Mary Shelley’s foundational science-fiction/horror novel Frankenstein inspired this tale of systemic violence and grief gone mad. First-time filmmaker Bomani J. Story crafts a solid narrative of a young woman obsessed with bringing her slain brother back from the dead.

Brilliant Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) believes death is nothing more than a disease that can be cured, a theory that seeded in her mind following the accidental shooting death of her mother and the intentional murder of her brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) by rival gang members. She snatches Chris’ body just after he was fatally gunned down, stowing the corpse in an abandoned utility room on her projects’ grounds.

Vicaria builds a machine that can harness the electricity from a nearby power station, and much like other Frankenstein adaptations before it, the ins and outs of this machine aren’t explained in full, letting the viewer suspend disbelief without a lot of cockamamie, pseudo-scientific jargon weighing the proceedings down. And much like in Frankenstein, Vicaria is successful in bringing Chris back, though of course he comes back all wrong. The gentle giant is now a bloodthirsty fiend whose motivations for killing are just as fuzzy as the methods that reanimated him. This is less Mary Shelley, more Hammer; the creature here isn’t a ponderous malcontent out for revenge, but a brute who can’t help but harm others indiscriminately — or at least, whenever he feels threatened.

Can Vicaria keep him a secret without losing her own life? This basic task is made all the more difficult by Kango (Denzel Whitaker), a local drug dealer who forces Vicaria to help him with his business after she steals some of his heroin to keep it off the streets and out of the hands of her father (Chad L. Coleman). Also complicating matters is Jada (Amani Summer), Vicaria’s little cousin, who seems to befriend Chris. To say that things eventually go sideways is an understatement.

There is much to love about The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, but particular praise must be given to Hayes’ performance as Vicaria. She plays the role with subtlety and a plethora of emotions overlapping and interweaving with one another — from the titular anger to fear to joy and beyond. We understand the character as brilliant for her age, but we also see shades of her youth and at times naivety bleed through the brilliance, making the film overall as much a coming-of-age narrative as it is a horror film about life and death.

The look of the creature is especially impressive as well, as is the machinery that brings him back to life. Both harken directly back to James Whale’s iconic 1931 Frankenstein, with the creature’s hulking frame and sutured visage, and the elaborate electrical mechanics of Vicaria’s invention. These fantastical elements contrast nicely with the lived-in feel of the projects setting, a backdrop that allows the filmmaker to explore reality-based horrors like gang violence, poverty and drug addiction. It makes Vicaria’s quest all the more believable — who wouldn’t want to eradicate death in an environment like this?

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is overall an engaging and nightmarish update on a literary classic, one squarely positioned in modern day concerns yet also painted in broader, more universal themes, giving it a feeling of timelessness, much like Shelley’s novel. Story shows tremendous talent, and one cannot wait to see what he does next. —Christopher Shultz

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Whilst flying over Asia’s version of the Bermuda Triangle, a commercial airliner is hit by pterodactyls, sending it crashing into the ocean. The scant few survivors wash up Lost on an island — Crocodile Island! 

It’s called that because, well, crocodiles. Big ones. 

Also, giant spiders, which make up the best stretch of an unremarkable movie from China. 

As a middle-aged Everyman, Gallen Lo dispassionately leads a generic group of characters, from his underage daughter and her boyfriend he doesn’t approve of, to such disposable types as Pregnant Woman and Nerdy Guy. 

That’d be less of a bother if Crocodile Island’s creature CGI didn’t look so unfinished, placing it under the already low bar of Syfy premieres. (Speaking of, Shixing Xu, co-helmer with Simon Zhao, since has remade the Syfy staple Sharktopus for his people’s republic.) What could have been a stupid-fun Jurassic lark is instead just stupid, plus thoroughly uninspired and dreadfully dull. 

Since China lifted its ban on having a second child, how about imposing one to keep Xu and Zhao from making a follow-up? —Rod Lott

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For its early years, starting in 1995, the fledgling UPN network operated on a business model leaning heavily on cheesy, ultimately short-lived sci-fi/action series, like Nowhere Man, The Sentinel and Deadly Games. In title, concept and production quality, Dark Asset feels like one of those shows, albeit never aired and salvaged by cobbling several episodes together into a faux feature. The first hour is so overstuffed with flashbacks, collectively introducing close to a dozen characters, that if not for the three-decade difference, my comparison wouldn’t be out of the question.

Total charmer Byron Mann (2018’s Skyscraper) stars as calm, cool, collected John Doe. He’s ex-Special Forces — “a soldier’s soldier,” we’re told — and the latest recruit for a shadowy super-spy operation in which Dr. Cain (Robert Patrick, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) shoves a microchip into the brain. Said chip allows Dr. Cain and his iPad to implant ideas into said brain — not quite control, but the power of suggestion.

Should’ve gone with control, Doc! Doe disobeys orders and punches, kicks and chops his way outta the lab and to a hotel bar where he meets Jane (Helena Mattsson, Species: The Awakening), a beautiful blonde in town for the requisite “business conference.” As with writer/director Michael Winnick’s superior Guns Girls & Gambling, his camera loves — and I mean loves — Mattsson. If you’ve ever wanted to see her fight with an open blouse, may I direct your attention to Dark Asset.

But it’s not likely to keep it. With a two-thirds-in twist you’ll guess upon Clue One, the structure of John Doe telling most of the movie’s story to Jane with constant cutaways that show it — flashy cars, pulsating lights, fisticuffs with swarthy bizmen — interrupts any gained momentum, if not derails it. The flatness of digital video doesn’t assist Winnick in achieving his B-pic vision; ergo, the UPNity of it all. At Dark Asset’s best, the Mann-as-machine fight scenes, I was reminded of Jet Li’s similarly action-driven The One; at its worst, well, UPN’s The Burning Zone, I guess? —Rod Lott

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In early 1995, I skipped class to attend a comic book-like convention near the now-demolished Holiday Inn on Oklahoma City’s north side. Even though the film bootleggers were always present in the exciting ads of cult-movie zines, this show was the first time I had seen them and their wares in person.

With a few bucks — I think about $5 — I purchased my first bootleg VHS tape, a staticky copy of the intriguing foreign action/comedy/sci-fi hybrid Acción Mutante, which I’d discovered in a dog-eared copy of the Film Threat Video Guide, a truly indispensable publication I loved at the time.

Went I got home, as soon as the VHS tape went into my player, I realized the movie truly changed my life, past and present, and I say that with no hyperbole or grandstanding.

In the three decades since his feature debut, the work of Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia has been mind-bending and phenomenal, including The Day of the Beast, Perdita Durango and The Last Circus, to name a few. Inventive and risk-taking, he’s never been disappointing — a feat, to be sure.

Now, with its grotesque vision of the handicapped future, the sickly evocative Acción Mutante hits Blu-ray. In this fractured time, the world has two factions: the rich, popular and sexy beautiful people, and the poor, hated and malformed citizens. On the latter side, the Acción Mutante team, led by terrorist Ramón (Antonio Resines), break into a well-publicized high-society wedding and kidnap the bride-to-be Patricia (Frédérique Feder), a shapely motormouth whose piehole is stapled shut in the ensuing fracas.

As the Acción Mutantes escape to another planet, they ransom her head to a slimy businessman and his effete son; meanwhile, Ramón kills every member of his “special” army to keep all of the (probable) dollars to himself. With the now-Stockholm Syndromed Patricia bound and dragged by her hair, they crash-land on a desert planet with diseased bodies, filthy minds and septic breath. Between the dead conjoined twins, the inbred family of rapists and a bar full of sexual violations, there is no way they are getting out of here … and they aren’t.

As the well-armed police patrol the scum-filled streets, our well-to-do saviors of the pretty and the factually ugly are trapped in this world — one perfectly comic and fully realized by Iglesias. As broken industrial architecture surrounds them as the most agitated haute couture despises them, they create a lived-in world of bad Andy Warhol movies, good John Waters films and, to top it all off, the second coming attraction of Christ as a disabled caricature.

This is anarchic art at its finest, and Acción Mutante is its own bloody afterbirth, made with corn syrup and food coloring. —Louis Fowler

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On the AM dial, KDUL is gearing up for a big night. The station’s switching formats from polka to rock ’n’ roll, with DJ Dangerous Dan O’Dare (Paul Hipp, The Last Godfather) manning the platters after an FCC-mandated hiatus. The promo plans include an on-site story by a TV reporter (MTV VJ Martha Quinn), but not an alien invasion.

Yet Bad Channels wouldn’t be a Full Moon film without the unplanned. A UFO brings two visitors to the KDUL studio: a robot with baby-blue peepers and a creature with a giant rock head “like a turd with a porthole window.” These alien beings cover the station in fuzzy green mold and abduct female listeners through the airwaves. Because this is a Charles Band production, the ladies shrink as they’re collected into miniature glass tubes.

Bad Channels’ gimmick is that immediately before abduction, each woman — from a sexy waitress (Charlie Spradling, Puppet Master II) to a sexy nurse (Melissa Behr, Ring of the Musketeers) — imagines herself cavorting in a music video, which director Ted Nicolaou (TerrorVision) shoots in full. Although the score comes from 1970s rock dinosaurs Blue Öyster Cult, the videos feature other songs, all unknown, from other bands, all unknown. Showcasing a group calling itself Sykotik Sinfoney, the third clip gives us the Full Moon catalog’s most frightening and/or disturbing sequence. Would you expect anything less from a makeup-dependent metal act whose members include Crusty Udder and Stankly Poozle?

Coming from Full Moon’s golden age — you know, when 45 minutes marked the halfway point, not the end — Nicolaou’s movie is an ambitious mix of science fiction and light satire, like George Pal’s The War of the Worlds meets Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors — but insipid, because its groupie mom had sex with Trixter in the alley. Still, something dumb can be mighty entertaining, which this is. Watch for an end-credits stinger with Tim Thomerson reprising his Dollman role for a few seconds — all the justification needed to bring Behr’s still-shrunk nurse back for Dollman vs. Demonic Toys the following year, and all the proof Band’s brain was decades ahead of Kevin Feige’s. —Rod Lott

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