From about the only part of Fantasia that isn’t a total snoozer comes The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an overlong Walt Disney fantasy-adventure with special effects shooting out of every orifice. Nicolas Cage essays the role of the sorcerer half of the equation; Jay Baruchel, the apprentice.

Cage is Balthazar Blake, a thousands-year-old magician for the powers of good (yet he can’t do anything about his stringy, homeless-man hairdo), while Baruchel is Dave, a New York nerd who speaks so nasally, you’d think this was a 110-minute advertisement for Breathe Right strips. He’s also the chosen one to help Blake in the fight against bad, a magician named Whorebath. Correction: Horvath (Alfred Molina).

They’re all fighting for control of something called a “grimhole.” (Can you say that in a Disney film?) Distracting Dave are his hormones; his magic wand grows for his childhood crush, bland blonde Becky Barnes (Teresa Palmer). He impresses her by playing musical Tesla coils. When she’s coming over, he has to clean up the place lickety-split, allowing the film to re-create Mickey Mouse’s ill-fated, abracadabra approach to housekeeping, but only after a shot of a dog urinating.

Apprentice reunites Cage with his National Treasure franchise director Jon Turteltaub, and you’ll wish they had made a third one of those instead. Especially when they had the smarts to cast the fetching Monica Bellucci, yet give her maybe five minutes of screen time (all clothed, at that). The only magic in it is that it comes to an end. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Just imagine the possibilities of a B-movie concerning two men vying for the affections of the last woman on earth. None of those possibilities are to be found in Roger Corman’s version, I’m sorry to say — not even if she were the Last Woman on Earth.

We first meet our trio during a Puerto Rican cockfight — with authentic mad-rooster footage! — the semi-lovely but wrinkly Betsy Jones-Moreland; shady hubby Anthony Carbone; and his lawyer, Robert Towne (yes, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, and he wrote this one, too). While the trio is scuba diving, everyone on land dies from a sudden lack of oxygen.

This leaves them lots of time to talk and eat and talk. The men start seeing each other as a threat, and Betsy as a prize. But all they do is talk and eat and talk.

There is one sequence I liked, when the Last Woman on Earth and her two dates roam the streets of Puerto Rico and see all the carnage. For a minute, it’s like they’re wandering through a George Romero film … only directed by Corman, y’know? You can skip it. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Novelist Michael Crichton was famous for being somewhat obsessive about the subjects that caught his fancy, often studying them until he could be considered almost an expert in the field. Sadly, the 17 years he devoted to researching the art of filmmaking weren’t quite as fruitful. As a director, he never managed to be more than an undistinguished journeyman; as a screenwriter, he failed more often than he succeeded.

His sixth and penultimate film, Runaway, is a clear example of his cinematic limitations. Always more interested in the ideas presented in his work than the stories he was telling, his plots served as little more than perfunctory frameworks for specific concepts and set pieces. Because of this most of his films succeed as superficial entertainment, but don’t hold up to any kind of prolonged analysis.

Set in an unspecified future where most menial tasks are now undertaken by non-anthropomorphic robots, Tom Selleck stars as the head of the local police force’s “runaway” squad, which is in charge of catching and stopping malfunctioning machines that pose a hazard to the public. When a robot murders three people, Selleck and his cute new partner, Cynthia Rhodes, uncover a plot by ruthless killer Gene Simmons to fuck everything that moves by selling a “smart bullet” capable of targeting an individual’s heat signature.

Caught up in this plot is a very hot pre-Cheers Kirstie Alley, Selleck’s young Flight of the Navigator son and a bunch of robot spiders that inject acid into their victim’s veins. Clearly in love with the film’s future-tech (most of which looks quite dated 26 years later), Crichton obviously wasn’t so enamored with his characters, none of whom are given any more depth than his robot creations.

Runaway has a few interesting moments and a good concept, but suffers from having been made by a man who was ultimately more interested in the idea of being a filmmaker than with filmmaking itself. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

Nobody can rip off Mad Max quite like the Italians.

In Warriors of the Wasteland — taking place in a post-apocalyptic future, it should go without saying — a small band of peacenik survivors is tormented by the Templars, an evil gang that roams the desert (or the fringes of a construction site) on cool motorcycles and customized cars loaded with deadly gadgetry. They also have names like Shadow and One, sport Mohawks and mullets, and dress like George Lucas’ Stormtroopers as made over by the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy team.

Stepping up to right wrongs and challenge the Templars is Scorpio, a disillusioned former member who looks like a hunky Peter Riegert. He’s joined by a vacant female love interest, a rock-slinging, tow-headed ugly kid and, best of all, crossbow-wielding Fred Williamson and his girly headband, rightfully playing a guy named Nadir.

The action scenes are what make this movie, alternately known as The New Barbarians. People explode in slow-motion into bloody chunks, get screwed by the Swiss Army car implements and even decapitated by a slowly whirling blade on the lead bad guy’s go-cart. There are several chase scenes like this — all set to a cool Claudio Simonetti score — so you’d think the carmageddon would get old, but nope, never does! —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Quick show of hands: How many people reading this are demented serial killers? One? Two? Six? It’s hard to say, but if we went by the sensational news reports that frequently aired during the ’80s, then all of us should have firsthand knowledge of the sound a puppy makes when you boil it alive. This is because we grew up watching horror movies and that way — so these reports claimed — inevitably led to mental illness and murder.

If you are a teenager having fun, someone somewhere is making money explaining to concerned parents how the activity you’re enjoying is going to rob you of your sanity and turn you into a demented maniac (or at least someone who doesn’t get into a good college). And chances are someone is going to eventually exploit this concern in a terrible made-for-TV movie. Which brings us to Mazes and Monsters.

In this early Tom Hanks vehicle, the threat to humanity is LARPing (or live-action role playing for those of you who have robust social lives or haven’t seen Role Models). Hanks plays Robby, a troubled college student who joins three other students to play the Dungeons & Dragons-esque title game, only to lose his ability to tell fantasy from reality when they take the game out of the dorm room and into the real world.

The script is as ridiculously overwrought as its plot suggests and eschews any semblance of subtlety in favor of in-your-face obviousness, usually to inadvertently hilarious effect. The gaming equivalent of Reefer Madness, it’s the kind of film you should watch if only to remind you that as crazy and dangerous as the kids may seem today, they’re going to eventually grow up to be as boring and normal as we are now. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.