Arriving a full decade after producer Dino De Laurentiis’ 1976 monster hit, its too-little, too-late sequel, King Kong Lives, was DOA at the box office. Director John Guillermin returned; audiences did not. The entire landscape of cinema had changed in that 10-year gap, and it shows in the new film’s opening. As if an acknowledgment that too much time had passed, Lives begins with a reminder: the ending of Kong ’76. As you’ll recall, the giant ape plunged from the World Trade Center to his death below, as Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges feigned horror.

But lo and behold — guess what! He’s not dead! In fact, King K– oh, you knew already. Yeah, the title does kinda spoil it, huh?

But how did he survive? Obviously, the big galoot was peeled off the New York sidewalks and airlifted to the Atlanta Institute of Georgia, where Amy Franklin (Linda Hamilton, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) is among the team of doctors performing emergency surgery on Kong — specifically, the implantation of a $7 million artificial heart approximately the size of a Yugo. Problem: Kong also needs a blood transfusion, but no species is a match, y’know?

Cut to: the jungles of Borneo, where intrepid adventurer Hank Mitchell (Brian Kerwin, It Came from Outer Space II) happens upon a second giant ape, this one with a vagina and floppy breasts. Brokering a quick deal, Mitchell has Lady Kong (as the credits call her) hauled to Hotlanta pronto. At least one oversized plasma bag later, Kong’s as good as new … and horny as hell. (Considering his inability to seal the deal with Lange’s Dwan, one can imagine the level of pent-up sexual frustration must be out-of-your-gourd maddening.) No matter how afar they hide Lady Kong, ol’ King can detect her musky, matted-fur scent … and it drives him bananas! He breaks loose to run away with her in the wild, where they enjoy such romantic acts as picking ticks off one another.

Primate-on-primate bliss is short-lived as the meddling military gets involved. Hank and Amy combine jungle wits and shoulder pads to save the Kongs from this ever-present threat of the feds, not to mention redneck hunters, whose appearance confirms that King Kong Lives has veered into self-parody without even realizing it.

As silly as the guys in the gorilla suits are (Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan veterans Peter Elliott and George Antoni) as they cuddle and snuggle and romp about green-screened backgrounds, they are better actors than our main characters. Kerwin is bereft of leading-man magnetism, while Hamilton cannot even utter “shit” with conviction. Maybe it’s just me, but that single-syllable word should be a cinch against ludicrous lines of dialogue like “We’re not lancing a hemorrhoid here!”

Believe it or not, the shit-silly Toho and Rankin/Bass co-production King Kong Escapes is doubly serious by comparison — mind you, that 1967 dose of matinee magic is the one in which Kong battles a giant-robot version of himself. King Kong Lives, however, is the only movie I’m aware of featuring an African-American youth waving the Confederate flag in celebration … so it’s got that going for it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

If a certain Transylvanian count earned an origin tale with Dracula Untold, why not the maddest of mad scientists? Victor Frankenstein proceeds to tell the story before the story of Mary Shelley’s classic novel … except that the monstrous creation finds itself right smack at the center of the Victorian-era film’s climax.

Between chapters of the X-Men franchise, James McAvoy essays the title role of the medical student with designs and theories that push the envelope as they push the definition of “extracurricular activities.” As the film by Push-er Paul McGuigan opens, London chap Victor finds a lab assistant in the most unusual of spots: a traveling circus. Igor (Daniel Radcliffe, further distancing himself from the boy-wizard gig of the Harry Potter series) is a hunchbacked clown with a knack for the anatomical.

A side note, Potterheads: Prepare yourself, because your Radcliffe looks terrifying, as if Edward Scissorhands, Conrad Veidt’s Caligari somnambulist and 1970s mime duo Shields and Yarnell crammed into Seth Brundle’s teleportation pod at once, and whatever emerged at the other end got its hair done by Helena Bonham Carter. Again, terrifying.

Victor could use a smart guy like Igor to aid in his experiments, so he springs the freak from his circus cage and gives him shelter, food, fresh clothes and hot water. He also “cures” Igor’s hunched back, in a scene primed to make you puke, if the thought of sucking a stranger’s pus through a straw sounds even the least bit unappetizing. All gussied up and standing upright, Igor is able to pursue Lorelei (Jessica Brown Findlay, TV’s Downton Abbey), the lithe, lovely trapeze artist for whom he has pined from afar. Although unspoken, she totally owes him a mercy lay, having saved her life in the prologue and all, yet instead, they court like Duggar daughters.

The difference is that we know the Duggars wouldn’t dare step foot in an institution of science, what with all its charlatans. Igor invites Lorelei to just such a place, to witness him help Victor re-animate a dead “homunculus” using a “Lazarus fork,” a metal utensil that converts electricity into the life-flowing kind. Their test subject is a patched-together meat puppet; the secret recipe, reveals Victor, is “mostly chimpanzee.” Its reaction to their action? Mostly preposterous — in a good, deranged way.

Had the screenplay by Chronicle’s Max Landis worked in more chunks of sick-minded, really weird science, McGuigan’s movie might rise above the notch marked “just barely alive.” Taking a parchment page from Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes reboot — it of the punch-o-matic predictor sequences — McGuigan grants his bro-heroes with the gift of anatomy-cam powers, enabling them to imagine Gray’s Anatomy-style illustrations — detailed, labeled, animated — over others’ bodies, like a Gothic precursor to Superman’s X-ray vision. While of negligible value to the story, this recurring bit makes for a welcome visual flourish and — this is important — something we haven’t seen before in many a Frankenfilm.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the movie at large; like so many enormously expensive genre pics, Victor Frankenstein suffers from grave Act 3 problems, not the least of which is that it loses whatever impish edge built in the beginning by culminating in the overly familiar — and not the best parts of the overly familiar, either. Why is there never a little girl around to toss in a pond when you need one? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

If a mystery exists in Jules Verne’s Mystery on Monster Island — one does not — the characters are not cognizant of it. Please forgive them, for they are very, very stupid.

And so is their movie, for which Pieces auteur Juan Piquer Simón pillow-smothered Verne’s 1882 adventure novel Godfrey Morgan into a live-action cartoon. Don’t get your hopes up when the names of Star Wars’ Peter Cushing and Superman II’s Terence Stamp topline the opening credits; both distinguished thespians bookend the film like veritable Cryptkeepers. (Expect even less from Spanish horror icon Paul Naschy, who croaks in the first scene.) That leaves the heavy lifting of the featherweight narrative to no-names Ian Sera and David Hatton.

Simón’s four-time leading man, the Screech-like Sera (Pod People) plays Jeff Morgan, one of those aristocratic sorts who wishes to see the world before settling down. His uncle (Cushing) bankrolls a yearlong, not-so-extraordinary voyage for the young man aboard his ship, and orders the fussy etiquette professor Artelect (Hatton, The Pirates of Penzance) along as Jeff’s slave, more or less. It’s as if Jeff were traveling with Sesame Street’s Mr. Noodle.

Rather quickly, the ship gets wrecked after an attack by walking fish creatures, leaving Jeff and Artelect stranded on an island where, despite a language divide, they befriend a native man (Gasphar Ipua, Simón’s Sea Devils) in a loincloth and constantly encounter title-hencing monsters, including dinosaurs, seaweed heaps and giant caterpillars that spew God-knows-what. No matter the critter, Artelect quakes in fear and screams, “Monsters! Monsters!” (He also shouts this upon spotting a pig and a fully stationary skeleton; in other words, he redefines “annoying.”) Eventually, our heroes get wise enough to Home Alone the hell outta that jungle by crafting such defense mechanisms as banana cannons and coconut catapults.

The monsters are laughably cheap and unconvincing, seemingly with fewer points of articulation than a corncob voodoo doll. Simón attempts to justify it through a story “twist,” but since Verne’s book was beast-free, I’m not buying what Simón is selling there. At the same time, I wouldn’t want him to change a thing, especially with regard to the creatures’ appearance; the more “real” they would look, the less entertaining Mystery on Monster Island would be. As is, it’s another Simón disasterpiece. Dig in! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

In the mighty tradition of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four — and by that, I mean never to emerge legally from the shelf on which it sits — is Justice League of America. Made for the CBS network, yet never-aired, the live-action movie assembles some of DC Comics’ most beloved superheroes … who are neither Batman nor Superman. See, with the rights to those two tied up with the Warner Bros. blockbuster machine, this Justice League is built upon a lineup of second-stringers: most notably Green Lantern, The Flash and The Atom.

When he’s not conjuring goofy umbrellas, power tools or helicopter blades with his magic ring, Green Lantern (Matthew Settle, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) tries to salvage his crumbling relationship with a young hottie. The Atom (John Kassir, the Cryptkeeper of the Tales from the Crypt franchise) is a pudgy science geek, whereas The Flash (Kenny Johnston, Scenes of the Crime) is a jobless loser, not to mention a clueless numbskull cast from the mold labeled “Joey from Friends.” Rather than talk shop at, say, a Hall of Justice, these guys loaf around in bathrobes in their shared apartment, where they attempt to fix the TV so they can watch — corporate synergy alert! — Touched by an Angel.

Joining them in their sporadic deeds of derring-do is Fire (Michelle Hurd, I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine), who — although she has the power to shoot flames — is just here to give the JLA a little diversity, as she is African-American. (Speaking of color, I am uncertain why a superhero named Fire is costumed in green.) When not busy as a struggling actress pursuing the role of the banana in a fruit commercial, Fire joins the guys as the JLA’s true hideout: an underwater structure overseen by an overweight Martian Manhunter (David Odgen Stiers, TV’s M*A*S*H).

Their fine and peaceful city of New Metro is under threat of its first-ever hurricane, whipped up by the snarling-evil figure known only as The Weather Man, who wants $20 million to not level town with a tidal wave. As we later learn (excepting the fact it’s totally obvious from the get-go), this villain is actually the highly respected researcher Dr. Eno (Miguel Ferrer, 1987’s RoboCop). Conveniently, while stumbling upon his lab one night, Eno’s perky assistant (Kimberly Oja, TV’s Son of the Beach) finds herself zapped by a freakish cloud of crude computer animation, which grants her the ability to freeze things. Because of this incredible party trick, the JLA recruits her and dubs her Ice, and of course she will turn the tidal wave into a sheet of ice. Yep, the plot is wound up that easily.

As you have every right to expect, Justice League of America makes for a veritable two-course meal of corn and cheese. After ABC’s more-than-decent The Flash series from 1990, it’s pathetic to witness that character taking a job as a mailman, so that many yuks may be elicited by the sight of him delivering letters at breakneck speed. We also watch him down food at a rate that puts competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi to shame, capped by that surefire laff-grabber, the hearty belch. Meanwhile, The Atom’s heroics are pretty much reduced (no pun intended) to shrinking so he can free a cat trapped under a porch. Oh, and he also gets small to enter a room undetected by an alarm laser, under which he limbos, as Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock” plays on the soundtrack. (Insert your own hearty belch here.)

That said, from a standpoint of pure guilty pleasures, I loved it! Directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá (Fire Down Below) and, reportedly, Lewis Teague (Cujo), the teleflick is at least made with technical competence, but maybe not so much that your attention is diverted from the joke-heavy script or school-play costumes or any other budgetary shortcoming. As prime-time superheroes of that era go, the Justice League tops 1996’s Generation X and the David Hasselhoff-led Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. So, yeah, good news, Zack Snyder: The bar isn’t set that high. —Rod Lott

Decades after being Oscar-nommed way back in 1956 for Around the World in Eighty Days, director Michael Anderson sunk his claws into a literary property and fashioned it into a modern sci-fi classic. I speak of Logan’s Run, of course, because his late-career Millennium is a low-flying turd. Despite arriving at the tail end of the ’80s, the shiny movie has its feet planted firmly in the style of the previous decade, in which Logan’s Run and Anderson’s made-for-TV Martian Chronicles were born. The most telling example is its out-of-vogue touch in casting, with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd in the leads — neither a box-office sparker. (Don’t get me started on Daniel J. Travanti.)

Credit screenwriter John Varley, on whose 1977 “Air Raid” short story the film is based, for at least getting these miserable 108 minutes off the ground quickly; the commercial plane crash that sets the story into motion (as it were) happens within the first two minutes. With mass casualties and mysterious circumstances surrounding the wreckage, NTSB investigator Bill Smith (Kristofferson, the Blade trilogy) is sent to, um, investigate. Catching his (beady) eye is Louise Baltimore (Ladd, TV’s Charlie’s Angels), a rather fetching blonde airline attendant who, in actuality, is from a barren population 1,000 years in the future.

What Ms. Baltimore (the fakest of fake names) is doing there and why she does it with Mr. Smith (the most generic of generic names) isn’t 100 percent clear — although Stargate clearly owes a great deal to Millennium — but you’ll be too distracted by Anderson’s wacky, wonky vision of tomorrow to care: Louise and her cohorts operate from an industrial hangar run partially by an Erector Set robot named Sherman (Robert Joy, Amityville 3-D). In this world, Ladd’s hair is fashioned into a Mohawk, like a soccer-mom Grace Jones, and everybody debates time travel, dropping the word “paradox” as often as “the.”

If you feel a bit sleepy as Millennium drags on, Kristofferson is right there with you. (Ladd, for the record, impresses.) Whether his character is ordering coffee, surveying a disaster, squeezing tit or saving mankind, the actor exhibits his go-to move: the vacant stare. Among the leading men of his time, Kristofferson may be the least expressive of all. Being saddled with him as the hero in a would-be sci-fi epic is as aggravating as the baffling ending. As it unfolds and sits there, we hear Sherman’s omnipotent voice echo and boom and Zardoz-ize as if saying Something Meaningful: “This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning.” It is an abortion. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.