If you ask me, the wrong sharksploitation movie hit theaters this summer, while the better one went straight to VOD: respectively, Meg 2: The Trench and The Black Demon. From Rambo: Last Blood director Adrian Grünberg, The Black Demon is, incidentally, also about the now-nonexistent Megalodon.

Poseidon’s Josh Lucas returns to ocean waters as Paul, a safety inspector for Nixon Oil (subtle!). With his wife (Fernanda Urrejola, Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman) and two kids in tow, he comes to Mexico to see about decommissioning an offshore rig (which should be the new “see a man about a horse”). To their surprise, the coastal town is nearly uninhabited. Might that have to do with the 70-ton giant shark? ¡Sí!

Bearing a “Based on the Mexican legend” credit, Grünberg’s likable Demon might play better to Those Who Believe, but it’s hardly a prerequisite. Compared to the Meg movies, it may be vastly smaller in scale, yet yields bigger entertainment returns for your time invested. Given its rig setting, its hot-wired execution and its Home Depot pitchman star’s resemblance to Thomas Jane, the film exudes more Deep Blue Sea vibes than the actual Deep Blue Sea sequels, not to mention snazzier shark CGI.

The worst element is an ending so cheesy, it practically suggests a chardonnay to pair. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

When Natural Born Killers came upon the scene in ’94, I was all for it, mostly for the Quentin Tarantino connection, but, even with the travesty of The Doors, director Oliver Stone was no slouch. I haven’t viewed it since late that decade, so I thought it was high-time time to reconnect. Sadly, I should have let it stay buried in Hollywood’s mass grave of pretentious cinematic outings.

What once was a kinetic path to demonic satire, is now a try-hard commentary on the beguiling mass-media pandering while exploiting its audience for Hot Topic-heavy merchandise like wall posters in this pre-Boondocks Saints era.

In other words, it had a lot to say about nothing much.

Of course, Tarantino disowned this “story by” script as Stone does what he does best: overstuffing a film with overblown, artificial characters and set pieces, veering the classic convertible to total immolation. Sure, U-Turn was terrible, but NBK made it a special viewing party for the latent arsonist in next bedroom.

With a mixtape-like soundtrack — starting with languid Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle” before double-timing into L7’s “Shitlist” — we start with a diner massacre with all the cartoon buffoons the law allows. Great?

I see what Stone does here — brutal violence with white payback, right? — but it seems too close to caustic lampoonery to take it very seriously, which I did for most of 1994. “It’s art, man!” I’d say defending it, as I would scream until I was hoarse until I became nearly mute.

Wish massive cellblock Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and dreamy nightmare girl Mallory (Juliette Lewis) as our guides, we take on criminal culture with wide-angled lenses, fish-eye perspectives, stock-footage immolation, dark parody slayings and plenty of Stone’s well-worked trampling of the Indigenous people for shock value.

Playing to crowds of preening disciples in fake blood, both Harrelson and Lewis are in a LSD trip to hell, but the acid is bits of paper to look like drugs; the psychotic conventions are too cold-blooded for the stars of White Men Can’t Jump and The Other Sister.

Even then, most of this hollow body count is on Stone’s Karo-splattered shoulders, with too much of Mickey and Mallory’s shocking exploits coming to no rhyme and no reason, with none of the characters, motivations or camera angles to justify the whole thing and its furor.

Or maybe that’s the whole joke?   —Louis Fowler

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Although Italy unquestionably dominated the James Bond wannabe subgenre, Mexico got into bed with the spy-fi craze, too. None other than Mexploitation royalty René Cardona Jr. (1978’s Cyclone) helmed S.O.S. Operation Bikini (aka S.O.S. Conspiración Bikini in its home country).

It’s the first and last screen adventure of Agent 00100 Alex Dinamo (Julio Alemán, Vacation of Terror), a government good guy aiding his lovely colleague (Sonia Furió, Operación Tiburón) as she infiltrates the enemy S.O.S. crime syndicate as an undercover fashion model. It all has something to do with the CIA shipping weapons to Latin America, but the story isn’t the point, nor it is the easiest to follow, despite not plotted in knots. As poorly written as the film is, it succeeds as an entertaining time capsule, capturing Ecuador in that era teetering between technology and tradition.

Nearly all of Operation Bikini unwraps in a swank, mid-century modern paradise of a hotel. Pool, casino, showroom — every on-site spot pops with a peacock’s plume of pastels. In an early shootout aboard a tugboat, you’ll be distracted by bananas in the ripest green ever photographed.

Zippy and bright (speaking visually, not intellectually), Cardona’s carnival of guns, gadgets, girls and güeyes vacillates between spy-movie spoofery and being the real deal, which may frustrate viewers looking for one or the other, not both. Chases abound: cars, boats, planes, copters and, yes, skirts. —Rod Lott

If William Lustig has a B-movie masterpiece, it’s neither Maniac nor Maniac Cop. I nominate his forgotten Hit List, a pulpy crime pic of economical gangster warfare in present-day, not-at-all-confidential L.A. With one of the tallest stacked character-actor casts a limited amount of money can buy, the coastal change does Lustig good.

Aging federal agent Mitchum (Charles Napier, 1997’s Steel) is on his requisite Last Case: babysitting greasy mobster Frank DeSalvo (Leo Rossi, 1981’s Halloween II) under protective custody before testifying in a grand jury against Teflon-coated heroin importer Vic Luca (Rip Torn, A Stranger Is Watching). DeSalvo’s child, Frank Jr., is none too pleased at having to hide at the safe house: “Dad, all dey got is microwave pancakes,” da kid sez like a pint-sized Pesci in training. “But dey ain’t got no microwave.”

Flapjacks excepted, DeSalvo’s biggest worry is the target on his head. See, Luca’s hired someone named Caleek, which sounds like the Wonder Twins’ monkey sidekick, to ice DeSalvo before court. As played by Lance Henriksen in a performance more bonkers than his Stone Cold turn, Caleek is a cat-burglin’ karate-chop assassin so badass, he brazenly drives a van with a “1 KILLR” vanity plate.

Caleek makes a big boo-boo in entering not the safe house, but the one across the street. Thus, unable to locate Frank, he kidnaps who he thinks is Frank Jr., but the child actually belongs to family man Jack Collins (Jan-Michael Vincent, Vigilante Force). In a flash, Collins shifts into Not Without My Alcohol Daughter mode, except with, y’know, a son.

With Collins forcing DeSalvo to join forces to get his kid back, Hit List shifts into a rip-roaring, Rip Torning buddy actioner without even bothering to push the clutch. Their shootout with Luca’s goons within a game of laser tag makes for an ingenious highlight, what with the underaged running around with imaginary zappers.

Video store customers at the time might recall Hit List for its car-crawler cover art, so incredible it practically drove off the rental shelves and into your heart. Unlike so many misleading VHS boxes, the scene shown actually appears in the movie. Lustig not only stages that scene, but showcases as it the climax in a parking garage as Collins attempts to flee Caleek, who climbs all over the moving car like a certain Teutonic cyborg. It’s a stellar action sequence, ending with a sick joke so obvious, yet so, so Lustig. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

In a right-place/wrong-time scenario, family man and schoolteacher Alex Gainer gets kidnapped by an enigmatic tech company secretly developing a super-soldier serum. After injecting illegals in this clandestine experiment, the firm moves to perfect physical specimens like Gainer, seeing how he’s portrayed by British kickboxer and American straight-to-video action hero Gary Daniels.

Gainer has everything to lose, so when he’s framed as a cop killer, he’s willing to do anything to avoid capture and clear his name, like:
• steal an 18-wheeler to penetrate a police barricade
• then steal a school bus as a follow-up
• fight an S&M-practicing couple in their own kitchen
• scale a skyscraper while being shot at from a helicopter
• trust a TV journalist (Kenneth Tigar, Phantasm II) whose camerawoman (Jillian McWhirter, Strangeland) wears a vest that might be a Pizza Hut tablecloth

Rage isn’t content with stopping there. Perhaps out-Commandoing Commando, the climax’s all-out brawl takes place in a multilevel shopping mall with many, many plate-glass windows for Gainer and his pursuers to bust through — some in glorious slow motion. No freestanding table or merry-go-round in the place is spared, nor are the VHS shelves of the video rental store offering only PM Entertainment titles, like Zero Tolerance and C.I.A. Code Name: Alexa.

Naturally, Rage not only was built at the PM Entertainment action factory, but more than competently directed by PM co-founder Joseph Merhi. In its decade of pumping these scuffles-and-’splosions pics out for Friday-night Cinemax premieres, his production company caught flak as a purveyor of schlock, but that reputation wasn’t always warranted, with Rage serving as proof. Presumably, its price tag came in below seven figures, yet the movie doesn’t act like it; with actual scope and scale, Rage is barely discernible from lower-tier wide theatrical releases that year — I speak of Fair Game, Top Dog and The Hunted. The one glaring exception: the lack of a household name.

Not that Daniels didn’t try! Like many of his co-stars in The Expendables, where he played the antagonist, he may not have razor-sharp thespian skills, but he’s got something. In Rage, that’s apparent right away — not in a kablooey set piece, but in teaching second graders about monkeys, even if it takes a dark turn into Jeffrey Dahmer’s dietary choices. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.