Albert Zugsmith’s The Phantom Gunslinger should exist as an animated film. It employs sound effects from a button presumably marked “ZANY.” It has opening narration that comparatively makes Elmer Fudd a great debater. Its scenes run sped-up more often than not; if that’s not quite true, it sure appears to be.

Plus, it puts former teen idol Troy Donahue (Seizure) on spring-loaded shoes.

Donahue plays Bill, mild-mannered seminarian-cum-sheriff of Tucca Flats, a Hollywood backlot of an Old West town. It’s a peaceful place until a group of Mexican bandits rides in, calling itself The Terrible Seven; one of its members is a little person who hangs with a duck and licks an Eggo-waffle lollipop. There’s no story to it — just slapstick fight after slapstick fight after slapstick fight, either with bullets or buffets. Of course pies are thrown.

All frying pans and feathers and “Frère Jacques,” The Phantom Gunslinger makes joking references to The Magnificent Seven, Mae West and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but really, it’s not so much a spoof of anything in particular beyond itself. Zugsmith (Sex Kittens Go to College) thinks this stuff is hysterical, but the humor is patience-trying, with just-because non-gags that range from a bank manager who strongly resembles Adolf Hitler to a saloon girl who drinks milk from a baby bottle. In the process — and in no particular order — he mildly insults Indians, Mexicans and your intelligence. —Rod Lott

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Whether inherent or learned, every bit of my being should revolt against something like Microwave Massacre, but refuses to do so. Oh, it’s a terrible, terrible, terrible movie, but among all the flicks the general public would find unwatchable, it’s one of the most watchable. Consider its opening scene: An incredibly stacked blonde (Marla Simon) risks nipple splinters by sticking her generous breasts through the conveniently tits-shaped hole in a construction site’s fence.

Why? Two logical reasons: First, because boobs. Second, it introduces us to Donald (Borscht belt comedian Jackie Vernon), our slobbish, hard-hat hero forever henpecked by May (Claire Ginsberg), his harpy of a wife who hasn’t had sex with him since 1962. She’s just bought a huge microwave oven, which she hopes will refine “my Q-zine”; Donald dismisses it as a “deranged toaster.” (That put-down is as witty as the movie gets, unless this tickles your funny bone: “I’m so hungry, I could eat a whore!”)

May’s cooking remains terrible, however, and during an argument over it, Donald bludgeons her with a pepper grinder. He then cuts her body into pieces, places them in the deep freezer and later, while hungry, accidentally gnaws on his dead wife’s arm and discovers her meat is oh-so-sweet. In order to feed his frenzy, he continuously must lure ladies over to his house to kill them. This proves to be no trouble at all, because suddenly, attractive women flock to the slovenly, unkempt, late-’50s lard bucket like flies to feces. If that analogy strikes you as disgusting, wait until you see Vernon’s hammy mitts allowed near naked, nubile flesh.

Aside from its opening and abrupt end, 1983’s Microwave Massacre has next to nothing to do with microwaves, just then becoming “a thing” in the commercial appliance world, just as made-for-VHS no-budgeters like this were in the realm of home entertainment. For this infamous gore-comedy opus à la H.G. Lewis and The Little Shop of Horrors, director Wayne Berwick (The Naked Monster) eschews rhyme and reason in favor of jokes — to be fair, semblances of jokes — about STDs, hemorrhoids and other things Vernon can deliver with a modicum of investment in the material.

Is “material” too strong a word for a dream sequence in which a nude woman is slathered head-to-toe in mayonnaise? Or a scene that has a sexy neighbor gardening with a vibrating dildo? I know the answer to both is “yes,” and yet you know I cannot wait to watch them again. —Rod Lott

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I have warned my kids that whatever pieces of popular culture they like today, they’re bound to wonder what they were thinking, 20 years from now. I speak from experience, having revisited Super Fuzz, the Italian superhero spoof I saw in theaters for David Huckabay’s 10th birthday party. There wasn’t a kid among our fourth-grade group who didn’t find it hysterical, both then and multiple HBO and VHS viewings later.

Fresh from the police academy, Officer Dave Speed (Terence Hill, My Name Is Nobody) gets his first solo assignment of tracking down a parking violator, but accidentally explodes an experimental rocket with one bullet while trying to frighten an alligator. (Don’t ask.)

On the plus side, he gains super powers from the fallout to which he’s exposed. Dave can see through walls, run really fast, walk on water, move things with his mind, catch speeding bullets in his teeth, make a stadium disappear — basically anything and everything, as long as he doesn’t see the color red. These feats of strength irk his tubby partner (Ernest Borgnine, Escape from New York) to no end. Why? Comedy, I guess.

While Hill remains affable as ever, Super Fuzz is no longer funny, assuming it ever truly was. As slapsticky as a Three Stooges marathon in the middle of a Keystone Kops retrospective, the movie suffers from an overall shoddiness of belabored gags, bad dubbing and a theme song that burrows into your being like a tapeworm. It’s disorienting to think that Sergio Corbucci, the director responsible for Django and other violent spaghetti Westerns, is also responsible for a movie that ends with a hero chewing enough gum to make a giant bubble on which he can float away. Where’s a badass gunslinger to shoot such a thing down when you need him? —Rod Lott

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I get why Showgirls 2 exists. What I don’t get is why it has to run for an utterly unbearable two and a half hours. Full of sequins and glitter and fake tits, the movie is so intentionally camp, prepare to be asked to write your name in your underwear.

An unofficial sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s notorious 1995 flop, Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven focuses on the minor Showgirls character of Penny Slot (get it?), played by Rena Riffel, who also serves as writer, director, producer and editor of this mess. Just because it is in on its own joke doesn’t mean its creative chaos can be overlooked.

After a testy exchange will a fellow dancer/stripper (“You stole my customer!” “You stole my G-string!”), Penny flees Vegas for Hollywood to chase her dream of being the gooey center of the Star Dance television show. But first, she has to pour hot sauce on her bare chest, become an escort, learn ballet, have a lesbian relationship, consider taking part in a snuff film, and so on and so on.

I’m guessing that maybe the underfunded but overstuffed movie plays better for those who have turned the original Showgirls into a contemporary cult classic, since I don’t remember Riffel even being in Showgirls. (She wrangled three other actors into reprising their roles; I remember only one.) Nonetheless, when it comes to matching the original’s atrocious dialogue, Riffel strikes the right chord. Example: “I don’t know what’s worse: your dancing or your camel toe.” Another: “You know, there’s an art to a good wiener.”

See, Showgirls 2 doesn’t even try to be a glitzy melodrama as Verhoeven did and failed; instead, Riffel goes straight for the self-aware comedy. In Penny, Riffle has the ditzy-sex-bomb thing down pat, and for the movie’s first several minutes — 15, 20 at the most, maybe? — I laughed along with her as she brushed her teeth with cocaine or tried to think of how she old she is. But even the best joke gets old when you keep telling it, and that’s what Riffel does, ultimately dooming its prospects. Something like this should be 75 minutes, tops, especially for projects with porno production values. —Rod Lott

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Donnie Darko, The Breakfast Club, Scream, Back to the Future, Freaky Friday, Heathers, Christine, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (I think), She’s All That (probably), The Fly (?!?) — it’s probably easier to name the movies not referenced by Detention.

Luckily, this ain’t a parody à la the Seltzer/Friedberg “Insert Word Here” Movie production line of films which rank among humanity’s most awful crimes. Detention, rather, is barmy genius, an aggressive meta-mash of preposterous proportions that actually manages through vigor, intelligence and breakneck lunacy to be one of the most original teen movies of recent years. Think John Hughes via Crank, or an evil twin of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

You’ll likely require a master’s in film studies to catch every pop-culture reference hurled at the audience at lightning speed. This is a Twitter generation film, tailor-made for an ADHD-esque attention span, so there are no pauses for reflection, only forward momentum that could grow tiresome for some (or trigger epileptic seizures from the frenetic editing), but which I found a blast and three-quarters.

Plotwise, none of it makes much sense. There’s a Bueller-style character (Josh Hutcherson, The Hunger Games), a beautiful wallflower klutz (Shanley Caswell, The Conjuring), a spaz, a hottie, a football star devolving into a mutant flyboy, a student who has been in detention for decades and a principal who both out-evils Breakfast Club’s Paul Gleason and proves that “comedian” Dane Cook plays an unlikable douchebag far more effectively than he does likable ones. There’s also body-switching, time travel, psychotic killers … it’s almost all films ever made in one gloriously messy craze-rave of awesome.

I cannot say all will love it; if you aren’t at least somewhat versed in the language of the genre, you’ll find it well-nigh incomprehensible. If you get it, however, you’ll see the movie beneath the artifice, and the love behind the camera. To put it weirdly, the cynicism on display is infused with a remarkable lack of cynicism. If you can parse the paradox within that Möbius sentence, you’re the right audience for this. —Corey Redekop

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