If the Jeremy Renner vehicle Hansel & Gretel Witch Hunters deserves scorn for anything, it’s for inadvertently encouraging the mockbuster Hansel & Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft into existence. It’s so bad, you’ll want to shove yourself into an oven.

In this flaccid effort at a contemporized fairy tale, orphaned siblings Hansel and Gretel Jonah and Ella (real-life siblings Booboo and Fivel Stewart, respectively) are sent to an elite private school that turns out to be — bleached shades of Suspiria! — founded by witches. Although on the surface overseen by Mr. Sebastian (Eric Roberts, DOA: Dead or Alive), the institution is ruled by a secret society called The Circle, constituted of magic-makers and spell-casters who have gone on to be presidents, CEOs and other captains of industry. Hansel and Gretel Jonah and Ella are destined to join so they can help fight a character who is revealed to be an evil witch, but whose identity you would guess far before the reveal. (I say “would,” because I implore you to avoid watching.)

Bearing the production values of porn, the obviously rushed Hansel & Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft aims for that teen-dream Twilight feel (a franchise being Booboo’s claim to fame) and succeeds, in that it is boring to the point of depression. The young Stewarts seem to be vying to out-not-act one another, and their bid is threatened by every young member among the compact, cost-efficient cast. Although leagues above in talent and screen appeal, Roberts, Vanessa Angel (Kingpin) and former Runaways vocalist Cherie Currie (Charles Band’s Parasite) can’t help but be tainted simply by association.

Not even on his best day would Daniel Day-Lewis be able to salvage such a stupid script by first-timer Larson Tretter (“Ella! I read in the paper you like pizza, right?”) or the lazy direction of the legendarily prolific David DeCoteau, whose bottom-drawer/bottom-dollar filmography includes Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, 1313: Giant Killer Bees! (exclamation his), and the cult curiosity A Talking Cat!?! (exclamations and question mark his). I know his budget for H&G:WOW had to be tight, but couldn’t he have grabbed three establishing shots of the campus instead of re-using the same one?!? —Rod Lott

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As the elderly ruler of a fictional Middle Eastern country, Amir (Reed Hadley, Zorro’s Fighting Legion), has a grand plan to beat his fast-approaching death — and, more importantly, the means to fund it: After his passing, he is to be wrapped in tin foil, be shipped to the United States and undergo secret surgery in which his brain will be transplanted into the body of a virile, strapping young lad. Amir’s scheme is quite ambitious; Al Adamson’s Brain of Blood is not.

Dr. Trenton (Kent Taylor, The Mighty Gorga) performs the illegal experiment, painstakingly protracted and presumably shown in real time. Although the doc has been blacklisted from every major medical institution, we know he is a legit cutter because of the anatomy skeleton and other science-class accoutrements in his laboratory. He’s just not the most ethical. When this mad scientist needs to “buy some time” to find that hot bod Amir desired, Dr. Trenton sticks the politician’s gooey gray matter into the nearest temporary brainpan: that of local simpleton Gor (John Bloom, Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein), a human can of Beefaroni whose face has been ravaged by redneck-poured battery acid. Sorry, Amir — consider your People’s Sexiest Man Alive dreams dashed.

As usual, Adamson’s wife, Regina Carrol (Blazing Stewardesses), all big breasts and mile-high hair, corrals the female lead. Playing Amir’s wife, she’s not thrilled with her hub’s new makeover; it’s a toss-up whether she has it worse than the women chained like pets in Trenton’s basement by his pint-sized assistant (Angelo Rossitto, 1947’s Scared to Death).

Everyone in the movie speaks with weird pauses, as if waiting for the cue cards to be turned (“There is no chance … for failure”), and the outdoor climax is filmed not unlike a high school play. In that scene, you’ll hear the words “That’s a very noisy little gadget you have there,” which double as a descriptor as good as any for Brain of Blood, an Adamson project so unmemorable, I didn’t realize until afterward that I had already seen it a decade ago, under the alternate title of The Oozing Skull. While we’re discussing titles, it’s worth mentioning that Brain of Blood often is believed to belong to the Blood Island franchise. Girl, it wishes it could be that good. —Rod Lott

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Two years before Journey 2: The Mysterious Island made a box-office splash, Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island did not. That’s the rosiest way to put it. While both films are very loose adaptations of Verne’s 1874 novel, this is the one nobody wanted or wants to see because it’s in the other one where The Rock bounces berries off his pecs — in 3-D!

In 1865, a Civil War unit led by Capt. Cyrus Harding (Lochlyn Munro, Freddy vs. Jason) hops into a hot-air balloon, hits a ripple in time, and crash-lands in today’s times on the title isle, which is now located in the Bermuda Triangle. The befuddled crew runs across the modern-day, resourceful beauty Julia Fogg (Gina Holden, Saw 3D: The Final Chapter) and her injured, airheaded sister, Abby (Susie Abromeit, Battle: Los Angeles).

Eventually, the girls tell the boys that, hey, they’re not in 19th-century Virginia anymore! Dialogue like this ensues:
• “What the heck’s a aeroplane?”
• “Colonel, you can’t seriously be listenin’ to a girl and a colored. They cain’t vote!”
• “What’s on yer face? It looks like you got Indian warpaint!”

There’s also a song that begins “‘Course I love yer biscuits / And your gravy, too,” but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, as these folks just wander about sandy beaches, the Syfy movie is kind of like the TV series Lost, but without the critical acclaim and massive fandom. In its place are invading pirates, killer bushes that growl like dogs, an active volcano and, as Capt. Harding puts it, “An octopus. A giant octopus.”

A turd. A giant turd. —Rod Lott

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Although nearly a half-century year old, Godmonster of Indian Flats remains startlingly relevant for our times. It’s a story of a God-fearing, anti-science populace clinging to the idea of yesteryear. It’s a story of a politician who abuses his power to enrich his own station in life, at the expense of the poorer townspeople. It’s a story of one African-American man trying to do what’s the right while forever under the thumb of a racist society that fears “the other.”

It’s also a story of a “damaged mongoloid beast,” but to the film’s credit, it could function with that plotline excised. I don’t want to live in a world in which such a removal were made — I’m only saying it could be done. More is bubbling beneath Godmonster’s matted-cotton surface than mere creature-run-amok chaos.

And holy moly, what a creature! One morning, to the amazement of all-business anthropology professor Dr. Clemons (E. Kerrigan Prescott, Fiend Without a Face) and mild-mannered sheep rancher Eddie (Richard Marion, Child’s Play 3), a half-developed embryo is birthed into the flock. Dr. Clemons notes the preemie’s condition is the result of chromosomal breakdown during cross-fertilization, and these 10 seconds form all the scientific explanation we as viewers need. The professor incubates the thing in his lab, where it grows into an 8-foot monstrosity that looks like a mange-ravaged Mr. Snuffleupagus or a walking tumor as depicted by a Nabisco Barnum’s Animal Cracker, or perhaps both.

When it gets loose and terrorizes the town, Godmonster morphs into a classic Western as members of the “vigilance committee” assemble on horseback to hunt it down and lasso that li’l doggie amid the mayor’s declaration of martial law. Needless to say, audience sympathy aligns with that of writer/director Fredric Hobbs (Alabama’s Ghost): squarely on the side of the deformed, misunderstood abomination, no matter how many schoolchildren he scares the shit out of or number of filling stations he somehow explodes. Godmonster of Indian Flats certainly hums an odd tune, but at least it hums. —Rod Lott

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Not to be confused with the recent M. Night Shyamalan film — but how I hope it is — the Split from 1989 is very much a prototypically bizarre YouTube clip stretched out into interminable movie length, so I guess that’s something to be technologically proud of.

Within minutes of pressing play, the screen is soon filled with bad teeth, bad accents and bad dialogue — including the classic line “We came for breakfast, not for AIDS!” — with the immediate start-stop bent going between this homeless man’s world and some sort of technologically unsound underworld, giving the movie an infinitely more intriguing first half-hour than many other futuristic-repressed films of the time.

The homeless man, actually, is a sort of quick-change artist, slipping in and out of one bad comedic persona after another; he’s also on the run from this nameless group of American computer-hacker types who are desperately trying to track down the man, whose real name we learn is the unlikely Starker (Timothy Dwight).

Apparently living off the grid, especially in a time when it was easier to, strange computer graphics come to life, pixelating and swirling, proving somehow that Big Brother really is watching Starker and, of course, brainwashing all of us. By the way: Everyone is living in some form of a dystopian future, but I only learned that from reading the back of the Blu-ray case — it still looks and feels like generic 1989 Los Angeles to me.

While writer/director Chris Shaw’s film drags as we follow Starker around from one supposed comedy bit after another, where he goes to art shows as an Austrian psychoanalyst and hangs out at a Terry Gilliam-esque woman’s house, for example, keep with it; if you persevere and give it a few minutes, Split eventually becomes an absolute cheesy mind-melt as it barrels down toward a typically dark and depressing ending that I’m not sure I really get yet, but I appreciated nonetheless.

Apparently one of the first films to use CGI — and it shows — Split was a very low-budget outing with a message bigger than it could possibly contain: Conformity is a soul-destroying beast and the only thing that can save us all is a fat urinal cake to be dropped in the water supply cleaning our clouded visions — something I’ve written about in clandestine pamphlets for years. —Louis Fowler

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