Total Recall is one of my guilty pleasures. It’s not a great movie. It’s not even the one really good science-fiction movie director Paul Verhoeven (hollow, startroop) has made — that was Robocop. But it’s a helluva lot of fun, and it moves fast enough that you never notice how silly it is till later.

Sewn together out of the scraps of far superior SF and action films, Red Planet is a frankenmovie, a soulless and charmless film that desperately hopes we won’t see the stitches that barely hold its disparate pieces together. Some mad producer somewhere saw the final cut and screamed ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’ But, alas, it isn’t.

There was a time when juvenile comedies were not about screwing innocent pastry or injuring defenseless household pets. Long ago, movies aimed at the high-school and college crowds occasionally had some substance to them, had a point of view and something meaningful to say, even if it was buried under crass comedy. I speak of Caddyshack, from the era, now long gone, when movies starring SNL alum were not embarrassments, and the suggestion of something gross was funnier for being only a suggestion.

The Legend of Bagger Vance is Redford’s latest attempt to break through the crust of the most hard-hearted cynic and warm her heart — and as that very person, I can attest that he succeeds. Redford pulls the emotional strings of a story oft-told so sublimely that I went along with him willingly, grateful with the opportunity to get swept away in it and for a little cry at the end.

There’s something very sexy about vampires — it’s the intimacy of their assaults and the fact that they traditionally choose to appear in women’s bedrooms in the middle of the night, perhaps. Anne Rice played this up to wonderful effect in her vampire novels (though the film version of Interview with the Vampire is more silly than erotic). But way back in 1931, director Tod Browning was pretty direct about bloodsucking as a euphemism for sex in his classic Dracula.

Corny? Sure. Melodramatic? You bet. And yet it still retains the ability to make you huddle a little tighter under the blankets as you curl up on the couch. The fear the best horror movies inspire springs from the power of suggestion and your own imagination, not from what you see on the screen. And so the key to getting some good, fun chills out of a silly old movie like The Wolf Man is atmosphere: Watch after midnight. Turn off the lights. Light a few candles. Don’t let your feet dangle off the edge of the couch or bed, lest a monster grab your ankle.

Raiders of the Lost Ark started here. The English Patient and Lawrence of Arabia nod almost imperceptibly in this direction. Stargate owes a huge debt. Okay, we could have done without Stargate, but my point is this: 1932’s The Mummy was the spark that ignited moviegoers’ love of shifting desert sands, adventurous archeology, and the mysteries of the past, a love that inspired some of the greatest films of all time and way too many movies not worth remembering.

Though he seems to try his damnedest to be one of those annoyingly frisky and ingratiating child actors, I just can’t help but love Jonathan Lipnicki. The lispy little guy who informed us how much the human head weighs in Jerry Maguire is still a self-conscious performer rather than a natural actor, but he takes … more…