TODAY'S LOW-BUDGET B MOVIES OFTEN A-OK.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

The shape of low-budget films has changed remarkably over the years. Once the dumping ground for genres Hollywood considered disreputable - horror, sci-fi, lurid thrillers, action-adventures - the underfunded realm recently has become the last resort of serious, character-based filmmaking.

Studios still lavish their biggest bucks on special-effects and action spectaculars, while deeming anything along the lines of serious drama commercially risky. This is just the opposite of the way things were during the high Hollywood studio era, when adult dramas, romances and sophisticated comedies attracted most of the attention, money and top talent.

But one thing hasn't changed. While low-budget productions, or B movies as they used to be called, have always been associated with exploitative junk, they've also provided fertile ground for unique and memorable filmmaking.

Just look at the lower end of the film noir cycle, those shadowy, psychologically loaded crime movies of the post-World War II era. Shot in just six days on a mere handful of locations, "Detour" (1945) offered up a bleak vision of female animosity and male fear that wasn't matched in savagery until "Fatal Attraction" 42 years later. Innovative mobile camera work was a hallmark of the 1949 "Gun Crazy," a Bonnie and Clyde knockoff that made the explicit connection between guns and eroticism 18 years before the glitzier Warren Beatty production did.

In the 1950s, science fiction became a staple of the drive-in movie circuit. While many of these films were klutzy giant insect sagas made specifically for an audience of inattentive, necking teen-agers, the genre also produced such modest masterpieces as the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956), a brilliant parable of Cold War paranoia (and still much more disturbing than its expensive, effects-laden 1978 remake), and "The Incredible Shrinking Man" (1958), which made compelling philosophical hay out of a premise later used for the hit family comedy "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids."

The '60s saw the ascent of longtime schlock director Roger Corman who, primarily through a series of stylish Edgar Allan Poe adaptations ("House of Usher," "Masque of the Red Death"), proved that cheap horror could be both artful and profitable.

More importantly, Corman inspired (and later, as a producer, launched many careers of) a number of young movie enthusiasts such as Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and James Cameron - many of whom, of course, went on to turn sci-fi, horror, crime and action movies into the main moneymaking genres of the '70s and '80s.

At the same time, a new generation of filmmakers who wanted to address primarily social and emotional issues - Spike Lee ("She's Gotta Have It"), Steven Soderbergh ("sex, lies, and videotape") and Neil Jordan ("The Crying Game") among them - increasingly had to push their way into the mainstream from the independent film movement margins.

Now, things appear to be shifting again. While big-budget escapist fantasies are still in demand, the market for that kind of stuff peaked years ago. Hollywood has once again made room for literary adaptations, realistic dramas and social-issue films - although recent box-office disappointments such as "Nixon," "The Scarlet Letter" and "The American President" could put the brakes on that trend.

And while limited independent financing remains the main route for character-oriented projects like "Circle of Friends," "The Brothers McMullen" and most of the entries at this year's just-completed Sundance Film Festival, it's instructive to note that the most celebrated recent indies are of an entirely different stripe. "Reservoir Dogs," "El Mariachi," "Pulp Fiction," "The Usual Suspects" - they're all sleazy but virtuosic crime movies that hark back to the days when low budgets automatically bought, at no extra charge, the stigma of disrespectability.

And when the people who made B movies bore it proudly.

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PHOTO

Photo Grant Williams improvises with sewing suplies in his effort to fend off a giant enemy in "The Incredible Shrinking Man," the 1958 B-movie sci-fi classic.