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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Four score and seven years ago — or was it 2012? — two studio pictures, each budgeted around $65 million, portrayed our nation’s 16th president as a larger-than-life, all-American hero. Whereas Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln could boast of taking home two Academy Awards, only Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter portrayed him as an ax-twirling ass-kicker.

Let’s see you do that, Daniel Day-Lewis! If he had, it wouldn’t make the movie any better; sitting through this Lincoln log is like a night at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and you’ve got an upper-right box seat. (Too soon?)

By day, a pre-politics Lincoln (Benjamin Walker, Kinsey) works as a shopkeeper, attempting to woo regular customer Mary Todd (Final Destination 3’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead, here looking like a porcelain doll and/or a Campbell’s Soup Kid). And largely by night, he is devoted to killing the monsters who deprived him of a mother since childhood.

Despite the apparent novelty of putting the red stuff in the White House, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter suffers from being just another watered-down vampire movie. Seeing the bloodsuckers fling live horses at those who wish to stake them is new. Then again, so is stopping the movie cold for a rousing speech by abolitionist Harriet Tubman (Jaqueline Fleming, Contraband), as if to lend PC integrity to soulless fantasy. Our leading man is as wooden as the trees Lincoln chops; on the other hand, Winstead acts her heart out, as if no one told her the project was junk.

As with Wanted, Bekmambetov nurtures a directorial flair that is not just style over substance, but style smothering it. Tim Burton producing only encourages the Russian filmmaker’s worst sensibilities, and your reaction to this flick is tied directly to your tolerance for his affinity to take an action move from regular speed to slow motion and then back to regular speed again, all within the same edit. The mashup of horror and history is a joke that should have ended with screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2010 novel, and that long-in-the-tooth best seller should have been a short story.

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln … —Rod Lott

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Gary Jones’ Mosquito comes from the right place: the heart. With a low budget and a lowbrow idea, it plays like a modern version of Bert I. Gordon’s big buggers of the atomic age, such as Beginning of the End and Earth vs. the Spider. The difference is that in his late ’50s heyday, Gordon never had the opportunity for a shot from the supine POV of a totally nubile, totally nude woman, looking from her ample chest to the creature poised at her feet, but its appendages reaching, er, higher up.

Thanks to a crashed meteor, the infected swamp at a national park causes its mosquito population to mutate to the size of a large dog. Said skeeters chase campers and drain them of blood through one nasty-looking proboscis. Often taking acting cues from cartoons, the terrorized human leads are cardboard and forgettable, save for the novelty of seeing The Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton as a dopey park ranger and Gunnar Hansen, Leatherface of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as a bank robber. Looking like a teddy bear in camo, Hansen is at his most Jerry Garcia-esque here.

Mosquito suffers greatly from second-halfitis. Jones (2000’s Spiders) throws so much at us in the establishing phases that he leaves nowhere else for him to go but back to the well. With each return trip, the pool of ideas is that much more depleted. To the movie’s credit, the in-camera effects of the mosquitos (and their prey) are inspired, no matter their placement across 92 minutes. (The occasional animated sequence, however, deserves a swat.)

Although Jones’ sense of humor remains intact throughout his debut film, Mosquito’s climactic confrontation is creatively bankrupt, what with the survivors boarding themselves inside a small house — and thus inside Night of the Living Dead — and, as an in-joke that’s not as clever as it thinks, Hansen wielding a chain saw as insect repellent of choice. Overall, the buzz is pleasantly mild. —Rod Lott

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Given Area 51’s title and creative pedigree, there’s no question of if aliens will be seen, but how long, and will the wait be merited? The short answer is “no,” which you might have guessed to judge from the film’s six-year sit on the Paramount Pictures shelf. The sci-fi/horror hybrid marks one of the more significant sophomore slumps for a 21st-century director — in this case, Oren Peli, creator of the record-shattering smash Paranormal Activity. Even with audience expectations calibrated to realistic levels, Area 51 emerges as a close encounter of the worst kind.

The movie finds Peli again toiling in found footage (whose second wave he ushered in with his 2007 from-nowhere debut), as an otherwise seemingly intelligent young man named Reid (unknown Reid Warner) ropes in his two best buds to embark on a ridiculous quest to break into Nevada’s titular U.S. Air Force base, long rumored to house proof of extraterrestrial life. Exercising an unhealthy obsession with UFOs and their related government conspiracies, Reid is the kind of anomalistic kid who earns straight As in school, yet treats The X-Files as something of a documentary.

Peli does his follow-up film no favors by telling us right away that Reid has vanished; we guess his fate (correctly, because it’s the most obvious choice) nearly 90 minutes before Area 51 gets around to it — and with some laughably bad CGI effects that ruin any illusion of the subgenre’s authenticity. As in the creditless Paranormal Activity, Peli painstakingly goes for that facade, which is the only legitimate reason we’d willingly watch so much of a movie through the limited, circular frame of night-vision goggles.

The main reason Paranormal clicked, I think, is because Peli really dug into our universal vulnerability while in a state of sleep; even if you found them annoying, Katie and Micah could have been you or I. Area 51 has no such relatability; it clicks only when you turn it off. Its measure as a disappointment cannot be overstated, as the project not at all boldly goes where every alien-conspiracy picture (and TV series) has gone before. —Rod Lott

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