I am not a fan of Donnie Darko, director Richard Kelly’s debut feature film. When I originally went into his follow-up, Southland Tales, well over a decade ago, I felt mostly the same way about Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Seann William Scott as they ran all over Los Angeles on a drug-fueled It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World low-riding cruise.

I walked out about an hour in.

Flash-forward many years later: Watching with far more of a (now) mature mind, I can see what Kelly — by accident or otherwise — was not only trying to do, but ultimately succeeded in: a near rewrite of the end of the world, with a heavy — and welcomed — emphasis on biblical allusions. Does a lot of it make sense? Not really, but I wouldn’t expect the apocalypse to, anyway.

Taking place in the then-futuristic landscape of 2008, society is much like it is now: a world of consumerism and lust ready to crumble upon itself. Boxer Santaros (Johnson) is an amnesiac who somehow hooks up with porn actress Krysta Now (Gellar) to collaborate on a screenplay entitled The Power.

Meanwhile, after a devastating nuclear attack on Abilene, Texas, a strange German corporation led by strange actor Wallace Shawn invents a new energy source called Fluid Karma that has, for the most part, put the Eastern part of the U.S. under its control, along with a nightmarish form of surveillance called USIdent.

Meanwhile meanwhile, as Shawn and crew plan for the next phase of their literal lower grab, a police officer (Sean William Scott) has apparently been split into two people sharing the same soul, each half looking for the other — a meeting that will cause time to collapse.

Again, does it make much sense? Not at first glance and, really, that’s probably what turned movie audiences off. But, especially with the help of drug-addled (and wholly grating) soldier Justin Timbelake’s biblically-based narrations, it becomes obvious that Kelly is rewriting the Book of Revelation for a crowd who, for the most part, no longer believes in the Bible or, sadly, the end of the world.

As time marches on, Southland Tales plays far more prescient now than ever before. —Louis Fowler

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Made for television, The Bermuda Depths is one of those siren-o’-the-sea stories, with Connie Sellecca (Captain America II: Death Too Soon) doing the honors as Jennie, who swims like a serpent, apparently lives in the Bermuda Triangle and — as local legend has it — sold her soul to the devil. She’s not a mermaid, but she may as well be.

In fact, The Bermuda Depths may as well be a proto-Splash of sorts. Just shove Fraternity Vacation’s Leigh McCloskey in what would be the Tom Hanks role and extract all humor. And instead of John Candy, we get Burl Ives, looking like a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew Big Bowl made human.

Adorned with an ever-present puka shell necklace, McCloskey’s Magnus Dens (huh?) is a perennial college dropout who returns to his childhood home of Bermuda, where he romped on the beach with a girl named Jennie and a sea turtle as big as a rocking horse. Orphaned as a child after his scientist father perished in a freak and vaguely supernatural accident, Magnus receives an overly hearty welcome — and a big exposition dump — from his marine biologist pal (Action Jackson himself, Carl Weathers).

Jennie pops up, too; now played by Sellecca, she’s all grown up and, well, weird. How much of that is in the script or Sellecca’s blasé performance has us shrug, but Jennie’s presence raises a lot of questions, like:
• Is this all in Magnus’ head?
• Why does her hair have a sheen?
• Why do eyes glow?
• Hey, what’s up with the now-Gamera-sized turtle?

I’ll address the last one: Because The Bermuda Depths is less a true example of Trianglesploitation and more about kaiju, following in the big footsteps left by The Last Dinosaur. Both were directed by Tsugunobu “Tom” Kotani for Rankin/Bass, the noted purveyor of those creepy yet cherished stop-motion Christmas specials from the late 1960s and early ’70s, so it’s only natural the miniatures and mattes carry some of that brand’s distinctive visual magic. At its best points, Bermuda imparts a narcotic quality; at its worst, it’s narcotized. —Rod Lott

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By title alone, Cosmoball sounds like you’re in for dull science fiction or novelty porn. For the record, the movie in question is sci-fi, but either way, it’s not something you’ll want to admit to watching.

As depicted in the Russian film Cosmoball, the future plays home to one of those sci-fi dichotomies where one environment is all super-high-tech and tricked-out, while the other dresses the populace in pieces of scavenged Tupperware. In the former, elite athletes play Cosmoball; in the latter, our unemployed teen scamp of a protagonist, Anton (Evgeniy Romantsov, free of charisma), waits in line for rationed water amid fellow commoners who appear to be doing Hook cosplay in the lobby of Rainforest Cafe — the one in Gurney Mills, Illinois, at that.

But back to the spectator sport of Cosmoball: Played in an indoor arena, the game is like soccer, except the players must have the power of teleportation. Also, only after five consecutive kicks does the opponent’s goal materialize. Also, it’s broadcast in the sky. Also, exploding balls of fire delight an all-alien audience only a Lucas could love. Also, a Rip Taylor-esque announcer pies himself in the face like a self-loathing clown whenever a goal is scored.

But other than that, just like soccer. Hell, even one player is named Pelé!

Because Anton needs money for his ailing mom’s Rx, because Anton crushes hard on Cosmoball star player Natasha (Viktoriya Agalakova) and because the team has an opening on the roster, it should surprise no one that Anton:
• can kick good!
• can teleport!
• will be recruited to join the team!
• will win Natasha’s heart!
• will be assigned a pet that looks like a tentacled ViewMaster!
• involuntarily teleports whenever he gets an unexpected boner!
• possesses a microscopic particle that the villain Cherno — who looks like a fist mated with Thanos — needs to complete a “protogene” that, once fully assembled, will grant Cherno power over the universe!
• will have his DNA attempt to be, um, “extracted” by a sexy waif (a WILF?) actually working for Cherno!

Okay, so maybe those last four fall under “Wait, wha-huh?” And for good reason: Director Dzhanik Fayziev and his writers’ room — repeat: writers’ room — pile one suffocating element atop another atop another, as if they’re world-building as they go … because they are, continuing the process until enough punishing minutes have passed that they risk using up the world’s entire supply of pixels if they don’t get to the climax. Folks, this isn’t storytelling; it’s rule-sharing.

With a cloying English dub and each frame green-screened into a cartoon artifice, it comes off possibly the most imbecilic family-friendly fantasy since that space-kangaroo movie a quarter-century ago. Somewhere, Soviet SF king Andrei Tarkovsky cries, “The fuck you say?” (Or, per Google Translate, “Какого хрена вы говорите?”) —Rod Lott

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I like the apocalypse and I love rock ’n’ roll, so the Japanese flick Burst City already has a lot going for it. Set in the decimated outskirts of Tokyo, here we find dystopian punkers fighting the dapper yakuza in a war of loud, noise-crunching guitars and repeating guns in a low-budget battle for … well, I’m not exactly sure — control of the nuclear power plant they live near, maybe?

Every night, sullen teens gather to hear the music of bands like The Stalin, The Roosters and so on, in a somewhat peaceful assembly of fans looking to tear shit up. When the yakuza comes around aiming to start trouble — as well as two Mad Max-like weirdos on a motorcycle — all hell breaks loose and something of a war is started, with the corrupt police coming in for a rip-’em-up finale.

Listed as a landmark in “cyberpunk cinema,” Burst City has not much of anything “cyber,” but there’s plenty of punk as these underground hooligans with soul-destroying glares whip chains and sling guitars in an epic showdown I imagine Japan, at the time, was craving.

Burst City is the cinematic debut from the director of the enjoyably insane Electric Dragon 80.000 V, Sogo Ishii, who kinetically manages to capture the manic aura the punk scene in Japan had at the time, with a setting far ahead of itself. It’s an unique stroke of filmmaking mishmash that America would try to copy with numerous films in the 1980s, none of them very good. —Louis Fowler

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For moviegoers who have longed to see Dwayne Johnson literally arguing with an albino gorilla via sign language, including one flip o’ the bird, Rampage answers your prayers. It also reunites Johnson with his San Andreas and Journey 2 director, Brad Peyton, officially making it a hat trick. Maybe you were praying for that, too?

Based on the semi-classic arcade game of giant monsters destroying buildings, Rampage indirectly acquires its big bads from the heavens when an Energyne corporation space station explodes, raining a trio of canisters across America. Since the jars contain a genetically edited pathogen that causes rapid growth and mutation, each is consumed by and/or exposed to a different animal — conveniently, those of the game: a wolf, a crocodile and that aforementioned ape.

The latter lives at the San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary, where Davis Oyoke (Johnson) works as some kind of souped-up zookeeper. Because he has huge muscles that might also be the product of rapid growth and mutation, Oyoke is a shoo-in at saving the world — or at least the Windy City — when all three creatures converge on Chicago’s Energyne HQ, lured there by radio signals sent by the tech firm’s greedy CEO (Malin Akerman, 2009’s Watchmen) and her ineffectual brother (Obvious Child’s Jake Lacy, either overplaying dopiness or being the only one cognizant of the source material’s campiness).

Oyoke is assisted by Energyne’s former engineer/current whistleblower (Naomie Harris, Spectre), who explains just enough science behind her CRISPR research to make the exceedingly stupid premise plausible. What I didn’t know until after the film: “CRISPR” is actual DNA terminology and not some off-brand air fryer.

Porting his Jumanji-sm appeal straight to another family-friendly piece of IP, Johnson does what he does well, which is rely on his massive charm, even if he recognizes it only goes so far: to when the soullessness of CGI takes hold to render a triple-bout monster mash in that last third. Johnson can stare wide-eyed all he wants, but it doesn’t make the sequence fun. (A one-line exception: “Of course the wolf flies.”) An empty-calorie blockbuster that should play better, Rampage gives you no quarter. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.