Here’s how you know The Evil That Men Do is going to be another Charles Bronson bad-asser: The film’s first shot is a slowed-down grab from a much later scene, of him throwing a knife just to the left of frame. This should’ve been used to start all his ’80s action movies, like his version of the 007 gun-barrel sequence; after all, Bronson’s post-Death Wish characters were pretty much variations of the same one-man-war assassin. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and in my book, there isn’t.

Dr. Molloch (Joseph Maher, Under the Rainbow) may be the sickest of all Bronson villains. Often seen wearing an executioner’s black hood, the physician schools the troops of some 20 countries in how to maximize pain and torture of one’s enemies. South America is the latest.

Meanwhile, professional hit man Holland (Bronson, duh) is enjoying retirement in the Cayman Islands when he learns an old buddy has been killed while trying to take out Molloch. Reluctantly, Holland agrees to assassinate the Doctor, and travels to Central American under the guise of a family man, with his friend’s widow (Theresa Saldana, Raging Bull) and daughter.

Directed by frequent collaborator J. Lee Thompson (10 to Midnight), the nicely nasty Evil is thought to be one of Bronson’s most violent pictures, and I can not disagree. For example, when the Mexican equivalent of Richard Kiel paws and licks a disgusted Saldana in a bar, Holland subdues the giant by grabbing his penis and bending it, eventually using both hands. I had to wince and cheer. But Evil is not without humor, too, like when Holland is trapped under a bed while lesbian-loving occurs above him (the evil that women do?), and he’s practically smashed by the moving mattress. Dammit, do I miss this guy. —Rod Lott

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Bringing the comic-book and cartoon characters to live action, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is more charming than a children’s film about talking, radioactive reptiles has any right to be. Oh, it’s still not very good, but its ‘tude could account for why the movie became (until The Blair Witch Project hit) the highest-grossing indie in cinema history. (Up yours, Kurosawa!)

Or maybe it’s because when it comes to denying their kids’ demands to pay to see mediocrity, parents have no backbone.

New York City is deep in a crime wave — good thing this is fiction! — cresting on an increasing series of thefts with no witnesses. Hot on the story is WTRL-TV news reporter April O’Neil (Judith Hoag, I Am Number Four), a curly ginger whom the turtles save from a mugging. She learns that a band of ninjas from Japan is to blame for the stolen goods, and the four turtles help her shut ’em down.

The turtles live in the sewers (no one smells this) with their Asian mentor, a wizened rat named Splinter (voiced by Kevin Clash, aka Sesame Street‘s Elmo) who’s instructed them in the ways of martial arts before he’s kidnapped by the ninjas. He also named them after famous painters, but the hell if I can tell them apart. Color their headbands whatever, but since they all crave pizza and crack groaning puns, they’re indistinguishable to me, aside from whichever one Corey Feldman voices.

Everything out of their mouths is as dumb as the entire concept reads on paper. As a comedy, TMNT is a failure; as action, it’s okay. While loud and senseless, it also manages to be boring and, per director Steve Barron (Coneheads), a little dark — just not dark enough to temper the ill elements, such as the laughable miscasting of Elias Koteas (Shutter Island) as April’s long-haired love interest and the turtles’ hockey stick-wielding accomplice. The best thing about TMNT is the animatronic work by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, but even the worst Muppets movie is better than this by bounds. —Rod Lott

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Mere minutes after learning his long-dead father was the celebrated superhero Copperhead — a secret, despite the costume being left in the top of his adopted dad’s desk drawer — Tekin carries on the family tradition of fistfighting, leaping onto moving trains, and dressing in a sparkly silver mask and flowing red neckerchief. He leaves a novelty snake figurine at the scene of each skirmish, like a parting gift for kicking your ass.

Under the guise of Coppherhead, Tekin seeks to avenge the murder of his two dads by Dr. Satan, because that’s just the kind of thing people with monikers like Dr. Satan are born to do. The Borgnine-ian buffoon Bitik gets assigned to assist Tekin in his mission — a move akin to appointing Jerry Lewis to the G8 summit — so he dons a Sherlock Holmes outfit.

Sporting a mustache that suggests a raccoon tail protruding from within each nostril, Dr. Satan gets others to do his bidding of theft and murder via remote-control devices that he can detonate. (He calls them “explosions,” but if farts were visual, they’d look like this.) Unbeknownst to authorities, the doc has assembled a bowlegged killer robot. It’s so primitive-looking, I wouldn’t be surprised if director Yilmaz Atadeniz ordered it filched from a local first-grade class art room.

Logic figures nowhere in The Deathless Devil, but makes up for it with open-to-close action (intended) and lunacy (some intended). Comic-book colorful and charming in its pure ineptness, the Turkish picture has lots to offer, from Dr. Satan’s booby-trapped lair to an out-of-nowhere love scene. And I want it for all time. —Rod Lott

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If you’re like me, Chuck Norris has forever debased the image of the Texas Ranger into a caricature of bearded empty-headed goofiness. How strange is it, then, to watch Extreme Prejudice and see Nick Nolte portray a Ranger with even less emotional range, and hit it out of the park.

Walter Hill, director of such manly classics as 48 HRS., The Long Riders and Southern Comfort, is not known for subtlety of characterization. He deals in black-and-white archetypes of mandom, shades of gray rarely necessary. So it’s no surprise that Nolte’s Ranger is good, Powers Boothe is evil (he crushes scorpions between his fingers, for Christ’s sake), and we’re never in doubt that Nolte will get the girl (The Running Man‘s Maria Conchita Alonso, doing her best to convey some sort of character in a translucently thin role).

Luckily, there’s a subplot involving rogue mercenaries led by Michael Ironside to complicate things. Throw in the invaluable Clancy Brown, William Forsythe and Rip Torn; coat everyone in record amounts of perspiration; and climax with a straight-up bullet-ridden homage to The Wild Bunch (if you must steal, steal from the best), and you’ve got a testosterone-fueled, underrated ’80s actioner that The Expendables could only dream of replicating.

Leading it all, the oak tree that is Nolte in his glorious physical prime, running on one emotion and one facial expression and overpowering everything in his path. There may be another fist beneath Norris’ beard, but beneath Nolte’s mustache? Chuck Norris, weeping like the little girl he really is. —Corey Redekop

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At the beginning of Viva Knievel!, the world’s most famous daredevil (Evel Knievel, playing himself) breaks into an orphanage in order to deliver a boxful of toys. While he’s there, an adorable crippled moppet abandons his crutches and explains that Evel’s heroism served as the inspiration to get him to walk again. It’s a moment so shameless, it feels like director Gordon Douglas (Them!) is begging us to imagine Santa Claus and Jesus Christ combined in the body of a red-faced, sideburned hillbilly with a twisted motorcycle fetish.

And as over-the-top as this may seem, what makes Viva Knievel! so special and an absolute must see for anyone interested in classic WTF cinema is the astonishing fact that this is the most subtle and ambiguous scene in the entire movie!

With his life story already having been told in 1971’s Evel Knievel (but starring George Hamilton), Viva eschews typical biopic melodrama in favor of cheesy, ’70s-era action exploitation. That is, unless at one point in Knievel’s life, there really was a conspiracy to sabotage his bike during a jump in Mexico, so a group of drug smugglers could load the semi carrying his corpse back into the States with millions of dollars worth of cocaine. In that case, the film could be considered unusually accurate.

To its credit, Viva is surprisingly well-made and looks like a real movie, unlike similar projects, which tend to resemble glorified TV pilots. To its discredit, it manages to outdo Xanadu for featuring the most embarrassing performance of Gene Kelly’s career and also forces us to confront the terrifying image of Knievel (who is admittedly better in the role than Hamilton was) making out with Lauren Hutton, which ranks right up there with Jessica Alba kissing Danny Trejo in Machete for pure unintended horror. —Allan Mott

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