In director Harry Hurwitz’s Safari 3000, David Carradine basically plays David Carradine, as a former Hollywood stuntman who enters the African International Race with Playboy photographer and vaguely mustachioed Stockard Channing as his navigator. Interesting, but that’s not the kind of bush of which Playboy is interested in running pictures.

Christopher Lee is the villainous mogul who also wants the crown, and the tricks he and his henchman pal are worthy of Bullwinkle cartoons — meaning that they’re entirely stupid for a live-action film. Which is much of the problem for this witless exercise: It’s unsure whether it’s an actioner, an adventure, a comedy or even a goddamn travelogue. Because it’s so start-to-finish insipid, I’m going with comedy. One thing’s for sure: It’s not worth your time.

The four-digit number in the title refers to the amount of kilometers of the race, but I suspect it was put there to fool moviegoers into thinking it a sequel to Carradine’s hit Death Race 2000. It also implies futurism, but about the only dose of that you get is Lee driving around in a Darth Vader helmet. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

You gotta admire a filmmaker with a record as perfect as Rod Amateau’s. Between 1970 and 1987, the former TV sitcom director made eight movies, all of which are awful. Beginning with Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You (a What’s New Pussycat? “sequel” I personally wouldn’t know existed, if not for the IMDb) and ending with The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, his filmography serves as an impressive tribute to failure (I mean, I haven’t even mentioned 1978’s Son of Hitler).

So when I say that Lovelines is probably the best film he made, that probably shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement. Fact is, Lovelines sucks. Hard. But by managing not to make me never want to see another film ever again, it has to be consider Amateau’s greatest triumph. It’s another Romeo and Juliet take-off, with the Montagues and Capulets traded in for rival bands, The Firecats (all hot chicks) and The Racers (all dudes), from feuding high schools. Serving as their priest is promoter/manager/hustler/entrepreneur Michael “Police AcademyPolice Academy sound-effects guy” Winslow, who runs the vague communication service that gives the movie its nonsensical title.

Beyond Winslow, the rest of the characters comprise an amazingly forgettable lot that range from the bland to the obnoxious to the blandly obnoxious. The fact that there isn’t a human alive capable of giving a fuck about its two lovelorn protagonists (Days of Our Lives’ Mary Beth Evans and Skatetown USA’s Greg Bradford) definitely hurts the central romance, which takes up the bulk of the third act.

Fortunately, a work like Lovelines easily can be redeemed by a decent soundtrack. Unfortunately, the music the rival bands play is so joylessly rote, your ears are incapable of even registering it. When Joe Esposito contributes the least-instantly dated song to a soundtrack, you know you’re in trouble.

In summary: For Amateau completests, Lovelines will serve as a welcome respite after the misery of The Statue and Where Does It Hurt?, but for everyone else, it’ll make you want to kick William Shakespeare in the nuts. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

When it first came out, the dark, beauty-pageant mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous was largely dismissed as a fitfully amusing comedy that lacked the improvisatory spontaneity that made the Christopher Guest films that inspired it so unique and special. Today, the film remains rough in some spots, but deserves to be re-evaluated as the rare social satire that has managed to become even more culturally relevant.

A large part of this is due to Kirstie Alley’s performance as a local Minnesotan pageant director/former beauty queen, who is only too happy to resort to murder to get her daughter into the state finals of the Miss Sarah Rose Cosmetics Pageant. Back in 1999, it seemed like Alley was channeling the dark side of Fargo’s Marge Gunderson (if only because of her accent), but now, it’s impossible to watch and not immediately be reminded of that inexplicable conservative icon Sarah Palin.

This uncanny coincidence causes the film’s many jabs at conservative “family values” to take on a newfound and occasionally disturbing piquancy. What may have once seemed overly broad now seems unfortunately believable in an age where conservative leaders such as Palin seriously decry the practice of advocating vegetables over junk food to school kids as a form of socialist liberal propaganda.

It also helps that the film features wonderful early performances from several young actresses who have since gone on to become an Oscar nominee (a nearly unrecognizable Amy Adams, playing a blonde cheerleading sexpot), a blockbuster star (Kirsten Dunst in full-on adorable-saint mode), a tabloid/reality-show train wreck (Denise Richards, whose natural, on-camera vacancy is, for once, used to great comic effect) and a corpse (a sadly underused Brittany Murphy, who has the film’s best throwaway line when she cheerfully admits her parents only had her because her brother needed a kidney).

While still not up to the comedic levels of Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman or A Mighty Wind, Drop Dead Gorgeous deserves to be revisited if only to appreciate how much can change and stay the same in the span of a decade. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

I find pot humor to be the anthesis of funny when it pops up in comedies, so imagine 83 minutes of it. And I do mean imagine, because you shouldn’t waste your time on Charles Band’s Evil Bong, unless you’re 13 years old and just looking for some quick nudity for masturbation purposes. What was Band smoking when he came up with this bargain-basement Full Moon production?

That was rhetorical. Alistair (David Weidoff, looking like Matt Damon with a butt cut) is a college chem major and resident square among a bunch of frat stoner dudes who always say “bro.” According to one of them, the pad they share lacks “a killer bong,” so they order one advertised in High Times that’s “shaped like a woman, bro: tits and a vag.”

When each guy smokes it — only Alistair doesn’t partake — he’s transported to the Club Bong strip club, where the fake-breasted dancers sport carnivorous chests that kill the dudes in real life. (All the movie is set either here — with animated ganja smoke around the edges of the frame — or at their home, which looks like the set of a sitcom threatening to burst into a porno.) Tommy Chong saves the day and runs toy cars up and down said man-made mammaries.

Highlights includes a cheerleader insulting the jive-talking bong (“It looks like an old molden dick. I ain’t suckin’ that shit”), a grandmother type being referred to as a “dusty old vaginal scab,” the phrase “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about” uttered thrice within three minutes. Hey, I didn’t say they were good highlights. You also get cameos from fellow Full Moon characters The Gingerdead Man, Jack-in-the-Box from Demonic Toys, Trancers cop Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) and more, not to mention an end-credit embedded trailer for Evil Bong II: King Bong. I’ll pass. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

The Last Godfather is intended to be a comedy. It stars and is written and directed by Hyung-rae Shim, who, by all accounts, is quite popular in his native South Korea, even if there’s no real evidence of such here.

See, it’s about this … well, you see, there’s this … ah, to hell with it. I’ll let screencaps from the movie say it all.

You get the picture. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.