By Steven Zeitchik

If you’ve been sitting back and wondering where the stars of yesteryear have gone — you know, the real stars, like Robin Givens and Dolph Lundgren — you need but take a stroll through the halls of AFM. We did, this past weekend, at the Loews in Santa Monica, and found that not only are these thespians working, they are making some of the funniest, sharpest, entertaining material around. Just ask the people who designed the posters.

We’ve long heard the conventional wisdom that Steven Seagal and his ilk enjoy a ten or twenty year afterlife in many foreign countries — the Tina Turner effect, if you will. But in perusing the posters (which tout English-language movies whose rights are being sold in foreign-language countries) we were struck by how many of these actors are not only working, but are actively marketed. If these people were in our movie we’d hide them, not boast about them.

Most of these movies at AFM have little in common (with each other or with any movie you might actually see at a theater). But the producers behind them do seem to share a similar philosophy — namely, to bring on actors with currency without actually spending any.

They also all have absurdly nonsensical taglines. We use to think the murky descriptions were a function of subpar copywriters. But it must be intentional. if you’re trying to sell a movie to twenty different countries, you need to boil it down to utter meaninglessness to ensure a broad market.