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Hollywood is a machine. Every week, every month and every year countless films are released into theatres 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 veritable 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 Quick and the Dead (1995)

Okay, here we go. If you want Stealth Entertainment, this film is it. The Quick and the Dead is so far under the radar that nobody even thinks about it any more. And that's a shame, because while this is not a great movie, or even a good one, it does a couple of things really well that instantly slide it right into the "Memorable" column.

First of all, there's the cast, which is completely nuts. The Quick and the Dead stars Sharon Stone as "Lady", Leonardo DiCaprio as "The Kid" Fee Herod, Russel Crowe as Cort, Gene Hackman as bad guy John Herod, Tobin Bell as Dog Kelly, Lance Henrikson as Ace Hanlon and Gary Sinise as The Marshall.

This casting list is completely crazy. That's a lot of star power for what is essentially a throwaway feminist western. Secondly, none of these guys were reigned in at all by the director. Everyone in this film chewed the scenery so hard you would have thought the set designer built the town out of meat and the actors were all piranhas. The only actor in the whole pack who even tried to be professional was Hackman, who played a character who was nothing more than a relentlessly selfish prick with as much self control as he could muster. Hackman radiates menace in this film in a way that astounds me. Not many actors could do what he did with this role, and he does it effortlessly.

You certainly can't say that about Sharon Stone in this film, as she plays "Lady" so badly that you've probably seen better performances in your local high school production of Hamlet. You could almost call her acting "wooden" and "amateurish", but that would probably be construed as an insult to trees, amateurs, and possibly amateur trees.

And then there are the action scenes in this film, almost all of them one on one gunfights in the street. They're gleefully over-the-top and done in defiance of logic and physics. During one of his gunfights, John Herod shoots the thumb off of one of his opponents, something I've never heard of happening. A couple of fights later he tortures one crippled opponent with a few shots before he dispatches him with a bullet to the head that leaves an exit wound the size of a grapefruit. During the climax scene, Cort wields two pistols and dispatches bad guys with shots over the shoulder and behind his back, an act made even more impressive with the broken fingers he is sporting thanks to the beating he took the night before.

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