One year after The Incredible Hulk Returns debuted to huge ratings, NBC sent the not-so-jolly green giant to court — basically in name only — for The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. Just as cheap, rushed and unintentionally jokey as its predecessor, this telefilm follow-up promoted star Bill Bixby to the director’s chair as well. (All those episodes of Wizards and Warriors paid off! Next stop: Blossom!)

Both Bixby and Lou Ferrigno remain in the roles they originated — Bruce David Banner and Hulk, respectively — in 1978 for CBS’ long-running Incredible Hulk TV series. Shortly after Trial convenes, Banner is arrested for Hulking out on the subway to defend a woman from two thugs. Being a dirt-poor drifter, Banner is assigned a free lawyer. (Think back to when you were last arrested; you were offered the same deal.) Representing Banner is a blind attorney-at-law named Matt Murdock (Rex Smith, Transformations), who, as luck would have it, is also a superhero, spending his nights as Daredevil.

Yet as was the case with the less-than-mighty Thor in Return, this Daredevil is not quite the one we know and love from the decades of Marvel Comics. It looks as if they forgot to make the Daredevil costume and didn’t realize it until the day of shooting, and just covered him in black pantyhose to compensate. Despite such handicaps, he still kicks butt, and leaves his victims with a dose of goody-two-shoes advice like, “Read a book!” (All that’s missing is the Peacock network’s “The More You Know” tag.)

The woman Banner defended is kidnapped by the thugs’ secret evil organization, headed up by the Kingpin (rotund Raiders of the Lost Ark fan fave John Rhys-Davies), who flies away at the end in some crazy jet boat, representing one of the worst optical effects seen on prime-time TV. Oh, and other than a dream sequence that sees Hulk co-creator Stan Lee as a bewildered juror, no trial takes place. —Rod Lott

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Penelope Spheeris’ Hollywood Vice Squad is not a sequel to Gary Sherman’s Vice Squad of four years prior. Guess no one bothered to tell Spheeris or Hollywood Vice Squad, because the movie sure plays like one, if lighter, fluffier and with 100 percent more Travolta! Sure, it’s Joey Travolta, yet the stat still stands.

After a title card promises we are about to see stories “based on actual cases” undertaken by “one of the most unusual police organizations in the country,” the film introduces its cop characters at a quick clip, almost as an afterthought. Its semblant spine is built upon a concerned Midwestern mom (Trish Van Devere, Messenger of Death) coming to Tinseltown to plea for the help of LAPD Capt. Jensen (Ronny Cox, Deliverance) in locating her daughter (The Princess Bride herself, Robin Wright, pre-Penn and in her mo-pic debut). Unbeknownst to Mom, the girl’s become a smack-addicted hooker under the employ of the town’s most fearsome pimp, logically portrayed by Frank Gorshin, aka The Riddler to TV’s Batman.

Meanwhile, the token black cop (Leon Isaac Kennedy, Penitentiary) goes undercover as a rival pimp; the token female cop (Carrie Fisher, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) is hungry for action and itching to bust her friendly neighborhood pornographer, whom she believes is using underage studs in his homemade productions; and the token Asian cop (Evan Kim, The Dead Pool) and the token Italian cop (the aforementioned Travolta, To the Limit) partner up and have all sorts of crazy adventures. There are many others, but these head the most prominent of seemingly a dozen subplots between which Spheeris’ film leaps.

Scenes of action — usually involving vehicular pursuit and inconsequential to story — hold Hollywood Vice Squad together like transparent tape. The seams of the episodic approach show, yet Spheeris (Wayne’s World) seems not to care. And nor do I, when the results are this entertaining. (Watch for the cameraman in the back of a car during an alleyway scuffle — you won’t have to watch very hard!) The quite-a-cast movie is as rough around the edges as her acclaimed Decline of Western Civilization trilogy of punk/metal documentaries and certainly as fascinated with colorful characters — some may call them “freaks” — for whom phrases like “only in Hollywood” were coined.

Set on the streets, so authentic you can smell them (starting with the Church of Scientology’s neon sign), the movie works as crime exploitation and as a time capsule of mid-1980s El Lay. Serving as markers are the Sunset Strip’s various theater marquees, luring patrons to see Rocky IV, Invasion U.S.A., Clue, Spies Like Us and Bodacious Ta-Tas. Only in Hollywood. —Rod Lott

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Six long years after organizing the underrated action film The Tournament, Scott Mann finally plants his ass in the director’s chair again to deliver another underrated action film in Heist. Although deprived of originality, it’s kinda great.

A loyal, longtime dealer at a riverboat casino, Vaughn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, The Losers) is in quite a pickle: His little girl is in the hospital receiving treatment for a life-threatening ailment, but all that is about to stop because he can’t afford to pay. After going to his gruff boss, Pope (Robert De Niro, not far removed from his Sam “Ace” Rothstein character in Martin Scorsese’s Casino), to ask for a $300,000 loan that promptly is turned down, Vaughn does the only thing he feels he can do: Rob Pope’s place. Teaming with an opportunistic security guard (Dave Bautista, Guardians of the Galaxy), Vaughn uses his access code to gain entrance to the vault — and thereby $3 million of laundered dough. Help yourself.

As happens in heist films, the heist doesn’t go quite as planned, sending the crew scrambling with gunfire at their heels until they hop aboard and hijack a city bus full of innocent civilians. Thus, with an hour left, Heist becomes Speed, minus the mph gimmick. As the wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round, all through the town, Vaughn and company are chased by Pope’s right-hand man (a believably imposing Morris Chestnut, The Call) and the cops, including a sympathetic officer played stiffly by Haywire’s Gina Carano, a former MMA fighter.

One looks at the pace and polish of Heist and thinks, “Why not give Mann the next Fast and Furious sequel?” His action scenes are alive and cut in a way that keeps them easy to follow — a huge difference in today’s marketplace, as is a lead performance as solid as Morgan’s. The ending is as predictable as any, yet detonates a few surprises to get there — the most shocking being the charm and humor brought to the pic’s second half by Saved by the Bell vet Mark-Paul Gosselaar, of all people! It’s like the part was written for Ryan Reynolds, but they couldn’t afford him once De Niro boarded ship, so they “settled” for this former teen TV heartthrob. Against all expectations, he steals his scenes and is terrific. —Rod Lott

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Rule No. 1 of Zombie Fight Club? Do not talk about Zombie Fight Club. Not because it’s secret, but because the Taiwanese flick is not worth talking up.

This being a source for film criticism, however, we’ll break that rule to tell you why. One random day, in a Taipei tenement that makes the Cabrini-Green public housing project of Candyman look cozy, activity is abuzz from floor to floor: a businessman being held ransom, a Halloween party, a raid on a cartel operation, a courier making an inordinate amount of package deliveries for a single address.

One of the latter’s stops is the party-central apartment of sleazebag David (Derek Tsang, The Thieves) and his way-too-cute-for-him girlfriend, Jenny (Beach Spike’s Jessica Cambensy, here as pure eye candy, romping around in a white bra). David receives a bag of bath salts (not the Bath & Body Works kind) from his stateside cousin, and as luck would have it (shades of Bath Salt Zombies!), anyone who swallows the pill turns into a member of the undead, complete with a taste for human flesh; anyone bitten by the undead becomes a — hell, you know how this works by now.

The virus spreads through the building faster than the film is paced. No plot exists; director Joe Chien (2012’s even worse Zombie 108) is content with just stacking one zombie attack after another (like a corpulent gangsta getting his penis bitten off) atop one escape attempt after another (such as Jenny and an eventual law-enforcement hero played by Blackhat’s Andy On mowing down shuffling corpses by driving a BMW down a hallway).

The initial tone is such that Sam Raimi could knock something like this out of the park in his sleep, whereas after an exhausting hour of scene-Xeroxing, Chien realizes he has nowhere to go. So he just stops suddenly and bunts his timeline one year forward. At least doing so allows him to justify the film’s potentially litigious title, as the zompocalypse has turned the world into something Beyond Thunderdome, where survivors are forced to battle the undead in gladiatorial games.

Sounds like a different movie? It feels like one, too: one inferior to what we already were watching. In wanting to be everything without earning it, Zombie Fight Club emerges as nothing but a collection of awful clipping paths. As Asian low-budget trash goes, however, it reeks less than that Sushi Typhoon nonsense. —Rod Lott

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In Florida, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas everywhere you go: Families are decorating their trees on the front lawn (huh?); Phyllis Diller is on the tube, shootin’ the shit with Merv; and Porky’s Revenge is playing at the local bijou. And then some Russians have to unload grenade launchers and machine guns into suburban homes and Mexican fiestas and ruin it for everybody. Call it an unprecedented act of terrorism — in fact, call it Invasion U.S.A.

Leading the charge is Mikhail Rostov (a reliably sniveling Richard Lynch, Bad Dreams), and he’d likely win his little war, if not for the CIA recruiting a bearded ex-agent — and Rostov’s longtime archenemy — back into all-American action: the Coors-drinking, alligator-rustling swamp rat Matt Hunter (Chuck Norris, The Delta Force). This Hunter dude is good, saving the stars and stripes with an assist from an ostensible sixth sense; wherever Rostov hatches an attack — even inside a crowded shopping mall — Hunter and his Ford 4×4 suddenly appear, as if he can predict the future … or just happens to be a block away gassing up the truck. Either way, this skill is rather convenient, given our infallible hero insists on being a one-man army.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter’s Joseph Zito directs, but with Norris co-writing the screenplay with frequent collaborator James Bruner (two of the three Missing in Action pictures), one can’t help but wonder if some of the star’s personal politics creeped into the script. Or perhaps it’s mere coincidence that much is made of Hunter saving an entire congregation of good Christian honkies in church, whereas a boatful of dirty foreigners seeking refuge from Cuba becomes a ship of human Swiss cheese — kids included! Unsubtle touches like that and a hooker getting a coke straw kicked up her nose contribute to an all-around bad taste … and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now a time capsule of Reagan-era America, Invasion U.S.A. knowingly ditches pesky things like “backstory” to hoist itself into that territory of unadulterated, over-the-top action cinema, all the while all but deifying its lead as the personification of patriotism with a mullet and a belt buckle. Compared to his peers/rivals (and eventual fellow Expendables) Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Norris was a second-rate brand of screen he-man, but No. 1 for those crazy Golan-Globus cousins. For their fondly remembered Cannon Films, this box-office Invasion is considered trash canon. —Rod Lott

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