Pity poor Lisa. She wakes in what looks to be a high-tech air duct, but with no idea where she is, how she got there or why. Only the gadget encircling her wrist — part flashlight, part timepiece — gives her an indication: It’s not good.

Sure enough, Lisa (Gaia Weiss, The Legend of Hercules) is part of a truly twisted game, forced to crawl through a maze of pipes of varying circumference — none comfortable for her or the Meander viewer. That goes double when the pipes start retracting in size as she scurries through.

You could say if a saving grace exists for her, it’s that the pipes aren’t loaded with surprise traps!

But you’d be wrong, because the pipes are loaded with surprise traps: fire, water, acid, wire and — take a breath; you’ll need it — much, much more.

Little dialogue notwithstanding, how can a film consisting almost entirely of a woman maneuvering her way through dark, tight passageways be compelling? Doesn’t matter, because Hostile writer and director Mathieu Turi succeeds with just that — perhaps too well, as Meander quickly grows so increasingly claustrophobic, I had to look away a few times just in case my daily dose of Lisinopril weren’t strong enough to keep my blood pressure at a manageable level.

I had no such reaction to watching Ryan Reynolds or Stephen Dorff trapped in their respective wooden coffin and car trunk for the whole of their also-respective Buried and Brake. But there’s something about Meander that elicits raw panic; going out on a limb, I’m guessing it’s the potential to get stuck. The inability to turn around. The absence of knowledge of what lie ahead. The praying it’s not a sharp curve. Hell, the poster alone sends me into a loop-de-loop of anxiety.

Comparisons to Cube and Saw are not only inevitable, but well-founded, as Turi merges the core ideas of both without fully imitating either, yet reaching a final scene that may disappoint most. One element of Meander, however, is incontrovertible: the sheer bravery of Weiss in her performance and as a performer. She made me feel every inch of confinement to a point of oppression; even with the element of make-believe, I don’t know how she did it. —Rod Lott

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Even though I’m typically the first one to openly ridicule many modern films focusing on fantastical fare along the lines of goblins, hobbits and elves, there are a few from the 1980s I unabashedly enjoy, with one of them being the 1985 Ridley Scott flick Legend, a favorite video rental of my mother.

I have to admit that, during my many childhood viewings, even though I was somewhat lost in the plot, as soon as Tim Curry’s demonic creature Darkness showed up in the third act, the fear of God was in me and it didn’t matter what had come before, as I was engrossed.

And that Bryan Ferry song playing over the credits? I’ve always loved that tune.

Tom Cruise is Jack, a forest dweller in love with the lovely Princess Lili (Mia Sara). In order to impress her, like most men would do, he shows her the secret unicorns roaming the woods. However, some evil demons are looking for the same beasts, mostly to steal their horns which apparently are imbued with some kind of magic.

This causes an immediate winter in the forest, as Jack and his newfound elven buddies try to make it down to the underworld to rescue Lili and regain the horn. That’s all well and good, but the place is ruled by Darkness, who, if you ask me, is the most perfect realization of a Satan-like creature in all of film. He is truly some scary stuff, although I heard women say he’s erotic. (Chances are they were looking for attention.)

When originally released, Legend was a bit of a bomb, and I can see why: The film suffers from a case of overimagination, almost creating its own rules and language — something that hurts many nonderivative films, as many moviegoers just want something they can get in and out of in around 90 minutes.

And, bless the studio, in the original theatrical cut, they sliced much of Scott’s work down to right around 90 minutes.

That being said, after viewing the director’s cut, I think he ably did his best to craft a modern-day fairy tale in the studio system, with actual thought put into it, so of course they didn’t want it. This isn’t just kids running around shouting made-up words like morons. But, you know, that’s the kind of fantasy that sells and this didn’t, so what do I know? —Louis Fowler

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Before I even get to the film, when did the subtitle become Jobe’s War? I always remember it being Beyond Cyberspace, but maybe I’m in one of those Mandela holes so prevalent these days.

Regardless, in this sequel to The Lawnmower Man — a Stephen King adaptation I never saw and probably never will— Jobe (Matt Frewer), a mentally handicapped and perpetually legless landscaper who loves comics and cake, is put to work by a heartless corporation to design a cyberworld inside of some sort of a super chip.

Outside, as the world is mired in a low-rent end-of-civilization-style collapse, a group of subterranean youths and their wacky dog are contacted by Jobe to find the comically apocalyptic Dr. Trace (a moustache-less Patrick Bergin) and help him decipher part of the super chip. Too bad it’s a trick and, drunk on power, Jobe has ATMs spit out money and fire hydrants shoot fire.

It’s all part of his plan to rule cyberspace as a god; personally, I don’t see a problem, but Trace and the kids do, jumping into the information superhighway, hopping on their “cyber-bikes” and taking on Jobe with a rather run-of-the-mill swordfight before the extremely rushed ending.

Still, would I be wrong in saying I kind of liked it?

Fitting in on the virtually imagined circuit board of pre-internet features like Virtuosity and Brainscan, Lawnmower Man 2 makes little to no sense, but in a way, that’s probably its strongest feature; it’s a disjointed film with characters that weirdly respond to one another, much of the time feeling like we’re in the dreams of another Frewer character, Max Headroom.

As long as we’re changing film titles, how about Matt Frewer Presents Tales from the Chip: Jobe’s War? Just a thought … —Louis Fowler

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Crack in the World could have been born from a discussion question in your fifth-grade science textbook: “What do you think would happen if scientists broke through the center of the earth with a nuclear warhead? Explain.” Heck, Crack in the World even uses the requisite 10 words from that chapter’s vocabulary list.

Underneath Africa, in a lab not unlike TV’s soon-to-debut Batcave, Dr. Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews, The Crowded Sky) runs Project Inner Space, which aims to harness the magma at our planet’s core as a “limitless” energy source. Rather than put a baby in his pregnancy-craving wife, Maggie (Janette Scott, 1963’s The Day of the Triffids), Stephen is obsessed with penetrating the final layer of crust to reach said magma.

His proposed solution — a 10-megaton thermonuclear device — sounds alarms in Maggie’s ex, Dr. Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore, Arabesque), who warns the explosion would cause massive fissures, tidal waves and other stuff that disaster-movie dreams are made of. Secretly terminally ill and thereby obsessed with his legacy, Stephen proceeds anyway.

The mission is a success! If the mission were to hella fuck some shit up ’round the globe. The titular crack in the world forms and begins circumnavigating; if not stopped, Earth will split in two, ending life as we know it. In what amounts to a metaphorical dick-measuring contest, Ted suggests fixing Stephen’s blunder by dropping a hydrogen bomb to effectively cut the crack off at the pass. (Trust me: It makes enough sense within the movie.)

As enjoyable as Crack in the World is, which is close to immensely, I can’t help but think what Irwin Allen would have done with it in his prime — likely something as cataclysmic as the poster depicts. In the hands of one Andrew Marton, then on the verge of becoming Ivan Tors’ go-to director, nothing remotely like that occurs, although he does take out a (model) train of evacuating villagers. Prepare not for an effects spectacle, but for a more sober, science-minded clarion call with a coda that leans hard into biblical overtones. After the near-miss of the Cuban missile crisis, it was just the type of Technicolor reminder the Western world needed. —Rod Lott

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When treasure hunters disturb Babylonian ruins not to be disturbed, lest ye wish to unleash a demon, a reptilian beast appears to prove the prophecy true. Bearing vampiric features and the power of flight, the demon Daimon (Chikara Hashimoto, the Daimajin himself) possesses bodies à la The Hidden by biting people’s necks, starting with the local magistrate and staff.

When a nearby kappa, witnesses one of these mystical swaps, the flat-headed water imp who looks like a mod Donald Duck, calls upon his fellow yokai for help. These supernatural creatures include a one-eyed umbrella with a tongue like rolled-out red carpet, a woman with a rubbery expand-o-neck, a squatty rock in a hula skirt, a walking turd, a giant rodent whose belly expands to project need-to-know footage — basically, the Justice League of Everything You Thought Lived Under Your Childhood Bed.

For Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, the middle of Japan’s mad-matinee trilogy, Yoshiyuki Kuroda (The Invisible Swordsman) takes over for Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters director Kimiyoshi Yasuda. You wouldn’t know it, as this immediate sequel retains the look of the original. Then again, the Daiei Film fantasies of the era seemed to be painted in the same color palette and shot on the same studio sets — none of that is a knock.

Kuroda smartly narrows the lineup to give this imaginative, colorful fantasy a sharper focus. For a kids’ film, Spook Warfare racks up an admirable body count as if it were unafraid to offend — because it’s not. Whatever the story calls for — from sword-skewering a dog to showcasing a husky kid’s butt crack — so be it! —Rod Lott

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