Whether known by Savage Harbor or Death Feud, this flick is one of those direct-to-video numbers in which nameless bad guys get shot while standing at the top of hills and stairwells so the camera can catch them taking a tumble, because such action is cheaper than an explosion on the beach. But there’s one of those, too.

And also Frank Stallone (Terror in Beverly Hills), so this sack of garbage already is three-for-three.

Stallone dons a stupid cap to play Joe, a longshoreman on leave who saves a woman named Anne (Karen Mayo-Chandler, Out of the Dark) from being raped. Joe and Anne immediately fall in love, and why shouldn’t they with such deep conversations as this, presented in full:

Joe: “Do you like avocados?”
Anne: “What?”
Joe: “Just a thought.”

Annnnnd scene.

After a romantic montage featuring outercourse in the park, Joe proposes to Anne before he has to leave for six months. She accepts. Unfortunately, Anne is on the run from Harry (Anthony Caruso, Mean Johnny Barrows), a human trafficker whose goons catch up to her, kidnap her from a grocery store and plunge her full of so much smack that she’ll work as a sex slave.

The horse works so well that she thinks every trick is Joe, rubbing her gartered-and-pantied self all over random guys as she groggily coos his name on loop. When Joe returns to shore, he sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong in order to find his beloved. And when he does, ooh, Harry better watch out! I’d say the rest of this sentence were a spoiler if it weren’t a compelling reason to watch: Joe shoots him in the dick.

Meanwhile, in a parallel plotline existing to achieve the magic 90-minute running time, we follow Joe’s fellow sailor buddy, Bill (Christopher Mitchum, The Executioner Part II), who claims he “can eat 40 eggs an hour.” Bill also finds love, with two-bit bar stripper Roxey, she of the Santa-hat pasties. That she’s played by Lisa Loring, The Addams Family’s former Wednesday all grown up (and out), makes the match — and the movie — that much weirder.

One could accuse the final film of writer/director/producer Carl Monson (Please Don’t Eat My Mother!) of being misogynistic … and one would be right. Outside of extras, each and every one of its female characters toils in the trade of transactional flesh. However, it would be unfair to reduce Savage Harbor to that label … because it’s also homophobic. What DTV actioner of the time wasn’t?

By no measure is Savage Harbor good, but it does feature Don’t Answer the Phone’s corpulent killer Nicholas Worth as one of Harry’s minions, another minion being dragged through California traffic by a rope, as well as an attempted assassination by trash truck. Not every movie can make such a double-barreled claim. —Rod Lott

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Two years after his last caper, master criminal and master of disguise Fantomas (Jean Marais) returns with his biggest and bestest scheme to date: Tax the rich on their right to live, under penalty of execution! This he poses to the world’s third-wealthiest man, Lord MacRashley (Jean-Roger Caussimon, The Return of Dr. Mabuse), who’s not too keen on the idea.

Consulting with his sick-money buddies the world over, MacRashley decides to use his supposedly haunted castle as a trap to snare Fantomas, with Commissioner Juve (Louis de Funès), journalist Fandor (also Marais) and Fandor’s fiancée (Mylène Demongeot) as bait …

… which sounds all fine and dandy, except it soon becomes clear that perhaps this was done for budgetary reasons, to keep the story confined to one location, clearing the way for a series of sequences — a séance, a fox hunt and business about hunting bedsheet ghosts — for Juve to bumble his way through. This effectively shoves Fandor to the sidelines as the film basically bides its time until the last 20 minutes, when they return to the plot so things can take off — even literally, what with Fantomas’ escape rocket.

A limp “FIN” to an otherwise fine trilogy, Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard is a lot like having that third child: Yeah, you love it, but no way are you going to make a baby book this time around. After this one, returning director André Hunebelle and the gang called it quits, which is probably for the best, before a mere trifle became a pure trial. —Rod Lott

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“V” is for Vendetta, but also “vacuous” — the very definition of this routine revenger from Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures.

In her one and only film role, Michelle Newkirk plays Bonnie, a young woman who murders her rapist (Greg Bradford, Zapped!) on the spot, then gets sentenced to two years in the clink for manslaughter. Behind bars, Bonnie refuses to become the bitch of the butch Kay (Sandy Martin, aka Napoleon Dynamite’s Grandma), so the mulleted gang leader has the good girl whacked and jacked with a lethal injection and staged to look like a suicide.

For Bonnie’s big sis, Hollywood stuntwoman Laurie (Karen Chase, Private School), that news is too bitter a pill to swallow. Knowing it’s BS, Laurie embarks on an afternoon crime spree for the sole purpose of being convicted and sent to the same prison so she can take out those responsible for Bonnie’s death. And by gum, her plan works! As Laurie explains to a gigolo during a conjugal visit, it’s all about “achieving honorable justice. That’s bushido.” (Hey, it beats “Did you finish?”)

Chase excels at the physical, but makes a mistake in spouting so many stupid lines with the weight of the world. Martin, however, recognizes the campiness of her dumb dialogue (example: “Look, if I wanted shit from you, I’d pick your teeth!”) and responds by tearing into it whole-hog with a heaping side of relish. A better director would strike a tonal balance between his protagonist and antagonist, but Vendetta has a first-timer in VFX man Bruce Logan (something called Star Wars). Despite erring in performance coaxing, Logan adheres to the rules of the Corman school by filling his film with many explosions and many more bare breasts, as every women-in-prison picture should.

Speaking of, Vendetta marks the final role for Corman regular Roberta Collins, who fatally overdosed two years later. Here, the star of The Big Doll House, Women in Cages and Caged Heat graduates from inmate to guard — and quite admirably acts her tail off. —Rod Lott

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Reads the opening crawl of the geopolitical goofball Cuba Crossing, “This motion picture is dedicated to all people who desire to live in a free democratic society.” Hey, that’s me! Maybe it’s you, too, but that doesn’t mean we’re obligated to like it.

Through chunks of mismatched stock footage, the opening depicts the United States’ botched Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. With his fellow soldiers slaughtered, Hudson (Robert Vaughn, Superman III) cries to the heavens, “Damn you, Kennedy!” Then, in present day, Hudson, now in the CIA, travels to Key West, Florida, to get his revenge; one of the film’s alternate titles sums that up succinctly: Assignment: Kill Castro.

To do that, Hudson hires bar owner and charter boat captain Tony (Stuart Whitman, Demonoid) to drop a couple of assassins on the island of Cuba and come back with a box of heroin. Tony agrees and soon after realizing he’s being played, but also enjoys the process — or at least the part of the process that involves being seduced by My Tutor MILF Caren Kaye.

Cuba Crossing unspools with muddled story points that fail to connect, perhaps keeping with the aforementioned crawl referring to the Bay of Pigs event as “confusing and frustrating.” Director Chuck Workman (the guy behind so many time-wasting Academy Awards montages) contributes to this by exhibiting something less than a sure hand; in one scene at Tony’s watering hole, it appears that three movies are being shot at once, what with a Marilyn Monroe impersonator singing “I Wanna Be Loved by You” as a massive bar fight explodes and two significant-sized iguanas crawl on some dumb guy’s head while he just sits there. It’s a mess — both that scene and the movie as a whole.

Co-authoring the screenplay with Workman was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s Robin Swicord, who clearly got better. Without much thought into other aspects of the recipe, they throw a lot of ingredients into their soufflé, including cockfighting, black-on-black mortal combat, man-eating sea turtles, the badass Woody Strode (Vigilante) the fine-ass Sybil Danning (Malibu Express) and, as the ultimate villain of the piece says, “that Fourth of July gun bullshit!” —Rod Lott

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How does one earn the ceremonial title of Queen of the Jungle? In 15 minutes or less, Sheena shows us: by having your geologist parents be killed by falling rocks while searching for the source of the fabled “healing earth” in a primitive African village.

Okay, so it’s a little more complicated than that, but that little white blonde grows up to be the zebra-riding, hedgehog-summoning, lion-ordering, vine-swinging, breast-bouncing leader of the Zambuli tribe. One credit sequence later, she’s bathing full-frontal nude under a waterfall — not just in broad daylight, but played by Tanya Roberts in her Bond-girl prime, her eyes both sultry and vacant. She looks like she’s auditioning for the part of Eve in Playboy’s The Bible.

Her quiet existence is upended when Sports World journalist Vic Casey (a bland Ted Wass, Curse of the Pink Panther) and rotund cameraman Fletcher (Police Academy vet Donovan Scott) fly to Africa to shoot a segment about the football glory days of Prince Otwani (Trevor Thomas, Inseminoid). A royal assassination occurs, and the patsy for it is the Zambuli shaman (Elizabeth of Toro), whom Sheena has on telepathic speed dial.

Sheena tries to keep the peace and protect her land. Vic tries to tap that.

If there’s one thing kids love in live-action adaptations of comics, especially ones they have no familiarity with, it’s warring political factions, right? This nonsense is like quicksand to Sheena’s pacing; there’s simply not enough of the Tarzan-style action and adventure present in the Will Eisner-created comic book and 1950s TV series. What little exists is supremely silly, with Sheena leading all creatures great and small in some sort of jungle-based Justice League (for which a rule against public defecation presumably has been waived), culminating in an elephant destroying a helicopter.

Whereas 2017’s Wonder Woman sees its heroine as empowerment embodied, Sheena sees its as merely a body. Even if Roberts’ nude scenes were excised, that still would leave all the leering shots up her loincloth, with John Guillermin reusing low angles from his ’76 King Kong as she climbs — which is often. (The nudity is something of a miracle for a PG-rated film, especially since the PG-13 was a month old.)

Sheena is also rather dumb, because when Vic first kisses her, she says, “Mouths were given us to eat with. Why did you touch yours to mine?” And that raises a Big Question: Does she brush and floss? It’s a valid inquiry, given her diet of “locust bean cakes” and “fermented buffalo milk.”

This claptrap goes on and on for two hours. If the natives are restless, think how you will feel. —Rod Lott

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