Displaying the lens-flared glaze of your grandmother’s favorite CBS prime-time procedural, Warner Bros.’ direct-to-video Deep Blue Sea 2 swims into sharksploitation-friendly waters … and sinks straight to the ocean floor. Directed by Darin Scott (Tales from the Hood 2), the belated sequel to Renny Harlin’s 1999 hit arrives with a title sequence that thinks it’s in a 007 movie, complete with a shapely scuba diver in silhouette and a jaw-droppingly horrendous ballad. A sample of the theme song’s IP-wedged lyrics:

Tread into the riptide
Falling from the light coming through
Trading dreams for nightmares
The undertow of gloom in the blue
Drowning in the deep blue sea

Folks, the movie only manages to metastasize from there.

Dr. Misty Calhoun (Danielle Savre, Boogeyman 2), a marine conservationist with a ridiculous name and a push-up bra, is offered five years’ funding to consult on a project with a big pharma firm. The research takes place at a tiny complex off the coast of South Africa. There, Rx giant Carl Durant (Michael Beach, Insidious: Chapter 2) runs intelligence-enhancing experiments on highly lethal bull sharks. He teaches them to swim in formation and obey simple commands, with the help of drugs and a training clicker not unlike the one wielded by Chris Pratt to coach dinosaurs in Jurassic World. Here, it’s clicked by Trent Slater (Rob Mayes, John Dies at the End), a living Ken doll sewn into a wetsuit.

Just as in the original film, Durant’s experiment goes awry, but now with markedly less convincing effects and the boneheaded addition of baby sharks that will remind viewers of Baby Groot. Savre, Beach and Mayes fill the movie’s respective blanks left by Saffron Burrows, Samuel L. Jackson and Thomas Jane, aping their character traits and mannerisms, yet only after stripping them to a single, flat dimension. Every scene, every story beat, every camera filter acts as a deliberate recall to Harlin’s picture; Scott even shamelessly tries to duplicate Jackson’s famed holy-shit moment. The sets look like a best-guess facsimile, were Deep Blue Sea fortunate enough to be adapted into an amusement-park attraction. All that’s missing from Scott’s wretched sequel is LL Cool J’s parrot.

Well, that’s not true — entertainment is also a no-show. Whereas I’ve seen the ’99 Deep Blue Sea three times, I barely could stomach a single viewing of Deep Blue Sea 2. I’ll give the sequel this, though: It stopped at 94 minutes instead of going to 95. —Rod Lott

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When Time Ran Out … could refer to the end of producer Irwin Allen’s reign as the movies’ “master of disaster.” A huge financial bomb, the film forced him into made–for–TV movie pastures for the half-dozen years his once-golden career had left. It represents something of an Irwin Allen all-star edition, too, reuniting The Towering Inferno above-the-line talent Paul Newman and William Holden, as well as The Poseidon Adventure second fiddles Ernest Borgnine and Red Buttons. Too bad getting the gang back together was all for naught.

You can break the story down to four primary beats:
• On a South Pacific island, an oil drilling foreman named Hank (Newman) is deeply concerned by a nearby active volcano.
• Shelby (Holden), a money-first hotel developer, not so much.
• Everyone is screwing around on one another, making for a cast list bordering on the incestuous.
• The volcano erupts.

In the compulsory hullabaloo, Hank and his tight-shirted ex-girlfriend/Shelby’s current girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset, The Deep) rally people to trek to safety — or die trying. Minorities fare poorly, in part because they’re not white enough to hold on tight, I guess. The big set piece is rather dull, unless watching Burgess Meredith (SST: Death Flight) doing a wire-walking act across a rickety bridge in real time is your idea of crackling entertainment. James Goldstone, who directed the infinitely superior Rollercoaster, pulls off a flood sequence that is better than any of the lava scenes, because those look like you’re peering down into a can of red paint being mixed at Home Depot. The climactic hotel destruction should be the pièce de résistance; instead, it’s so cartoony, today’s viewer would not flinch if the word “KABLOOEY!” appeared onscreen.

Early in the movie is a tantalizing bit of would-be foreshadowing as Veronica Hamel (Beyond the Poseidon Adventure) warns of footlong centipedes emerging from the volcano … yet we never get to see them. In their place are James Franciscus (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) in a uniform made of Jiffy Pop foil; Edward Albert (The House Where Evil Dwells) sporting a ’do seemingly shaped by a cafeteria lady’s hairnet; Pat Morita (Do or Die) doing what amounts to an impression of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and Allen’s untalented wife, Sheila, in a most unflattering muumuu. —Rod Lott

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One of the best film books of this decade is Julian Upton’s Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems, which opened my eyes to, well, some of British cinema’s curiosities, obscurities and forgotten gems. I finished the book with a to-watch list with more titles than life will allow me to get around to. One toward the top, however, was Corruption, a mad, mod variation on France’s wildly influential Eyes Without a Face.

From Black Gunn director Robert Hartford-Davis, Corruption casts Hammer horror icon Peter Cushing as “the famous surgeon” John Rogan, who has quite a lovely fiancée in Lynn (Sue Lloyd, Revenge of the Pink Panther), a model whose camera-beloved face is scarred hideously when a scuffle at a party knocks a photography lamp onto her right cheek. Ridden with guilt, Dr. Rogan experiments furiously until he’s able to restore Lynn’s va-va-voom visage via dead tissue. The procedure is unethical, yet utterly remarkable … until it no longer is and the scarring resurfaces.

The trick, of course, is that in order to make the procedure stick, he must acquire living human tissue. And for that, of course, he must resort to murder.

That’s where Corruption becomes really oddball, because seriously, where else can you see Star Wars’ Grand Moff Tarkin wrestling with a topless prostitute? Although the good doctor becomes quite adept at beheading babes, the film is not quite the festival of sleaze as advertised; in truth, it is not too far removed from Hammer’s level of gore: now near quaint.

With horns blaring and sweat dripping, there’s an urgency and immediacy to the scenes in which Dr. Rogan claims his victims, but for true Corruption, look to Lynn, who increasingly pushes her hubs to kill for the benefit of her beauty. By the second half, the gorgeous gal has gained an ugly heart. Similarly, Hartford-Davis’ film loses its luster in the last half hour, when it trades Georges Franju’s aforementioned Eyes for Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, but with a laser. —Rod Lott

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Jaws wasn’t even a year old when NBC debuted Shark Kill on May 20, 1976, making the telefilm likely the first contestant in the still-ongoing sharksploitation sweepstakes. And that’s about all William A. Graham’s (Beyond the Bermuda Triangle) cash-in has going for it.

At an oil rig under repair in the Pacific Ocean, young marine biologist Rick Dayner (Phillip Clark, 1982’s Alone in the Dark) spots (stock footage of) a Great White shark, but blue-collar boss Banducci (Midnight Run’s Richard Foronjy, the Luis Guzmán of his day) won’t have any of it, claiming the kid just “sees sardines,” and orders his men to keep working. Dayner is adamant: “Mister, I know what I saw!”

Eventually, they listen to him … but only after the (stock footage of the) shark eats one worker and amputates the leg of another. The latter fellow’s brother, Cabo Mendoza (Richard Yniguez, The Deadly Tower), joins Dayner on a $20,000 bounty hunt for the shark. When Dayner answers Mendoza’s question about the size of their target (about 15 feet), we know this is a BFD because the music score wakes up just long enough to punctuate Mendoza’s face pause with a “dun-dun-dunnnnn!”

Scheider and Dreyfuss, they ain’t. Hell, Lorraine Gary and Mario Van Peebles, they ain’t. I’m sure I would have loved it at age 5. —Rod Lott

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Pets introduced audiences to not only one of the B-movie world’s most beautiful debutants, but also its eventual queen in Candice Rialson (billed here as “Candy”). In an approximate five-year stretch before choosing early retirement, the buxom blonde made a string of low-budget hits, most notably in three Roger Corman productions: Summer School Teachers, Candy Stripe Nurses and the self-aware sublimity that is Hollywood Boulevard. While not as well-remembered or -reviewed, Pets got there first, showing what the gorgeous, all-American girl could do with ease to a grimy, sugar-stained screen: light it up.

As with The Centerfold Girls the following year, Raphael Nussbaum’s Pets eschews the route of plot for an episodic structure of three stories; other than sort of ending without an ending, the only element they share is Rialson, front-and-center throughout as Bonnie. Even the last scene gives up on closure, asking, “THE END …?” as if Bonnie’s misadventures were ready to play out in a weekly prime-time slot. (We should be so lucky.)

Having just fled her abusive brother (Mike Cartel, Runaway Nightmare), the presumably teenaged Bonnie meets Pat (Teri Guzman, Five Angry Women), an African-American woman who teaches her street-survival skills by making her an unwitting part of a kidnapping and robbery. Their target: a married man (Bret Parker, This Is a Hijack) all too willing to give them a ride, presumably in exchange for another.

Then Bonnie wanders from that bad situation into another, entering a live-in business-and-boudoir arrangement with Geraldine (Joan Blackman, Macon County Line), a lesbian painter whose jealousy flares brighter than the colors on her canvas. Finally, Bonnie accepts an invitation to hang out at the home of wealthy art patron Vincent Stackman (Ed Bishop, TV’s UFO), whose hidden basement doubles as a private zoo. This final segment lends Pets its title, as well as its meant-to-shock marketing depicting Guzman and Rialson chained at the neck — something that never occurs and primes the viewer for a bucket-brimming serving of vile, debasing pornography. This is not that movie …

… but it more than earns its R rating. Nussbaum (The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote & Sancho Panza) clearly knew he was holding dynamite with Rialson carrying the picture, so the TNT is pushed into scenes of T&A often. This being her first speaking role, Rialson is not as comfortable and charismatic as she soon became, so she lets her pink blouse do much of the heavy lifting. Pets is just sleazy enough to placate drive-in crowds, yet smart enough to not let the sex and violence entirely drown out its message of — yep, believe it! — female empowerment and its questions of who’s possessing whom. —Rod Lott

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