After a Komodo dragon was utilized to wondrous comic effect in 1990’s The Freshman — stealing the show from stars Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick — it’s tough to find the lizard threatening. It’s even tough to do so after watching the dreadful Komodo, in which three or four of these oversized reptiles menace a sparsely populated island.

The lone directorial outing for Michael Lantieri, who had won a much-deserved Oscar for Jurassic Park’s special effects a half-decade prior, the straight-to-VHS film begins with a Komodo eating a dog and its entire vacationing human family, save for one spooked teenage boy (Kevin Zegers, Wrong Turn). A year later, renegade psychiatrist Victoria (Jill Hennessey, Exit Wounds) thinks it’d be good therapy to return the emotionally troubled lad to the scene of the slaughter. Of course, she doesn’t realize the Komodos have called dibs on the turf, and not even her deep and manly speaking voice can turn them away.

The dragons are all-artificial, including computer-animated — mostly pretty well, surprisingly. But the story by Anaconda’s Hans Bauer and Milo’s Craig Mitchell is so routine and connect-the-dots, it might as well not have killer animals in it at all. However, I confess to enjoying the scene in which a dragon appears to dry-hump a moving station wagon. Needs are needs. —Rod Lott

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If you see only one Gamera adventure from the Daiei studio’s initial run (not to mention outside of all those Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes), might as well make it Gamera: Super Monster. Playing like Gamera’s Greatest Hits, the Saturday-matinee movie largely comes cobbled together from the giant flying turtle’s previous adventures. This eighth flick inadvertently sent the Godzilla knockoff to the franchise cemetery, where it stayed buried for a full 15 years.

Directed by Noriaki Yuasa (as with the other seven), the film opens on a pirate spaceship in battle. Don’t get your hopes up for an epic star war, however; Super Monster is so cheap that the skirmish is depicted only via stationary illustrations. Nonetheless, the ship sends a female alien to attack Earth, yet Earth is protected by the Spacewomen, a superhero trio. When not in their matching costumes, the three ladies individually work at a pet store, a school and a Mazda dealership. The Spacewomen occasionally shrink to fit inside a dog carrier; ride in the pet shop’s van, which takes flight as a glowing orange oval; and have a loyal friend in the genre’s required little boy in short pants. Not to stereotype, but like all good Japanese students, he plays a mean rendition of “Camptown Races” on a Yamaha keyboard.

If there’s one thing the kid likes to do more than smile, roam the metropolitan area freely and hang out with older women, it’s watching Gamera defend the world. The Spacewomen don’t do a whole helluva lot beyond some kung-fu sparring with the alien; a good two-thirds of Super Monster is given over to the fight scenes culled from the aforementioned other movies (the American versions of which often have vs. in the title). Gamera pulls out all his tricks — breathing fire, spinning like a goddamn pinwheel, doing gymnastics on industrial constructions — as he goes head-to-turd-resembling-head with the creatures Gaos, Zigra, Viras, Jiger, Guiron and Barugon — or, in respective scientific terms, a bat-dragon, a shark thingie, a squid with an extra chromosome, a dentally challenged dinosaur, a knife-headed reptile with built-in ninja stars, and I don’t even know what.

Early on, a kooky cop dismisses a Gamera manga as “just funny old fairy tales” — as good a review as any for this and any other Gamera outing. They have their place. —Rod Lott

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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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