"The dopiness of so-called ecotainment -- environmentally virtuous entertainment -- rises in direct proportion to its message-mongering."

Writes Scott Brown, who generally loves "movies about the environment, especially ecological-disaster flicks—oh, the hilarity!"

From the atomic-paranoia-fueled Pandora's boxes of the '50s (Them!, Godzilla) and the hapless "nature's revenge" flicks of the Love Canal era (The Swarm, Piranha) to the budget-busting disaster epic (2004's The Day After Tomorrow, best remembered for a scene in which Climate Change implacably pursues Jake Gyllenhaal), commercial attempts to put a high-minded, hortatory gloss on schlocky genre cinema are always good for a guffaw. My favorite would have to be Frogs, the 1972 "thriller" whose trailer intoned, "Suppose nature gave a war ... and everybody came?" (That's good, but it should've read, "Suppose Hollywood covered aging Oscar-winner Ray Milland in confused, nonunion amphibians ... and everybody laughed?")