One of the great good films to come out of the 1990s action boom, this Russell Mulcahy caper stars Kim Basinger as Karen McCoy, quite possibly the hottest felon ever to walk out of a woman’s prison, complete with makeup and hair did. After a multiyear rap for a botched burglary of an Atlanta bank — complete with high-tech gear that must’ve cost more than she would’ve made from the heist – she’s now looking to reconnect with her son and walk the straight and narrow.

But, of course, because Kim Basinger is so hot, every man she comes across wants to wrap their slimy tentacles around her, especially her grimy parole officer, who I’m pretty sure was in plenty of Ernest P. Worrell flicks. Add in the equally slimy Terence Stamp, as a crime lord clad mostly in a terrible Southern accent, who kidnaps her kid, leaving her with no other option but to return to the robbing life. Along the way, she meets affable J.T. (an affable Val Kilmer), a bumbling driver who seems out of place in this movie, but oh, well, it was the ’90s and we threw caution to the wind and hired Val Kilmer whenever we could.

Watching The Real McCoy for the first time in 20 or so years, it’s a bit strange now to watch these Joel Silver, Andrew Vajna, Don Simpson or, in this case, Martin Bregman-produced flicks in the era of #MeToo, because throughout most of the movie, Basinger takes beating after beating from various men and never once fights back — until the very end, of course, when she all of a sudden unleashes kung-fu kicks left and right.

A lot of this probably wouldn’t fly today and you’d have to wonder if Basinger, whose star has waned a bit, would do it all differently today. And while it would be easy to call for a remake, this was quite the bomb at the box office, earning about $6 million in receipts. Maybe it didn’t fly so well back then, either? —Louis Fowler

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Don’t mess with Texas, as the state’s motto goes. Which is not to say Texas won’t mess with you.

So it goes for Clay McCarthy (Patrick Wayne, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger), driving from California to Tennessee in his souped-up van so he can do his stuntman work on a location shoot in Nashville. Tagging along are brother Dale (Mitch Vogel, The Reivers), because he wants to be a country music star, and sister Sugar (Lindsay Bloom, Sixpack Annie), because the primary antagonist needs someone to leer at and harass. Unfortunately, no sooner have the opening credits finished when a truck of redneck prison escapees forces the McCarthy siblings off the road and robs them of their wallets and wheels. Welcome to the Lone Star State, ya hear? Texas Detour might as well point them to Macon County.

Help — and eventual trouble — arrives in Beau Hunter (Anthony James, Soggy Bottom U.S.A.), a lanky, petulant rich kid who gives them a ride and a roof while they wait for the town’s apathetic sheriff (R.G. Armstrong, White Line Fever) to locate Clay’s van, provided he ever starts searching. Beau introduces the McCarthys to his sis (Priscilla Barnes, Mallrats), who goes gaga for Clay, and his dad (Cameron Mitchell, Gorilla at Large), who does not. Needless to say, the West Coasters learn about Southern-fried “justice” the hard way — none more so than the sweet Sugar, but judging from the weight writer/director Howard Avedis (Mortuary) gives various misdeeds, the theft of Clay’s van ranks higher than sexual assault.

Given that Texas Detour is an action movie from the era in which American culture fetishized vans, color us nonplussed. Story doesn’t propel Texas Detour forward, and yet Avedis keeps it moving in that direction, straight and steady. As immensely pleasurable as its leads are genial, the hicksploitation pic comes vacuum-packed with such drive-in-friendly confections as a motorcycle race, a car chase, Barnes’ bare chassis, a decent-enough Flo & Eddie soundtrack, a bar decorated with clown paintings this side of John Wayne Gacy and — what else? — Cameron Mitchell being all Cameron Mitchell, cigar ash on his shirt like so many flecks of Cheetos. —Rod Lott

Real-life not-twin sisters Audrey and Judy Landers play respective twin sisters Polly and Ruth Morrison in Deadly Trigger. It also features special guest star from Das Boot, Jan Fedder. Mind you, that’s how the actual movie actually credits him in its actual opening moments, which is one of your first signs that something about this double-vanity project is … off. Another tell is that a script credit is nowhere to be found.

Many more red flags unfurl; please be patient.

No sooner are happy, sexy sisters Polly and Ruth picnicking in a New York park and talking about moving to Germany to work in a bank and take pictures, respectively, and — bam — they’re in Germany and wearing sparkly dresses and singing in a local nightclub, allowing for music numbers that you just know the Landerses had written into their contract. One night, the girls are attacked in a parking garage, have their shirts ripped off and are raped, all at the behest of laughing thug Harry DeRomeo (aforementioned special guest from Das Boot, Jan Fedder) and his coke fingernail. Making this all the more is tragic is that Ruth, three months pregnant, miscarries and tries to kill herself by jumping out the hospital window. In the fall, Ruth is paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair and presumably testing the bonds of sisterly love by putting Polly on wiping duty.

Alternately known as Deadly Twins, the movie then becomes a rape-revenger — or at least once-and-only-once director/producer Joe Oaks’ approximation of the exploitation staple. Polly teams with a police detective to frame DeRomeo for stealing a cash payroll from a steel mill. Their plan does not make sense, but does DeRomeo flee, kidnap a kid at gunpoint and shout “It’s April Fools’ Day, guys. Off with your pants! Off!” at two cops? He does.

Does he chase an army man with a bulldozer? Yes.

Is said army man outwitted by said bulldozer and deposited into a lake? Most certainly.

Will you see DeRomeo duke it out with a guy while going through an automatic car wash? You will, but don’t get your hopes up — Oaks did not spend the extra two bucks for a spritz of tire sheen.

In fact, despite Deadly Twins being shot on video, Oaks somehow didn’t spring for recorded sound. This entire enterprise in VHS Eurotrash is not only dubbed, but dubbed very, very poorly, digging to a level of incompetence that is nearly indescribable.

But I’ll try: It’s as if Oaks had never seen a movie before, and only had heard about the concept in passing, yet decided to give it the ol’ community-college try. Then he either forgot to mic everybody or accidentally erased the soundtrack while playing with a RadioShack magnet kit too close to the camera. Thus, he was forced to re-create all the audio, but by then, everyone long had thrown away the script, so they went off memory, but everyone had received at least two concussions in the interim.

You have no idea how close that explanation is.

Lovely and talented, the Landers sisters were TV mainstays in the late 1970s and early ’80s — prime time to be a vital part of my pre- to pubescent dreams. I was partial to Judy (Hellhole) purely for curvaceous reasons, but Audrey (Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation) is the better actress, which may be why she gets the lion’s share of screen time. However, their infamous Playboy spread from 1983 exhibits more life than either sibling does here.

Where was Andy Sidaris when the Landers sisters — and the world — needed him? —Rod Lott

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In this film’s prologue, journalist Tom Nilson (Thomas Hunter, The Cassandra Crossing) sits at his desk to record an audio account of harrowing events he experienced in the past month, when a small passenger jet leaving Chile for Rio disappeared over the Amazon. Nilson teases that his story is “something extraordinary.” In reality, it’s a Jess Franco cheapie. And that’s not really a complaint.

Welcome to Utape Airlines X312 — Flight to Hell! One of the handful of passengers aboard is a big bank president (Siegfried Schürenberg, The College-Girl Murders) who’s fled his employer with millions in stolen jewels on his person — a fact not lost on the plane’s hijacker, inadvertently causing the craft to crash in the Brazilian jungle. On the ground, as the survivors attempt to make their way to safety, they’re chased by a band of revolutionaries led by Pedro, played by Franco regular Howard Vernon (Countess Perverse) in a visibly glued-on mustache that makes him look like Michael Shannon as a live-action Frito Bandito. And Utape employee Bill (Fernando Sancho, The Swamp of the Ravens) isn’t exactly making things easier on them, what with wanting the loot for himself and willing to murder to achieve that goal.

Characters are 100% recycled cardboard, with one defining characteristic — okay, maybe two, tops — to define them. They include a fey man (Antonio de Cabo, Franco’s Devil Hunter) with a tiny dog named Pepito, a grown Austrian woman (Gila von Weitershausen, Trenchcoat) forever clutching a teddy bear, a hot Spanish woman with built-in floatation devices (Esperanza Roy, It Happened at Nightmare Inn) and a rich American woman (Ewa Strömberg, Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos) who observes in broad daylight, “The moon is so romantic!” Earlier, right after X312’s rough landing, she says, “There have to be snakes and crocodiles, just like in the movies,” and dammit, she’s right!

From title and setup, X312 — Flight to Hell sounds as if a sweet little disaster film awaits your eyeballs, but let’s not kid ourselves. In such a confined space as the fuselage, Franco can’t engage in his goddamn zooms, so he gets this baby on the ground as soon as allows. That makes the movie fall into the category of jungle piffle. And, once more, that’s not really a complaint. —Rod Lott

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If the Fast and Furious movies are the cool jocks who get good grades and homecoming honors, then the Death Race films, Universal’s other gas-powered cash cow, are the near-invisible stoner kids who spend breaks between classes smoking outside. And this one, Death Race: Beyond Anarchy, tries so little, he flunks woodshop.

In this fourth and fetid entry, the titular competition now takes place within the walls of The Sprawl, an 88,000-acre home to 220,000 hardened criminals. You do the math (because the target audience sure can’t). Metal-masked Frankenstein (Velislav Pavlov, Lake Placid vs. Anaconda) may be the prison sport’s reigning hero, but he’s no longer our main character — hell, he’s no longer the good guy, which seems pretty counterproductive, but whatev. That task falls to a not-up-to-it Zach McGowan (Dracula Untold) as Connor Gibson, a black-ops specialist sent undercover to take down Frankenstein and the race. This requires Connor to earn a contestant’s slot via a preliminary game of Capture the Keys, whose officials do not want “to see some MMA-submission bullshit.”

Fans of the previous Death Race pictures are bound to express disappointment with where director Don Michael Paul (Half Past Dead) and co-writer Tony Giglio (S.W.A.T.: Under Siege) take their first turn at the direct-to-video franchise’s wheel: to something resembling fanfic, built upon the visual equivalent of STDs and self-pleasing dialogue like “Well, ain’t this a rainbow of fuckin’ ugly?” So skeevy and scuzzy is this “effort” that the returning character played by Danny Trejo (L.A. Slasher) appears to want little to do with it, spending most of his runtime literally watching the action from bed!

Early in, someone remarks that it doesn’t matter who’s behind Frankenstein’s mask, because duh, it’s a mask. However, Paul proves that theory untrue — Luke Goss, we hardly knew ye! — and not just because the mask looks positively Predatory this time around. The previous entries may be junk, but they are fun junk; this grimy, slimy one forgets and/or forgoes the fun. In its place? Decapitations, misogyny, face piercings, sub-Slipknot metal, Purge-level beatdowns, talk of taxes, more misogyny, dramatic rain fighting, Danny Glover, motocross, ziplining and some MMA-submission bullshit. —Rod Lott

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