For anyone rushing to a nearby red-box location for the promise of a nonsensical rant from Flav to cue up what Rod Serling would have called “stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination,” don’t bother. Flav’s 20-second appearance here is little more than a bumper tacked onto a run-of-the-mill slasher flick. All we get for our prurient interest is Flav materializing onto a digital backdrop of a castle that wouldn’t even cut it on “Zomboo’s House of Horror Movies” in Truckee, Calif., and saying, “I am your host, the Time Keeper.” Flav then does his best Count Chocula laugh and disappears in a cheesy fog rendered by the barely adequate use of Adobe After Effects.

After the crushing disappointment of Flav’s lack of intro, the film begins with an attic full of neglected kids who go on a prank-calling rampage while their parents party downstairs. They end up calling the wrong dude. We know he’s the wrong dude because he has the standard-issue Hollywood-movie serial-killer voice, only this time with a slight Southern twang for extra creepiness. Some time later, after all the kids in the attic and the drunken adults downstairs have passed out, the serial-killer dude shows up with an axe and hacks all the parents to bits, leaving the kids alone. Hey, the kids’ parents left them alone, so why not the ski-mask-wearing psychopath?

Ten years later, a masturbating grunge hippie is butchered with an axe. Police detective Rutger Hauer thinks there’s a connection between the grunge hippy’s death and the massacre from a decade earlier. Sadly, Hauer works for the worst police chief in movie history, who thinks that his biggest career mistake was “sending a suit” to investigate his jurisdiction’s most grisly case of mass murder ever. What was the chief going to do instead? Send out a couple of meter maids? “Don’t waste my time with murders from 10 years ago when I’ve got the press digging down my throat over bodies that are turning up the street today,” the chief barks. Maybe there are so many bodies clogging up the streets because the police chief closes the books on multiple homicides and discourages his detectives from following any leads. Just a thought.

After the slaying of the masturbating grunge hippie, a urinating wigga is almost offed with a knife, but this is just one of those false scares that these movies have been required to provide since John Carpenter’s “Halloween” in 1978. For a minute, I was thinking that I might be watching a movie where the psycho only kills dudes that are holding their junk in their hands. At least that’s an original idea. Instead, “Dead Tone” doesn’t give us another act of onscreen bloodshed for nearly 45 minutes. For nearly half of the movie’s 99-minute runtime, we’re instead treated to a house full of horrible college kids who don’t get killed, have sex with their clothes on and play a stupid prank call game called “75.”

When the killer finally reappears, he quickly dismembers three partygoers in an attempt to regain his mojo. He also chops up a kitchen’s worth of cabinetry and smashes through a plate glass window, though nobody in the house seems to notice. When they do hear selective pieces of sound editing, they blame it on smoking weed and go back to dry-humping before finally getting killed.

Lame explanations are given during the movie’s climax, but they’ll only confuse the brave souls who make it that far. Also, Rutger Hauer becomes almost as scarce as Flav, only to return during the last two minutes. If you’re renting this for Hauer, you should probably stick to repeated viewings of “Blind Fury” or “Ladyhawke” instead. “Dead Tone” shows up on IMDb as “7eventy 5ive,” which was shot in 2005 and screened at the Sacramento Film Festival in 2007, but needed an assist from Flav to make it to DVD in 2010. And that pretty much sums this one up — it needed Flavor Flav to attain the cinematic heights of “Megashark vs. Giant Octopus.”

Originally completed in 1999, “Ed Wood’s Devil Girls” is only just now making its way to DVD, although it may have clawed its way into a handful of screenings at artists’ collectives and dilapidated revival houses over the last decade. The 73-minute, black-and-white Edward D. Wood Jr. homage is the brainchild of zero-budget specialist Andre Perkowski. Along with this film, he sent me home-burned discs of yet another modern-day Wood picture titled “The Vampire’s Tomb” and “I was a Teenage Beatnik and/or Monster for the Literal Underground” with Neil Innes of the Rutles. Presumably Perkowski himself hand-scrawled “Watch only one film at a time” on the back of the bubble mailer these DVDs arrived in as an almost Lovecraftian warning, fearing that a continuous viewing of his oeuvre could drive even the most hardened junk cinema aficionado to madness. These are words well-heeded.

In “Devil Girls” a “small desert town” that looks suspiciously like the Chicago suburbs is plagued by a drug epidemic and a ruthless gang of female juvenile delinquents who “don’t even wear panties” according to an overwrought high-school principal. The pantyless girl gang gets high, engages in girl-on-girl grope sessions and has hallucinations of “a shapeless thing in a flowing gown surrounded by dark marijuana smoke.” On the case is Buck Rhodes (Paul Hoffman), the town sheriff who is given to non-sequitur rants about over-taxation and how “automation is the ultimate of human desires.” And since this is based on an Ed Wood novel, cross-dressing is eventually used to infiltrate a massive drug drop of “marijuana, pills, LSD, the works.”

“Devil Girls” is pieced together from murky Super-8 film footage and videotape made to look like murky Super-8. By choosing Ed Wood as his muse, Perkowski has created an arena where any production shortcoming is easily explained as being done in the name of authenticity. While the sight of a fat, bald guy staggering around as Tor Johnson from “Bride of the Monster” is a bit much, Perkowski is smart enough to use Wood’s completely inane dialogue as the film’s greatest asset. The straight reading of Wood’s prose by amateur actors (just as Wood himself would have done it) gives “Devil Girls” more than a few hearty chuckles.

Whereas “Devil Girls” was filmed in the 1990s but attempts to look like something from the ’50s, “B-Girl” is a 2010 release with the look and feel of something from 1984 (the year that “Beat Street” graced still-surviving drive-ins). Angel (Julie Ulrich), a Brooklyn-bred break dancer with a mad rep, is stabbed by her jealous ex-boyfriend Hector (James Martinez) in an attack that also leaves Angel’s friend Rosie (Aimee Garcia) dead in a pool of blood. The assault causes Angel and her mom (Missy Yager) to hightail it to L.A. despite Angel’s desire to stay on the East Coast. For the rest of the picture, we keep hearing that “Hector is out there” as a reason for not going back to Brooklyn. Why is Hector out there? He killed somebody. Why isn’t he in prison? “B-Girl” writer/director Emily Dell never bothers to give us that stock scene of Hector intimidating Angel and other witnesses with his street gang or getting off on some kind of legal technicality. Despite committing homicide, Hector is left to date other girls and stab them in alleyways.

This sort of thing happens a lot in “B-Girl.” Angel wants to stay on the East Coast, right? She goes to L.A. Community College, meaning she’s at least 18. Why didn’t she just stay in New York? She’s an adult. We never find out. During a scene in which Angel discovers a church break-dancing class (yes, this is a stealth Christian film) she is shoved down by a rival dancer named Righteous. You’d think that would spark a dance-off where Angel has to prove her mettle in competition with Righteous. That would maybe provide some suspense or drama as well as an explanation of future camaraderie between the two b-girls. Instead Righteous helps Angel up and then asks her to be part of her more secular break-dancing crew that practices in a bar during off-hours.

Although “B-Girl” itself is one giant cliché, it’s almost as if Dell turns away from resorting to them in the telling of her story (which is based on a 2004 short film of hers by the same title). Unfortunately, the obvious, time-worn scenes that are absent here aren’t replaced by anything more interesting, resulting in a film with more head-scratching moments than “Devil Girls,” and “Devil Girls” openly courts incoherence. Even with its shortcomings, “B-Girl” could have been saved on the dance floor, but there’s just not enough dancing here to put it over.

 During this double feature, check out “Devil Girls,” but you’ll wanna bounce before “B-Girl.” 

“The Marine 2″ already pulls off a near impossibility in being the first straight-to-DVD sequel that’s better than the theatrically released original. The first “Marine” (2006), which sported the insanely huge John Cena grunting and groaning his way through car crashes and CGI explosions, was a PG-13 affair that watered down the brutality in a bid to make nonstop violence more family friendly. “The Marine 2,” on the other hand, goes for broke with an R rating, since there’s little to stop tweens from slipping a copy into the basket at Target when their moms aren’t looking.

This time around instead of Cena as John Triton we have Ted DiBiase Jr. (his father was an ’80s wrestler dubbed “The Million Dollar Man”) as Joe Linwood, a Force Recon sniper who watched a young boy get killed in the crossfire during his last mission. While on leave, his wife (Lara Cox) convinces him to attend the grand opening of an exclusive Southeast Asian seaside resort owned by her boss (Robert Coleby), a billionaire motivational guru with shifting accents who wants to surround his pristine beaches with electrical fences to keep the local kids away. Thankfully, it’s not long before said beaches are stormed by tribal mask-wearing, machine-gun toting insurgents who must have read Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” and are really pissed off about it. Our marine gets away after taking out a few bad guys with body slams, but his wife, her boss and a buffet line’s worth of high-income partygoers are taken hostage and held for ransom.

This is the same setup from the previous “Marine” and the WWE’s 2009 John Cena epic, “12 Rounds.” It’s also the plot of any number of “Die Hard” movies or “Taken” with Liam Neeson. This hardly matters. We don’t need originality. It will only confuse us as DiBiase goes it alone through several slow-motion fight scenes and cataclysmic pyrotechnics to free the hostages before they are decapitated live via iPhone.

As a screen actor (as opposed to a “sports entertainer”), DiBiase’s first effort is a valiant one. He’s not nearly as wooden as the Rock was in his first starring vehicle, “The Scorpion King” (2002). While his acting needs a little more mat time, DiBiase’s wrestling experience gives him the ability to do his own stunts during extended takes, a skill that will only become more valuable as high-def makes stunt doubles more obvious. One fight sequence pits DiBiase’s clothesline takedowns against two quick Muay Thai kickboxers in a series of hard moves that’s as satisfying as anything in an “Ong Bak” film. As long as DiBiase sticks to roles where his massive trapezius muscles aren’t out of place, he is well on his way to the same level of cult action star status as Jason Statham (“Crank”) or Michael Jai White (“Black Dynamite”).

Dutch director Roel Reine, a straight-to-DVD specialist who has given us a recent Steven Seagal flick, keeps the pacing quick but isn’t afraid to give us an interesting shot here and there. As the rebel leader, Temuera Morrison is much more menacing here than he was as Boba Fett’s dad in two “Star Wars” prequels (although he could have been a tad more sympathetic in order to assuage my p.c. sensibilities).

If you enjoyed “Die Hard 4″ or “Rambo” and remain unashamed, “The Marine 2″ will bring no dishonor to your Netflix queue. Martial arts fans will also want to see the outtake reel in the DVD extras. As long as WWE Films produces action flicks of this quality, they have a shot at cornering the home theater market for such guilty pleasures at a time when multiplexes prefer to screen “Avatar”-scale spectacles.