Machete Kills, review - Telegraph 15 cert, 110 min. Dir: Robert Rodriguez. Stars: Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez, Mel Gibson, Sofia Vergara The story so far. Machete was a trailer before it was a film - one of the spoofy pastiches sandwiched between Death Proof and Planet Terror in the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez compendium, Grindhouse. It was funny as a coming attraction, much less so as one which actually turned up, in 2010, with Danny Trejo's titular hero doing all the grisly things promised in the preview ad nauseam. Perhaps because the joke's already spent, this sequel has a pretty low bar to clear, and manages to be both utterly meritless and weirdly bearable. Along with more decapitations than a king prawn smorgasbord, it has a surprisingly beefy cast: when you've got Mel Gibson as your baddie, Charlie Sheen (going by the name "Carlos Estevez") as a reactionary US president, and a subsidiary psychopath who shapeshifts, Mission: Impossible-style, between Antonio Banderas, Lady Gaga and Cuba Gooding, Jr, that's either a slew of favours Rodriguez is calling in, or a whole lot he's promising. The plot's barely worth mentioning, except as a bridge to propel Machete into yet another sequel, Machete Kills Again... In Space, which is trailered here and actually looks a bit more entertaining. With their hat-tipping to the bargain-basement exploitation genre, these movies have an excuse to look cheap, but if anything, this one doesn't look cheap enough - Sofia Vergara's breast-mounted machine gun is too slick an effect, and there are none of the clever dodgy-projection gimmicks which made Planet Terror a connoisseur's delight. A bad film in tired inverted commas is still a bad film.