Casting can make or break a movie, but it's the rare piece of casting that can do both to the same film, depending on the viewer. Gregory Peck's borderline bizarre turn as Nazi butcher Josef Mengele is the most compelling reason to watch The Boys from Brazil (1978), because you'll either feel you're staring straight into the face of evil, or you'll be sitting slack-jawed at the wrong-headedness of the entire undertaking. There's really no middle ground when an actor as beloved as Peck decides to clone Adolf Hitler, especially since Peck appears to have de-aged himself by rubbing black Kiwi shoe polish into his hair. One reviewer wrote that he's "made up to look like a cross between a banana republic dictator and a rodent."

Based on Ira Levin's best-selling novel, The Boys from Brazil concerns itself with the fictional post-War activities of Mengele, who in real life was alive and hiding in Sao Paolo, Brazil when the film was produced. Mengele, of course, was the sadistic physician who performed unfathomably hideous experiments on thousands of unwilling subjects who were under his "care" at Auschwitz. (In one of the 20th century's cruelest twists of fate, The Angel of Death was never captured and tried for his horrendous crimes.)