'When in doubt, keep moving': 20 underappreciated movies filmed in Oregon

“Animal House” reached theaters 40 years ago this August, and so Cottage Grove, where a key scene was filmed, plans to celebrate with a huge toga party in downtown.

It’s one more reminder of Oregon’s rich history as a setting for Hollywood movies. “Goonies,” as everyone knows, was filmed in Astoria. And then there’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Drugstore Cowboy” and “Wild” — all filmed in the Beaver State.

Of course, Oregon hasn’t only been the backdrop for movie classics. There also have been plenty of clunkers. But rather than focus on the misfires, we’re going to direct you to some of the underappreciated gems that were filmed here.

Below are 20 movies that deserve to be remembered — and enjoyed — more often than they are.

Haley Joel Osment is a robot seeking love and connection in this 2001 movie. Today it’s not widely considered one of director Steven Spielberg’s best, but it was well-received at its release. Offered Empire magazine: “This is the work of a living, breathing master. … Perplexing, infuriating, mind-blowing: it’s a voyage into a wonderland where the fairy-tale motif becomes inseparable from the cool future-vision.” When you’ll recognize Oregon: Sam Robards driving through Oxbow Regional Park.

Is this a dumb movie? Of course. It stars slapstick-meisters Tim Conway and Don Knotts as Old West bandits. It also makes kids chortle. Wrote Time Out: “The traditional ingredients of [cozy] moralizing, sentimentality and raucous slapstick are used sparingly, the dialogue is fairly bright, and some visual gags are neatly executed.” Scenes for the 1975 Disney comedy were filmed around Bend.

You can never, ever go wrong with a movie that puts James Stewart in the Wild West. And, as it happens, DVD Beaver calls this Portland-set oater “[o]ne of the best of the Anthony Mann/James Stewart team-ups — and many of these are in a very esteemed class of the western genre.”

Burt Reynolds made a lot of bad movies in the 1980s, the decade that saw him devolve from guaranteed box-office hits (“The Cannonball Run”) to second-rate TV fare (“B.L. Stryker”). But the 1989 John Sayles-scripted “Breaking In,” in which Reynolds played an aging Portland safecracker, should have sparked a lasting big-screen comeback. Rolling Stone called it a “wry comedy” and “a nonstop pleasure.”