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Hollywood is a machine. Every week, every month and every year countless films are released into theaters and not every one is as successful as the studio heads would hope. Sometimes the publicity machine was askew, sometimes the movie targeted an odd demographic, sometimes the release was steamrolled by a much larger movie and occasionally the movie is flat out bad.

But Hollywood's loss is our gain. There is a veritable treasure trove of film out there that you may not have seen. I will be your guide to this wilderness of unwatched film. It will be my job to steer you towards the action, adventure, drama and comedy that may have eluded you, and at the same time, steer you away from some truly unwatchable dreck.

Hopefully we'll stumble across some entertainment that may have slid under your radar. Wish us luck.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)

When I advised David Mumpower that I would be writing about this film, he performed the email equivalent of a coffee spit, advising me that he'd actually placed it on his bottom five list for 2003. I'm not sure how he could feel that way in a year that brought us The Cat in the Hat, S.W.A.T., 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Core and Dumb and Dumberer. Yes, 2003 was a very special year in a very special Olympics sort of way. I'm a little surprised David was able to restrain himself to a bottom FIVE.

Incidentally, this may be my last review once David realizes that I just forced him to recall those films. I'm fairly certain he's blocking my e-mail address even as we speak. Still, I am intrepid, and will press on.

The league of Extraordinary Gentlemen is about a number of literary icons who are banded together to battle an imminent threat of world war. The film is set in 1899 in a sort of steampunk age and this is one thing the film does very well, the atmosphere is dank and mechanical and you can almost smell the grease in the air and feel the fog on your face. And in fact, that's about as close as this film gets to the actual graphic novel.

LXG stars Sean Connery (James Bond, The Rock, The Hunt for Red October) as Alan Quartermain, Naseeruddin Shah as Captain Nemo, Peta Wilson (la Femme Nikita the TV Series, Superman Returns) as Mina Harker, Tony Curran (Underworld: Evolution, Blade 2) as the Skinner the Invisible Man, Stuart Townsend (Queen of the Damned) as Dorian Gray, Shane West (Dracula 2000) as Tom Sawyer, Jason Flemyng (Layer Cake, Stardust) as Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde and Richard Roxburgh as ‘M'/ The Phantom. It's an impressive sounding cast, but really, when the best credits to your names include Dracula 2000 and Queen of the Damned, you know something's up. Also, I'm not sure we can even make fun of Naseeruddin Shah at all, as his film biography apparently includes every Indian film made in the last two decades. As I haven't seen any of them, I can't really subject him to ridicule for that. What I am fairly certain of is that fact that he most likely gets mocked regularly for appearing in THIS film by all his Indian co-stars.

This really should have been a great film, as the story focuses strongly on the League itself. It starts out in Africa with a messenger sent to recruit Quartermain into working for Britain. A group of assassins arrive shortly after the messenger does and we are almost immediately treated to a band of machine gun wielding assassins having a huge gunfight with elephant gun wielding geriatrics. Quartermain pulverizes the assassins quite handily and then wounds the last one from long range so he can question him. The last assassin kills himself to prevent interrogation and then the bar the entire battle took place in immediately explodes, forcing Quartermain to join up with the League as nothing pisses Sean Connery off more than the senseless destruction of his favorite bar.

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