From the opening scenes featuring a middle-aged man with a machete cutting the throats of a few vatos playing a crooked game of dice, this Machete looks very much like a homegrown copy of that Machete, even if this was strangely filmed a few years earlier.

However, as soon as this Machete finds an adorable, Walter Keane-styled lad in need of a family getting beaten up by locals, it’s here where the film veers off into a somewhat violent tale of spiritual love as the possibly Heavenly Kid and a group of irreligious area thugs battle for the soul of Machete.

With a healthy appetite for tequila — Antigua Cruz, straight from the obtuse bottle — Machete, also known as Lukas, an ex-bodyguard for the president, wanders the desert, stopping by the small town of Purgatory — to hell with subtlety, I suppose — for reasons that are unclear and remain unclear. Either way, he causes trouble with the same three locals throughout the movie, swinging a flimsy machete around like a 5-year-old who’s just seen Conan the Barbarian.

Meanwhile, as a young girl and her “gypsy” mother are harassed by those same three locals, a gringo from Machete’s past — back in Vietnam, apparently — is looking for him, ready to take him back to Arizona, “dead or alive.” While they all impatiently come together for the climax, as the film tries to tie all the loose ends together at once, complete with Machete being shot to death.

Only he’s not. I think.

With guardian angels, familial intrigue and a white dude machete training montage in the desert, writer and star Pablo Esparza — who I do hope that I’m related to on my maternal side — does what he can on this zero-budget actioner, even if very little of it makes any sense which, of course, makes it incredibly entertaining.

At the very least, I hope they got a few bucks from the Antigua Cruz sponsorship. It’s in this flick so much, I’m surprised that bottle didn’t get a producer’s credit. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

If you’re anything like me — and I’m guessing you probably aren’t — you probably thought that The Parent Trap would have been a might better with Bolo Yeung as a Triad hitman who mercilessly shotgunned Hayley Mills’ parents to death in the film’s opening.

Double Impact gets you halfway there, albeit with double the Jean-Claude Van Dammes. Let’s get together, yeah yeah yeah!

Here, JCVD takes on the dual roles of Chad and Alex, somewhat different twins separated at birth and driven together by their love of smoking-hot blondes and, I guess, solving the murder of their parents while collecting the apparent royalties from the Hong Kong-mainland tunnel their dad completed before his death. But mostly smoking-hot blondes.

Between selling smuggled Mercedes on the high seas to busting up a clandestine Hong Kong drug operation, the brothers seem to be getting along until one of them gets way too drunk and imagines in his mind — and dramatized onscreen, thankfully — the other brother sexually satisfying a smoking-hot blonde, leading to some classic Van Damme-on-Van Damme action.

Still, after seeing a few Triads storm the beach the next morning, they decide to put their mutual dislike of each other aside and take on the nameless Chinese sentries, all to get to the snooty British businessman that, as snooty British businessmen are wont to do, put the hit on his parents for reason I still haven’t grasped.

With many instances of Bolo Yeung’s burly stockiness lurking about — and even a little bit of Cory Everson’s muscular thigh-crunching for equal opportunity — the screenplay, written by Van Damme and director Sheldon Lettich (Lionheart), is a highly nonsensical but ultimately fun kick to both of the gonads, preferably while in the patented Van Damme splits position.

For years, Van Damme has teased a sequel pitting Chad and Alex against the “South Central mob,” if such a thing exists, but those plans have yet to see the light of day. I guess those Tostitos commercials are the closest we’re ever going to come, which I’m okay with. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.