Fire on the Amazon (1993)

No one makes low-budget genre fare better than producer Roger Corman. Be it sea creatures in rubber suits or slimy alien rapist worms, Corman can (and usually does) deliver the goods. But what happens when he tries to, you know, get serious? What happens when he tries to make an “issue” movie? If Fire on the Amazon is any indication, I’d love to see his version of An Inconvenient Truth.

Yep, Fire on the Amazon is a movie about the devastation of the rainforests and one man’s fight to stop it. Of course, when that man happens to be the ridiculously coiffed Craig Sheffer, looking like he came straight from a grunge-era Playgirl photo shoot, the results will be nothing more than ineffectually comedic. He’s a nosy “photojournalist,” but I’d like to see his press credentials and, no, your blog doesn’t count, Craig.

If following this clown around Bolivia weren’t enough — and believe me, it is — Amazon also happens to be one of the earliest films to star Sandra Bullock, and, true to Corman form, she has a sex scene. While this may be a cream-dream come true for her fans, director Luis Llosa brings the same clinically erotic eye to lovemaking that he did with Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone and a bathroom floor in The Specialist. (I’m actually worried that Llosa has never been with a woman. We should all pitch in and get him a hooker!)

Does the rainforest get saved? No, of course not. But Bullock does get many long-winded speeches about displaced native peoples that actually made me almost want to do something. Almost. So I guess it was successful in that respect. —Louis Fowler

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So Fine (1981)

Despite spending much of the ’70s at the top of Hollywood’s A-list, you don’t hear much about Ryan O’Neal these days. His great work in such films as What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon and Barry Lyndon seems to have been completely undone by the string of lackluster failures that followed them, as well the fact that all evidence points to his being an utterly worthless human being.

Yet as big of a hitting-on-his-own-daughter-at-his-famous-girlfriend’s-funeral sleazeball he may be, there’s no denying that he once possessed a certain charm that made him a compelling and likeable onscreen presence. Evidence of which can be found in So Fine, one of the early ’80s flops that marked the beginning of his slow decline into tabloid obscurity. The directorial debut of once-promising comedy director/screenwriter Andrew Bergman (whose own career was sidelined by the one-two disasters of Striptease and Isn’t She Great), So Fine is an often funny contemporary evocation of ’40s screwball comedy.

O’Neal plays Bobby Fine, an English professor at a stuffy New England college who is literally kidnapped to work for his father’s (a hilarious Jack Warden) struggling clothing company at the behest of a behemoth loan shark named Big Eddie (Richard Kiel). When Bobby is introduced to Eddie’s hot Italian wife (Lina Wertmüller regular Mariangela Melato), it’s lust at first sight and many amusing complications — including the invention of a revolutionary new fashion style — ensue.

While nowhere up to the level of His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby, So Fine is a fun, refreshing return to the screwball formula that promises the sight of Jaws in blackface singing Verdi’s Otello, a brilliantly droll performance by Ed Gwynne as O’Neal’s stuffy academic boss, and lots of pretty girl in assless jeans. What’s not to like? Besides O’Neal being such an epic douchebag offscreen, of course. —Allan Mott

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Sanctum (2011)

When a thriller set beneath Papua New Guinea name-checks National Geographic magazine not once, but twice, it’s safe to say the focus might be on pretty pictures than pulse-quickening. Such it is with Sanctum, an Australian film to which James Cameron has attached his name as executive producer, because the guy gets erect for projects dealing with underwater exploration.

But don’t expect The Abyss. Fantastic Four‘s Ioan Gruffudd plays a billionaire financing a cave-diving scubafest that takes expert Frank (Richard Roxburgh) and his crew through tight squeezes as they venture through heretofore unexplored territory. Disaster strikes when a cyclone up top floods the caverns.

From there, it’s a swim for survival, with nature providing just as much conflict as Frank’s whiny, put-upon son (Rhys Wakefield). Any guess as to whether he and Pop will work things out by the end? Originality is not Sanctum‘s strong suit. I’m not sure it has one, but if it does, it’s in making viewers queasy with claustrophobia. (That could be because I was weak from hunger.)

Bad dialogue clashes with bad acting from all involved except Roxburgh. Gruffudd overacts to the point of being a cartoon (can we call a ban on all Apocalypse Now references in helicopter scenes from here on out?) and Alice Parkinson, as his girlfriend, reads her lines as if she’s expecting to be dubbed. And sorry, Jim, but the 3-D isn’t All That. Sanctum may not stink, but it sinks. —Rod Lott

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The Law vs. Billy the Kid (1954)

Before he became the Greater of Cheese, William Castle was an all-purpose director of schlock B movies at Columbia — Serpent of the Nile, Slaves of Babylon and The Saracen Blade, anyone? Even when these movies show up on TV, no one pays much attention to them because they’re not horror, the genre in which Castle made his reputation for goofiness and gimmickry.

But the truth is that the pictures are not half bad for what they are: B-level, Saturday-matinee kiddie-fodder. Take, for example, The Law vs. Billy the Kid with Scott Brady as The Kid; that terrific character actor James Griffith as Pat Garrett; and The Skipper himself, Alan Hale, Jr. as the bullying Bob Olinger.

The script even sticks, with some slight degree of stickiness, to the outline of the Lincoln County War. Kid and Garrett are saddle pals — Kid goes off the rails to avenge the murder of his boss; Garrett is recruited to become Sheriff and track the Kid down. Kid busts out of jail; Kid is killed by Garrett at Pete Maxwell’s ranch near Roswell, N.M.

Brady, who was Lawrence Tierney’s kid brother, was too old at 31 to play the Kid, but Griffith is just right. The action moves along quickly, the romance isn’t too romancy, the drama of two buddies on opposite sides isn’t too dramatic, the Technicolor is sharp, and the pic lasts only 72 minutes.

You may not be able to put faces to the names of the two leads, but you’ll know them when you see them. Brady’s last role was Sheriff Frank in Gremlins. You know he was a B actor if Joe Dante gave him a cameo. —Doug Bentin

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