The second MACHETE is better than the first. But don’t thank the stunt casting. Thank a lesser-known actor who gives this anti-heroic fantasy a formidable villain.

Once upon a time, in a dirty and slightly sticky corner of the motion picture industry, there were films produced purely for the sake of feeding audiences’ seemingly endless appetite for gaudy sex and near pornographic violence, often slathered with buckets of unnaturally red viscera and always with a splashy title and equally eye-catching poster. The rise of independent cinema in the 1970s made for an explosion of these low-budget features, and audiences hungry for…