Even compared to Al Adamson’s other cheap films, Horror of the Blood Monsters is shameless. A patchwork stitching of new scenes by Adamson; a 1965 Filipino oddity titled Tagani; Hal Roach’s 1940 classic, One Million B.C.; and at least three other flicks, it should be called Horror of the Stock Footage. No matter how many movies incorporated, it would not make sense.

Its opening would have viewers think they’re being presented with a modern-day tale of vampires in an urban setting. Don’t be silly — that’s merely a prologue stuck atop the mission of American spaceship XB-13 to explore the heretofore “unknown solar system” discovered by Dr. Rynning (John Carradine, seen that same year in two other Adamson pictures, Five Bloody Graves and Hell’s Bloody Devils). En route, the crew members are thrown to the floor by space lightning, prompting the “funny” one to crack, “Next time I’m going to go Greyhound and leave the driving to them.”

XB-13 lands on a prehistoric planet that, depending upon where one looks, appears in a top-to-bottom tint of red, blue or green. (This is because Tagani was shot in black and white, so Adamson solved the conundrum with the “color effects” miracle known as Spectrum-X.) While Dr. Rynning stays behind due to risk of coronary, the crew traverses the area and witnesses such sights as primitive men fighting, lizards wrestling and little bat-people swooping through the air.

Unfortunately, most of such scenes appear in two bursts, leaving narrative stretches as dry and barren as the planet’s desert landscape. To pad further, Adamson occasionally cuts back to ground control, where two technicians take time out from XB-13’s emergency situation to boff. Yet even sex is boring when it’s had in Blood Monsters. Let’s put it this way: When the DVD started to pixelate and skip forward in snatches of double-digit seconds, I did not mind. —Rod Lott

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Tron — the 1982 tale of a computer programmer (Jeff Bridges, True Grit) zapped into a world of anthropomorphized data programs — is not a classic. The writing is basic; the direction, adequate; the plot, silly; the acting, coasting on charm alone, which, in the case of Bridges, is fairly substantial.

Yet little of that matters, because its unabashed special-effects joy leaps from the screen. Like Star Wars, 2001 and King Kong, Tron — with its revolutionary CGI — was an FX leap that held you to your seat with a huge grin on your face. This was benchmark, even if the rest of the film was flat as warm cola.

There was little chance that, three decades later, Tron: Legacy (plot: Bridges’ son explores the computer world to find his long-missing father) would even touch Tron’s pop-cultural importance. And despite light-years of difference between the two — more distinctive direction by Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion), impressive visuals, slightly more interesting characters — Legacy fails its birthright.

Tron was a lighthearted adventure; Legacy succumbs to the Dark Knight-ization of modern reboots. Gee-whiz fun is replaced with a soul-destroying pixelscape of bleakness, the effects stunning yet in service to nothing. The original character of Tron (Bruce Boxleitner, TV’s Babylon 5) is barely even present, shoehorned in at the end to play deus ex machina and allow the scriptwriters a way out.

Weirdly enough, the real pleasures in this special-effects showcase are the actors. Nominal star Garrett Hedlund (Eragon) brings limited range to a limited role. However, Bridges’ now-iconic/laconic Zen-master shtick is a desperately welcome pleasure. Olivia Wilde (Cowboys & Aliens) uses her exotically outsized features to pleasing effect as Bridges’ companion, and Michael Sheen (Underworld) goes full “campy Joel Grey in Cabaret” with his too-brief, entertainingly broad portrayal of a conniving program with wires in every port.

It’s not enough, not when there are tens of effects for every line of dialogue. Tron, for all its weaknesses, had a soul within its electrical universe; Legacy can’t find it.

Speaking of soullessness: Bridges also portrays Legacy’s villain, Clu, a program that looks as Bridges once did, his now-aged visage replaced with a youthful one. When the face isn’t moving, it’s an impressive feat of effects work. But when it talks? Unnervingly off. It may seem odd to complain about computerized artificiality in Tron, but Bridges’ uncanny valley visit will haunt my nightmares. —Corey Redekop

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Francis Lawrence (Constantine) didn’t have to work too hard to clear the bar Gary Ross set in 2012 with the dull adaptation of The Hunger Games. I wish he had anyway, because Catching Fire does just that only about halfway in, and then never roaring.

Assuming audiences have digested the previous film and its Battle Royale of a plot, Catching Fire catches Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson, 2012’s Red Dawn remake) ditching their potato-sack wardrobe to embark on a victory tour of the nation’s 12 districts and sell the illusion of a romance to the huddled masses. Instead, they deviate from the government script and Katniss becomes a “beacon of hope for the rebellion. She needs to be eliminated,” orders nefarious President Snow (Donald Sutherland, Space Cowboys).

To do that, Snow forces the pair into another round of Hunger Games, this time an all-stars edition planned by Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master). As Head Gamemaker for the Capitol, he creates a deadly beach scenario full of such frights as angry monkeys, blister smoke and Amanda Plummer.

Once Lawrence — the director, that is — gets his young stars into combat, the movie becomes mild fun to watch. Before that, it’s almost as bland and plodding as Ross’ work, which mistook its dystopian setting as a mandate that it also couldn’t have a soul. Dozens of characters with names that sound like failed foreign breakfast cereals return, but Mr. Lawrence is able to inject the proceedings with more juice. Too bad his leads remain ever languid.

The one thing that the original The Hunger Games had that Catching Fire does not is an actual ending. What viewers get here is not just a cheat, but a bout of expository diarrhea. It is possible to give a story closure while leaving some threads dangling for the next chapter; this one is all damned dangle. —Rod Lott

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Adam Simon’s Brain Dead is engineered to mess with your head. It undoubtedly will succeed if you have trouble telling Bill Pullman apart from Bill Paxton, since both men star in the loftier-than-usual Roger Corman production.

Pullman (Spaceballs) is neurosurgeon Dr. Rex Martin, cajoled by hospital administrator Jim Reston (a visibly grease-slicked Paxton, Weird Science) into determining if mental patient Jack Halsey (Bud Cort, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) is faking his clinical paranoia. A mathematics genius believed to have killed his family, Halsey has important numbers in his head that some very important people want retrieved.

Entering his findings into what appears to be a MacPaint knockoff, Dr. Martin finds Halsey to be the real deal. Our good doctor then helplessly bounces between realities in which he is not the physician, but the patient; in which he is a doctor, but under Halsey’s name; in which various people — including his wife (Patricia Charbonneau, Manhunter) — are found murdered, their eyes stabbed free of their sockets.

So often does Brain Dead leap from level to level, with Dr. Martin jolting “awake” in a sweaty panic, I couldn’t help but think of The Kids in the Hall‘s classic sketch a year earlier in which “I had the pear dream again.” Simon’s movie is like those three minutes, if extended to a feature length. It would function better as an episode of The Twilight Zone — which makes total sense since Charles Beaumont, a regular scribe for that landmark TV series, shares screenplay credit with Simon — especially since they do not have the budget necessary to pull off their collective ambition.

Is it “the most terrifying film of the decade,” as the posters claimed? No. It’s not terrifying at all, yet at least one cannot fault the movie for overflowing with ideas. Whereas Simon went on to bigger things, notably Corman’s Carnosaur, Beaumont remained deceased, having passed away in the late 1960s. Another nugget of trivia: Paxton’s Martini Ranch band provides the club-ready, Dragnet-era Art of Noise-esque end theme. —Rod Lott

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Baby-faced Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid, Innerspace) is a gadabout psychic specializing in extreme telekinesis, perpetual womanizing and dim-witted snark: “Who’s your decorator? Darth Vader?” He’s “recruited” for an extended stay at Thornhill College to participate in a top-secret project; over a pitcher a beer at a proto-Hooters pub, Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow, Flash Gordon) lays it all out: The doc is researching how to psychically project a person into another’s dream and have that person actively participate with — and protect — the REM-phase sleeper.

Having succeeded in the how-to portion, Novotny wants Alex and his considerable mind powers to join the team. Being on the run from gambling-related goons, Alex accepts, and Dreamscape works best when depicting his lab sessions of the surreal and nonsensical. Years away from CGI, director Joseph Ruben (1987’s The Stepfather) has to rely upon cut-rate green screens and matte paintings, but these effects are nonetheless effective. Besides, dreams are imperfect, so having the seams show seems appropriate.

For the first two-thirds of the film, the dream sequences differ wildly in tone. The one set atop an under-construction skyscraper is riddled with high-anxiety suspense, while one involving infidelity is funny. Viewers are served one that is genuinely scary (with a Snakeman lurking among Caligari-esque corridors) and one that is genuinely sexy (as Alex enjoys train-car copulation with a project researcher played by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom‘s Kate Capshaw in her prime).

If only Dreamscape didn’t collapse in its final act, when the focus shifts from Alex to the President of the United States (Eddie Albert, The Devil’s Rain). Plagued by visions of a nuclear holocaust, the leader of our free world just wants “these damn nightmares to end!,” while others wish to end him. On the whole, the movie is like a ’70s conspiracy thriller wrapped in an issue of EC Comics’ Weird Science. I loved it without question or criticism upon its premiere, when I was 13; I like it fine today. —Rod Lott

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