What, if anything, does the title Everly convey to you? By that, I mean, shouldn’t an action film carry a name that suggests — if not promises — y’know, action? In that aspect, Everly arrives holding an enticement level of zero; at most, it sounds like a music biopic of those brothers who kindly told Little Susie she needed to wake the eff up.

I don’t want to see that. I do, however, want to see a balls-out ammo-fest starring Salma Hayek as a prostitute with remarkably good aim. That’s what Everly is — or at least strives to be — but with a moniker like that, it is all but counting on audiences to ignore its existence. To paraphrase the film’s running gag, A Lot of Dead Whores would look better splashed across a one-sheet, not to mention weed out a sizable chunk of viewers who would find the flick tasteless. While Everly’s crassness is debatable, it’s not exactly defendable, either.

Returning to those Desperado days that helped make her famous, Hayek gives it her all and gets physical — really physical — as Everly, a high-class sex slave who finds herself in a do-or-die situation, so she chooses “do.” She’s trapped in an apartment building infested with members of the Japanese yakuza crime syndicate. With animal-print heels on her feet and weapons in her hands, she fires away with abandon in an attempt to escape. Don’t expect a floor-by-floor takedown like The Raid: Redemption — she rarely and barely leaves the room.

That’s about all there is to it. Director/co-writer Joe Lynch (Knights of Badassdom) tries to wedge some family drama in there, but that peg doesn’t fit the slot. Hard-wringing and heart-tugging have no legitimate claim to a battlefield strung with jacked-up sadomasochists, costumed warriors and bounty-seeking strumpets. And yet by sidestepping the one issue that would give Everly more purpose (her rape, unseen but used as a starting line), Lynch denies her deeper character motivation. We’re left with much go boom about nothing.

Although funny in quick bursts, Everly is never as fun as it believes itself to be. For example, it is set at Christmastime for no other reason than to allow for multiple ironic uses of holiday tunes to score scenes of splatter. Once is cute; beyond that pushes it. For a project that seems to have been engineered as the Most Awesomest Movie Ever, Dude, some ingredient is lacking to hold the thing together, so it feels utterly pointless. Violence for violence’s sake can work — see 2007’s self-parodying Shoot ’Em Up for proof — but Lynch wants to play up the gore at times purely for laughs and at others purely for disgust; the problem in doing so is that both instances share a trough on the tonal wavelength. After a while of so much assault, you may wonder which reaction he wants, so you choose neither. —Rod Lott

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Following the previous year’s Black Samurai, a post-Enter the Dragon Jim Kelly re-teamed with schlock director Al Adamson to go all 007 with Death Dimension. They were off by at least six points.

Kelly’s police detective lives by the credo, “The name of the game is Save Your Ass.” His captain (George Lazenby, the one-and-done James Bond from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) assigns him the case of The Pig (Harold Sakata, aka Goldfinger’s Odd Job), a crime lord looking to sell a “freeze bomb” to any country willing to shell out $30 million. The scientific weapon turns anything within an immediate radius to absolute zero; under an Adamson budget, this is depicted by throwing fake snow within the frame.

Although Adamson was behind the camera, he was not responsible for the screenplay. That batch of incoherence can be blamed on Death Dimension’s own producer, Harry Hope, the man who unleashed a real weapon in 1972: the unwatchable Doomsday Machine. While Death Dimension shares that sci-fi turkey’s whiff of inadequacy, it emerges superior — comparatively speaking, of course — thanks to The Pig keeping a pet turtle, a pet madam (Terry Moore, 1949’s Mighty Joe Young) and a pet giant horny toad, which he threatens will “bite your tit.”

Lest we forget, Death Dimension also boasts star power in Kelly, a real-deal martial artist whose smile radiates actual charm. Yet having charm does not equal exercising good judgment in choosing scripts. In the end, Kelly takes down an airplane with a couple of shots from a hand pistol. Then, to celebrate, he performs a flying kick toward the camera, and Adamson, in his finest visual flourish not involving his wife Regina Carrol’s bosom, freezes the image. Absolute zero, indeed! —Rod Lott

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Ginger McAllister, we hardly knew ye. (And yet it still burns when I urinate.) A mere two years after the sexy(-ish), slutty superspy burst onto the screen in 1971’s Ginger, the series — spicy and sleazy, in equal measure — comes to a close with the third and final chapter, Girls Are for Loving.

This time, the CIA calls upon Ginger (Cheri Caffaro, Savage Sisters) to literally prostitute herself for the good of the country. Details aren’t all that important, but the mission has something to do with an international trade alliance in the making, an Asian ambassador (Yuki Shimoda, The Octagon) and a swingin’ socialite/American diplomat (Scott Ellsworth, who would appear in the Caffaro co-penned sex comedy H.O.T.S.). The latter is whom the feds ask Ginger to bed. Her response is a riot:

Ginger: “I don’t mind giving my bod to him … in the name of the flag, of course.”
Ginger’s Exasperated Boss: “But why?”
Ginger: “Well, let’s just say I like to fuck a lot.”

Ginger likes to fuck a lot, and Caffaro and writer/director Don Schain (then her hubby) take the canoodling as far as they can go, slipping the surly bonds of the MPAA’s R rating. Even when she’s not having her lady parts squeezed and stroked for the camera’s delight, Ginger often goes without clothes: for an off-key musical striptease, a topless hotel fight and some impromptu, bikini-bottom-only karate sparring on the beach. By no means is that a complete list.

As trashy as they are watchable, the secret-agent shenanigans take her to the Virgin Islands — irony! — where Ginger meets her match in ginger-haired bad girl Ronnie St. Claire (Sheila Leighton, How Sweet It Is!). That the two ladies will engage in a catfight before the closing credits is a given; that Ginger electrocutes a pair of wieners, not so much. —Rod Lott

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Law of diminishing returns be damned, the accidental franchise that began with 2001’s The Fast and the Furious not only keeps chugging along well past other repeat players’ sell-by dates, but somehow grows even more successful. Now we’re up to Furious 7. Seven!

In terms of sequentially numbered series — no reboots, no remakes — such longevity and mobility are unheard of. For sake of perspective, other chapter sevens have found Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees facing New Blood in the form of a telekinetic teenager, and the Police Academy gang on a rather говенный Mission to Moscow. Respect, Furious 7, respect.

After the one-two horror punch of Insidious and The Conjuring, director James Wan trades poltergeists for pistons to take over the driver’s seat from Justin Lin, helmer of the past four adventures, from 2006’s underrated Tokyo Drift to 2013’s Fast & Furious 6. The change is imperceptible, because Wan keeps the camera at ass-cheek level around the gyrating bikini models and follows the Mad Libs plot structure: Reformed ex-con Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel, Riddick) is called upon to reassemble his team of gearheads for one last time — again!

For this go-round, the whole frickin’ world is at stake, with terrorists itching to wrest control of a global-surveillance system by kidnapping a frizzy-haired hacker (Nathalie Emmanuel, TV’s Game of Thrones) who conveniently looks dynamite in a bikini. And who else does the U.S. government rely upon to quash the threat but a bunch of grease monkeys with an extended subscription to Motor Trend … but only for the pictures.

So stuffed to the brim is F7 that it juggles two villains: the aforementioned international terrorist (Djimon Hounsou, Guardians of the Galaxy) and a British special-ops assassin (Jason Statham, The Expendables 3) who’s hissing-snake evil in his quest for vengeance following the murder of his F6-antagonist brother. As for the movie’s three set pieces, “big” doesn’t do them justice. They’re so outrageous — and know it — that they remind one of elementary schoolers tearing up Mom’s garden by playing with Hot Wheels: Cars parachute from military aircraft! Cars fly from skyscraper to skyscraper! Cars leap hovering helicopters! Whatever they dream up has been rendered possible and sold as plausible.

Not wanting to mess with a good thing — assuming you found the past couple of sequels to be that (and I did) — F7 retains that fizzy feeling for more than two hours, with Wan turning in what amounts to an all-star edition that presents practically every not-dead character from previous installments as audience rewards, complete with intentionally howl-worthy dialogue. The studio juggernaut feels like a love letter — or a “swipe right” on Tinder — to those long-haul fans who, like Dom, aim to live their lives a quarter-mile at a time. (That it marks the final bow for co-star Paul Walker, who died tragically halfway through filming, makes those good vibes stickier.)

New to the fold on sides both heroic and hateful are a smooth-as-snot Kurt Russell (Grindhouse); Ong-Bak’s Tony Jaa, Thailand’s answer to Jackie Chan; and UFC champ Ronda Rousey. Among the most notable returners is Diesel’s belly button, which, jutting from beneath a muscle shirt in the fiery climax, resembles a rather intimidating camel toe. —Rod Lott

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As reimagined by director Brett Ratner, Hercules is half-god, half-human and all but a lost cause. Hardly under-represented in cinema history, the mythological hero has been embraced by the public consciousness worldwide for centuries, largely through the “12 labors” tales that found him battling a three-headed dog and slaying the Hydra. Assuming you ditch the one about Herc having to clean stables in a day’s time, these stories are arguably the most ripe for screen adaptations; naturally, Ratner does away with them in the prologue, showing us only pieces of a few, like a greatest-hits reel. Tellingly, these are the high points of the film’s trailer, so you’re in for a long 98 minutes.

Based on Radical Comics’ series, this Hercules (Dwayne Johnson, Fast & Furious 6) toils for gold as a freelance mercenary (characters spit that word like a slur, the way “liberal” is used today), despite being the son of Zeus. The story’s stone wheels start moving when Herc is hired by Lord Cotys (John Hurt, V for Vendetta) to help quell a civil war in Thrace. With half a dozen special-skilled sidekicks (Dark City’s Rufus Sewell and Deadwood’s Ian McShane among the most notable) supporting him, Herc preps for battle by donning the skin of a vicious lion he once killed, draping it over his head the way preschoolers do security blankets. Speaking of animals, Herc later punches wolves.

Although with little variety from one to the next, the war sequences are staged with far greater competence than Ratner’s track record with action would have us expect — at least any action scene not involving Jackie Chan’s dazzling acrobatics, that is. But lordy, is this epic dull. More mortal than its main character, the film is doomed from the start when two CGI snakes look as if they were created on an iPhone app someone downloaded for free through a Starbucks promotion. Shorn nearly completely of the fantastical elements that make previous Hercules flicks such a hoot to watch — Cannon’s early ’80s pair of Lou Ferrigno vehicles, in particular — this massively budgeted monstrosity fails to muster any significant feelings beyond boredom and contempt. It’s even too soulless to be fun, for which, all other things being equal, I gladly would have settled. By comparison, Johnson’s similar-in-appearance Scorpion King is Raiders of the Lost Ark.

None of this is Johnson’s fault; as always, the guy perspires charisma. Ratner errs in letting too much humor show through, to where everyone is at the ready with a quip engineered for pandering laughter, which would be a masterstroke if the Rush Hour conductor were making — or remaking — Hercules in New York. He was not. He made an action-adventure summer blockbuster so beholden to mass appeal, each reel has been cast in that Jerry Bruckheimer-favored Instagram filter marked “Weasel Piss.”

To be fair, Ratner’s Hercules is more watchable than 2014’s competing Greco-Roman project, Renny Harlin’s The Legend of Hercules. (To be fair again, Harlin left the bar set at ground-level.) This Herc pic is so far from mighty, Greece is not the word. —Rod Lott

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