On the AM dial, KDUL is gearing up for a big night. The station’s switching formats from polka to rock ’n’ roll, with DJ Dangerous Dan O’Dare (Paul Hipp, The Last Godfather) manning the platters after an FCC-mandated hiatus. The promo plans include an on-site story by a TV reporter (MTV VJ Martha Quinn), but not an alien invasion.

Yet Bad Channels wouldn’t be a Full Moon film without the unplanned. A UFO brings two visitors to the KDUL studio: a robot with baby-blue peepers and a creature with a giant rock head “like a turd with a porthole window.” These alien beings cover the station in fuzzy green mold and abduct female listeners through the airwaves. Because this is a Charles Band production, the ladies shrink as they’re collected into miniature glass tubes.

Bad Channels’ gimmick is that immediately before abduction, each woman — from a sexy waitress (Charlie Spradling, Puppet Master II) to a sexy nurse (Melissa Behr, Ring of the Musketeers) — imagines herself cavorting in a music video, which director Ted Nicolaou (TerrorVision) shoots in full. Although the score comes from 1970s rock dinosaurs Blue Öyster Cult, the videos feature other songs, all unknown, from other bands, all unknown. Showcasing a group calling itself Sykotik Sinfoney, the third clip gives us the Full Moon catalog’s most frightening and/or disturbing sequence. Would you expect anything less from a makeup-dependent metal act whose members include Crusty Udder and Stankly Poozle?

Coming from Full Moon’s golden age — you know, when 45 minutes marked the halfway point, not the end — Nicolaou’s movie is an ambitious mix of science fiction and light satire, like George Pal’s The War of the Worlds meets Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors — but insipid, because its groupie mom had sex with Trixter in the alley. Still, something dumb can be mighty entertaining, which this is. Watch for an end-credits stinger with Tim Thomerson reprising his Dollman role for a few seconds — all the justification needed to bring Behr’s still-shrunk nurse back for Dollman vs. Demonic Toys the following year, and all the proof Band’s brain was decades ahead of Kevin Feige’s. —Rod Lott

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Gotta give it to the 40-meter silver-shiny superhero Ultraman: He sure as hell doesn’t look 55! It helps that Shin Ultraman is a spit-polished reboot, following the similar sober treatment director Shinji Higuchi gave another kaiju legend in 2016’s Shin Godzilla.

A government agency, the S-Class Species Suppression Protocol (SSSP) works to protect the country against giant monsters, which have a habit of popping up everywhere. Through the eyes of new transfer Hiroko (Masami Nagasawa, Godzilla: Final Wars), we witness how SSSP reacts to the sudden appearance of a mystery metallic man (“Ultraman” to you and me) who emerges from the sky to kick the asses of such destructive creatures as an invisible horned thing that feeds off electricity and a lizardy whatsit with a whirring drill bit for a head.

Under the sneaky pretense of an alliance, an evil electromagnetic extraterrestrial named Zarab (voiced by Kenjirô Tsuda) warns officials against our hero and drafts an Ultraman Elimination Plan. Take a look and let’s circle back to see if we’re aligned, okay?

As fun as Shin Ultraman’s battle sequences are, what sucked me in was the oil-and-vinegar working relationship of go-getter Hiroko and her solitary-minded, no-nonsense partner (Takumi Saitoh, Japan’s Cube remake). They’re essentially the Mulder and Scully of this world — accurate, given the original Ultraman spun off from the Ultra Q sci-fi mystery TV series, a single-season wonder. Their problem-solving and office politics make for the sort of things to which Hollywood would give short shrift.

Almost inconceivable in this Marvel age, Higuchi brings his baby in at under two hours — partly because it’s not awash in mythology requiring viewers to have seen some untold number of movies and series to follow. Whether you have fond memories of running across reruns on your local UHF station (as I do) or you struggle to ID your Ultraman from your Infra-Man (also me, once upon a time), Shin Ultraman is constructed as intelligent, often rousing entertainment for all. It goes without saying the effects are first-rate, as the Toho studio has this style of flick down to a science. —Rod Lott

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Although Tales from the Apocalypse is a collection of shorts versus a proper anthology, its five stories share a factor: indifference. At least all but one look fantastic, and that odd man out serves up rust-colored desolation on purpose.

In William Hellmuth’s Gravity-esque Alone, the bunch’s best, the sole survivor of an exploded ship is marooned in a lifepod, sucked closed into a black hole by the second. As she nears certain doom, she converses with a cartographer who picks up her mayday signal. Coming to grips with possible death post-devastation also carries Damon Duncan’s Cradle, so stacking it atop Alone was not the wisest choice, even if it does have a cool robot spider.

Sporting the aforementioned layer of grime is Gabriel Kalim Mucci’s Lunatique, free of dialogue as an armored woman hunts a creature on a windy planet the color of dirt. From Susie Jones, the YA-influenced New Mars posits a future of forced marriages upon teens. Finally, Lin Sun’s Earth 2035 considers the difference between AI and humans: “Humanity,” says a doctor in a moment intended as Deep and Important, but lands as a pretentious punchline with the impact of a greeting card.

Nothing wrong with sci-fi being serious, but the contents of Tales from the Apocalypse (aka Episodes from Apocalypse, despite “apocalypse” being debatable) hold little wonder or imagination. On a purely technical level, they succeed with effects often superb. However, I can’t shake the feeling I was watching calling cards and demo reels rather than shorts where scripting merited as much attention. —Rod Lott

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Everyone from Gary Cooper to Gandhi guests in the eighth of luchador Santo’s escapades. So what if they’re basically sculpted candles in a Mexico waxworks? They help make Santo in the Wax Museum a field trip worth taking. Get those permission slips signed early, kids.

Said museum is owned by Dr. Karol (Claudio Brook, Cronos), who’s particularly proud of the horror figures in the basement: Mr. Hyde, Quasimodo, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, the Phantom of the Opera. Despite all being fictional characters, Karol deems them “faithful reproductions.” Some stand noticeably more still than others.

When a foxy magazine photographer (Roxana Bellini, The Brainiac) doing a story on the place becomes the third visitor to vanish of late, Dr. K falls under the authorities’ glare of suspicion. They call upon El Santo and his sparkle cape to help find the kidnappers — well, between matches in the ring, naturally.

Is it possible that Karol’s time in a Nazi concentration camp infused him with mad-scientist leanings? You already knew the answer by paragraph 2. You wanna watch anyway. I get it. I feel the same, although — heresy alert! — I have no patience for its long wrestling sequences, even as I recognize the Santo series wouldn’t exist otherwise. One of Santo in the Wax Museum’s bouts pits our hero against El Tigre del Ring.

Taking inspiration from the then-decade-old House of Wax, director Alfonso Corona Blake follows up his first Santo pic, 1962’s Santo vs. the Vampire Women, but never made another. Both in black and white, the Blake joints were among the quartet dubbed for Yanks by K. Gordon Murray. —Rod Lott

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Your basic Saturday-matinee movie of rear projection and rubber suits, Destination Inner Space takes place at an underwater research lab. Inside, scientists express concern over a blooping blip on the ol’ sonar. As the skipper up top (Radar Men from the Moon’s Roy Barcroft) puts it to hero Cmdr. Wayne (Scott Brady, Strange Behavior), “There’s something odd going on down there.”

And how! The blip leads the crew to an alien spaceship on the ocean floor. Automated to push a glowing triangle ice-cube thing from its wall, the craft contains a capsule shaped like a tablet of cold medicine. When they take the mystery container back to base and dare open it, they let loose a finned monster who could be the Creature of the Black Lagoon after years of eating exclusively at Steak ’n Shake. From there, the movie is reminiscent of It! The Terror from Beyond Space, but with establishing shots filmed in someone’s living room aquarium.

Also aboard Destination are Wende Wagner (TV’s The Green Hornet) as Wayne’s love interest, Mike Road (the voice of Race Bannon on TV’s Jonny Quest) as Wayne’s rival, Sheree North (Telefon) as a marine biologist who mostly tends to the men, and the legendary James Hong (Everything Everywhere All at Once) as the world’s preeminent mechanical engineer and deep-sea diver. Just kidding; ’60s sci-fi being the domain of Caucasian squares who all look ready to sip G&Ts by the hi-fi, the Asian Hong plays the SEALAB chef, complete with bird on his shoulder.

Although merely serviceable, Destination Inner Space excels in the department of subaquatic footage. Clearly, director Francis D. Lyon (Cult of the Cobra) is aware, repeating scuba-dooba scenes (like a two-man submarine in action) as often as possible to steer this ship to 83 minutes. —Rod Lott

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