The last time that Lionsgate unleashed a werewolf movie on Redbox patrons, we got the hairless wolf men of the Alan Smithee directed “Neowolf.” “If you can’t afford a bale of yak hair,” I quipped at the time, “you’ve got no business making a werewolf picture.” It seems that Lionsgate got the message, because they’ve come roaring back (all puns in this particular column are intentional) with “Wolf Moon,” and this time the lycanthropes have the appropriate amount of hair. The werewolves still look like what you’d get if you tried to make a wookiee costume from black hefty bags and a whole mess of clip on tresses, but at least these howlers don’t need an appointment with Sy Sperling and the Hair Club for Men.

“Wolf Moon” starts off with a brutal murder shot in black and white followed by a couple of truckers getting torn up by a wolf man. Some bare b-cups make their way into the picture at the 21-minute mark but then the bulk of the first hour is taken up by enough music videos to start a new digital cable channel that nobody watches. Like most people, I watch a werewolf movie for some mutilations, time lapse transformations and even a little inner torment, but I don’t watch them for scene after scene of a drifter auto mechanic (Chris Devecchio) frolicking in local swimming holes with a teen hoochie (Ginny Weirwick) to the strains of a wannabe Steve Perry solo project. As I watched “Wolf Moon", I couldn’t help but picture a guitarist rushing into band practice saying, “Hey we got a song in ‘Wolf Moon’! We’re finally gonna’ MAKE IT!” Poor fools. “Wolf Moon” marks your group’s zenith, not its ascent. Now get back to the barroom and stop taking up space in cheap horror movies.

“Wolf Moon” features Maria Conchita Alonso ("Running Man") as the lady sheriff of a small Nevada town, Billy Drago (you’ve seen him in many straight-to-DVD and SyFy movies) as a werewolf hunter who spends a lot of time looking at microfiche, and Sid Haig ("The Devil’s Rejects") as a cranky rancher who’s way too into Viagra. Why you’d make a werewolf movie with Haig and not have him play a werewolf, I don’t know. Max Ryan, who appears in “Sex and the City 2″, makes a bid to be in two of the worst movies of 2010 with his turn as the werewolf patriarch who strings together more clichés than I ever thought possible. “Blood is thicker than water/There’s a storm blowin and it’s coming down heavy/ You’d better realize what side of the fence you’re on,” he says almost one tired line after the other in a move more savage than any he commits under the light of a full moon.

Your average straight-to-DVD movie clocks in at 80-90 minutes, but “Wolf Moon” is a punishing two hours and four minutes. It feels even longer at times. I know that Roger Ebert or someone will probably tut-tut me for this, but I was driven to watching long stretches of this movie on that 2x fast-forward setting where you can still hear sped up dialogue and slowed it down to normal speed for the occasional slaughtering of hookers and hot werebeast-on-werebeast action. This is how I recommend viewing “Wolf Moon” and think that Lionsgate should include a special feature suggesting this on any future pressings of the disc. This movie rates a T for torturous on the ol’ SHITE meter, making it one cut above “Neowolf", which only eked out an E for endlessly dull.

In other straight-to-DVD news that has totally slipped past me for six months now, Global Asylum, the makers of such “mockbusters” as “Snakes on a Train” and “The Da Vinci Treasure” as well as “Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus", has beaten Pixar to the punch with their December 2009 release of “Princess of Mars", an adaptation of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 space adventure novel that kicked off his John Carter series. Pixar has their live action “John Carter of Mars” movie scheduled as their big release for 2012, but “Princess of Mars” has fallen into public domain so Global Asylum can adapt some source material instead of slapping together their usual shameless ripoff. Why they released it so far in advance of Pixar’s effort instead of cranking out something called “Toy Tale” is anybody’s guess. Still, an actual literary adaptation gives Global Asylum an unsettling air of legitimacy.

Any legitimacy is quickly shattered upon viewing the disc, however. In Burroughs’ novel, John Carter is a confederate Civil War veteran who is magically transported to Mars after being bushwhacked by Indians. Once on the red planet, he romances the titular princess and grapples with Tars Tarkas, a four-armed badass with huge fangs. Writer/director Mark Atkins (cinematographer of “Transmorphers: Fall of Man") updated the tale and has Carter (Antonio Sabato, Jr.) shaking down opium growers in Afghanistan before getting whisked away to some planet called Mars that isn’t the real Mars. (Please don’t make me explain.) Beginning our tale during the War on Terror is understandable, but Sabato’s tramp stamp is a piece of modernizing I could have done without. To compensate for Sabato’s unfortunately placed tattoo, the film boasts lots of Traci Lords in a metal bikini, but then it plunges back into negative territory with a chintzy two-armed Tars Tarkas (Matt Lasky). I’m not a Pixar zombie by any stretch, but at least I know they’ll deliver a Tars Tarkus with the right amount of limbs.

It’s also safe to say that Pixar will give us a more creative vision of Barsoom (as the Martians call it) than that patch of Vasquez Rocks where Captain Kirk once fought the reptilian Gorn in an old “Star Trek” episode and the waste filtration plant where this “Princess of Mars” ends up. In the movie, they say that the plant is used for making breathable air on Mars but I bet there’s a lot of poo moving through those old pipes. There was also 42 inches of visible poo on my flatscreen TV when I was watching this thing. I wanted to give this an I for interesting for the curiosity factor, but the good ol T is more appropriate.

Tonight, John Cena and the rest of the cast of “Monday Night RAW” ran into a volcano. Despite a near demigod status bestowed on Cena by the son of one my readers, the incredible brawn of the World Wrestling Entertainment champ was no match for the continent-covering clouds of pumice and ash thrust into the air by a raging Mother Earth. Yes, folks, the volcano won, leaving a large chunk of the WWE roster, who had been touring Europe this past week, stranded in Northern Ireland as they waited for trans-Atlantic air travel to resume.

When Triple H (or HHH if you prefer) entered the ring on “RAW” tonight and announced that he was the only one there because he didn’t go on the European tour with the rest of the gang, it was easy to believe that Cena or Orton would pop out from under the ring and prove him wrong. As a wrestling fan, I’m conditioned for this sort of thing. It’s called a swerve in the vernacular of the backrooms and they seem to happen a lot these days. Most other TV shows would have just aired a rerun and called it a day, but pro wrestling is steeped in “the show must go on” ethic of the carnivals, circuses and vaudeville halls from which it sprang. Luckily for Triple H, the stable of “Smackdown” wrestlers made it back from Europe before air traffic was grounded. Triple H and CM Punk played the dozens and traded barbs for an extended take before brawling, indicating that killing time was still of the essence.

After Triple H and Rey Mysterio, Jr. fended off an attack from Punk and his “Straight Edge Society” (a society consisting of one lackey and a curvaceous but bald-headed valet), announcers Jerry Lawler and Michael Cole cut to a taped announcement from a solemn John Cena, who was still stuck in Belfast. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” he said, I guess referring to a squad of wrestlers dying of utter boredom in a three-star UK hotel.

“We’re safe,” he continued before ratcheting up the rhetoric against Dave “The Animal” Bautista, his opponent at the “Extreme Rules” pay-per-view this Sunday. “I’m fully focused,” he said before promising to “swim across the Atlantic Ocean,” if he had to. If there’s anyone who could do it, it’s probably him, but only if he resists the temptation to sample the “Extreme Rules” sponsor: the very controversial KFC Double Down, which combines bacon, mayo and fried chicken into a grease bomb that could even fell the mighty Cena.

When wrestlers weren’t passing their time with lengthy bits of oratory, SNL’s Will Forte was on hand in the guise of his “MacGyver” spoof character MacGruber to hype the upcoming film of the same name. After being called out by the Putin-esque Russian judo expert Vladimir Koslov, McGruber blew-up rapping wrestler R-Truth in one of McGruber’s trademark explosives mishaps. Hopefully, this will prove to be the ruse that all of Triple H’s volcano talk wasn’t. (Truth was seen scurrying off the stage before the massive display of pyro that supposedly wiped him off the face of the Earth.) In another note, “MacGruber” is a film loaded with WWE wrestlers, featuring appearances by Chris Jericho, Mark Henry, The Big Show and the Great Kali.

Just when the show seemed barren of any actual wrestling, The Undertaker, who appears to have suspended a rare vacation for him, emerged to save the show like the trooper that he is with a long match against World Champ Jack Swagger. The WWE has two champions, almost mimicking the alphabet soup of title that run rampant in boxing. The World Champion appears on “Smackdown” while the “WWE Champ” (Cena) rules on “RAW.” Taker’s match with Swagger was a little heavy on the rest holds, showing that the 7′ tall goth might not be fully healed from his already classic match against Shawn Michaels at last month’s WrestleMania. Still, Undertaker and Swagger took some hard spills into the steel steps outside of the ring. Undertaker ended the match by catching Swagger with a choke slam after Swagger had sprung off the ring ropes. As the ref counted the pin, WWE commentator Michael Cole tastefully announced, “Jimmy Hoffa’s not the only body buried in the New Jersey Meadowlands.”

The show closed with a six-man tag match pitting Triple H, Rey Mysterio and Edge against CM Punk, Luke Gallows and Chris Jericho. It was the kind of weird teaming that you’d usually only see at an un-televised tour stop. Pro wrestlers don’t have an off-season. They perform on at least one TV show a week and several Sunday pay-per-views throughout the year. It’s a schedule that would make John Stewart or Conan O’Brien weep and those comedians just get to sit in a chair throughout most of their shows, not get hit with it. No, even what Michael Cole called a “volcanical eruption” could not stop the show.

QUICK ANNOUNCEMENT: I’ll be reading from my punk-wrestling memoir, “Beer, Blood and Cornmeal” at the Cal Student Bookstore at UC Berkeley on Thursday, April 29th at 6pm. The store is located at 108 MLK Jr. Student Union #4504, Berkeley, CA 94720. April is the two-year anniversary of the publication of “Beer, Blood and Cornmeal,” which was released by ECW Press in April 2008. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long, and needless to say, I’m happy that Ali Rappaport and the the folks at Cal Berkeley invited me to do this reading. Hope to see you there.

Gene Barry (with co-star Ann Robinson) crashed a plane to get away from Martian war machines in “War of the Worlds” (1953), not “Invaders from Mars.”

Gene Barry, a towering figure of my UHF TV viewing in the 70s, passed away in a rest home in the Woodland Hills district of Los Angeles today. He was 90 years old. The Associated Press obituary of Barry didn’t even mention that he was in War of the Worlds (1953). That’s like forgetting that Sir Alec Guiness was in Star Wars!

Look, if you just admit that the greatest achievement of American culture was the output of science fiction movies in the 1950s, we’ll all get along a lot better. Sure Hendrix, Steinbeck and Miles Davis were all pretty amazing, but the greatest artistic explosion this country has ever seen started in 1951 with The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still and drew to a close in 1960 with The Time Machine. Some would argue that the 50s sci-fi movement actually ended in 1963 with The Slime People, but that film, where all of the action is obscured by the constant output of one heck of a fog machine, can best be described as an outlier. A case can also be made for 1962’s Day of the Triffids. Triffids definitely has the quality of such 50s staples as War of the Worlds and Forbidden Planet, but it’s British so we don’t care.

Yes, I know that Barry was nominated for a Tony for playing a gay night-club owner in La Cage aux Folles on Broadway in the 1980s, but that pales in comparison to playing a scientist trying to hold society together while Martians blast the living shit out of Los Angeles (and London and San Francisco and Moscow) with crazy looking heat rays that make a cool assed noise. The Associated Press did credit Barry with being in the other Martian invasion movie of 1953, Invaders from Mars. The only problem: Barry wasn’t in Invaders from Mars. Fact check people! Saying that Gene Barry was in Invaders from Mars is like putting Mark Hamill in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Gene Barry was also in the nuclear scare movie The Atomic City (1952) and he did some pretty crazy kung-fu with that cane of his in 108 episodes of Bat Masterson but I’ll always remember him as the suave but earnest Dr. Clayton Forrester in War of the Worlds, even if the Associated Press can’t seem to. At least Adam Bernstein in the Washington Post bothered to get it right and even imbedded this trailer from War of the Worlds in his Gene Barry piece:

The suspect is up against the oversized red truck. One of the arresting officers has the familiar grimace of many insomnia-fueled cable TV binges. “Steven Segal! It’s Steven Segal!” the suspect exclaims, motioning towards the uniformed cop in question and making the other officers on the scene nervous. The perp is right. It is Steven Segal. With one pullover, the suspect’s mundane brush with the law (DUI, a blown taillight, whatever) has intersected with such Hollywood action flicks as Under Siege or Marked for Death. However, this perp won’t get to test his martial arts skill against Segal on a high-jacked battleship or a speeding train. If he’s lucky, he’ll get Segal’s autograph on something other than a traffic citation or arrest report.

Something tells me that this sort of thing is going to happen a lot on A&E’s new celeb-reality show, Steven Segal: Lawman, which premiered Wednesday with a pair of half-hour episodes. The show follows Segal in his crisp, blue sheriff’s uniform as he patrols the streets of the New Orleans suburb of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana . As loony as the concept of Lawman may be, you can’t really call it a comeback because Segal never left. Sure, the days of $60 million budgets are behind him, but Segal has been cranking out straight to DVD potboilers since the end of his early 1990s heyday. He’s also appearing with Robert DeNiro and Jessica Alba in Robert Rodriguez’s upcoming Machete, the expanded version of the faux trailer from Grindhouse (2007). Still, Lawman has generated more interest in Segal than he’s probably seen in years, although links to A&E’s promotional vids for the show are usually followed by many a “WTF!?!” and calls for Segal’s retirement, at least as far as my Facebook feed is concerned.

Any need for an image makeover is one that Segal shares with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, which made him a reserve deputy 20 years ago. The last time this law enforcement agency got this much national attention was when it was one of the police departments that blocked mostly African American refugees from fleeing New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in what is now referred to as the “Gretna bridge incident.” It should come as no surprise that Segal’s partner on the force, Colonel John Fortunato, is also the commander of the department’s public information office. If that wasn’t enough, Captain Alex Norman, another officer that patrols the streets with Segal, serves as commander of the community relations division. Segal is not only there to show them marksmanship and aikido takedowns but also the Zen of Hollywood publicity.

Reserve Dep. Chief Steven Segal demonstrates his command of the zen of backseat driving for his partner, Col. John Fortunato.

The resulting product is little more than an infomercial for Steven Segal’s ego. “As a lifelong practitioner of the martial arts,” Segal informs us in the first three minutes of the inaugural episode, “I’m trained to remain calm in the face of adversity and danger. When the world is speeding by for others, I see things for what they are. A cock of the head, a foot planted forward or back, a flick of the wrist, they all tell me something: whether somebody’s gonna’ fight, pull a gun or run.”

Evidently this extra sensory perception akin to the Marvel Comics hero Daredevil imbues Segal with the ability to backseat drive. During a high-speed chase he tells Fortunato to veer left or right. “Let me drive Steven!” his partner pleads.

“I’m just telling you where the holes are,” Segal replies. Steven Segal can see things no one else can see; do things no one else can do.

Throughout the two opening episodes, Segal reminds us repeatedly that he is an expert in the martial arts. He also mentions “Zen archery” and the “Asian Zen lesson” and the “Zen method of breathing” to the point where I can see the SNL spoof of the show before it’s been written and drinking games conjure themselves. During the cablecast, several ads aired for BBQ Pitmasters on the Learning Channel. Why can’t Segal be BBQ Pit Master instead of a Lawman? Then he can drone on about the “zen method of grilling” and how being a practitioner of the martial arts allows him to sense the meat as it starts to sizzle.

The mostly white sheriffs are shown patroling predominantly African American neighborhoods.

At times, Segal and his cohorts seem like an occupying force as they ride through “the ‘jects” (as Segal refers to the projects) in massive SUVs. With the exception of veteran officer Sgt. Lawrence Matthews, who is African American, all of the officers depicted in Lawman so far are white. Making them seem even more distant from the community they serve, many of them have New York or Northeastern accents. I can only wonder if scene after scene of white cops tasering black men will have the desired PR outcome for a sheriff’s office that was once caught up in the ugliness of the Gretna controversy. It was also hard not to view this show through the prism of Warner Herzog’s brilliant Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. It’s easy to substitute Segal for the manic Nick Cage here and scenes of alligators didn’t help. If only Segal started snorting all the contraband in the property room and seeing hallucinatory iguanas everywhere. Then we’d have a piece of cinema on our hands.

Segal is still trying to prove that he’s the badass he portrays on the screen and his ability to put a slug through his own bullet hole in a target is astonishing. But this approach only makes you want to see less of him. Jean Claude Van Damme, Segal’s rival in the martial arts movie biz, was able to accomplish much more by debunking his image in JCVD (2008). Van Damme’s fourth-wall breaking soliloquy where he speaks of the disillusionment of the dojo, the media, romance and shattered dreams was enough to get me to rent Ringo Lam’s Van Damme cloning epic Replicant (2001). The sight of Segal hurrying to get into each frame to look important won’t get me to tune in next week.

The celeb-reality show as a genre has given us family comedies (Hogan Knows Best, The Osbournes), romantic farces (Flavor of Love, Rock of Love) and now with Steven Segal: Lawman, it has given us a cop show – a bad cop show.