“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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Only in the 1970s — or at least the New World Pictures version of the 1970s — could you make absolute heroes out of a pair of cop-shooting, hostage-banging, dynamite-toting bank robbers the way that the drive-in favorite The Great Texas Dynamite Chase did, starring the breast-baring duo of Claudia Jennings and Jocelyn Jones.

Doing a good job of capturing small town Texas — or at least the California stand-in of it — complete with tumbleweeds blowing down the railroad tracks, bored Texan Ellie Jo (Jones, Tourist Trap) works in a bank that has a Confederate flag on the wall; when prison escapee Candy (Jennings, Sisters of Death) comes in, sticks of lit dynamite in hand, the two team up and head out on the road looking for money and men, not in that order.

And it’s a pretty good plan, too, taking them all across Texas’ various backroads, saloons and hotels. Eventually, they hook up with small-time thief Slim (Johnny Crawford); if you’ve ever wanted to see the co-star of The Rifleman making drunken love while a song called “Love Is Good to Me” plays over the quadraphonic stereo — and I know that fetish is out there — here’s your flick.

In a particularly downbeat ending, even though the gals make it to Mexico on horseback, just about everyone else receives massive shotgun blasts to the chest; to be honest, I was kind of hoping for some dynamite-handling gone wrong — nothing big, just a few blown off fingers here and there — but on an impossibly tight budget, I guess director Michael Pressman (Doctor Detroit) did the best he could.

However, with Jennings and Jones frequently nude — and both with a sexy look that reminds me of the white-trash moms I grew up around in Texas — it’s really not that difficult for The Great Texas Dynamite Chase to instead manifest a couple of explosions in your blue jeans. —Louis Fowler

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With a title that translates to Fearless Punks, the Mex Pistols of Intrepidos Punks are a down and dirty wrecking crew that roams the near future — possibly a day or two from now — of a small, south-of-the-border town, dedicated to causing mass anarquía wherever they go. ¡Ay, dios mío!

After the oft-repeated three-chord tune plays over the vandalized credits, led by the chain mail-masked monster Tarzan (El Fantasma), these satanic punks rob and rape any and everyone they come in the slightest contact with, to the point where a pair of powerfully mustached plainclothes cops decide suficiente es suficiente, especially when it disrupts their undercover mota operation, I think; to be fair, there were no subtitles to this Mexican flick and my Spanish is intermedio at best.

But, you know, the language barrier shouldn’t really make a difference because these choque rockeros de la ciudad speak that one language that truly matters in the future: pura violencia. With very little plot, the movie relies heavily on the punks cruising around on their impressively innovative motorcycles, killing men, women and possibly children wherever they go, always in new and inventive ways, no stuntmen required.

With a forward-thinking flamboyant costume design that probably scared the mierda out of many a punk-fearing abuela, Tarzan and his high-haired old lady, Fiera (La Princesa Lea), mercilessly fling throwing stars, chuck battle axes and wield other decidedly non-punk paraphernalia with appropriate ferocity; it all leads, of course, to their own deathly downfalls, along with most of their gang, by the two undercover cops who afterward have an on-screen steak dinner to celebrate their win.

Sadly, their job isn’t done yet: The punks somehow returned seven years later in the follow-up, La Venganza de los Punks. It’s a flick I own, purchasing it in an area flea market’s parking lot. When I went to play it, however, in a final middle finger to society, my machine wouldn’t read the disc. ¡Malditos gamberros! —Louis Fowler

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