Assembled by Something Weird Video back in its VHS heyday, the bottomless bowl of queso known as Mexican Monsters on the March is a compilation of 10 black-and-white schlock classics from Mexico heavily edited into featurettes. Basically, all the dull parts have been excised, leaving you, dear viewer, with what has to be the ultimate party tape to feature fake-looking monsters, sexy señoritas and lots of trilled Rs. Short of swimming naked in a room full of Takis Fuego, what could be more fun?

The 1958 Western The Rider of the Skulls stars a hooded hero dueling a wolfman, a batman and a headless horseman amid tumbleweed, while 1959’s The Return of the Monster features a fazed, Frankenstein-like creature kidnap a child, roar and find his head smoking, all while his creator (whose assistant is a talking skeleton) goes loco, prior to an assault by pitchfork.

From 1960, the space-themed The Ship of Monsters introduces us to the lovable “monstruos de las galaxias“: Uk, Utirr, Tagual, Tor and Zok — or, to lessen confusion, a cyclops, a belching alien, a robot, a hairy tarantula-man and a set of dinosaur bones. Together, they turn a woman into a vampire; she provides an incredible musical interlude; then one of the creatures get a slingshot to the eye.

Straight from 1965, Adventure at the Center of the Earth offers cardboard bats, rat-devouring gargoyles and other assorted cavern-based beasts, while ’62’s The Baron of Terror — better known as The Braniac, he of the forked tongue and pulsating cranium — administers a kiss of death to the bare necks of various lovelies.

Also abridged within are 1966’s Dr. Satán; comedian Tin-Tan’s 1961 melting-skeleton epic, Madness from Terror; the House of Wax-esque Museum of Horror, from 1964; the 1958 Zorro-like Scarlet Fox vehicle, Vengeance of the Hanged; and 1965’s self-explanatory She Wolf.

None of the condensed films are dubbed or subtitled, nor do they need to be, as the comp swings a purely visual punch. For the ultimate in old-school, south-of-the-border trash peliculas, settle down with an appropriately chintzy Patio dinner or two and revel in Mexican Monsters on the March. —Rod Lott

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When her estranged brother vanishes while looking for life-extending pharmaceuticals in an abandoned mine in the Chinese desert, venomous animal expert Dr. Jia Le (Li Bingbing, The Meg) joins a team to find him. Leading the charge is the brother’s boss (Kelsey Grammer, The Expendables 3), co-founder of the biotech firm for which the siblings’ father was CEO. As if Grammer’s presence weren’t off-putting enough, Kellan Lutz (The Legend of Hercules) is on hand as the search-and-rescue expert.

After the team members encounter dried-out livestock at ground level and manage to outrun a lightning storm, they descend into the mine — actually a series of secret tunnels from an ancient emperor’s underground palace. There they find the movie’s raison d’être: spiders genetically engineered to breed and kill — and, per the closed captioning, “chitter.”

7 Guardians of the Tomb is a Chinese-funded production helmed by Australia’s Kimble Rendall, the former founding Hoodoo Guru whose 3D sharksploitation effort, 2012’s Bait, is not dissimilar in spirit, but boasts less convincing effects. That the CGI spiders don’t look as “added in post” as expected is one of 7 Guardians’ two strongest points; the other is that Rendall doesn’t skimp on them, with spiders small, medium and big-ass crawling all over his film’s frames and cast members.

But one cannot depend on all that arachnageddon alone, which is why a heavy dullness soon sets in. Overwhelming crudity drags the proceedings down to such a level of Syfy silliness that not even Grammer’s hammy God-complex speechifying can distract from it, no matter how loudly he yells. —Rod Lott

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Of all the sci-fi flicks to rip-off, filled with a lone alien, multiple guttings, large explosions and little to no story, one of the best is Predator. But, thinking outside that pine box, Split Second decided to go a different route and do Predator 2. Well, okay.

Sometime in the near future — and now far past! — Great Britain of 2008, prescient global warming has turned the isles into one big, dirty swimming pool. Puffy Rutger Hauer is burnt-out cop Harley Stone, a foreign-exchange officer who lives on chocolates, coffee and the long-lasting regret of his partner dying at the hands of a 10-foot-tall beast with a taste for human hearts. But can you blame him?

Armed with psychic powers left unexplored, he’s partnered with pencil-pushing nerd Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan). This mismatched duo slogs through a soggy England with generous hand cannons and shotguns, trying to protect the vapid Kim Cattrall from what turns out to be a rat-loving, tide-drenched version of Satan, here an ineffectual representation of absolute evil, but a great clone of a Xenomorph.

Also, at one point, Stone refers to a dog as a “dickhead” and then questions it as the witness to a murder in a nightclub that rock legend Ian Dury runs. Maybe that should have been the movie …

For years, I mistook this flick for the Dolph Lundgren favorite I Come in Peace (“You go in pieces …”), like a cinematic idiot. And while I was sure I would be disappointed by this, I happy to report that Split Second is unapologetic in its constant writhing in wet trash, an art form that only Tony Maylam, director of the equally trashy The Burning, could ever achieve. —Louis Fowler

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Fritz Leiber Jr. was a moderately popular speculative writer whose novels and stories were adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery TV series and films such as Burn, Witch, Burn and Weird Woman. His 1942 tale “The Hill and the Hole” is also the basis for this recent atmospheric indie flick of the same name, a bizarre yarn of the Southwest that hard to fully grasp, but harder to quit watching.

Archeologist Tom (Liam Kelly), working for the Bureau of Land Management out in the deserted desert of New Mexico, finds a topographical anomaly: an oversized hill completely missing from area maps. Seems that the locals will do anything to protect that mysterious mound, including walloping Tom upside the head and leaving him for dead.

He narrowly escapes, but is met with strange characters and stranger scenarios, most of which are impossible to tell if they’re due to the town or Tom’s possible brain damage. Basic discussions turn into psychic breakdowns; local characters turn into conspiracy theories; and that hill, as you could guess, ain’t what it seems to be.

To be honest, I still don’t know what it is.

Visually, The Hill and the Hole is a gorgeous slice of oddball Americana, capturing a fever dream where everything is ordinary, but the closer you look, out of the ordinary. Everything, that is, except for the mostly amateurish acting that, at times, can lead to more wincing than wonderment.

Still, this low-budget flick is an idiosyncratic and incongruous sojourn to the deepest recesses — literally — of a perplexing pile of dirt, a brain-boiler that will leave far more questions than answers, but I suspect that was probably the point. At least I hope it is. —Louis Fowler

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Dead Dicks does itself no favor with that title, suggesting a farce the dark-humored film never quite becomes, or a piece of juvenilia the speculative sci-fi picture is clearly too mature to be. It may attract the wrong kind of audience. It may set the curious up to be profoundly disappointed. It deserves better.

Said title refers to Richie (Heston Horwin, Rock Steady Row) and the three carbon-copy corpses of himself littered about his pigsty apartment. A starving artist with debilitating mental health issues, he has successfully killed himself thrice, even if each demise immediately results in a reborn Richie emerging buck-naked (and explicitly uncircumcised) through the giant vagina that is his bedroom wall.

Wait, what?

His ever-supportive, long-suffering sister, Becca (Jillian Harris), shares your reaction when she arrives Richie’s place to check on him. Processing the unprocessable, she is torn between helping him and getting him help, which don’t always overlap.

Every mention I’ve seen of Dead Dicks thus far name-checks Groundhog Day, but with several versions of Richie sharing the cramped quarters, I would argue the Canadian indie shares more thematically with another Harold Ramis film: Multiplicity starring Michael Keaton, Michael Keaton and Michael Keaton. But again, I stress that despite parts that may be funny, Dead Dicks is no comedy … unless comedies have started carrying suicide-prevention PSAs before minute one.

In their feature directorial debut, scribes Chris Bavota and Lee Paula Springer make a loud splash with a high-concept mindfuck operating on little more than two brave, believable performances and the hard-charging assault of Tusk & Bruiser’s melodic post-rock to chart their arc. Although the second half can’t match the energy of the first, ingenuity reigns throughout. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.