If it looks like Andy Sidaris, walks like Andy Sidaris and talks like Andy Sidaris … well, it’s probably Andy Sidaris. But it’s also The Lost Empire, which has the distinction of being the debut film of Jim Wynorski, whose thirst for the big breast is Sidaris’ equal and trumped only by Russ Meyer.

The bountiful babe at Empire’s creamy center is Melanie Vincz (Hunk) as blonde policewoman Angel Wolfe who goes undercover, Charlie’s Angels style, on a not-so-secret island fortress. Ruled by religious nutso Dr. Sin Do (Phantasm’s Tall Man, Angus Scrimm), the place is the site of an annual $25,000 “spiritual competition,” which advertises for contestants in the classifieds. Joining Angel in the mortal combat are another large-chested blonde (Angela Aames, Bachelor Party) and, to shake things up, a large-chested brunette (Raven De La Croix, Screwballs).

There’s much more to the story, but damned if it makes sense, and doubly damned if Wynorski means for it to: ninjas with yo-yo stars, a ridiculously phallic laser gun, Lemurians using scientific secrets into tangible jewels that glow as red as a monkey’s ass. Speaking of, there’s also a gorilla; De La Croix punches him in the face and kicks him in the balls and, therefore, makes a play straight for your heart.

Sloppy and scrappy, the pic bears the sensibilities of the three magazines present on Angel’s boyfriend’s coffee table: Playboy, Mad and King-Sized Cracked. Wynorski fills the minutes with everything he can jam in — robot spiders, Angelique Pettyjohn — as if he would not get the chance to make another movie. We know now that certainly wasn’t the case, but there once was a time when Wynorski made some blasts of B movies, rather than the softcore dreck he grinds out today. —Rod Lott

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Early in Need for Speed, an adaptation of the video game series, the main characters are seen playing what I assume is one of those games. It further accentuates how thin the story measures, and how thinner the source material. At its best, Need for Speed plays like a sequel in the Fast & Furious franchise; at its worst, Need for Speed plays like a sequel in the Fast & Furious franchise.

Fresh from five seasons of TV’s Breaking Bad, the talented Aaron Paul underwhelms in the miscast lead role of bankrupt, glowering gearhead Tobey Marshall. He can drive fast cars faster than anyone else because he says so, and because these things dictate that he must. His considerable skills behind the wheels of modified rides shift into personal when an incredibly dangerous, dick-measuring race down both sides of a highway results in the fiery death of his pretend “little brother” (Harrison Gilbertson, Haunt), thanks to a bumper nudge from rich, hot-as-snot Dino Brewester (Dominic Cooper, Captain America: The First Avenger).

Payback for Tobey will come in the crushing defeat of Dino in a super-secret, super-illegal annual race that is invitation-only and thrown by a super-embarrassing Michael Keaton (The Other Guys) in Wolfman Jack mode. First, Tobey and his British passenger/love interest (Imogen Poots, 2011’s Fright Night remake) have 48 hours to get from New York to San Francisco, thus allowing for several races along the way of this race to that race. Director Scott Waugh (Act of Valor) shoots these sequences in a gung-ho manner that delivers the shiny, well-oiled goods in the department of vroom-vroom, but does so via a template of Bruckheimerian angles viewers can check off mentally.

Despite the here-and-now gloss, Need for Speed seems to herald from another era, like the jalopy-ready pictures AIP pushed to teens in drive-ins — you know, like 1955’s The Fast and the Furious. (Need for Speed even begins at a drive-in!) Paul, Cooper, Gilbertson and company all sport haircuts so high and spiked, they visually recall a live-action version of Dragon Ball Z. It’s particularly distracting for Paul, who’s all forehead, which he touches constantly as he looks toward the ground and then up dramatically. Half his performance is this move.

Need for Speed is diverting enough, but also needlessly exhausting for something so frame-one predictable. Imagine what a better, more interesting movie it would be had Poots — such an ugly name for such a pretty woman — been placed in the driver’s seat instead. For 130 minutes of my life, I think that’s a fair trade. —Rod Lott

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In this third Armour of God film, Jackie Chan can’t wait to get his hands around a big ol’ cock. And a snake. And a monkey. And a rabbit. And the remaining eight animals of the Chinese zodiac, rendered as a set of rare bronze heads prized by precious-artifact collectors the world over.

As JC, Chan is tasked with retrieving the heads scattered around the globe; a corporate slimeball (Oliver Platt, 2012) offers him 1 million Euros for each of the national treasures he’s able to obtain and/or steal, so off JC goes! Plot holes extend as wide as canyons, over which Chan gladly leaps. As director and co-writer, he’d likely do without a story entirely if he could get away with it; he almost has.

In a cinematic environment that demands its action pictures to be fast, furious and expendable, Chinese Zodiac is out-of-vogue, but either no one told Chan or he didn’t care. He remains true to the same unapologetic mode of the 1986 original and 1991’s Operation Condor, both goofy-smiled variants of Indiana Jones and James Bond, which is to say this overdue leg of an inadvertent trilogy is great fun, loosely bundled.

Right out of the gate, the film goes for broke, with a prologue that sees JC escaping a military base by playing human skateboard. From there, the star and company impatiently zip from one inventive set piece (and country) to the next, constantly vying for oneupmanship of itself. If Chan isn’t being chased by guard dogs while trapped in a garden maze, he’s dodging live ammo and busy beehives in the forest, all building toward a finale that ask the near-sexagenarian to skydive toward a lava-spewing volcano. Hell, why not? —Rod Lott

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While Machete Kills is nearly indistinguishable from the 2010 original Machete, it does bring one differentiating element to the table by beginning with a fake trailer. This in-joke within an in-joke not only nods to the accidental franchise’s birth as a faux coming attraction that kicked off Robert Rodriguez’s half of 2007’s Grindhouse, but also proves to be the best part of this sequel. Since it promotes a purported third chapter set in the realm of ’70s cinematic outer space, how could it not? Perhaps Rodriguez should have ended Kills with this gag, as the whole movie sets the story up for heading that direction; it’s like hearing the punchline first.

After his partner is killed during a mission at the border, the superhuman Mexican known as Machete (Danny Trejo, xXx), is hired by the President of the United States (Charlie Sheen, here credited under his actual name of Carlos Estevez) to execute a cartel turncoat / schizophrenic madman named Mendez (Demian Bichir, The Heat) who has a big ol’ missile pointed at America and a $10 million bounty on his head. Machete soon learns that Mendez has whipped up a life-insurance policy, so to speak, by wiring the missile to his heart; should his meat ticker stop, the weapon’s ticker starts.

And that’s merely one loco idea in the screenplay by newcomer Kyle Ward (and not by Rodriguez, strangely enough). Others include pairing Machete with a Texas beauty pageant contestant (Amber Heard, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane); befitting a bordello madam (Sofia Vergara, the hot tamale of TV’s Modern Family) with a metal bra that fires bullets; and having a character named El Camaleón be played by, in order of appearance, Walt Goggins, Cuba Gooding Jr., Lady Gaga and Antonio Banderas. Exactly none of these wacko bits advances the plot, save for the stunt casting of former Lethal Weapon Mel Gibson as the villainous Voz, a tech billionaire who happens to be a clairvoyant end-timer.

As with its predecessor, Machete Kills is to be taken as a chunk of cinematic queso, period. Trejo’s ever-frowning hero is easy to root for — especially for an action-oriented protagonist pushing 70 — and several of the supporting players get the joke, none more than the unexpectedly very funny Bichir. That joke has a shelf life, however, and would operate better under the economy of Rodriguez’s early work. (Lest we forget, his 1992 debut, El Mariachi, was only 81 minutes.) Even at his usual breakneck pace, this action-packed goof is just a little too long in the tooth — one that nonetheless still gleams with mischief. —Rod Lott

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In Firefox, Clint Eastwood, in a bold change of pace, plays a renegade computer programmer who invents a new web browser that quickly becomes popular, making him rich.

Sound dull? Unfathomably, the real Firefox, in which Eastwood (also directing) plays a burned-out pilot tasked with stealing “the most sophisticated warplane on the face of this earth,” is rarely more interesting. Well, at least it gives us another entertainingly eccentric performance from Freddie Jones (The Elephant Man) on which to chew.

There’s more than a whiff of the lackluster from the start, when Eastwood suffers what appears to be flashbacks to a stock-footage festival he attended while fighting in Vietnam. This debilitating dread, played up as a great demon he must constantly battle, manifests itself mainly through Eastwood sweating and dramatically pausing when he shouldn’t as he goes undercover in Russia. Fully two-thirds of a movie ostensibly about one kick-ass piece of weaponry is bequeathed to a lethargic spy thriller rife with bad accents, dull dialogue and rather unpleasant jingoism.

All this could be forgiven, perhaps, if the main attraction were at all interesting, but even here, despite some really neat effects work by John Dykstra (Star Wars), the plane is ultimately a letdown. For a film built around the concept of “the greatest warplane ever built … a Mach Five aircraft with thought-controlled weapons systems,” the filmmakers do precious little to make it seem unique.

It looks cool, sure, but after a wearing hour and a half of setup, finally arriving at the “Let’s see what this baby can do!” point, I expect a tad more from an action thriller than a half-hour of cruising altitude and refueling while Soviet generals argue with each other over where the plane might be. And when there is finally some bloody action in a long-promised dogfight the likes of which we presumably have never seen … we’ve seen it before, and better, and longer.

In film, there’s Eastwood classic (Unforgiven) and Eastwood junk (Pink Cadillac). Firefox, all buildup and no payoff, is Eastwood meh. —Corey Redekop

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