Based on the 1927 H.P. Lovecraft short story “The Colour Out of Space” without crediting it as its source, The Curse concerns the Crane family of a tiny Tennessee town. Ruled with an iron fist by asshole fundamentalist patriarch Nathan (Tentacles’ Claude Akins), the blended farming clan has worries beyond crops when a shiny, white orb lands on their lawn. Despite it looking like a Christmas ornament from last year’s Neiman Marcus catalog, they call it a meteorite. Whatever it is, the thing plops from space while Nathan’s wife, Frances (Kathleen Jordon Gregory), is plowing the field (so to speak) with the hairy, hunky (well, compared to Akins) farmhand.

Only Frances’ son and daughter, Zack and Alice (Stand by Me’s Wil Wheaton and his real-life sister, Amy), seem to notice how different — and terrible — the well water tastes ever since that gosh-durned galaxy rock invaded their property. Then the animals start acting crazy, too; Nathan’s fat-ass slob of a son, Cyrus (Malcolm Denare, John Carpenter’s Christine), is attacked by a horse, while Alice is nearly pecked to death by angry chickens. Nathan praises God for allowing apples to grow on his tree, then is horrified to discover they’re full of writhing maggots. Frances arguably has it worse: After she halves a freshly plucked head of lettuce, only to find it full of goop, a pierced tomato unloads a loose-manure typhoon onto her screaming face.

Soon, her face is newly dotted with a couple of zits that grow into an infection that suggests she caught the herp from her barnyard romp. And yet, even after they balloon into scabby boils, no one dares address it. Just as no one complains about Frances’ fried chicken dinner being marinated in salmonella soup. Just as no one shares their anecdotes about the trick fruits and vegetables. Just as Nathan never says to his wife, “Hey, remember when I caught you in your nightie outside with that hairy, hunky farmhand? What in tarnation was that all about?” Just as no one asks Zack, “Isn’t there anything on the TV other than Hee Haw?” Just as no one ever says, “Holy hell, we sure do have one hot li’l filly of a next-door neighbor!” She’s played by Hope North (Linedancin’ U.S.A.), and not even Cooper Huckabee (Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse) as her husband seems to notice … especially when she’s gussied up in silky purple panties to seduce him!

Even by science-fiction standards, logic in The Curse is lacking, as are the makeup effects on the simplest usage. (For example, as Alice begins to inherit her mother’s “complexion,” it looks as if the little girl just self-applied blobs of calamine lotion with a cotton ball.) Let’s make sure no one fails to tell you that the 1965 Boris Karloff vehicle Die, Monster, Die! is a far superior adaptation — histrionic title and all — than this, the directorial debut of Daredevil actor David Keith and produced in part by The Beyond’s Lucio Fulci and Beyond the Door’s Ovidio G. Assonitis. The latter name sounds like a true curse: a south-of-the-belly-button disease I never wish to contract. Symptoms of Assonitis include violent itching, uncontrollable oozing, extreme discomfort while seated and an appearance by Hazzard himbo John Schneider. —Rod Lott

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Popular culture owes Larry Buchanan a mountain of debt, because if not for the Texas-based filmmaker’s Mars Needs Women, what other dialogue could MARRS possibly have sampled for its smash hit, “Pump Up the Volume”? (And then, by extension, that Christian Slater movie would have been titled something generic like Teen Rebel DJ.) But Buchanan’s film itself? It’s no damn good.

At the United States Decoding Service — NASA Wing, mind you — decoders have been busy for three days decoding coded messages from outer space. These “mysterious signals” all say the same thing: “Mars needs women.” Further explanation is delivered via Dop (Tommy Kirk, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini), one of a crew of five clean-cut Martian men who have come to Houston to enact Operation Sleep Freeze, in which they will recruit (read: abduct) five unmarried, but way-beautiful women for a mission of repopulation. Exclaims Dop to those aforementioned decoders, “We are in earnest! The life of our planet depends upon this!”

When Buchanan (The Naked Witch) isn’t busy padding his 83-minute picture with so much stock footage of military aircraft taking off and landing (not to mention a loudspeaker that shows up so much, it deserves a supporting credit), he shows us the Martians collecting their prey like so many Pokémon: a stewardess, a homecoming queen, a stripper (Hip Hot and 21’s “Bubbles” Cash, per the credits) undulating like a Bill Ward cartoon in the ever-livin’ flesh.

But in the midst of their rapey plan, what would happen should Dop — gasp! — fall in love? Enter Yvonne Craig (the same year she debuted as Batgirl to TV’s Batman) as a prim-and-proper scientist. That their date takes them to a planetarium is a foregone conclusion since it allows Buchanan to make it to feature length by working in what amounts to a slideshow on the red planet. Strangely, it is more compelling than the movie’s actual story. —Rod Lott

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What’s in Hong Kong’s The Cave of Silken Web? Try seven spider demons, in the shapely form of sisters clad in eveningwear from the Roy G. Biv collection, with color-coordinated webs to match. Still, I could not tell them apart — a difficult task made all the more taxing by the insistence of director Ho Meng-Hua (The Mighty Peking Man) to cram the entire septet into the frame at once and as often as possible.

Based on Chinese folklore, this kiddie-matinee fantasy pits these vixens as eager to feast on human flesh, which is why they get so worked up when they see a monk (Ho Fan, reprising his role from 1966’s Monkey Goes West) approaching with three travel buddies-cum-bodyguards: a fairly worthless friar (Tien Shun, also back from West), a massively titted pig man (Peng Peng, ditto) and the ever-acrobatic Monkey King (Chou Lung-Chang, who was not returning, but came back for the next sequel, 1968’s The Land of Many Perfumes). From there, the simple story points are placed on a virtual carousel as the spider women try to capture and consume the men, while the men try to evade capture and save those not as fortunate, while also not becoming breakfast. With trick spells on both sides cast as fast as spittle flies, misunderstandings are used for strategic purposes, as if an episode of Three’s Company were infiltrated by magic.

For example, the sisters initially attempt to lure the men into their cavernous death trap by giving it a proto-HGTV makeover — the first of the film’s musical numbers. (Oh, I didn’t mention the flick is also a musical? Well, it is.) As optical effects do their best to suspend our disbelief, the ladies sing about their dastardly plan. Here, check out the lyrics that begin this sick beat:

I’ve turned the cave into a gorgeous hall
With all these splendid decorations
Luxurious furniture
And all types of antiques
The garden is adorned with rare plants
There are boys and girls waiting to serve
It’s taken on a whole new look
It’s a deadly trap to kill them
To kill them

Game, set, match, Kanye.

Many of the effects — like the friar leaping from ground to mountaintop or Pigsy’s fruit turning into a rock mid-chomp — are achieved through the ol’ freeze-now-and-edit-later method. In rare instances, this works really well, with no moment better than the Monkey King being electrocuted into a skeleton as he tries to bust through a giant web. (Incidentally, this occurs 34 seconds into the trailer and 34 minutes into the movie. Hashtag congruence!) This being a Shaw Brothers production, a fair share of martial-arts battles breaks out, with our heroes and villainesses sparring with swords on a stick — a war of weapons the soundtrack depicts with the cacophony of your kids banging pots and pans.

Still, the sets are a marvel and the pervading wackiness translates into the near-irresistible. As arachnid chick numero whatever says, “Don’t dismiss this monkey, sister.” —Rod Lott

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In the village of Edo, a corrupt businessman conspires with the local magistrate to tear down its shrine and tenement house, in order to make way for a brothel.

The word “brothel” aside, you don’t give a flip about any of that, do you? I get it. Because the title of the Japanese film is Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters, by Buddha, you want monsters! And monsters you certainly get in this decidedly bonkers, bizarro fantasy from the Daimajin creative team of director Kimiyoshi Yasuda and writer Tetsurô Yoshida.

The flick’s structure allows for a mix of monster stories within the story and eventually full immersion of said monsters into our main plot of political machinations. (Uh-oh, did your interest begin to wane again with that phrase? Brothel! Brothel!) No matter the level of narrative Inception, way is made for many supernatural freaks to hit the screen, including a hairy cyclops, a snake-necked woman, a squatty midget caveman, a giant hag face in the sky, a featureless face on some guy and, perhaps most WTFy of all, a one-eyed umbrella creature that hops around on its lone leg and unfurls a tongue of a length that would provoke jealousy in Gene Simmons.

True to the title, dozens more monsters exist. Wonderfully surreal even by today’s seen-it-all standards, the folktale as cautionary tale was followed by two more Yokai Monsters pictures: Spook Warfare later in ’68 and Along with Ghosts the next year. Both play as 100 Monsters does: as if the classic 1964 omnibus Kwaidan had been remade by Sid and Marty Krofft. —Rod Lott

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Although my gut tells me the release of Jurassic World is the true reason, I dream that Zoombies exists because someone at the production company made a typo, showed the boss, and that typo got the green light. “Teh hell,” you say? The Asylum has proceeded with pitches less substantive.

What Zoombies is about is all contained with within the title’s eight letters: Zoo animals become zombies, duh; how, when and why are irrelevant. For historical purposes, however, here goes: At the Eden Wildlife Zoo, a deceased lab monkey is given a shot of an experimental concoction that turns it into an undead death machine. Infecting all the other creatures great and small across the theme park, it turns the zoo into … well, a zoo in the metaphorical sense.

Directed by The Coed and the Zombie Stoner’s Glenn R. Miller, the movie puts an ethnically diverse group of dolts through the ringer of mortal danger. Most notable among them — but only because she is the film’s lead — is Kim Nielsen (The Amityville Terror) in the Bryce Dallas Howard role, but saddled with a precocious daughter (a film-debuting LaLa Nestor) who gets to baseball-bat a killer koala into chunks of lunch meat. More disposable are a bird buff (Isaac Anderson) who is so enthusiastic about his internship, he seems to be auditioning for an I Am Sam reboot; the aviary supervisor (Tammy Klein, Little Dead Rotting Hood) who appears to have applied her eye shadow in the dark and upside down; and a ponytailed dude (Aaron Groben, CobraGator) whose right cheek plays home to three moles in such a perfect horizontal line, you await the arrival of Pac-Man to chomp ’em up.

Zoombies knows exactly what it is — at one point, Nielsen’s character exclaims, “This is a zoo, not Jurassic Park!” — which could be why it barely tries. With Zoombies being a product of Z-movie shithouse The Asylum, nobody should expect it to be anything but, in the best possible scenario, only marginally watchable. That might be the case if the effects were even a hair above their current ranking of far below average. Whether a monkey claws out a nurse’s eyeballs, or giraffes pull apart an Asian man like taffy, or elephants stomp their way across the grounds, great pains have not been taken to meld the computer-generated elements with the real-life ones; concepts like depth and perspective are given the middle finger. In many genre pics, these kind of errors have the unintended effect of elevating one’s enjoyment level, but Zoombies is so oppressively stupid at its core, added incompetence just further weighs it down. —Rod Lott

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