Anyone familiar with the concept of the penny dreadful? It was a kind of serial novel back in the 1800s that was popular mostly in England, a lurid tale of blood and violence designed to shock and titillate that came out in several parts. That’s exactly what Machete is, except with the volume cranked to eleven and updated for the modern era.

Machete follows the title character, a federale in Mexico with either skin made of iron or more luck than any one human being should have, as he drives into a hail of gunfire yet manages to not get hit once, instead, his partner takes all the bullets.

Machete is betrayed by his bosses and manages to survive an assassination attempt, then sneaks into America where he poses as a day laborer to survive. Meanwhile, a massive conspiracy is afoot to put on a dumb show of securing America’s borders whilst allowing a drug kingpin free rein over the handful of weak spots in the border.

It’s easy to see where people would be offended by a movie like Machete–the Latino characters are the only ones here with anything like depth. The handful of white folks that show up are either corrupt to the eyes or so sympathetic to the illegal immigrants that they speak Spanish at most any opportunity.

But leaving aside the politics of the movie–which have been hotly debated in many, many more venues than can be easily listed–the key takeaway is that Machete is, much like England’s penny dreadfuls–a loud, violent show in which plot takes a back seat to bloodshed and all the nastiness is cranked to eleven. And yes, like the penny dreadful, this one will come out in three parts, or so massive title cards at the end breathlessly promise.

There will be many moments here in which the laws of physics and the space-time continuum are as gleefully broken as United States immigration laws for the sake of a more interesting story.  Machete himself, meanwhile, seems either to be able to stop time or possesses some kind of high-density cloaking device as he disappears and reappears semirandomly, and usually right behind the next poor schmoe who’s about to become his temporary scabbard.  I’m still a little shaky on how he pulled off the gurney bit. But I can’t fault any movie that includes Cheech Marin on general principles. Guy’s as good an action hero as he is a comedian, even if he does wind up the Sancho Panza to someone else’s Don Quixote most of the time. The next Don Quixote adaptation, this guy HAS to play Sancho Panza. He’s made for it.

And for those of you hoping to see Lindsay Lohan topless, you will not go away disappointed.

So what do you do, when you’re faced with a movie with more fake blood than good common sense?  If you’re the Screenhead Ten Scale, you shrug, call it a “summer movie” and hand it a six out of ten for pulling off most of what it sets out to do, but realizing that, at the same time, most of it really wasn’t worth setting out to do in the first place.