In the village of Edo, a corrupt businessman conspires with the local magistrate to tear down its shrine and tenement house, in order to make way for a brothel.

The word “brothel” aside, you don’t give a flip about any of that, do you? I get it. Because the title of the Japanese film is Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters, by Buddha, you want monsters! And monsters you certainly get in this decidedly bonkers, bizarro fantasy from the Daimajin creative team of director Kimiyoshi Yasuda and writer Tetsurô Yoshida.

The flick’s structure allows for a mix of monster stories within the story and eventually full immersion of said monsters into our main plot of political machinations. (Uh-oh, did your interest begin to wane again with that phrase? Brothel! Brothel!) No matter the level of narrative Inception, way is made for many supernatural freaks to hit the screen, including a hairy cyclops, a snake-necked woman, a squatty midget caveman, a giant hag face in the sky, a featureless face on some guy and, perhaps most WTFy of all, a one-eyed umbrella creature that hops around on its lone leg and unfurls a tongue of a length that would provoke jealousy in Gene Simmons.

True to the title, dozens more monsters exist. Wonderfully surreal even by today’s seen-it-all standards, the folktale as cautionary tale was followed by two more Yokai Monsters pictures: Spook Warfare later in ’68 and Along with Ghosts the next year. Both play as 100 Monsters does: as if the classic 1964 omnibus Kwaidan had been remade by Sid and Marty Krofft. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Although my gut tells me the release of Jurassic World is the true reason, I dream that Zoombies exists because someone at the production company made a typo, showed the boss, and that typo got the green light. “Teh hell,” you say? The Asylum has proceeded with pitches less substantive.

What Zoombies is about is all contained with within the title’s eight letters: Zoo animals become zombies, duh; how, when and why are irrelevant. For historical purposes, however, here goes: At the Eden Wildlife Zoo, a deceased lab monkey is given a shot of an experimental concoction that turns it into an undead death machine. Infecting all the other creatures great and small across the theme park, it turns the zoo into … well, a zoo in the metaphorical sense.

Directed by The Coed and the Zombie Stoner’s Glenn R. Miller, the movie puts an ethnically diverse group of dolts through the ringer of mortal danger. Most notable among them — but only because she is the film’s lead — is Kim Nielsen (The Amityville Terror) in the Bryce Dallas Howard role, but saddled with a precocious daughter (a film-debuting LaLa Nestor) who gets to baseball-bat a killer koala into chunks of lunch meat. More disposable are a bird buff (Isaac Anderson) who is so enthusiastic about his internship, he seems to be auditioning for an I Am Sam reboot; the aviary supervisor (Tammy Klein, Little Dead Rotting Hood) who appears to have applied her eye shadow in the dark and upside down; and a ponytailed dude (Aaron Groben, CobraGator) whose right cheek plays home to three moles in such a perfect horizontal line, you await the arrival of Pac-Man to chomp ’em up.

Zoombies knows exactly what it is — at one point, Nielsen’s character exclaims, “This is a zoo, not Jurassic Park!” — which could be why it barely tries. With Zoombies being a product of Z-movie shithouse The Asylum, nobody should expect it to be anything but, in the best possible scenario, only marginally watchable. That might be the case if the effects were even a hair above their current ranking of far below average. Whether a monkey claws out a nurse’s eyeballs, or giraffes pull apart an Asian man like taffy, or elephants stomp their way across the grounds, great pains have not been taken to meld the computer-generated elements with the real-life ones; concepts like depth and perspective are given the middle finger. In many genre pics, these kind of errors have the unintended effect of elevating one’s enjoyment level, but Zoombies is so oppressively stupid at its core, added incompetence just further weighs it down. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.