Seven years after breaking big in/as Flash Gordon, Sam Jones got the chance to play another Sunday-funnies superstar with/as The Spirit. All right, so it was made for TV, but at least this time, Jones didn’t have to suffer the indignity of having his voice dubbed by someone else. An added bonus (although we wouldn’t know it for another two decades and some change) is that the ensuing telepic is a greater, grander entertainment than Frank Miller’s $60 million stink-bomb adaptation for the silver screen.

Being a feature-length pilot for ABC’s intended series, this version scripted by Die Hard scribe Steven E. de Souza depicts the origin story of Will Eisner’s comic-book creation: After presumably being shot dead by a baddie, the square-jawed, straight-and-narrow cop Denny Colt takes advantage of his antagonist’s assumption by donning a sliver of a blue mask to disguise his identity. Reborn as The Spirit, basically a superhero in a GQ-worthy suit, Colt sets about cleaning his beloved Central City of its crime problem, vigilante-style. That no one recognizes him — not even gal pal Ellen Dolan (a miscast Nana Visitor, aka Mama Voorhees of 2009’s Friday the 13th remake) — is ludicrous, but just let it ride; as comics readers know, that’s just the style and, er, spirit of the piece.

Faithful though it is to Eisner’s source material, this Spirit makes one major change that’s hard to argue against: giving young sidekick Ebony White an upgrade from his 1940s stereotype — a step above Stepin Fetchit — to a modern, palatable role. Now named Eubie, he’s played by Enemy Mine’s pint-sized Bumper Robinson. Hopefully, the shift would have happened regardless, but that it did is not at all surprising, especially considering blaxploitation pioneer Michael Schultz (Cooley High) was at the helm. That said, Schultz’s Spirit is left with a few unfortunate hallmarks of its own era: namely, big hair on the ladies, a synth-sax score and multiple Rick James references.

On the plus side, where dozens more tick marks reside, The Spirit boasts a vibrant color palette that predates Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, a general pulp vibe as enjoyable as an ice-cold glass of Tropicana, and a permeating sense of humor that’s mostly meant to be, even if our effective detective twice says, “Crime, especially murder, is never a laughing matter.” —Rod Lott

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Ib Melchior’s short story “The Racer” — the source material for 1975’s Roger Corman-produced cult classic Death Race 2000 — doesn’t even receive credit in the 2008 remake Death Race until the very end. No big deal — it bears little resemblance to the story, anyway.

That 10-pager — I first encountered it in the Forrest J. Ackerman-edited anthology Reel Future — is little more than a quick morality tale, about Hank and Willie, two guys with a car equipped with bull’s horns on the front, competing in a cross-country race in which scores are obtained by mowing down pedestrians. They’re skilled at making kills until one of them starts imagining the face of his daughter on all of their targets, and decries his participation.

For Corman, screenwriter Charles B. Griffith (The Little Shop of Horrors) and director Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul) just took that core idea of the race and amped it up with a bevy of colorful characters with crazy names — Hank or Willie simply wouldn’t do — like Frankenstein, Machine Gun Joe, Calamity Jane, Matilda the Hun and Nero the Hero. They also kept the bull’s horns.

For Hollywood’s big-budget remake and these PC times, however, mowing down innocent people for sport won’t do, so writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil) makes his competition internal, in an enclosed track on a prison island. The drivers are hardened criminals; five victories and freedom is granted, according to icy warden Joan Allen (Face/Off).

In the ’75 film, former Kung Fu master David Carradine was the star, a heavily scarred racer named Frankenstein who hid his face behind a mask for much of the film. In this ’08 model, Frankenstein is the race’s superstar, but it doesn’t matter much who’s behind the mask. When the first Frank dies in an earlier Death Race, the warden asks new felon Jensen Ames (original Transporter Jason Statham) to take the name and get behind the wheel. Of course, Statham looking like Statham, he only has to wear the mask in a couple of scenes because no one can see through the windows of his souped-up Ford Mustang.

The one element from Melchior’s tale that the new film makes use of is the idea of the daughter. Here, she’s a newborn, but she drives Ames’ conscience. It’s a little out of place and feels tacked on at the end, but doesn’t detract from a stupidly enjoyable hour and a half. Bartel’s film was an all-out satire; Anderson’s is an all-out actioner. Melchior’s “The Racer” lay not quite committed to either. —Rod Lott

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Entry No. 7 in Hong Kong cinema’s unrelated Police Story franchise (if we count Michelle Yeoh’s Supercop 2 spin-off), Police Story: Lockdown again stars Jackie Chan, this time as Capt. Zhong, a middle-aged career cop and now a widower. He meets his emo-medical daughter, Miao (Jing Tian, Special ID), at a trendy, two-story nightclub complete with private rooms, go-go girls and frickin’ live piranha.

Resentful of her workaholic father’s years of absenteeism, Miao nonetheless makes an effort to reconnect, starting with introducing him to her new beau, Wu (Liu Ye, The Chef, the Actor and the Scoundrel), formerly a pugilist in an illegal boxing ring, currently owner of this very hot spot. Zhong immediately dislikes Wu and … well, father knows best, because Wu takes his whole bar hostage, plopping all patrons who weren’t able to flee during the melée into the dancing cages. (No word if such dual use was in mind when Wu designed the club, but the cages certainly came in handy, no?)

As villains go, Wu is pretty cardboard — or maybe candy glass is more apt here — and as heroes go, Chan is Jackie Chan, the ever-reliable, brand-name action star. From Little Big Soldier director Ding Sheng, Lockdown is middling fare at best — nowhere near Chan’s peak (which includes a handful of the Police Story stories), but equally distant from his more-recent nadir. It is what it is, which means that while the film is limited by its (mostly) single location, it’s worth tuning in just to watch the fight sequences (and usually the bloopers, although that’s not the case here). The 60-something Chan isn’t quite as fast on his feet these days, but like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, he’s never going to lose all those moves. Aging suits him well, even when the scripts fall short. —Rod Lott

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As World War II comes to a close, three Japanese soldiers — aka the losing side — hide a bunch of gold in a cave in the Philippines. Thirty-six years later — round numbers, phooey! — some honkies go a-hunting for it, in an expedition so dangerous, one of them remarks, “I knew this was going to be difficult.”

Viewers of this truly terrible film, Invaders of the Lost Gold, no doubt will agree at the outset.

Staying in what appear to be tents purloined from a traveling circus and/or an annual Renaissance fair, the members of this Horror Safari (the movie’s alternate, better, yet still deceitful title) include:
• the presumed leader (Stuart Whitman, Guyana: Cult of the Damned), eternally grouchy and quick to call someone a “bastard”;
• his former partner (Edmund Purdom, Don’t Open Till Christmas), now a cut-and-dry conniving villain;
• in his final film role, Harold Sakata (Goldfinger’s Oddjob) as the sole surviving point of the aforementioned Japanese triangle, thereby making him the only person who knows where the loot is, thereby making that Lost Gold portion of the title entirely irrelevant;
• the safari funder’s “confounding daughter” (Glynis Barber, Edge of Sanity), because every he-man needs a love interest, even in a movie bereft of affection;
• a second woman (Black Emanuelle herself, Laura Gemser), because every Z-grade adventure needs an actress willing to provide nudity;
• and poor Woody Strode (Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead), Invaders’ only African-American not part of the demeaning ooga-booga tribes.

Strode has so little to do (which may have been for the best) that all I remember his character doing is scratching his head. I’m sure it had to do with the jungle heat, but one can’t help but think the man’s mind was processing some cosmic question like, “How in the hell did I go from John Ford and Stanley Kubrick … to this?”

By “this,” we mean the work of Killer’s Moon director Alan Birkinshaw, working from a screenplay he co-wrote, from a story dreamt up by his producer, exploitation legend Dick Randall (Pieces). While I admire a great deal of Randall’s vast filmography, Invaders of the Lost Gold is the rare entry that doesn’t cut it. Ostensibly a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style adventure of Eastern Hemisphere exploits, the flick cuts its own throat — with a dull machete, fittingly — by being excessively lazy and shoddy, even by Randall’s low standards.

Merely one example: One unnamed character unclothes to starkers — oh, did I just give her identity away? — and takes a dip in the river, only to scream in mortal terror at … well, something. She’s dead, Jim — yet we never find out how or why! That’s just how Birkinshaw rolls: with patches of mold. —Rod Lott

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Held every seven years in some unsuspecting town, The Tournament is a numbers game. For 24 hours, 30 of the world’s best assassins compete for a $10 million prize in a competition with only one rule: Kill or die. What more setup does an action-craving viewer need?

With tracking devices implanted in their tummies, contestants worthy of note include a parkouring Frenchman (Sebastien Foucan, who performed similar duties against 007 in 2006’s Casino Royale), a crazy-ass Texan (a miscast Ian Somerhalder, TV’s Lost), a Russian special forces member (Undisputed series badass Scott Adkins), a Triad vet (Kelly Hu, X-Men 2’s Lady Deathstrike) and the returning champion (Ving Rhames, Pulp Fiction). The latter is only in it to avenge the recent death of his wife by the trigger-happy hands of a fellow contestant — he just doesn’t know which one. Blah, details.

This particular do-or-die tourney takes place in Middlesbrough, a British town boasting more public surveillance cameras than anywhere on the globe — fortuitous for the assembled high-rollers hoping to make a mint off the blood of 29 hired guns. They are as unapologetic about their gambling as director Scott Mann (2015’s Heist) is about depicting irredeemably graphic acts of violence; let’s just say more than one human head explodes.

Accidentally caught in the crossfire of the shoot-’em-up (by events so unbelievable, explanation is futile) is a hooch-sloshing priest (Robert Carlyle, Trainspotting) and, one assumes, the audience surrogate. Yet you need not be inebriated to feel The Tournament’s juice kick in; Mann and company take care of providing the rush on their own. Virtually unseen, the film deserves better — not pantheon placement, but some sort of regard among fans of swiftly and slickly executed set pieces of undiluted action. Mann does that so well and so often, it seems as if the flick weren’t scripted so much as improvised, taking suggestions from audience members into what situations he should throw his players and their weapons: “In a slaughterhouse!” “At a strip club!” “On a moving bus! You know, the double-decker kind!” —Rod Lott

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