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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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

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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

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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

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