If only Sugar Boxx were a faux trailer and nothing more, it might be something. Extended to a full-length feature, however, it loses a lot of spark … much like Robert Rodriguez’s own Grindhouse spin-off, Machete. Still, any purebred fan of the women-in-prison (WIP) film won’t hate himself for digging in, as this Boxx offers all of the much-reviled subgenre’s mainstays, sapphic ones included.

Cody Jarrett’s low-budgeter centers on Valerie March (The Hillside Strangler’s Geneviere Anderson, who’s prettier than the transvestite Christina Applegate the poster depicts her to be), a go-get-’em news reporter for WPNS (get it?). Wishing to expose the Sugar State Women’s Prison as the sex-and-slavery hovel it really is, Valerie longs to go undercover as a prisoner. Shortly after donning hooker getup, she gets her wish and lands herself behind its bars.

The hot-flashed hoosegow is the kind of place that houses the worst of the worst, where … well, let’s let the sexy Warden Beverly Buckner (Linda Dona, Future Kick) fill us in: “Life in this compound can be pretty damn hard unless you have friends. I’m talking about beatings, gang rape, dysentery.”

Check, check and check! Writer/director Cody Jarrett (Frog-g-g!) gleefully submits leading lady Anderson and her fellow actresses to much mayhem and misery before allowing them to achieve that much-desired revenge. As a result, Sugar Boxx is marginally violent, occasionally funny and aggressively stupid, while not fully being able to embrace its drive-in roots. Having little money certainly works to the movie’s advantage, as does Jarrett’s decision to fill supporting parts with Russ Meyer starlets Kitten Natividad and Tura Satana, not to mention veteran WIP director Jack Hill (The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage). That said, a little more creativity is required to pull off the pastiche/homage to the point where it looks as authentic as Jarrett no doubt would like.

I admired it more than enjoyed it, getting in step with its funky groove as it shimmied its way forth. In terms of silly-minded throwbacks of fightin’ foxy females, it’s not up to the titillating heights of, say, Bitch Slap, but for a mere 86 minutes, it will do. —Rod Lott

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As demonstrated by Dr. Jack Finney (Lee Gideon, 1988’s D.O.A.) in the prologue, the gadget for which this film is named is a tiny computer chip that, when tucked into the folds of one’s brain, acts as a form of remote control: mind control, to be clear. In fact, Killing Device has the power to “turn people into kamikazes,” according to our hero, intrepid newspaper reporter Kyle (bland Antony Alda, half-brother of Alan), whom we don’t even meet until a third of the film has flickered past.

Before that point, one-time director Paul MacFarlane (cinematographer for shot-on-video slasher The Ripper) layers scene after scene of device-implanted humans — from a ’roided-out Stallone stand-in to an insolent granny — putting senators to the most extreme of term limits. One is shot dead; another is felled by a trick cigar that emits poison gas; yet another is shot while smoking an actual cigar! Kyle investigates, with the assistance of Sara (Gig Rauch, better-known as Gig Gangel, Playboy’s Miss January 1980, in her only acting role), a beautiful woman who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and exists mostly to provide the inevitable, smooth jazz-fueled sex scene with shapely and immodest eye candy.

Packed with silly violence and scenes shot in a strip club just because, the low-budget actioner plays like a production of Andy Sidaris in his prime, only shot in Oklahoma instead of Hawaii or California, and infused with a political conspiracy à la Three Days of the Condor, but narrowed to the length (and depth) of a two-martini lunch. The dialogue is a hoot, particularly in the threats thrown Kyle’s way, from “Find what you’re looking for, fuzz nuts?” to “You better hope that gun’s made of chocolate, asshole, cuz you’re fixin’ to eat it!”

Featuring Return of the Living Dead’s Clu Gulager as Smitty and live music by Flash Terry and the Uptown Blues Band, if you’re into either of those sorts of things. —Rod Lott

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Audiences barely had dried after embarking on The Poseidon Adventure when producer Irwin Allen decided to let his disaster river run inside America’s living rooms, by way of the made-for-TV Flood.

In the small town of Brownsville (located in Anywhere, USA), the sport of fishing attracts quite the tourist population and, thus, pays the bills. Private helicopter pilot Steve Brannigan (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice’s Robert Culp at his most Redford-esque) even flies filthy-rich anglers (including Planet of the Apes resident Roddy McDowall to and fro sweet spots for $150 a day, so one would be forgiven for thinking he may place his financial interest above the well-being of his fellow citizens, but nope — he and his aviator shades are our hero!

The same cannot be said for town council head John Cutler (Richard Baseheart, Allen’s City Beneath the Sea), because when the water level rises and the dam starts to burst leaks, he advocates against opening the spill gates to drain the lake, thereby scaring away the fish. He’s our bad guy, which we know before he voices placing profits above safety, because he has a mustache and smokes a pipe.

Guess what happens: Yes, the dam bursts and Brownsville floods, through the magic of miniatures and stock footage — some of it in black and white! Among the stars put in peril are Poseidon vet Carol Lynley as a pregnant woman overdue for a burst of her own, teen idol Leif Garrett as a kid spreading word of impending danger, Titanic’s Gloria Stuart as a grocery shopper unwilling to believe him, and Black Swan’s Barbara Hershey and The Doll Squad’s Francine York as nurses of the cozy, down-home hospital.

Viewers will be surprised at how entertaining Flood can be on a scale considerably lower than what Allen’s act-of-God blockbusters were used to, and shocked at how director Earl Bellamy (who followed this up with the following year’s Fire, also for Allen) allows karma and comeuppance to punish Cutler. Let’s just say it’s the kind of bold move upon which network prime time frowned. —Rod Lott

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As played by Jason Statham, master assassin Arthur Bishop returns from 2011’s The Mechanic, but loses his “The” along the way to Mechanic: Resurrection. It’s a sequel for which no one was clamoring, given the tepid response to the 2011 film, itself a remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson vehicle.

Presumed dead and definitely retired, Bishop lives quietly and off the radar … until he’s tracked down and approached to perform three hits for a man named Crain (Sam Hazeldine, 2012’s The Raven). Bishop refuses … until Crain’s goons kidnap Bishop’s brand-new girlfriend, Gina (Jessica Alba, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For), and hold her as incentive. This works, even though Bishop literally just met her the day before, but hey, Gina’s a social-justice peacenik who runs a shelter in Cambodia for victims of human trafficking — in other words, she’s a keeper!

Bishop’s hit list, in order of preferred execution:
1. an Idi Amin-style warlord (Femi Elufowoju Jr., The Legend of 1900) holed up in an impenetrable Malaysian prison.
2. a billionaire (newcomer Toby Eddington) holed up in an impenetrable Australian high-rise.
3. an arms dealer (Jason Bourne’s Tommy Lee Jones, whose craggy face sports a stoopid goatee) holed up in an impenetrable Bulgarian fortress.

Employing disguises and MacGyver-ing the shit out of situations on the fly, Bishop is one smooth operator, reminding viewers of one Ethan Hunt, debonair agent extraordinaire for the Impossible Missions Force. In a likely not-accidental move on the part of director Dennis Gansel (We Are the Night), this Resurrection wants to reinvent itself as a Mission: Impossible holdover. In fact, Resurrection’s most memorable set piece — in which Bishop cracks open the glass bottom of a cantilever pool 76 floors above ground — directly recalls Tom Cruise’s skyscraper-crawling exploits in Ghost Protocol. (Not for nothing was this scene the centerpiece of the studio’s ad campaign.)

This movie, however, is a below-average ass-kicker whose three-kill structure feels like episodes of an as-yet-nonexistent Mechanic TV series slapped together to sell as a feature overseas. With the teacher/student relationship that drove The Mechanic’s plot machinations now gone (along with Statham’s co-star, Ben Foster, Hell or High Water), so has the one thing that made that movie stand out from the action pack. Statham (Furious 7) is not to blame; as always, he delivers, which is immediately obvious in the slam-bang prologue, an asinine yet irresistible melding of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and the goofy stunts of the 007 adventure Moonraker. What Alba is doing in such a small, thankless and insignificant part is anyone’s guess, so I’ll take one: to allow Gansel’s camera to admire her supple, cocoa-butter flesh? Yeah, it’s a gimme. —Rod Lott

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When you take your act from the big screen to the small one, you have to shout to get noticed. That could be why producer Irwin Allen’s made-for-TV movie Cave In! arrived in NBC prime time with an exclamation point intact.

At Yellowstone’s Five Mile Caverns, the north fork of the grounds undergoes a smidge of a rock collapse. Rather than close the tourist destination until the situation is fixed, the rangers on duty decide just to keep the tour groups away from that part. After all, a couple of bigwigs are on their way: a state senator (Susan Sullivan, TV’s Castle) and a crotchety professor (Ray Milland, Frogs). Ranger Gene (Dennis Cole, Death House) even was supposed to marry one of them; you guess whom. Among the few others along for the stroll are a sad-sack cop (Leslie Nielsen, just before Airplane! sent his career soaring in a different direction) and a short-fused fugitive (James Olson, Amityville II: The Possession). Wouldn’t you know it, that group gets trapped when boulders fall all around them and block off the obvious paths.

From there, it’s all about the saintly Gene leading them to safety … just as another saintly Gene (Hackman, that is) did the same in Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure. If director Georg Fenady (Terror in the Wax Museum) had excised his characters’ flashbacks to recent points in life when they weren’t stuck in a cave — each the stuff of soap operas — then Cave In! would look brazenly more like a drier remake of Poseidon, as Gene takes the men and women through nature’s obstacle course: tight crevasses, gaps over perilous heights, a rock path through a geothermal pit, underneath a submerged rock wall and across a rickety bridge made of wood and rope, neither to be trusted.

But Allen’s brand name can be, provided an undiscriminating, no-brainer disaster fix is all you seek. Compared to his blockbuster movies, Cave In! has less money and lower star power to work with, but does hold one unique advantage: getting the job done in about half the time. —Rod Lott

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