Officially, I Am Omega is not based on the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. Yeah, whatever, but po-tay-to fucking po-tah-to: It’s totally based on the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. After all, we’re talking a production of The Asylum, which specializes in taking popular movies to Kinko’s and then Liquid Paper-ing just enough names to satisfy legal.

This one, of course, only exists to coincide with Will Smith’s end-o’-the-world blockbuster I Am Legend of the same year. But Omega star Mark Dacascos is no Will Smith — and thank God for that, because this last man on Earth gets to do what America’s favorite Man in Black did not: train with fighting sticks and practice martial arts, not to mention beat the steering wheel of his crappy car like a drum kit while listening to generic stock rock on cassette.

I expected Omega to suck completely, because it kills the MILF within less than two minutes from starting. But all is mostly forgiven by the time Dacascos is beating back the undead with nunchucks. Sometimes when he fights zombies, Itchy & Scratchy music squeals away on the soundtrack.

Anyhoo, Dacascos’ character is not the last human alive, of course. A video feed reveals there’s an undernourished but not unattractive out there. She’s being sought by rednecks for the antivirus that lives in her blood. Don’t get too excited, viewers, because her high-pitched, whiny voice mitigates any good looks. Speaking of voices, don’t zombies realize they’d be more successful if they didn’t announce their arrival with a cry of “ROWR!” each and every time? —Rod Lott

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I’m not sure why audiences and critics were so harsh toward Poseidon, Wolfgang Petersen’s remake of the inexplicably Oscar-winning 1972 disaster flick The Poseidon Adventure, as it’s a perfectly acceptable, escapist summer movie: A boat flips, people die. What more do you want?

Poseidon wastes precious little time getting the giant wave to tip that cruise ship upside down. I think it’s chapter 5 on your DVD player, and Petersen (director of the equally water-logged The Perfect Storm and Das Boot) milks the spectacle for all it’s worth. True, that causes the film to suffer in character development, giving us extremely simplified personalities that pretty much begin and end with the stars’ images; for example, Kurt Russell is basically playing Kurt Russell, with Josh Lucas doing Josh Lucas. And the rest of the cast includes Hot Daughter, Single Mom, Token Kid, Expendable Minority and Fussy Richard Dreyfuss, who, because he wears an earring, doubles as The Gay Guy.

Ultimately, as an effects-heavy action-adventure, that doesn’t matter. That Russell still harbors nice-guy charisma and Emmy Rossum sports wet cleavage through the whole thing helps even more. It even has bite, with one person in particular meeting a gruesome death worthy of a slasher flick. Like Paul Gallico’s original novel, Peterson’s film could be accused of a little racism, if subconscious, doing away with almost all the Latinos and blacks in one fell swoop. Just seeing Andre Braugher in the role of the ship’s captain is an automatic death knell.

The film gives water a sense of real menace. Claustrophobia is very real, and Poseidon takes advantage of that. So for a disposable thriller with good special effects, Snake Plissken and a little Fergie ass-shaking, Poseidon will do you right for a night’s rental. —Rod Lott

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I’m not a fan of war movies, but leave it to Hong Kong to make one well worth watching. Sort of like a cross between The Dirty Dozen and any movie with the words “punch” or “kick” in the title, Eastern Condors has big, round Sammo Hung leading a ragtag group of criminals on a suicide mission to find discarded U.S. weaponry in the jungles of Vietnam.

The film introduces a load of characters in a flash, so if it’s character development you seek, you’re up a creek here. Sammo’s men include notable Asian directors Cory Yuen (The Transporter) and Yuen Woo Ping (Drunken Master), a guy who wears goofy goggles, and a guy who stutters so bad that when he’s told to count to 20 before he pulls his chute when jumping off a plane, he dies because he only makes it to 16 before he slams to the ground!

Those who do make it find immediate action, in a flick jammed full of it — and largely gory! — ranging from a dude getting stabbed right in the taint or another blowing up after having a grenade shoved in his mouth to your more standard, everyday decapitations and dismemberments. Although armed with machine guns, the men get inventive when it comes to defeating their enemies; Sammo even uses leaves to fell the bad guys by sending them flying through their necks.

People jump, bounce and all over the place; Oscar winner Haing S. Ngor (The Killing Fields) plays comic relief; and Yuen Biao sports an entirely unfortunate ‘80s haircut that completely covers half his face. Yessiree, this movie just about has it all. —Rod Lott

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There’s a reason well-known character actor Gregg Henry (Body Double, Payback, Slither) has spent the majority of his career playing a succession of creeps, criminals, douchebags and assholes: He’s really, really good at it.

This explains why the strange attempt to turn him into a standard-issue action hero in The Patriot is the only remotely novel aspect of a film that could otherwise be described as what would happen if someone tried to make an Andy Sidaris movie without any of the good parts (insert de rigueur boob joke here).

It casts Henry as a former Navy SEAL who was dishonorably discharged from ’Nam when he refused to take part in a pointless raid on a defenseless village, but who gets a chance to restore his good name when the death of a friend alerts him to a (poorly thought-out and rather nonsensical) conspiracy to smuggle stolen nukes out of the country through oil pipelines.

That synopsis is far more coherent than the actual movie, which lacks the kind of urgency you’d expect from an action thriller about potential Armageddon. All of this can be blamed on its nonexistent budget, atrocious editing and a script (co-written by former B-movie vixen and future Poison Ivy director Katt Shea Rubin) that must have been a lot harder to type than write.

The Patriot is so low-rent, it doesn’t even rise to the level of the cheap, Cannon-produced actioners that obviously inspired it. A direct-to-video effort made before the concept of direct-to-video actually existed, it’s a deservedly forgotten effort that even the biggest Henry fan shouldn’t feel compelled to discover. —Allan Mott

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From the same creative team that brought you Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 the Grave comes Exit Wounds, an enjoyable piece of trash that has to be Steven Seagal’s best movie since Under Siege except for that one on the plane where he died in the first 20 minutes.

Now markedly puffy and with out-of-control sideburns, Seagal is a Detroit police officer reassigned to a lesser precinct after saving the life of the U.S. vice president, but embarrassing him in the process. The cops there don’t like him sticking his ever-curious and pudgy nose into their business, especially when he learns they’re dirty and deep into a heroin ring with Internet gazillionaire DMX. Thus begins a barrage of super-slick car chases and gunfights, with lots of requisite slow-motion martial arts and surprising gory violence.

Director Andrzej Bartkowiak certainly has an unapologetically commercial style that’s high on gloss and short on everything else, but there’s something about it I like. Although it’s far from brilliant, it’s also far from incompetent. I’m just not sure why every movie he does has to star DMX and Anthony Anderson (a little of whose ad-libbed shtick goes a long way). Also starring in this outing are Tom Arnold (some of whose scenes with Seagal seem filmed without Seagal even there), Isaiah Washington and, all too briefly, Eva Mendes. —Rod Lott

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