The cover of Ted V. Mikels’ 10 Violent Women screams “Itching For Action!,” but “Itching with Crabs!” would be more appropriate to the Z-grade auteur’s tiresome take on the women-in-prison genre. An opening credit dares get biblical to kick off the so-called story: “In the beginning … there were 10 good girls.”

However, that’s before they move from mining jobs to a jewelry heist. Among the gems they take is an Arab’s sacred, irreplaceable “master scarab,” which puts them in his sights. Rather than laying low after such a caper, they get involved in the coke trade and, worse, nude hot-tubbing with Mikels, who’s wearing his signature, stupid-ass, boar-tusk necklace. I didn’t sympathize when one of the girls stabbed him to death with her high-heeled shoe.

Roughly halfway in, 10 Violent Women switches gears into WIP territory when the chicks get thrown in the clink. It has all the elements one expects from the subgenre — nude showers, lesbian warden — but none of the punch. The flick’s initial energy peters out right after the heist.

Mikels idea of character development is shooting the female cast in various states of dress and undress; how they look naked is the only way I was able to distinguish one from the other. The sex is as gratuitous as the disco music and Mikels’ chest hair. If you make it to the end, you’ll note such odd credits as “Other Jail Prisoners: Many Other ‘Bad’ Girls,” not to mention “Special Acknowledgements” to “The Fox Hunter (Disco)” and “Filthy McNasty (Limo).” If only the movie were as amusing. —Rod Lott

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If you should see Hero and the Terror — and I’m certainly not suggesting you do — pay close attention to the scene in which Chuck Norris works out at the gym. As he’s lifting weights, all these other muscle-bound guys gather ’round to watch him push it real good. Chuck grunts as he does so. Now, close your eyes during this part and tell me it doesn’t sound like gay porn. You can’t, because it totally does.

Pointless experiment over. Anyway, Norris stars as half of the title, and you get one guess as to which half. He’s Danny O’Brien, a cop, who once upon a time, took down the other half of the title, the serial killer of women Simon Moon (Jack O’Halloran). Danny still has bad dreams of wandering into Moon’s dead hooker depository, which doesn’t exactly bode well for the good guy — now reduced to a minimum-wage worker on a Mexican food truck — when Moon escapes and starts killing them bitches all over again.

We’re to believe, of course, that Chuck Norris could defeat Jack O’Halloran, but c’mon! We’ve all seen Superman II. Besides, Moon busts out of prison simply by bending the bars, because, after all, he is General Zod’s sidekick Non, period.

There’s a subplot about Danny inseminating his girlfriend (Brynn Thayer of TV’s Matlock). I distinctly remember that when Chuck was making the promotional rounds for this so-so, by-the-numbers effort, he appeared on The Tonight Show with the clip of him passing out at the hospital on the impending birth of their bastard child. The audience cracked up, because, as Norman Mailer once wrote, tough guys don’t faint! Or something like that. —Rod Lott

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Women. Don’t listen to ’em. Snake-wranglin’ John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) doesn’t when Colorado church missionary member Sarah (Julie Benz) comes to Thailand to ask him to take her team to Burma. He turns her down because it’s a literal war zone. She pleads. He says no. She pleads again. He says no. She pleads again. He says no. She pleads even more. He says “oh, alright,” probably just to shut her up.

And then what happens? Just what he said would: The Christians are either killed or kidnapped by Burmese rebels. And Rambo is asked by the pastor (Ken Howard) to take a group of mercenaries there to save them. At least that allows Rambo — in Rambo, the fourth in the franchise — to do what he does best: slaughter foreigners. Way to go, Julie Benz, you’ve now got the blood of hundreds on your hands. Women.

In all seriousness, the 20-year gap between Rambo III and this comeback vehicle works to the action extravaganza’s benefit. Namely, CGI allows Stallone to make this rumble in the jungle as vile and violent as he wanted. Heads roll. Arms and legs fly. Torsos explode. Burma, shaved.

It may seem crass to use a real-life genocide as the jumping-off point for a Hollywood blockbuster, but it does shed a beam of awareness on a problem of which popcorn-munchers likely were ignorant. For Stallone, doing so lets him engage in a wish-fulfillment fantasy, doing things onscreen he cannot do off. Don’t worry, action fans: The politics behind it are splattered — if not all but obscured — with the red stuff. Mass extermination: That’s entertainment! —Rod Lott

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One would expect Ruggero Deodato, the director of the notoriously nihilistic Cannibal Holocaust, to bring something different to an Italian cop film. In Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, he does just that: basic disregard for human life. Enjoy!

The best part of this crime story comes right out of the gate, as thieving hoodlums on a motorcycle drag an innocent woman along the city sidewalks, because her purse is chained to her wrist. Plainclothes buddy cops Alfredo (Marc Porel) and Antonio (Ray Lovelock) witness this, setting off an ass-kicking, near-10-minute motorcycle chase through the streets (partly shot with no permits). When they catch up to the crashed bandits, only one survives; rather than arrest him, they snap his neck. Justice!

Mind you, this is merely the first scene in a film full of “shoot first, fuck questions” scenarios. We simultaneously root for and abhor Alfredo and Antonio as they go about their really lethal-weapon ways. They rest only long enough to sexually harass women, pestering them for threesomes or sometimes not bothering to ask at all. Chivalry!

All of these elements combine for a one-of-a-kind experience, albeit bookended by ill-fitting, Yankee folk ballads of the era. Our poliziotti violenti anti-heroes play like Starsky & Hutch with undiagnosed pathological problems, where blowing up a bunch of people just seems like a really good joke to amuse themselves. And you. Kaboom! —Rod Lott

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Coming not-so-fresh off The Scorpion King, wrestler-turned-actor The Rock (not yet billed as Dwayne Johnson) fully earned his action-hero credentials in the enjoyable comedic adventure romp The Rundown.

He plays a “retrieval expert,” which mostly means he collects gambling debts, by force if he has to, although he hates guns. Eager to get out of the biz, he’s cajoled into the requisite One Last Job: plucking the boss’ snot-nosed son (American Pie’s Seann William Scott) out of Brazil and bringing him back home to L.A. Scott, however, doesn’t want to go, seeing as how he’s stumbled on to a treasure he’s hidden in the jungle – a treasure also wanted by a group of rebels led by barmaid Rosario Dawson, as well as the poor city’s devious slave ring owner Christopher Walken, (who is, no shock, 100 percent pure Walken).

So The Rock and Scott get to bicker and spar like The Defiant Ones, forging a bond only out of necessity to stay alive. They find themselves in the middle of a machine-gun riot, at the mercy of hallucinogenic fruit and having their faces humped by crazed monkeys. Their greatest adversary proves to be Ernie Reyes Jr. (the Surf Ninjas star all grown up), who unleashes his “spinning Tarzan jujitsu” on The Rock, in not only the film’s best fight scene, but best scene, period.

I’m not so much surprised by how pleasurable The Rundown is to watch than I am how charismatic The Rock is on screen. He’s a natural, a logical heir to the throne of Arnold Schwarzenegger (who cameos early in the film to pass the torch, so to speak) and can dispense lines like “You’re threatening me? You’re threatening me with pee?” with note-perfect delivery. —Rod Lott

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