In this post, Colophon posts a link to the imdb page of Open Water 2, which is a movie thriller about some friends who are out on a sailboat and all jump in for a swim without remembering to put the ladder down. Then they all go crazy and turn on each other until they drown, or something.
From the imdb summary and watching the trailers, this strikes me as so totally stupid, I can only begin to list the reasons why.
[ul][li]It’s a sailboat, which means that, with no one in the boat, it’s got to be anchored, right, or it’d drift away. So they could climb the anchor line.[/li][li]There are like six of them, all athletic, and the preview shows that the deck of the boat is only maybe 5 or 6 feet above the water line. It even shows them making desperate grabs and coming up a foot or two short. C’mon, people. Just get the 4 buff guys to boost one of the 110 lb women up to the deck.[/li][li]They all have swimsuits on. Even with the whispy things that the women are wearing, they could tie them together, throw the line across the bow, and climb up that.[/ul] [/li]
Now, I haven’t actually seen the movie, so it’s possible it’s not quite as dumb as it sounds. But I’m sure (without thinking of them off the top of my head) that there are many others that are. Please share.
I’m guessing you mean movies with stupid premises that attempt to pretend that they aren’t.
I haven’t seen it, but my pick would be Shopgirl. I simply refuse to believe there would be a love triangle between the lovely Claire Danes, the rather cute Jason Schwartzman and…Steven Martin, who is old enough to be their father and nearly old enough to be their grandfather. Sorry, but my disbelief just doesn’t suspend like that.
Double Jeopardy, with Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones. A woman is framed for her husband’s murder, and upon her release from jail, she sets out to find him and kill him. She’s told she can do this with impunity because she cannot be convicted of kiling her husband twice. :rolleyes:
Plan 9 from Outer Space has a better-thought out premise. This interpretation of legal ‘double jeopardy’ is so far off from reality that I can’t believe they put it into a serious movie and expected nobody would fall down laughing.
Mine is the justly obscure recent film “The Deep End”, starring Tilda Swinton.
Open Spoilers
Basically guy gets killed, who it turns out was Swinton’s sons gay lover. We never learn if the son was guilty or not (mom forgets to ask). Anyhoo, blackmail guy comes along to mom with tape of the dead guy and Swintons son getting it on. Wants money to give mom the tape. Can’t recall the chain of events, but the resolution is, mom gets the tape, therefore the son will never be interrogated because mom has only evidence. Huh? Won’t even the worst cops do an investigation to see who the dead guy knew, who he hung out with, screwed, was enemies with, etc? Won’t they find someone who can corroborate the relationship between son and dead guy? Won’t their be phone records, photos and what not of the two together? How is this a resolution?
The weird thing about this movie was how much critics loved it. I seem to remember Ebert in particular falling over himself to praise Swinton for playing a regular person in over her head with the whole blackmail thing. I was surprised by how stupid it was.
Hah! None of these can hold a candle to Bad Science Fiction and Horror.
Try this: The Prehistoric Sound – people open a cave and releaase a sleeping dinosaur. The hitych is, it’s invisible!! Contains the worst invisibility effects you’ll ever see. I think they did this because they were too cheap to come up with a good dinosaur suit, so they hid its inadequacies by not showing it until the very end of the film.
I don’t think I can agree with that. Admittedly, not venting the air is stupid. But the other stuff makes plenty of sense. Ash lets the alien in because he’s evil. The fact that we don’t know that doesn’t make it stupid, it just adds a little bit of depth to the story. It’s not just a monster movie, it’s also the little people battling against the evil corporation. And people freezing or not thinking clearly for a brief enough time to get eaten when faced with a huge freaky monster isn’t unreasonable.
And some of the other complaints are pretty asinine. It doesn’t make economic sense to abandon the ore in favor of the alien? Well, according to the My Ass Economic Forecast of Way the Hell in the Future, it’s easy to see that shares of the Ultimate Weaponized Lifeform corporation are up eleventeen points in active trading, with a cap of nearly three times that of the Space Mining Conglomerate.
That said, a creature with such a bizarre and destructive life cycle is a pretty stupid thing to exist.
For me it was redeemed by two shots. One, a shot through a drop of water suspended from the faucet, and two the shot of her leaning into the car around the mortally wounded Goran Visnjic and the shot is just right for them to fall into the cliched freeze-in-someone-else’s-gaze and kiss but they don’t. I’m a sucker for pretentious shots!!
A movie where someone needs to keep their heart rate above a certain level or die?
That’s a shame about Open Water 2–Open Water was based on real events and was a truly scary idea.
How about all those “romantic comedies” where the protagonist spends the first 95% of the movie lying their ass off to their supposed true love about some crucial fact. At the climax of the movie the asshole reveals the truth, the supposed true love forgives them, and they Live Happily Ever After.
In real life, if you find out the guy you were dating was really a girl pretending to be a guy, or was just conducting a science experiment that got too personal, or was really a dyslexic albino big-game hunter pretending to be a amidexterous mulatto touch-typist, you’d probably take out a restraining rather than forgive them.
The variation on this is the Terrible Misunderstanding, which could be resolved in 4 seconds if the moronic lovers would only talk to each other like adult humans. “Oh, the corvette? It belongs to my SISTER!” “I had a flat tire, and my cell phone battery died!” “I’m part of a Shakespeare in the Park theater group, we were performing ‘Julius Caesar’. That’s why I was waving a bloody knife and wearing a bedsheet!”