As hot as sex kitten Kim Basinger was/is, the cartoon version of her in Cool World, Holli Would, might be a bit better, if only for the way she cockteases anthropomorphic dogs, cats and a young Brad Pitt. Yowza! According to the ads, “Holli would if she could …”

Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World really adapts the video of the Rolling Stones’ “Harlem Shuffle” by way of a cheap skin flick, leading to a great good okay movie. Coming out of the clink for, I guess, murder, artist Jack (Gabriel Byrne) drives around his comic studio and comic shop, letting all the early ’90s nerds know graphic artists drives girls crazy, especially Holli.

From his mostly drawn Cool World, Holli entices Jack to cross over into our world primarily by using sex as a weapon (to be fair, so was Kim Basinger). On her tail is Pitt — whose acting talent was apparently not always there — as a 1940s cop who has to take her down, as well as a few abrasive — but very Bakshi-lite — cartoons.

The breathy intonations aside, trailblazing animator Bakshi created a new playground in 1992, but sadly, everybody instead was watching progeny like Tiny Toon Adventures, The Ren & Stimpy Show and other post-ironic viewing. Meanwhile, Cool World was a smutty sex comedy, as was the custom in ’92. Monkeybone vibes, anyone?

Byrne is mostly fine and Pitt is all about the baby blues, but the selling point is the miniskirted Basinger, animated or not. But what I really dug was the closer tune, “Real Cool World” by David Bowie; maybe the movie should’ve been about some puppets? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

For me, the day after Halloween is one of regret, over the sheer multitude of peanut butter cups and gummy confections consumed. For the roommates of The Day After Halloween, it’s one of confusion — as in, why is a dead girl in our bathtub? Until they’ve answered that question, regret remains TBD.

Shot in Pennsylvania, the shaggy-dog indie comedy follows Addison (Danny Schluck, writer and co-producer) and Hayes (Brandon DeLany, Air: The Musical) as they spend Saturday, Nov. 1 (obvs), piecing together substance-fragmented memories of the previous night’s debauchery. Their back-and-forth glimpses gradually allow us to know Addison and Hayes (uh, Moonlighting much?) beyond the duties of running The Mahoning Drive-In Theater. Addison is a smart-ass slob, irresponsibility personified; Hayes is the more adult of the two, yet pressured by an outta-his-league girlfriend (model Aimee Fogelman) to gain enough ambition — fun-sized, even — to attend college.

With its blackout-cum-befuddlement concept, comparisons to The Hangover trilogy are inevitable and merited; however, the influence looming largest over The Day After Halloween is Clerks. To its detriment, Schluck’s script trafficks in Kevin Smith’s droll, smarmy, too-knowing patter, so everyone’s conversations amount to a stand-up routine for an audience of one or two. You hear it in discussions of everything from ALF to anuses, Raggedy Andy to rape and Jehovah’s Witnesses to jerk-off patterns.

That said, as with Smith, it scores a base hit every now and then, whether pegging older women as “brutal beasts fueled by white wine and Pilates” or a crafting an action plan to deal with the tub corpse: “We’re gonna need tools, duct tape and a fuck-ton of Febreze.” One thing Schluck and first-time director Chad Ostrum have going for them is an element of surprise: Yeah, it takes a turn. In the end, The Day After Halloween is just engaging enough to like, yet clearly made with more love than transferred to viewers. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Exclamation his, Jim Wynorski’s Bigfoot or Bust! packs three scenarios — note I didn’t call them “stories” — into one lame-brained comedy. So similar are they, “Never the twain shall meet” need not apply:
• A large-breasted woman whose father died in a Bigfoot hunting expedition embarks on a Bigfoot hunting expedition.
• A large-breasted doctor and her large-breasted friends embark on a Bigfoot hunting expedition.
• Three large-breasted women from the future embark on a Bigfoot hunting expedition. But mostly for his giant turds.

Across all, the “joke” is Bigfoot (some guy in a Harry Knowles costume) is always around, usually peepin’! And the ladies don’t notice on account of their large breasts, ha!

For this sad, tired exercise, Wynorski has cast The Expendables of top-heavy starlets: Becky LeBeau, Gail Thackray, Rocky DeMarco, Cindy Lucas, Christine Nguyen, Tane McClure, Antonia Dorian and Deborah Dutch. All but Lisa London hail from booby movies of his past, including but by no means limited to Sorority House Massacre II, The Bare Wench Project and Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre.

While Bigfoot or Bust! digitally blurs out any instances of nudity, it remains T&A-minded, costuming the women in bikinis, bras and other push-up, skintight contraptions designed to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive. Because having no story requires heaps of padding, the shot-on-video flick asks them to jump on a trampoline (shown in slow motion, revealing an unforgivable frame rate) and perform endless stripteases, one of which begins in a row of Coldwater Canyon Park port-a-potties.

If you believe Thackray and LeBeau doing childish impressions of apes will be the most embarrassing moment, hang tight for Bigfoot bustin’ a move as the girls DJ some rockin’ tunes. And for the sped-up film. And for the cartoon sound effects. And for the fart noises. And for Wynorski pausing the movie to get pied in the face. And for the laugh track. (Speaking of, I found one genuine laugh: a surreal, single-shot throwaway cameo by internet urban legend Momo.)

Many online reviews and comments object to the women being “old” and, therefore, “unattractive.” That’s ridiculous. If you’re going to knock them for anything, it should be their acting. That said, Lucas possesses real comedic timing, and I think Nguyen actually can act. Among all 77 minutes, a great deal feels improvised. I long for the days when Wynorski made real movies with real plots, like — as the cover art reminds — Chopping Mall and The Return of Swamp Thing. As he proved right out the directorial gate with 1985’s The Lost Empire, he’s perfectly capable of making a feature that’s sexy, funny and, yes, written.

Although not a Bigfoot movie completist, I don’t exactly turn one down when a screening opportunity arises. Following Bigfoot or Bust!, I may need to enact a no-go policy for any made after the 1980s. I’m sure everyone had a blast shooting this one, but it doesn’t translate to the viewer. The finale could not come soon enough. When it does, it taunts, “THE END?” No, Jim, no. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Conceived as an affectionate send-up of the days when you (read: your parents) could go to the theater to see two movies, a serial, a cartoon, a newsreel and a handful of previews on one ticket, Flicks offers just that. Peter Winograd’s film is like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, but in half the running time and the fake trailers aren’t any good.

What little notice Flicks attracted on its way from skipping theaters for video store shelves flagged the animated “Cat and Mouse at the Home” as the standout. From the retirement home for cartoon actors, former teammates Cat and Mouse reminisce about their golden years before proceeding to beat the crap out of one another for old times’ sake. In taking the classic Tom and Jerry rivalry to an extreme, it’s an undeniable precursor to The Simpsons’ Itchy and Scratchy.

Then, in appropriate black and white, the “News ’R’ Us” segment (“All the news that be or ever were”) casts its roving-reporter eye on a unique medical experiment (compression of Siamese twins versus separation) and America’s ball-whacking craze — the latter because the joke wrote itself.

In the film’s first “feature,” Martin Mull (Ski Patrol) and Betty Kennedy (Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie) stars as spouses who move into the House of the Living Corpse, so named for the disfigured, malnourished, shellacked dog-loving creep who lives within the walls, Bad Ronald-style. Mull may be the name, but Kennedy’s in the driver’s seat as the dim-bulb blonde, delivering an excellent comedic performance that could go unnoticed if you’re disarmed by her sex appeal.

The second feature on this double bill is Philip Alien, Space Detective, a noir parody with a sci-fi gimmick: The third-rate gumshoe is a 6-foot bug from outer space. Voiced by Simpsons vet Harry Shearer, Philip falls for a human dame (Pamela Sue Martin, 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure) while looking for a runaway husband. While it may not land as intended, it earns a few laughs nonetheless, like when a flummoxed Philip tries to unhook Martin’s bra using four of his insect limbs.

Shown purposely out of order, two consecutive chapters of Lost Heroes of the Milky Way bookend the phony features. The Flash Gordon-style serial chronicles the intergalactic mission of the S.S. President Nixon patrol vessel, captained by Joan Hackett (The Last of Sheila) in her final film role. The serial also features Mull as the evil Emperor Tang, comedian Richard Belzer as a stoner, more dated counterculture humor and a henchman made of chocolate ice cream.

Penned by its director and three writers from HBO’s Not Necessarily the News, Flicks could illegitimately hail from the National Lampoon; it certainly reps the magazine’s spirit better than the Lampoon’s own similar project of ’82, the triple-spoofing Movie Madness. Unlike that partial-birth abortion, I find something new to appreciate in Flicks, however insignificant, each time I give it a whirl. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

A week before its 50th annual Alligator Festival, the Louisiana town of Thibodeaux is suddenly plagued with gator attacks. Lest more citizens be chomped to chum, Sheriff Mitch pleads with city officials to call off the festivities. They don’t.

If that sounds like Jaws, it’s intentional, as Paul Dale’s Sewer Gators is a gentle, purposely toothless parody. Opening credits like “DON’T WORRY THE FILM WILL START SOON” make that as transparent as Claude Rains.

The reptiles’ raids start in the unlikeliest of places: in the butt, Bob. A redneck is obliterated as his bowels do the same, with all but one very fake foot yanked down the toilet. Over the course of the flick, the gators surface thrice through a porcelain stool, twice through a bathtub drain and once through a washing machine, Jacuzzi and everything including the kitchen sink. Hell, not even a cup of ramen noodles is safe. Is nothing sacred?

Only an attractive zoologist (Manon Pages, Purgatory Road) proves any help to aspirin-guzzling Sheriff Mitch (Kenny Bellau, Dale’s Fast Food & Cigarettes), because Thibodeaux’s good-ol’-boy mayor (Sean Phelan, Dale’s Silent but Deadly) is all about the almighty dollar.

Phelan and Dale himself (as obnoxious TV reporter Brock Peterson, whose “mustache reeks of corn chips”) are often hysterical. As Sheriff Mitch’s right-hand woman, Gladyis, Sophia Brazda shines in a droll cluelessness, not unlike Aubrey Plaza. Consider her delivering the news on the first victim:

Gladyis: “Reggie says he got ate.”
Sheriff: “Ate what?”
Gladyis (after long pause): “Up?”

Gleefully stupid and nearly as amiable, Sewer Gators is smart enough to know to scram before it’s asked to leave. The fun concludes at the 52-minute mark, followed by nearly 10 minutes of the slowest end-credits crawl you’ll ever see, with each name’s rise from bottom to top taking a good 120 seconds. Not even the most desperate Lake Placid sequel would dare pull that time-stuffing trick; however, since Sewer Gators is scads more entertaining than any Lake Placid sequel, who cares?

When it hits, ketchup-packet effects and all, Dale’s goof of a spoof is reminiscent of the $6K wonder Bad CGI Sharks. And when it doesn’t, I’m reminded of my own bored, preteen days of camcorder buffoonery. But I can sanction that. —Rod Lott

Get it at By the Horns.