So laid-back and limey that I can understand why all Americans hated it, The Avengers adaptation is simply misunderstood. It’s a decent movie as long as you know what to expect: the most British movie ever made by an American studio. Then again, the iconic 1960s TV series never went over all that well here, either, so I don’t know why the film’s reception would be any different.

Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman — he of the bowler hat, she of the catsuit — star as secret agents John Steed and Emma Peel. Prim, proper and pernicious, they join forces to take down Sir August de Wynter (Sean Connery), maniacal designer of contraptions to control the world’s weather for handsome profits. While the UK sees torrential rainfall and mammoth tornadoes, our Avengers take time out for tea and macaroons.

De Wynter has a Peel clone on his side, as well as a group of thugs encased in teddy bear costumes every color of the rainbow. As absurd as this is, it has nothing on an attack by robotic killer beecopters or the brief (non)appearance of original Steed Patrick Macnee, now cameoing as the agency’s invisible archivist.

Although it doesn’t play as well as it thinks it does, The Avengers is still worthy entertainment. At a scant 90 minutes, it asks little of you to invest. Sadly, a lot of what director Jeremiah Chechik (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation) shot — the most curvaceous scenes of Uma in that sexy suit included — hit the cutting-room floor. I’d like to think someday this will thrive as a cult item, but for now, it remains pegged as a creative catastrophe on the level of 1997’s Batman & Robin — a comparison most unfair. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Finnish director Jalmari Helander already has one modern cult classic under his belt with 2010’s twisted Christmas fantasy Rare Exports. He has another at the ready in Sisu.

As a title crawl explains, practically doubling as a synopsis, the word “sisu” means white-knuckled courage that comes forth only when all hope is lost. In 1944 Finland, a battle-scarred soldier (Helander regular Jorma Tommila, Big Game) deserts the war (WWII, you may have heard of it) and wanders the sprawling vistas of the wild with his trusty dog.

Lucking into a life-changing cache of gold, he needs all the sisu he can muster, which is a lot, when tanks and trucks of Nazis cross his path. (Understandably in today’s topsy-turvy world, it’s not enough for them to be Nazis; Helander makes them child-raping Nazis.) Led by an SS officer with the appropriate name of Helldorf (Aksel Hennie, The Martian), they’re rendered surface-level despicable — more characterization than they deserve.

From there, Sisu is one set piece after another, with a minimum of dialogue and a maximum of bloody action. Painted with strokes as mythic as The Man with No Name, Mad Max and Rambo, our rumored-immortal hero exacts justice that’s swift, brutal and cathartic, whether navigating minefields or hanging on an ascendant plane via pickax; not for nothing was he known as a “one-man death squad” while under conscription. Helander knows just how to handle him: as a movie icon in the making, even if his exploits are one or two reels too long in the knocked-out tooth. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

A rep-tarnished attorney in between at-law jobs, Ares has little choice than gigging as a delivery driver. His shift’s last drop-off takes him to an address bearing the number 13, so you know something’s not on the up and up. He’s knocked out and awakes with timed C-4 explosives strapped to his chest.

Via earpiece, a Jigsaw-modulated voice gives Ares (Apostolis Totsikas) a series of missions to keep the device from detonating. The fun of Short Fuse is seeing the obstacles he’s thrown at — and in between — each step, from cops and gangsters to mines and even a booby-trapped exercise bike.

Co-directed by Andreas Lampropoulos and Kostas Skiftas, the film plays like Greece’s version of David R. Ellis’ 2004 breakneck thriller, Cellular. Totsikas even seems cast from the early-career Chris Evans hothead mold. No kidnapped Kim Basinger exists here, but Evgenia Dimitropoulou (The Two Faces of January) fills the distressed-damsel role with more active participation.

With chases by wheel and by foot, gunfights galore and, yes, explosions aplenty, Short Fuse is less a white-knuckle experience, more a pleasant discovery. It may not knock your socks off, but your toes won’t get cold. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

All collagen and silicone, Carmen Electra got her first lead role thanks to The Chosen One: Legend of the Raven. A superhero film before such a thing was in vogue, it merges The Crow, Deliverance and anything ever shot in that sketchy wooded area by every neighborhood. She plays McKenna, a vengeful hussy selected to carry on the longstanding tradition of a Native American tribe. Or something like that.

It begins with her sister, Emma (Shauna Sand, former Playboy Playmate and former human), pursued by the local womanizing redneck (Michael Stadvec, The Dentist) in a town full of womanizing rednecks. He kills her to get his grubby hands on her necklace, which grants the wearer mystical tribal powers, but before expiring, she hides it under a couple of leaves. Why she didn’t use the jewelry’s functionality to escape harm, we’re not supposed to ask.

Upon hearing the news of Emma’s death, McKenna moves back home. Her old flame, Henry (Tim Bagley, The Mask), is now sheriff. He’s shacking up in a mobile home with Nora (Debra Xavier, American Vampire), who may as well be named Whora. Henry ditches her for McKenna faster than a budget divorce, naturally driving Nora to take up meth.

Meanwhile, McKenna sees visions of Natives in her bedroom, beckoning her to become “the chosen one.” (Are Carmen and the devil walkin’ side by side?) Putting in repeat visits is the spirit of Emma, whose vocal delivery leads viewers to believe director Lawrence Lanoff (Playboy: Babes of Baywatch) instructed Sand, “Hey, do your Kathy Ireland.”

So that Legend of the Raven can last longer than 30 minutes, McKenna gives in to the ghosts and wears the necklace, thus imbuing her with aforementioned mystical tribal powers. Suddenly, she’s excitedly licking her dinner plate and dry-humping the air around her. Soon, she and Henry have music-video montage lovin’. When they go at it again, it’s with a half-gallon of milk, which made me want to swear off the moo juice.

An hour into this opus, McKenna finally dons a costume as Indigenous superhero The Raven — which is to say she wears a skin-tight silver spandex onesie, complemented with spiked and steel accessories. Inversely, Nora resurfaces as an out-and-out comic-book villainess in black leather and a yard-sale Lone Ranger mask. They have a poorly choreographed fight to the overacted finish.

Continuity is absent from The Chosen One, as is a logical script. I didn’t even get to mention the subplot about the Route 33 serial killer (Lanoff himself). And check out the cutaway of birds in flight … as one poops. This is the rare movie that dares to play the line “How ’bout a knuckle sandwich?” entirely straight.

At the end, McKenna and Henry agree to eat a cow. The whole experience is best summed up by exclaiming, “Crazy. Froot Loopin’ crazy!” — a line cribbed from the Decampitated trailer preceding this Raven. Nevermore. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

In a cargo ship leaving the Philippines for Busan, Korean detectives chaperone a boatload of extradited criminals. And, unknowingly, one desecrated corpse of a science-abetted super soldier with his eyes stapled shut. God forbid some rogue agent gets the not-so-bright idea to reanimate that thing!

The vehicle-bound prisoners have distinct personalities, like in Con Air. They take over the boat and hold people hostage, like in Under Siege. Someone does resurrect that Frankensteinian beast built to be virtually indestructible, like Wolverine in X-Men Origins. It even hunts its human prey in thermal vision — in color! — like Predator.

Despite these blockbuster similarities and influences, the magic of Project Wolf Hunting is how fresh it feels. In high concept and shiny sheen, it suggests a graphic novel adapted to live-action perfection; as puny prisoners are punched across long distances, you can imagine the edges of comic-book panels being burst to convey such brutal force. Yet the South Korean film’s source material is the brain of its writer and director, Kim Hongsun (2014’s The Con Artists.)

Train to Busan’s Choi Gwi-hwa may not look menacing in real life, but as Alpha, the awakened military experiment, he’s a hulking machine of intimidation. One swing of his arm can — and does — amputate another’s. He pummels through people as if their bodies were Baggies. Folks, this movie is violent. It might even spill more blood than Sam Raimi’s first two Evil Dead chapters combined. In not holding back, Hongsun delivers audience-pleasing, sphincter-clenching action on a grand scale. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.