Throw a rock in any direction in the B-movie pool and you’re bound to hit a rape-revenge thriller. Chances it will involve a hot lady robot with a master’s degree in disguise, however? Infinitesimal. That one-in-a-million shot is Steel and Lace. Praise be it is not one of a million.

On the night of her concert debut, on-the-rise pianist Gaily Morton (Clare Wren, Season of Fear) is raped in an alleyway by real-estate mogul Daniel Emerson (Michael Cerveris, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant) while his four “musketeer” buddies watch and egg him on. At the trial, however, the balding, yet ponytailed Emerson is found not guilty. Crushed, Gaily ascends the courthouse stairwell to the roof and purposely plunges to her death. Crushed five years after the fact, her scientist brother, Albert (Bruce Davison, 1971’s Willard), uses his room of blip-de-bloop wall computers to recreate her as a sexy cyborg with instruments of death hiding in her killer bod.

Donning enough full face masks to outfit the next two Mission: Impossible installments, Gaily seduces her way through the quintet of womanizers, offing each in an unexpectedly gory manner. From drilling straight through one guy to decapitating another, her chintzy methods of disposal give Steel and Lace what little juice sits in its tank; she’s like Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct murderess rebuilt as a Swiss Army Knife model of the Six Million Dollar Man.

Wren is appropriately cold and emotionless, devoting herself to the role with admirable commitment not shown by her fellow cast members — among them, An American Werewolf in London’s David Naughton as the cop who investigates the killings because he has to, Luther the Geek’s Stacy Haiduk as a chain-smoking courtroom sketch artist who investigates the killings because she’s nosy, and David L. Lander — once and forever Squiggy of TV’s Laverne & Shirley — as our comic relief (although he doesn’t come close to actually providing it).

For such an impressive CV as an FX artist and animator who’s worked for James Cameron and John Carpenter, debuting director Ernest D. Farino appears to have left his considerable day-job skills back at the office. Steel and Lace is cheap-looking trash that feels so creatively ill-invested, it’s amazing Farino went on to helm bigger and better things … psych! His only other features were parts one and five of Charles Band’s insufferable Josh Kirby … Time Warrior kidventures. —Rod Lott

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In the X-Men films, you know when the opening 20th Century Fox logo fades to black, how the “X” is held for a fraction of a second longer? Well, Fantastic Four pulls the same trick, except it calls out a different letter: yep, the “F.” I couldn’t help but take that as a grade.

Following 2005’s Fantastic 4 and its 2007 sequel with Silver Surfer, this franchise reboot from Josh Trank (Chronicle) errs from the start — not necessarily by giving us the third screen telling of the quartet’s origin as much as by recasting our heroes as mopey, obnoxious, entitled teens. Reed Richards (Whiplash’s Miles Teller, toning down the smug) is the genius kid scientist who’s been toiling on teleportation since the fifth grade, with the aid of blue-collar pal Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell, Snowpiercer). Their work brings them to the attention of the Baxter Foundation, which recruits them to help the institute crack the riddle of interdimensional travel.

With further assistance from fellow student Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) and Storm siblings Johnny (Michael B. Jordan, Creed) and Sue (Kate Mara, The Martian), they succeed and make a unsanctioned trip to “Planet Zero,” where these supposedly intelligent youngsters take Instagram selfies and touch mystery goo. This mutates all of them into, respectively, a living Stretch Armstrong doll, a pile of talking rocks, a crispy-burnt mummy, a flying fireball and an invisible woman who digs the trip-hop tunes of Portishead.

“We can’t change the past,” says Sue, who can create a force field, yet not a smile, “but we can change the future.” And so can you, by avoiding this needless iteration of the Marvel Comics mainstays, infinitely more of an embarrassment than Roger Corman’s infamously unreleased The Fantastic Four adaptation of 1994. Gripe at the aforementioned pair of mid-aughts adventures if you must, but at least they got the tone of the source material right, with bickering and in-fighting abound. Trask’s switch to making the team members morose and gloomy benefits no one; in fact, it compounds the movie’s problems, because in aiming for realism, the foursome’s realization of their changed bodies strikes viewers as worthy of ridicule. And it is.

Even before this Fantastic Four do-over opened, the clock struck clobberin’ time. Is it as bad as you’ve heard? No, but also yes — “no” because the sci-fi superhero tale is far from unskilled garbage, and “yes” because it is astonishingly leaden and as dull as it is expensive ($120 million). —Rod Lott

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Claiming to be a precursor to both RoboCop and The Terminator, the manga mainstay known as 8 Man could and should have made for one slick superhero flick of his own. Unfortunately, director Yasuhiro Horiuchi steered the science-fiction film down the soap-opera route, in much the same way heavy metal bands used to release a ballad in a shameless bid for mainstream acceptance.

Like RoboCop, the character of 8 Man (first published in 1963) was born out of the lifeless body of a cop (Toshihide Wakamatsu, TV’s Birdman Squadron Jetman) killed in the line of duty. A hush-hush program run by a brilliant scientist (Jô Shishido, Branded to Kill) resurrects the dead dick as a super machine, here emblazoned with a large “8” across his sleek, robotic form. To Horiuchi’s credit, his film does include some nifty sequences that shows our 8 Man in action, like running at incredible speeds or catching bullets in his hands.

Too bad these sequences are few and far between. Instead of being the hyperkinetic, balls-out action extravaganza you would expect from Asian genre efforts of that era, 8 Man generates hate by instead opting to focus on the hero’s exploration of his past and his current hobby of emotion-grappling, leading to ridiculous, soul-searching montages scored to terrible J-pop love songs. It grows sappy enough to become simply unwatchable, as if the opening (read: baffling) dedication of “For all lonely nights” weren’t an immediate clue.

On a scale of 1 to 8, 8 Man would be lucky to earn a 4. Alas, it is not that lucky. But, hey, that suit is cool. —Rod Lott

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Maybe the marketers behind Stung didn’t even consider that using the tagline “The Ultimate Buzzkill” could come back to sting them in the ass — as in, “Stung is a real buzzkill.” Because it is.

A throwback to the big-bug invasion flicks of the 1950s, the first movie from director Benni Diez pits wasps against WASPs. A garden party to honor a deceased, well-to-do patriarch represents a do-or-die opportunity for the catering company owned by Julie (appealing newcomer Jessica Cook), having taken it over on the occasion of her own father’s death. On hand to help her is her one employee, the smart-mouthed Paul (Matt O’Leary, Sorority Row), who obviously carries a torch for her with more devotion than he carries buffet trays.

What should be a routine gig is ruined when a swarm of giant, mutated wasps zooms in and crashes the party. The insects have the wings; the humans haven’t got a prayer. And what should be a fun hour and a half just isn’t, falling as flat as a soufflé removed from the oven too early.

Everything seems to be stuck at the halfway mark for optimal conditions: its energy level, the jokes, characters for whom to root, creatures frightening enough to fear. (Committing to the practical route vs. relying on CGI to create critters would have taken care of the last point.) When you cast Aliens’ Lance Henriksen, yet his big moment consists of him ordering the wasps to “kiss my ass!,” an opportunity clearly has been wasted. As is, the film is watchable, barely. —Rod Lott

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Here’s how little I understood Beowulf when I had to read it in English class in junior high and again in high school: I thought the title referred to the monster, and that the monster was a wolf. Laugh all you want, but Anglo-Saxon epic poems of the 8th century are not the easiest things to decipher.

Luckily, Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf is different, and I don’t just mean because it’s animated. The film marks his “no-bullshit” version of the classic text, as he promises on the making-of documentary featured on the DVD: “This has nothing to do with the Beowulf you were forced to read in junior high school. It’s all about eating, drinking, killing and fornicating.”

Actually, as scripted by novelist Neil Gaiman (The Sandman) and Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary, the movie doesn’t stray all that far from the story of its source. It’s just that it ditches much of the boring elements and amps up the saucy ones, leaving an action-oriented, sometimes ribald and unapologetically over-the-top experience. Should Beowulf really be shown punching his way out of sea monster by going through the eye? Sure, why the hell not?

Getting a CGI slimdown in the process, The Departed heavy Ray Winstone assumes the lead role of Beowulf, a hero — here, made flawed, in direct opposition to the poem — who arrives at the castle of King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins, Thor) to slay the monster Grendel (Crispin Glover, apparently having put his Back to the Future beef with Zemeckis behind him), a giant deformed beast from a nearby village who doesn’t like all the noise their merriment makes.

Beowulf agrees, Grendel attacks and — while stark naked and opting to use no sword — our hero slays the creature. That doesn’t sit well with his serpentine mother, who takes the form of Angelina Jolie (Maleficent), whose breastastic reveal sent the tongues of internet bloggers a-wagging when the scene was leaked just prior to its theatrical release. She offers Beowulf a truce: He can say he killed her if he promises to leave her be. Because she looks like a nude Jolie, he agrees.

Women are known to change their minds, however, which results in Beowulf having to engage in the fight of his life with an enormous, fire-breathing dragon. Like much of the movie, this sequence is a thrill to watch. Even when the narrative lags — and at nearly two hours, it does here and there — the visuals are something to behold. While I’ve never been a fan of motion-capture animation, Beowulf represents a huge leap for the medium; it’s difficult to imagine even a whiz-kid director like Zemeckis being able to make it work in the traditional format of live-action. Laden as his film is with violence, gore and nudity, it makes the ages-old story more exciting and accessible (Seamus Heaney or no Seamus Heaney) than it ever has been, or could ever hope to be. —Rod Lott

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