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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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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