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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From the opening scenes featuring a middle-aged man with a machete cutting the throats of a few vatos playing a crooked game of dice, this Machete looks very much like a homegrown copy of that Machete, even if this was strangely filmed a few years earlier.

However, as soon as this Machete finds an adorable, Walter Keane-styled lad in need of a family getting beaten up by locals, it’s here where the film veers off into a somewhat violent tale of spiritual love as the possibly Heavenly Kid and a group of irreligious area thugs battle for the soul of Machete.

With a healthy appetite for tequila — Antigua Cruz, straight from the obtuse bottle — Machete, also known as Lukas, an ex-bodyguard for the president, wanders the desert, stopping by the small town of Purgatory — to hell with subtlety, I suppose — for reasons that are unclear and remain unclear. Either way, he causes trouble with the same three locals throughout the movie, swinging a flimsy machete around like a 5-year-old who’s just seen Conan the Barbarian.

Meanwhile, as a young girl and her “gypsy” mother are harassed by those same three locals, a gringo from Machete’s past — back in Vietnam, apparently — is looking for him, ready to take him back to Arizona, “dead or alive.” While they all impatiently come together for the climax, as the film tries to tie all the loose ends together at once, complete with Machete being shot to death.

Only he’s not. I think.

With guardian angels, familial intrigue and a white dude machete training montage in the desert, writer and star Pablo Esparza — who I do hope that I’m related to on my maternal side — does what he can on this zero-budget actioner, even if very little of it makes any sense which, of course, makes it incredibly entertaining.

At the very least, I hope they got a few bucks from the Antigua Cruz sponsorship. It’s in this flick so much, I’m surprised that bottle didn’t get a producer’s credit. —Louis Fowler

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