At the tail end of the ’80s, what was in the Hollywood water supply that caused a wave of waterlogged movies? That pool included The Abyss, Leviathan, DeepStar Six and — at the bottom, floating just above the Roger Corman-funded Lords of the Deep — Juan Piquer Simón’s Endless Descent, aka The Rift.

After the Siren experimental submarine disappears with no word from those aboard, its lion-maned designer, Wick Hayes (Jack Scalia, Wes Craven’s Red Eye), is called upon by a concerned Pentagon to join the crew of the Siren 2 to seek closure. With Capt. Phillips (Tom Hanks R. Lee Ermey, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) calling the shots and Robbins (Ray Wise, Jeepers Creepers II) navigating, the Siren 2 picks up a signal from the black box of the original-recipe Siren — or Syren, depending upon the prop — located some 20,000 feet below in a rocky crevice — a rift, one might say. Between here and there grows giant seaweed, a sample of which is requested by the sub’s resident biogenetics expert (Deborah Adair, TV’s Dynasty).

Compliance proves to be a very bad idea for the Siren 2 crew, but a good one for Endless Descent, as it allows Simón to get to the face-melting, skin-bubbling and other icky results of mucking with underwater flora. Further problems befall Hayes and company when they investigate the signal’s source: a cave that may as well be an alien world, what with the giant tentacled starfish and all the creatures aggressively popping from holes in the wall like the babies of a Surinam toad; the trypophobic may want to skip this section, although it’s the film’s best.

For such a transparent purloining of Ridley Scott’s Alien, this Descent could have been much worse. Unlike Simón’s previous works, it appears to have a semi-healthy budget, so that the special effects actually work, rather than detract. It also, amazingly, has as much in common with Prometheus, Scott’s 2012 Alien franchise restarter, than it does his 1979 original. As always, Wise makes the most of his role, giving the B material his capital-A all; as always, Ermey and his Angry Birds-friendly eyebrows do the Ermey thing, which is to say a one-note-off rehash of his iconic performance as the nightmarish drill instructor in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Despite being the ostensible “star,” Scalia is a nonentity. —Rod Lott

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I’m not going to, but one could make an infographic with all the numbers Chosen Survivors throws at you in its opening scenes:
• one global thermonuclear war
• 214˚ F heat on Earth’s radiated surface
• 168 men and women selected by the U.S. government to be saved
• for confinement terms of five years
• across 12 locations
• 1,758 feet underground
• in an 18,000 square-feet space
• with a shitload of vampire bats

Okay, so “shitload” is a little vague, but those bloodthirsty bastards move too damn fast — even the fake ones! — for the viewer to count. Let’s call it “thousands” and leave it at that. Besides, they’re not supposed to be there; it’s important that the 11 humans residing in the bunker (in which the film is set almost entirely, save for a disorienting elevator ride at its bookends) repopulate the planet. Mostly unlikable, they receive the lowdown via prerecorded bits read by an inexpressive blonde woman (Kelly Lange, Spy Hard) who provides instructions and activity tips as if she were Julie, Your Dystopic Cruise Director.

Played by such names as Jackie Cooper (Superman’s Perry White), Bradford Dillman (Joe Dante’s Piranha) and Richard Jaeckel (John Carpenter’s Starman), these handpicked sperm donors/receptacles are largely scientists of one specialty or another, except for the one African-American man who happens to be an Olympian (Lincoln Kilpatrick, Stuart Gordon’s Fortress), because somebody’s gotta do all the rock climbing in the climax.

In one of his scant few movie gigs, prolific TV director Sutton Roley (Snatched) displays the guiding hand of someone who appears to be as disengaged as you or I. Whether thousands of bats or millions or billions, those creatures only get you so far through the dull stretches of bickering, and that unscientific distance is not very far for a thriller as confining — both physically and creatively — as its sterile-white sets. What Roley’s doomsday picture doesn’t convey — yet absolutely should — is claustrophobia. Chosen Survivors is too mundane and stuffy to approach such low-hanging levels of tension. —Rod Lott

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R.O.T.O.R. opens with a title card that in part reads, “Our objective was to build the perfect cop of the future … but, something went terribly wrong.” There is no establishing who “our” is, so one could choose to take it — and I do — as a half-hearted apology from the filmmakers for the movie, for something indeed did go terribly wrong: It was made.

Its poster art may be a blatant horizontal flip of Mad Max, but the sci-fi action motion pictures that R.O.T.O.R. would not exist without are RoboCop and The Terminator. Famously, RoboCop was set in Detroit, yet lensed in Dallas, and R.O.T.O.R. unspools in a way that suggest its makers saw “them Hollywood folk” shooting around Big D and thought, “Well, heckfire, I can do that!” Technically, they did; creatively, they didn’t.

The acronym of the title stands for Robotic Officer Tactical Operation Research — a legally in-the-clear way of saying “robot cop with a porn ’stache.” Heading up this division is police Capt. Barrett Coldyron (Richard Gesswein), a real shit-kicker type of Texan who lives on a farm and smashes the stereotype that robotics experts can’t look like the guy who runs the mechanical bull at establishments where patrons are encouraged to let their peanut shells fall to the floor. English does not appear to come easily to Coldyron, but that could be because Gesswein’s entire performance was dubbed by someone else.

What Coldyron (pronounced “cold iron”) and his team have assembled is not a finished model, but a flawed prototype that is accidentally jolted into action and unleashed upon the populace when the department’s jive-talkin’, sex-harrassin’ Indian janitor named Shoe Boogie (“Once you go red, you never get out of bed”) drops his switchblade comb into the educated white people’s fancy plug-in machines. A large-scale tragedy set in motion by a hair detangler — that’s a cinematic first, right? I’d like to credit the actor playing Shoe Boogie for his part in history, but he is (wisely) uncredited.

A quick aside: What the hell kind of name — for an Indian or anyone — is Shoe Boogie? R.O.T.O.R. scribe Budd Lewis (the Robert Z’Dar vehicle Dragonfight) appears to be handicapped in that arena, given other characters’ names of Houghtaling, Moulie, Mokie, Buglar, Grotes, Glorioso, Kipster and Statum. Are those Texans or elves and sorcerers from a fantasy epic I’m doomed to loathe?

Back to a project I already do: Rather than cure Dallas of its problem with rapists and robbers, the on-the-loose R.O.T.O.R. (played by three people, including Ticks stuntman Brad Overturf) contributes to it by murdering innocent civilians — “like a chainsaw set on frappé,” quips Coldyron. Luckily, R.O.T.O.R. has a Kryptonite: car horns!

Eventually, Coldyron gets an assist from scientist Dr. Steele (Jayne Smith, Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders), who resembles Tyne Daly as an American Gladiator. I hope I’m not spoiling anything by saying the last shot teases the steroidal-looking, skunk-mulleted Steele as the cyborg at the center of R.O.T.O.R. II. If you own lucky stars, thank them that a sequel never came into existence, because one feature outing from Cullen Blaine was pollution enough. For his single, ill-fated foray into live-action, the animation director brought the imagination, action and suspense from all those episodes of The Get Along Gang. In other words, it is S.H.I.T. —Rod Lott

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A shark movie with no tension or thrills is like a Jim Wynorski flick with no nudity. Unfortunately, Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre is both. Yet another Sharknado-style exercise in trying tedium, Sharkansas offers nothing of value beyond the title, which is admittedly amusing while also pushing it. Mind you, I’m open to Wynorski’s work; the problem is his heyday of The Lost Empire, The Return of the Swamp Thing and Transylvania Twist is long, long gone.

Because of fracking, underwater walls have burst open, loosing prehistoric sharks into the Natural State’s lakes and swamps. Being cooped up for presumably millions or thousands of years (pick whichever better adheres to your religious worldview), the spiky and finned creatures are starved, and humans do the body good. Investigating the resulting beheadings and such is a detective played by Traci Lords (whose role in 1988’s Not of This Earth remake for Wynorski and producer Roger Corman began her transition from porn to the mainstream). She mostly shouts.

Meanwhile, a few bouncing, busty, pneumatic lady prisoners are unlocked from their cells for a day of hard labor outdoors and near water. Essaying the parts of this belly-chain gang’s members are Instagram model Skye McDonald, Dinocroc vs. Supergator’s Amy Rasimas Holt, Piranhaconda’s Cindy Lucas and, as the subject of many an Asian slur doubling as derisive nickname, Bikini Frankenstein’s Christine Nguyen. The front-and-center star is the poor man’s Lolita, Dominique Swain, as the vinegar-dispositioned Honey. At one point, the girls find time to hot-tub (a Wynorski staple) and one of them makes a batch of peaches and chili beans for their dinner. Apparently, that ungodly culinary mix is a real thing, which appalls me far more than the movie could dream of engaging me. As these things go, the CGI sharks look more realistic than Lucas’ breasts.

Sharkansas is not funny, although it thinks that it is; a guy asks one of the women, “What do you do when you’re not fleeing prehistoric ass?,” and she answers, “Five to 10.” All that’s missing from that punch line is the squeezing of a rubber bulb horn for waka-waka-hey emphasis. Speaking of punctuation, the last line uttered in Sharkansas is also its most uttered: “Crap on a cracker!” (Cracker not included.) —Rod Lott

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A stalwart of Hammer Films with the likes of The Evil of Frankenstein, Freddie Francis also directed many a genre pic for the rival Amicus, including They Came from Beyond Space, a cheap but enjoyable sci-fi flick based upon a Joseph Millard novel titled The Gods Hate Kansas, a title they clearly should have kept.

After a formation of meteors falls on a farm on Earth, people find their minds controlled by the glowing rock, accompanied by an entirely inappropriate crime-jazz score. Luckily, our hero (Robert Hutton, The Slime People) has a steel plate in his head, so he is immune to the aliens’ ways, although a spaghetti colander apparently does the trick, too.

And while “they” may have come from “beyond space,” they have taken up residence on the moon, where they’re lorded over by the Master of the Moon, played by Michael Gough, aka Alfred from Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher’s four combined Batman movies. Villain or no, it’s hard to hate such a nice old man. —Rod Lott

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