standards, neither does it embarrass itself. Director Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry) breaks no new ground, but helms with the cool efficiency of an acupuncturist who knows what pressure points will satisfy action-flick fans. It works, if perfunctorily, from the contrived plot devices (why exactly does the entire Russian mafia appear to be headquartered in the United States?) to a smattering of pop songs that provide ironic counterpoint to blood-spattered mayhem.

Best of all is Bob Odenkirk. The 58-year-old former sketch comedian turns out to be a credible tough guy. The film offers some other nifty casting choices, particularly Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future’s Doc Brown) and rapper RZA (The Man with the Iron Fists) as Hutch’s father and brother, but Odenkirk’s rumpled charisma is what ultimately makes Nobody worth knowing. —Phil Bacharach

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Admits Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character several times within the opening minutes of Wake of Death, “I’m tired.” Dude, we’ve noticed.

Van Damme’s Ben Archer is former mob muscle gone legit, now a club bouncer, loving father and devoted husband. His wife, Cynthia (Lisa King, Love N’ Dancing), is a cop who, upon discovering a boat of Asian refugees at the harbor, bring a scared young girl home for the night, as if test-driving a puppy from the pound. Unfortunately, 14-year-old Kim (Valerie Tian, 2012’s 21 Jump Street) is no ordinary refugee; she’s on the run from her father, who unfortunately is Triad crime boss Sun Quan (Simon Yam), who unfortunately slit his wife’s throat post-coitally as Kim unfortunately watched.

“I’m going to get Kim back my way,” says Quan, and boy, does he try, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake — a wake of death, one might say — including Cynthia’s. As you’d expect, that leaves Archer in reluctant but devoted charge of Kim, protecting her from own father. It’s not unlike Boaz Yakin’s Safe, the 2012 movie in which Jason Statham also protects a young Chinese girl from the Triad while also taking revenge on the goons who murdered his spouse. The difference is Safe is far smarter and better made, but it’s not like Wake of Death didn’t have a chance.

Shot in South Africa, the cheap actioner has four credited writers and went through three directors, the first being Hong Kong great Ringo Lam, reuniting with Yam after Full Contact and with Van Damme after three films, including Maximum Risk. Lam walked after a couple of weeks, so who knows which scenes are his; my guess is the film’s best: a motorcycle chase through a shopping mall, including up the escalators and jumping from level to level. A sequence as bravura as that rises above Wake’s other set pieces, which are so poorly staged and edited that the viewer is never given the chance to invest oneself. Since Philippe Martinez (The Chaos Experiment) holds the directorial credit and also produced, we can pin the failure on him.

Van Damme himself is fine. Ironically, the further time removes him from his box-office heyday, the better an actor he becomes. Every now and again, one of his DVD premieres pops with some acclaim — like 2008’s JCVD and 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning — but not enough to fuel a career comeback. Wake of Death isn’t one of those standouts, lumbering with so many slow-motion shots and needless scenes — like watching Yam practicing tai chi for a hot minute — that the running time keeps calling attention to its own padding. —Rod Lott

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