Cue the trumpets. Part the velvet curtain. Put down that teacake and settle in for Out-the-Fireball Theater. This week, you lucky high-brow admirers of low culture, we have an especially fine installment called Reign of Fire. It's about mythical fire-breathing dragons laying waste to much of the planet after being discovered in a rather shallow cave under the streets of downtown London - rather shallow, considering all the construction that has gone on since medieval times, the Ice Age, and the demise of the dinosaurs. Those filthy epochs, we're told, are the result of dragons. Not Puff.

The film was shot by Rob Bowman, who made The X-Files movie and some of the series' best episodes. It stars Christian Bale (American Psycho) and Matthew McConaughey (best known for his unrealized potential). They play dragon slayers; everyone, thankfully for you, takes this film very seriously. McConaughey is so serious he looks insane, screaming his lines like a lunatic. It is all very fun, a B movie on a B+ budget, with monsters swooping through the sky, wrapping their DC-10-sized wingspans around castles.

Our story begins in modern-day London. A young boy is going to see his mother, who leads a construction crew. This being the United Kingdom, the sky is overcast and dreary (Dickensian, if you will) when construction workers unwittingly break the seal on an ancient tomb. Surprise: Dragons are real. One nasty claws its way to the surface and multiplies, leaving the world, and London ... um, overcast and dreary.

What is that you ask: How could one dragon become millions when there is only one of them? I fear there is no answer for you, my rather logical friend.

Stay with me now.

After a flurry of newspaper headlines and newsreel footage portraying the war between humanity and, ahem, fire-breathing dragons - one that went nuclear with negative results for humanity - we see the last of England, circa 2020. A band of survivors is holed up in a castle looking like a road company of The Road Warrior: The Musical!

Bale plays Quinn. He wants to wait out the dragons, which are starving alongside the last humans. “Only one species is getting out of this alive,” Bale warns.

Which means: Basically the humans sprint for food. In the meantime, in a charming touch that shows the filmmakers are having fun with this silliness, Quinn and friends perform small plays for the remaining children. In an age when mythical dragons rule the Earth, what kind of folk tales does one tell? Star Wars, of course. And Jaws.

Enter Van Zan (McConaughey), the U.S. Marine, who rolls into Quinn's outpost with a tank and troops. Speaking of Jaws, he's the Quint character, a tattooed Ahab. How did they get the gas to roll into town? How did they get to England from the United States when dragons rule the skies?

“There hasn't been anything in the air in 20 years,” Quinn points out. “That's their territory.”

“That's my territory,” Van Zan corrects. “They're just renting.”

Oh. I mean, see?

Van Zan brings stories of how to kill the dragons. Slay the male, which just happens to reside in England and just happens to be easily identifiable amid the zillions of other dragons that look exactly alike. Also, kill only at dusk, Van Zan says - the magic hour, that's when their eyes go bad.

In short: There is much scurrying and strutting dragons dripping liquid-fire drool, and one awe-inspiring shot of a lizard strafing a column of soldiers that would make Godzilla envious. And when these monsters go down, they go down good and hard; all you have to do is leap from a helicopter, transform yourself into a human missile and use yourself as bait, while two parachuters behind you fire nets at the beast's wings.

When these Brits and Americans finally do bring one down, they turn the castle into a party spot, listening to Jimi Hendrix's “Fire” and shining spotlights in the sky like it's the gala opening of the shabbiest hotel in Europe.

Before you can ask why they would do that, you know, with all the dragons in the sky and such, or where they got the electricity for such a celebration, there are bigger, more vicious dragons to fry.

As Van Zan points out: At this pace, they should kill all of the dragons in roughly 300 years.

But then Reign of Fire defies explanation, anyway. It's the kind of earnest, no-nonsense monster movie Hollywood used to toss out in the 1950s, and it works for one reason only: The ability of a handful of good actors, and monster movie-loving filmmakers, to keep a straight face. Cheers.

First Published July 12, 2002, 1:32 p.m.