I will state up front that Lost City Raiders is an inverse Poppins. It’s perfectly passable in any way, but rarely rises to any noteworthy peaks until very late in its runtime. Amy’s take on it was even more blunt: “boringly adequate.”

The climate change in the backstory did not happen slowly, like a glacier in reality, but instead it happened quickly, like a glacier in a bad movie. The ice caps have melted, and the waters are rising, and rising, and rising. Miraculously so, in that every major city in the world (New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Dresden, Geneva) seems to be equally inundated, with tall buildings and hilltops peeking out from the water, and many buildings only semi-submerged. But it’s only a matter of time until the entire world is submerged!

John Kubiak runs a salvage business, along with his adopted sons. They are low on operating capital because they are running some secret salvage missions for the New Vatican. There is an attempt at a Raiders of the Lost Ark vibe as a journal leads to a dagger leads to a scroll leads to….

The action sequences are not great, but adequate. The acting is not great, but adequate. The digital matte painting FX are not great, but adequate. This movie only whelms in one direction, and it’s under.

The goal is something called the Scepter of Sobek, which Moses used to part the Red Sea when escaping from Egypt. It can control water. The Kubiaks’ competition is a rich guy who wants the Scepter because he has funded floating communities. He plans on letting the world flood, renting out his floating habitats, buying submerged land cheap, and then putting things back the way they were. Real estate fraud on the grandest terrestrial scale imaginable.

The Scepter of Sobek turns out to be a super-science thing, which has a Phillips head — not suitable for your flat-head Egyptian Scepter needs. It can manipulate the cosmic energy convergence points to move the earth’s tectonic plates. This must be true, because a geologist in a low-cut top tells us so.

Speaking of which, Amy’s hypothesis is that both women in the movie wear low-cut tops in inappropriate situations because they are solar-powered, and their solar cells are located on the rolling hills of their bosoms.

I will gloss over the denouement of the movie, which involves a treacherous priest and a millennia-old natural gas pilot light, to share with you my favorite ridiculous line of dialogue. The New Vatican warns that there will be seismic activity as our heroes sail off, but they reassure the Cardinal: “We’ve sailed quake waters before!”

The opening credits for Hard Rock Nightmare promised me something that I’d seen a lot of pop culture references to, but never once witnessed for myself: “Troy Donahue as Uncle Gary.” So … now I have seen a movie with Troy Donahue.

The hard rock band The Bad Boys are practicing in a garage in suburbia when the cops show up and tell them they will be arrested after the next noise complaint. Where is a hot young rock band to practice?

Luckily, Jimmy’s grandmother left him a remote farm! The band borrows Uncle Gary’s Winnebago and they set out to drive there. Only after they arrive at the end of the road does Jimmy tell everyone they will need to hike the rest of the way. Did I mention that Jimmy is the lead singer? The drummer and the sound guy are especially unhappy at this revelation.

Several of the guys in the band look alike. I found myself building a logic-puzzle-style grid in order to keep track of them. Jimmy, Paul, Charlie, Tim, Sammy, John. Vocalist, guitarist, bass, drummer, keyboards, and the sound guy. But not in that order. Plus two girlfriends (Sally and Connie) and a hanger-on (Tina). I was almost done with the movie by the time I had the whole thing filled out. There was a (lingerie) dinner party of sorts, but I didn’t need to figure out a seating chart, thank goodness.

People start to die. Jimmy believes that his grandfather has come back from the grave as a werewolf — or possibly a vampire. When Jimmy was a kid, his grandfather scared him with a story about being a werewolf and a vampire: grandpa was going to suck out Jimmy’s blood and kill him! After scaring Jimmy to death, his grandfather went off to take a nap. Being scared to death, young Jimmy then staked his grandfather to death. So it’s possible that older Jimmy is having a psychotic break by being back at the farm — and is himself the murderer.

The conclusion has very little logical connection to the rest of the movie (“How can a wolf light a match?”), but I suppose they needed to end it somehow. And we get to see Uncle Gary nutted.

There is a lot of hard rock music in the soundtrack, but a lot of it is The Bad Boys practicing. How are they? They’re solidly mediocre; there’s a reason they need the practice.

If I tell you that the 3-D sequel to the 3-D movie Piranha 3-D is called Piranha 3DD, that will tell you a lot. Will there be gratuitous naked women? Indeed there will. Will there be a lot of swarming fish attacking the innocent and the guilty alike? Absolutely. Will there be random things that fly directly toward the camera? Ah, but of course. How about a guest appearance by David Hasselhoff as himself? Why not? Will there be a scene where a piranha bites a guy’s penis and won’t let go? That is a strangely specific guess, but yes, yes there will.

I’m not sure when our theme transitioned from ‘Injury to Eye’ to ‘Injury to Penis,’ but this is maybe the sixth film I’ve watched in the past two years where a penis is bitten, bitten off, or otherwise disrespected. Don’t worry, however — there is also Injury to Eye in this movie. And a lot of Insult to Eye.

Maddy comes back to her family’s water park to find that her step-dad, Chet, is reinventing it as a strip club / water park. She is attacked by aggressive piranha. She talks to a scientist from the first movie who tells her that these piranha live in underground lakes and streams. She discovers that Chet bored an illegal well and is pumping water for the park from an underground lake. She insists that he stop, but he won’t. It’s the Grand Opening of The Big Wet!

That’s it. That’s the entire plot. The rest of the movie is people making out or being attacked by piranha. And/or. The most amusing scenes are and/or.

I want to start with the title card, which makes it look like somebody involved in Brøderbund’s Print Shop got very excited about Blood Sisters of Lesbian Sin.

And there were, indeed, blood sisters. Was there lesbian sin? Not on camera. Is this movie in any way problematic? Oh gosh. Let me start at the beginning …

Our movie is set in Golgotha County. A dark ritual is about to take place. There’s only one way to stop it! A random local splits “The Hellstone” into three pieces, and rapes the virgin priestess of Asmodeus. That’s right … Random Redneck Rapist is the good guy here!

The priestess of Asmodeus gives birth to three girls (of course), and the bulk of the movie takes place 25ish years later. This information is given to our hero, Johnny Blake. He is a monk who has been tasked with eradicating this evil. He must face off against the three Blood Sisters: Sister Avarice, Sister Anger, and Sister Lust (because the writer apparently couldn’t think of a term for Arousal that started with the letter A).

Johnny is over-specialized against the supernatural. He is weak to the mundane. Sister Avarice saves him from being beaten to death. Sister Anger drugs him. There are stripteases at Sister Lust’s. So. Many. Stripteases. No one can save him from the stripteases. No one can save us!

In the end, Redneck Rapist Dad saves the world again (without raping anyone this time).

I leave you with my favorite dialogue exchange in this movie:
“I’ll be damned.”
“Afraid so.”

When Amy and I were at Cinema Wasteland in April, we decided to watch one of the movies they were screening. I viewed some trailers on YouTube, and Hobocop looked the most promising. The trailer had a scene where the Robocop-knockoff-in-cardboard was panhandling with a sign that read WILL DISPENSE JUSTICE FOR WEAPONS. It didn’t look like a CMP movie, but it looked amusing. So we went and watched Hobocop along with most of its cast and crew, who I think were seeing it for the first time.

It turns out, there are multiple movies called Hobocop, and this one doesn’t have any trailers on YouTube. This version of Hobocop is about a corrupt police department and the prostitution and drug dealing that it enables. A drug bust gone bad leaves a dead cop. A passing transient picks up the cop’s badge and gun … and $300. Enter: Hobocop!

It turns out, that transient used to be a police officer himself, but was fired because he threatened to expose the department’s corruption. He immediately begins to abuse the power granted to him by a badge, a gun, and money.

It turns out, the internal strife between the corrupt cop and the druglord are enough for the druglord to kill her lieutenant. The lieutenant was being careless. So the druglord and an associate drug him, and take him deep into the woods. They kill him, but first they use a pair of giant novelty scissors to cut off his penis.

It turns out, this movie shows a lot more penis than your average micro-budget Bad Lieutenant knock-off. The individual scenes are well-shot and well-directed, although it is unclear if the director cannot maintain a consistent tone, or simply chooses to switch tone abruptly within most scenes.

It turns out, there are one and a half decent actors in this movie. The half-a-decent-actor does a great job with her facial expressions and whole-body acting. If it were a silent movie, there would be two good actors, but alas.

It turns out, the most entertaining aspect of this movie was watching it with the cast and crew. People laughed at random things, probably thinking of something that happened when they were shooting. One really drunk guy was commenting on people in the movie. “That’s me!” He played a john that was stabbed to death by a naked prostitute. “That’s you!” She played a prostitute who got into a fight with another prostitute over some crack. “That’s you again!” Thankfully, she wasn’t in too many scenes, because he pointed her out every time.

It turns out, the funniest line of the movie was delivered by the drunk guy in the audience, at the pivotal Bad Lieutenant moment: “That’s Bob’s dick!”