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

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When sequels start dropping numbers from their titles is one sign consumers can take as caveat emptor. Another is when none of the franchise’s stars is willing to show up, even for an easy-paycheck cameo. And yet another is skipping theaters entirely.

Species: The Awakening checks all three of these boxes. You have been warned. And warned. And warned yet again.

With Natasha Henstridge in absentia, the direct-to-DVD flick falls upon the supple shoulders of Swedish actress Helena Mattsson (Guns Girls & Gambling) as the resident Hot Alien Who Kills When She Gets Horny. The twist here is that she just doesn’t know it yet. Her Miranda is a university professor in pure Sexy Librarian Fantasy mode; her first-scene lecture is nothing short of lascivious, with director Nick Lyon (Hercules Reborn) shooting through her parted legs and at her adoring male students, who all but have books strategically placed on their smoldering crotches. (These guys would appreciate being pointed to the 56-minute mark of the Blu-ray.)

On the faculty with Miranda is her only family member, Uncle Tom (!), played by a very sweaty Ben Cross (The Unholy). It is he who helped make her that way — not to mention help make her, period — by mucking around with alien DNA, thus providing screenwriter Ben Ripley (who also penned the slightly better Species III) a tenuous connection to the previous films.

However, Uncle Tom (!!) has kept this a secret from his niece until now, when the corpse of a young man is discovered in the park, shortly after Miranda comes home dazed from a date — a sexual Awakening, perhaps? The answer is as affirmative as Mattsson is strikingly beautiful, and sadly, that is not reason enough to sit through this fourth and (until the inevitable reboot) final Species. Once Uncle Tom (!!!) takes her to Mexico to meet her creator, the sci-fi slasher becomes increasingly dull, despite them being pursued in part by a tentacle-sprouting nun. While Mattsson and Cross do try their best, their efforts are not helped by Lyon’s contagious disengagement and shoddy effects that recall the heyday of CorelDRAW. —Rod Lott

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Toasts Charles Grodin’s sniveling corporate villain in the opening scene of 1976’s King Kong, “Well … here’s to the big one!” While he’s referring to his hunt for untapped petroleum on an Indonesian island, the comment winks at an audience fully aware that a big ol’ angry ape awaits. Personally, I can’t help but take Grodin’s line as a reference to the movie itself: a Dino De Laurentiis production as giant-sized as its cryptozoological star; a spare-no-expense spectacle that bridged the gap between Jaws and Star Wars; and, lest we forget, a once-sacrilegious remake of the 1933 all-time classic — not just for the fantasy-adventure genre, but the art form of cinema as a whole.

Do-gooder hippie Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges, Iron Man) stows away in the ship carrying Petrox exec Wilson (Grodin, Midnight Run) and crew. Unlike Wilson, Prescott is not there for the oil; as a professor in Princeton’s Department of Primate Paleontology — try fitting that on a business card — Prescott has in his heart the best interest of the rumored gargantuan gorilla worshipped by the primitive islanders. En route to the isle, the Petrox vessel picks up something else for Prescott’s heart: the lifeboat-stranded, would-be actress named Dwan (Jessica Lange, Tootsie) — not Dawn, but Dwan, and she is dmub as drit.

Her eventual presence on the island catapults Kong into a horny tizzy; I can relate. Other than the climax’s change of venue from the ESB to the WTC, the largest difference this bicentennial Kong has over its Depression-era forefather is the cranked-up kinkiness! The ’33 Kong may have sniffed his fingers after handling his distressed damsel, but this ape intends at hitting a homer, starting with stripping Dwan from the confines of that clingy evening gown of hers. Although unnatural and imbalanced, their chemistry is a welcome sign o’ the times; when Kong saves Dwan from a giant snake … well, let’s just say the symbolism is not lost — in fact, it’s as clear as Crystal Pepsi.

Time has been both kind and unkind to director John Guillermin’s Towering Inferno follow-up. To deal with the “unkind” part firstly and quickly, its Oscar-winning (!) effects by E.T.’s Carlo Rambaldi play beyond hokey by today’s standards, heightening the comedy not intended by Guillermin or screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (who re-teamed for the 1984 stinker Sheena: Queen of the Jungle). On the coin’s flip side, Lange’s performance now registers as one. This being her film debut, she played an IQ-challenged, dim-bulb bimbo of enormous naiveté so well, audiences and critics confused the character with the actress. We have come to know better.

The approach taken to the source material by Guillermin is admirably workmanlike and unassuming, in that he doesn’t allow his direction to get in the way of — or distract from — the action. (It’s still uncertain if he possessed an authorial stamp at all.) His shots do not call attention to themselves, with the exception of the POV of a NYC subway car as it careens toward Kong’s greedy grasp. The biggest complaint we can throw the pic’s way is that at two hours and 14 minutes, it could be considered slow … until you compare it to the 3.35-hour slog of Peter Jackson’s oversized 2005 remake, whereupon Guillermin’s trip to camp looks duly efficient. Even without Jackson’s version retroactively propping up Guillermin’s, this second King Kong remains a good time. —Rod Lott

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Movies involving cowboys and Indians were never for me, but cowboys and dinosaurs, as in Horror at Snape Island director James O’Connolly’s The Valley of Gwangi? I think I could get used to this.

A year before venturing Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the clenched-teeth James Franciscus portrayed Tuck, a cowboy who moseys down to Mexico to see his former flame, T.J. (Gila Golan, Our Man Flint). She now spends her time in a rodeo, riding horses that jump from a ramp into big tubs of water. It’s kind of a turn-on.

Tuck hopes to make T.J. rich when he discovers a miniature horse — and I do mean miniature. The animal stands barely bigger than a bug, and they have to chase and lasso it as it scampers across the desert. But that’s not the only strange creature they find. Nope, there are pterodactyls and the titular Gwangi, a mid-sized T-rex that they capture and put in the circus, which the dinosaur doesn’t like, as is evident when it fights an elephant.

Valley’s second half is a lot more exciting than the first, which starts off pretty slow. But the one thing that is consistent throughout is — as always — the excellent stop-motion effects work of Ray Harryhausen. Yet another collaboration with producer Charles H. Schneer, this was his last picture of the 1960s, capping an extraordinary run that included Jason and the Argonauts; only two more Sinbad adventures and one Clash of the Titans were to follow Gwangi before retirement beckoned. —Rod Lott

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