By Jason Adams, MyNewPlaidPants

Summer starts for real next week with the release of Thor, but for now there are several new movies clamoring for a dollop of your dollars.

Vroom vroom, the gang’s all back for the fifth installment of the apparently successful The Fast and the Furious series. I say apparently because I’ve made it this far without having sat through more than five fast and furious minutes of the whole thing. Don’t think it’ll be changing this time around either, even if they did add Dwayne Johnson’s terrifying biceps to the mix.This one’s called Fast Five, naturally – although I’m surprised it’s not called just Fst5 because vowels really do tend to bog things down, don’t they? Or maybe they should call it Tits and Ass and Big Boner Cars. Anyway against all sense of reason it’ll make some money and Vin Diesel will continue to exist.

And then there is a movie called Prom coming out. Something tells me Carrie doesn’t have to worry about being dethroned Best Prom-related Movie Of All Time. I mean, if you can’t get some telepathic fire revenge on the snots who tormented you then what’s the point?

And then there is a movie called Hoodwinked Too! Hood Versus Evil coming out, and… I just can’t. There was a first one? I’ll wait until they complete the epic trilogy with Hoodwinked 3: Boyz In Hood to catch up. Let me add that I did see a commercial for this on television earlier this week and it has got to be the cheapest looking animation I’ve seen being passed off as a theater-quality release since that movie about Gnomes came out earlier this year. An episode of VeggieTales looks more elegant.

One-time Superman star Brandon Routh plays a different comic book hero in Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, about some sort of paranormal investigator in a world of all kinds of evil things going bump in the night. Seems kind of like a male-centric Buffy. Or, you know, Angel. Still, even if it’s a little redundant Routh’s an underrated charmer.

A 3D movie from the director of Fitzcarraldo? Sure, if it’s a documentary about ancient cave paintings. Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams is out in limited release today, and watching it (I saw it a few months ago) feels like a gift. He’s taken us into a space where we would never get to go otherwise and shown us things we would never have gotten to see. The 3D transports you in an uncanny way. Hopefully science classes will be showing this until the end of time.

Also in limited release is Japanese director Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, a riveting and rousing samurai epic that could very well turn out to be the best action movie to come out this Summer. The fact that it won’t make one one hundredth of the cash that a third Transformers film does is proof enough that our culture’s doomed.

Not-so-angry birds movie Rio topped the box office last weekend for the second week in a row with just over 26 million dollars, proving again that families have never met an animated animal given creepy human characteristics that they couldn’t adore. Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family – I think Tyler Perry should pay me a percentage for the chunk of my life that typing out his ridiculous movie titles, always so long, steal from my life – came in second with just over 25 million dollars. And in third was Water For Elephants with 16.8 million – I suppose the Twihards can accept their vamp-boy with a girl his own age but Reese was a stone’s throw too ancient.

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