This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury”

Is it a satire on uber-action movies such as “Rambo,” or is just a self-consciously clunky piece of moviemaking hoisted on its own satiric barbs? That’s a puzzle that’s posed but never really answered by the super-bad “Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury,” due out on DVD Tuesday.

The cheeky promo material for the film claims that it was originally made in 1990 but was so terrible that the studio refused to release it. The supposedly “unearthed lost movie” – a hodgepodge of mockumentary devises, thudding parody, purposefully clumsy special effects, tasteless comedy and wink-wink, ham-handed acting – has all the markings of a straight-to-video cult wannabe.

Directed by TV actor-cum-auteur Garrett Brawth (best known for a Bud Light Super Bowl commercial) with frat-boy zeal, “Poolboy” seems designed to offend on all levels.

Marshaling the talents of name stars Kevin “Hercules” Sorbo, craggy-faced villain Danny Trejo and perennial “Clerks” slacker Jason Mewes, plus a cast of justifiably unknowns, the film plays out “Scary Movie”-style like a jigsaw collection of scenes and conventions from several different genres.

Taking its initial cue from “Rambo,” the story follows brooding Vietnam vet Sal Bando (Sorbo), a former Southern California poolboy, who returns to Van Nuys and a country much changed for the worse. While he was away at war, it seems, his wife cheated on him and “the Mexicans” have moved in to take over the pool cleaning business.

So the butched-up Bando sets off on a violent spree to reclaim his rightful poolboy business and to take bloody revenge on the brutal Caesar (Trejo), the evil crime lord that killed his family. The result is a carnival of bad taste, racist “satire” and just painfully bad judgment.

“Poolboy” aims for that “so bad it’s good” sweet spot. But it only hits the “so bad it’s bad” jackpot.

“Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury” is rated R (for crude and sexual conduct throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language, violence and drug use) and runs 90 minutes. It’s being released by Screen Media.

- Dennis King

Jessica Alba

As chopped-off noggins roll around like careening bowling balls and as blood spews in ghoulish crimson fountains, “Machete” pushes the boundaries of on-screen action violence to the limits of ridiculousness and beyond.

To say writer-director Robert Rodriguez’s comic-book vigilante saga is madly, gleefully over the top is a gross understatement. In fact, it’s a vigorously in-your-face, gloriously gory, politically incorrect romp through B-movie exploitation territory, all gussied up with a campy Hollywood cast of stars, starlets and has-beens.

Serving as an unlikely star vehicle for Rodriguez regular Danny Trejo, whose pocked face and lumbering countenance scream anti-leading man, “Machete” realizes a long-held scheme by the Austin-based filmmaker to create a franchise that casts Trejo as a sort of Mexican Charles Bronson.

Machete, a renegade Mexican federale who dispatches bad guys with vicious sweeps of his broad blade, first showed up on movie screens in a garish “fake trailer” inserted into Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s tandem 2007 B-movie tribute, “Grindhouse.”

And true to Rodriguez’s penchant for wasting nothing, the filmmaker responded to the wild popularity of that tongue-in-cheek trailer by dusting off a mothballed 1993 script and giving us a full-out Machete, a sort of brutish but decent modern-day Zorro who wields not a whippet-like rapier but instead swings a mean, meat-cleaving machete.

The story is mainly boilerplate stuff (with some sly satirical digs at so-called immigration reform and U.S. schizophrenia toward migrant workers from south of the border).

Machete is hired by a shady political hack (an oily Jeff Fahey) to assassinate the bloviating Texas state Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro in a wink-wink performance), who’s advocating an electric fence all along the U.S.-Mexican border.

But quickly Machete finds himself double-crossed and on the run, accused of the failed assassination attempt. Soon he’s caught up amid the sexy wiles of a pursuing ICE agent (Jessica Alba), the underground schemes of a fiery Hispanic revolutionary (Michelle Rodriguez), the dastardly conniving of a cruel Mexican drug lord (Steven Seagal in the blackest hair-dye job imaginable) and the political chicanery of the crooked McLaughlin and his murderous border vigilante cohort (Don Johnson sporting prison-warden shades).

Another Rodriguez regular, Cheech Marin, shows up to earthy comic effect as Machete’s ally and brother, a profane, shotgun-slinging Catholic priest. Also, Lindsey Lohan turns in a good-sport appearance as the pampered, petulant daughter of wealth who goes from stark naked to a nun’s habit in the wink of eye.

Throughout, Rodriguez (along with co-director Ethan Maniquis and co-writer-cousin Alvaro Rodriguez) keeps the camera focused on the hulkish but oddly likable Trejo. And he paints the whole thing in garish, comic-book hues, packs it with pithy-campy dialogue and punctuates it with ultra-violent set pieces featuring shootouts, gang rumbles and grisly killing effects (how about those multiple decapitations or a zinging machete blade through a skull?).

It’s all offered up with the darkest, most mocking fanboy brio. “Machete,” with its cynical humor and zestful urge to shock, might not find a mainstream following. But among comic-book fans, youthful hipsters and admirers of Rodriguez’s maverick methods, this will certainly be cutting-edge stuff. Characteristically, Rodriguez ends the film with teasers for two supposed sequels – “Machete Kills” and “Machete Kills Again.”

- Dennis King

“Machete”

R
1:45
2.5 stars
Starring: Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson.
(Strong bloody violence throughout, language, some sexual content and nudity)

Danny Trejo

Austin-based Robert Rodriguez has earned his reputation as a maverick, do-it-all filmmaker who makes the most of every resource at his disposal. Give him left-over chicken gizzards, he’ll make a tasty chicken soup.

He was, after all, the guy whose first breakout hit, 1992’s “El mariachi,” was made for the Mexican video market for a paltry $7,000, part of which he reportedly earned by working as a test subject in medical science tests.

Since establishing his Troublemaker Studios in his Texas hometown, Rodriguez has gone on to much bigger things, but always with that hand-made ethic that often sees him serving on his films as director, producer, writer, editor, musical composer, cinematographer, sound technician, visual-effects artist, electrician, actor, production designer, miscellaneous crew and more.

So it’s not surprising that this style of using everything but the kitchen sink to make his movies comes to the fore in his newest picture – the over-the-top actioner “Machete,” an amazing amalgam of low-budget, B-movie panache and big-time Hollywood star power.

The overarching gag about “Machete” is that it’s the classic example of the tail wagging the dog; it’s a feature-length movie drawn from one of several “fake trailers” included in Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 exploitation double feature, “Grindhouse.”

Apparently, audience buzz for the “Machete” trailer was so strong that Rodriguez decided make a “Machete” movie for real. So he dusted off an unproduced script he’d written in 1993, after he’d first cast Danny Trejo in “Desperado.” Then, recycling footage from the fake trailer, casting Trejo in the lead and adding star power with a surprisingly potent cast that includes Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson and Lindsey Lohan, Rodriguez gradually built a “Machete” that 20th Century Fox elected to release as a late-summer theatrical feature.

“Machete” will screen at the 67th Venice International Film Festival on Wednesday (Sept. 1) and open nationwide in the U.S. on Friday.

Oddly enough, this is not the first time a trailer has created a sensation that turned the fate of the movie it was previewing.

When Warner Bros. was prepping Kevin Costner’s “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” for its 1991 theatrical release, a preview trailer was released months in advance to whet audiences’ appetites. The trailer featured a cutting-edge, digital arrow-cam shot that followed an arrow from the archer’s bow as it zipped through the forest and thudded into the trunk of a tree. The shot was not originally included in the film. But the buzz created by that remarkable digital sequence persuaded director Kevin Reynolds and the producers to include a similar arrow-cam shot in the finished film. It became the movie’s signature image.

See? The tail wagging the dog.

- Dennis King

Angelina Jolie

BY DENNIS KING

Having passed the half-way point of summer’s big-bucks movie season, film fans must now be asking themselves: Is the popcorn box half full or half empty?

Traditionally, Hollywood studios frontload the lucrative summer season with the hottest attractions in May, June and early July (the better to wring longer, profitable runs from blockbusters during vacation and school’s-out time).

So, late July and the dog days of August aren’t usually as packed with big tent-pole movies each and every weekend.

A quick look at release calendars for the remaining weeks through Labor Day seems to bear that out.

With box-office under performers like “Sex and the City 2,” “Prince of Persia,” “Robin Hood” and “Knight and Day” still hanging on to screens, with big-foot profit makers like “Toy Story 3” and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” still selling tickets, and with intriguing adult fare like “Inception” creating a buzz among moviegoers, the summer seems far from over.

But peer deeper into the bottom of the popcorn box and it looks like just a few fully blossomed kernels and a lot of grannies are left to be consumed.

This weekend promises a little “Salt” to spice up the multiplex fare, and the much hyped Angelina Jolie spy thriller from reliable director Phillip Noyce (“Clear and Present Danger,” “Patriot Games”) certainly qualifies as a big-deal summer release.

But beyond that, weekend release rosters just seem to get thinner and weedier.

The last weekend in July hosts a less-than-explosive trio of wide releases – the social farce, “Dinner for Schmucks” (a remake of Frenchman Francis Veber’s “The Dinner Game”), the silly, petcentric sequel “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore” and the mystical baseball romance “Charlie St. Cloud” – with either very specialized or very limited appeal.

The same can be said for the entire month of August, with few releases that truly qualify as “events.”

Julia Roberts

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg’s cop buddy comedy, “The Other Guys,” ushers in August on the 6th, hopefully giving Ferrell a chance to make people forget about “The Land of the Lost.” Then on August 13, Julia Roberts goes all touchy-feely and philosophical in the book-to-movie adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love.” That shares the weekend with a film version of the obsessive comic-book favorite “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” and the old Hollywood-style, star-packed action saga “The Expendables” (with Sylvester Stallone directing and starring with a crew that includes Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis).

After August 20’s “Nanny McPhee Returns,” a sequel to Emma Thompson’s warmly quirky tale of a magical, potato-nosed nanny who rescues a dysfunctional British family, the summer seems to fizzle out.

Left over are things like the gimmicky “Piranha 3-D,” the slapdash “Twilight” spoof “Vampires Suck,” a Drew Barrymore romantic comedy called “Going the Distance,” a last-gasp Jennifer Aniston comedy from the dying Miramax titled “The Switch” and a hardboiled detective tale with Matt Dillon titled “Takers.”

But if Labor Day weekend marks both the end of summer and the beginning of the fall-holiday movies season, then both of them promise to go off with a bang. The Sept. 3 weekend boasts two strong finishers-starters for the transition of seasons.

Austin maverick Robert Rodriguez teams up with his favorite craggy-faced star Danny Trejo for “Machete,” a revenge yarn in which a hired assassin is double crossed and sets out to assassinate those who would assassinate him. Then George Clooney takes up arms in “The American,” another assassin’s tale with Clooney’s hired killer hiding out in an Italian village contemplating one last tricky assignment.

From that weekend on to Christmas and New Year, our popcorn boxes will again be overflowing.

Adrien Brody and Alice Braga

While John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 “Predator” spawned one official sequel and two ill-conceived spinoffs, it is only now that a truly worthy follow-up to the original has arrived on screens with the swift and deadly “Predators.”

Disregard 1990’s muddled “Predator 2” and two forgettable “Alien vs. Predator” knockoffs and step up instead to the cunning vision of Hungarian director Nimrod Antal (“Kontroll”) and maverick producer Robert Rodriguez and his Austin-based Troublemaker Studios. They’ve concocted a hard-charging summer B-movie that slyly hits most of the mythological cues of the original film and even makes room for a few intriguing shades of character depth here and there.

Rodriguez, the one-time boy wonder of “El mariachi” fame, provided the blueprint for this new film with his 1994 screenplay that went unproduced. Intriguingly, it pays fitting homage to 1932’s classic “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which the insane and insanely wealthy Russian Count Zaroff conspires, for sheer sport, to hunt down a luckless group of people who’ve been shipwrecked on his remote private island.

“Predators” sets its action on the jungle hunting preserve of a remote alien planet, and Adrien Brody assumes the Joel McCrea lead as the alpha hunter who ironically finds himself being hunted. And multiplying Leslie Banks’ role as the monstrous, amoral predator count is a snarling trio of armored, bullet-headed, dreadlocked reptilian beasties familiar to all from past films.

Employing sophisticated camouflaging technology, infra-red vision and switchblade cufflinks, the hulking Predators apparently took a page from Count Zaroff ‘s playbook and imported a butched-up band of human mercenaries and murderers – this most dangerous game – for their own hunting amusement and blood sport.

The story opens in literal freefall, with a breathless sequence in which the mercenary Royce (a very buff Brody) awakens from unconsciousness to find himself plummeting from the sky toward a jungle canopy, his parachute opening at the last minute to deposit him roughly on the floor of an eerie alien rainforest.

He soon discovers himself in the befuddled company of others similarly shanghaied – a dirty half dozen that includes a lithe Israeli sniper (Brazilian beauty Alice Braga), an inscrutable Yakuza hitman (Louis Ozawa Changchien), a Mexican drug cartel enforcer (Rodriquez mainstay Danny Trejo), an African soldier-warlord (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), a tough Russian soldier (Oleg Tartakov) and a chatty death-row serial killer armed with a shive (Walton Goggins).

Tagging along as a seeming sacrificial lamb is Topher Grace’s wimpy medical doctor, and showing up midway for a great scenery-chewing cameo is Laurence Fishburne, an unhinged survivor of past Predator hunts who seems to be channeling Colonel Kurtz from Fishburne’s youthful outing in “Apocalypse Now.”

As Royce takes charge, quotes Hemingway and tries to outsmart his hunters, “Predators” leads us on a merry, sweat-soaked expedition that offers few surprises – disposable characters are disposed of with ample gore, irony is piled upon irony and a final, brutal showdown shapes up with a predictable but satisfying sense of inevitability.

Antal directs with quick dispatch and witty attention to detail and the cast performs both grittily and nimbly – especially the surprisingly muscular Brody (Oscar winner for “The Pianist”) and the doe-eyed Braga.
While this hard-to-kill sci-fi monster epic might not be in the same league as “Alien”/”Aliens,” “Predator” and “Predators” indeed show a killer instinct when it comes to satisfying the popcorn blood lust of summer cinema goers.

- Dennis King

“Predators”

R
1:47
3 stars
Starring: Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Laurence Fishburne, Danny Trejo
(Ratings criteria: sensuality and violence, etc.)