What’s the worst movie you’ve seen with the best cast stuck inside it, trying to act their way out?
The reason I bring this up is, I have a candidate: The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant. This is not the Ray Milland/Rosie Greer movie that at least had SOMETHING to say about racism. It’s instead a dreary monster flick. Warren Oates is a psychotic killer whose head gets grafted onto a large, kinda retarded farmhand for some reason by mad scientist Bruce Dern. Pat Preist, best known as Marilyn Munster on “The Munsters” TV series, is The Girl. Radio’s Casey Kasem is the heroic male lead.
There’s no sign that any of them did anything more than deliver acting on par with the script and the direction, which frankly was on par with the sort of B movies that hire porn actors to give themselves a patina of class and professionalism (although it was well filmed, looked like they hired a competent TV cinematographer).
I found myself amazed that Dern and Oates and Preist would get themselves involved with the sort of crap that is The Incredible 2-headed Transplant. One of them, I might understand, after all, Michael Caine took that big paycheck to be in Jaws 3, but a BUNCH of actors who’ve had roles in movies and TV shows that made sense appearing in something like “Transplant”? Did somebody get some favors called in?
Please don’t use this thread just to bag on big-budget productions you don’t like. Whatever your opinion of Star Wars I, it’s not amazing that Liam Neeson and Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson agreed to be in it. I’m looking for the sort of films that get a WTF reaction when you see several good actors in them.
Warren Oates was not in that movie. I think the character you’re talking about was played by Albert Cole, who’s nobody famous. Pat Priest got almost no roles after The Munsters, so she was probably happy to take anything she was offered. Casey Kasem has been mostly a voice actor and was probably surprised to be offered a live role. Only Bruce Dern had much of a career as a live actor in good films at that point.
The cast list for Movie 43 goes on for a mile, and includes such notable names as Denis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Hugh Jackman, Uma Thurman, Naomie Watts, Richard Gear, Gerard Butler, Halle Berry, Terrence Howard, and Kristen Bell. I have not seen it, but from what I’ve heard, this is a miracle, as it’s one of the worst movies to be made in some time.
Hey, remember when Academy Award winners Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton teamed up with Academy Award winner Charlton Heston and Academy Award winner Goldie Hawn? No? Of course you do; on hand to deliver supporting-cast lines, there’s Jenna Elfman in the middle of her award-winning run on Dharma and Greg; Holland Taylor, in the middle of her award-winning run on The Practice; Garry Shandling, fresh off his award-winning run as Larry Sanders; and Buck Henry is always perfect.
Trust me, you’re going to get a bunch of big budget flops posted, not B-movie schlock and direct-to-video dreck like you planned.
My favorite is “Naked Space,” subsequently re-titled “The Creature Wasn’t Nice.” A comedy take on “Alien” wherein a crew picks up a small gelatinous mass that grows into a people-eating monster… that communicates via show tunes (30 years later, I still hum “I Want To Eat Your Face.”).
It stars Leslie Nielsen, Patrick McNee, Cindy Williams, Gerritt Graham, and Bruce Kimmel (who also directed, sang, and played the creature; I think he choreographed it as well). The set is, for the most part, a hallway where they change the numbers every time someone goes by to indicate the ship is big, a couple of rooms, and everything could be done by a high school drama dept. The movie looks like it was made for about what Williams made for a single ep of “Laverne and Shirley,” so I’ve never figured out what the cast was doing there. Kimmel’s e-mailed me a few times over the years, but I’ve always thought it rude to ask. I think he and I are the only people that think the film’s hilarious.
For more thread-fodder, I suggest following the career of Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who’s making a steady stream of low-budget direct-to-dvd action films that inexplicably include Hollywood A-listers like Bruce Willis, Robert DeNiro, Forrest Whitaker and names that are also recognizable, if not as big. I don’t know what’s up with that…
The one with the famous cast. You know, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Orson Welles, David Niven, Ursula Andres, Deborah Kerr, William Holden, Charles Boyer, John Huston, Jacqueline Bisset, Angelica Houston (not famous at the time, now famous), Peter O’Toole.
Robert De Niro- 7 Oscar noms. 2 wins.
Katherine Heigl- 1 Emmy.
Diane Keaton- 4 Oscar noms. 1 win.
Amanda Seyfried- Several “Best Cast” noms and a win for films like Les Misérables.
Topher Grace- Won “Best Ensemble” SAG for Traffic.
Susan Sarandon- 5 Oscar noms., 1 win. 4 Emmys. 1 BAFTA.
Robin Williams- 4 Oscar noms., 1 win. 8 Emmy noms., 2 wins. 2 SAGs. 5 Cable Ace awards!
7% at Rotten Tomatoes, 3% among top critics.
(I haven’t/won’t see Movie 43 but I think many of the big stars only did cameo/segments. The above aren’t in small roles.)
That’s got an 85% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Even if you don’t like it, I don’t think you can call it a “bad movie”.
For my nomination, I’ll throw out All The King’s Men (2006, 11% on rotten tomatoes) starring Sean Penn, Jude Law, James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, and Anthony Hopkins.
Dern’s presence in that movie is the only thing that’s puzzling because his career was really taking off at that point. At that time, Dern either had appeared or was to appear in **The King of Marvin Gardens **opposite Jack Nicholson, Silent Running, and in The Cowboys with John Wayne where he had a memorably evil turn as the main villain. Seeing an obvious drive-in/grindhouse exploitation cheapie like **The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant **listed amongst those titles is rather jarring.
The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant is available on YouTube:
I’ve only watched a few minutes of it, but I don’t find anything hugely discordant between the quality of the film and the quality of the actors. The director/editor and the screenwriters put together enough money to make it at a reasonable budget. They probably pitched an idea that might appealing as an interesting B movie. They got Dern, who was and up-and-coming actor but not a well-known one, to play a major role. They got Priest, whose career wasn’t going well, and Kasem, who hardly ever did live roles, for other parts. Everybody else was just whoever they could hire cheaply.
I think in a thread on the movie here on the Dope somebody speculated that favors had to have been called in to get that cast in a movie that awful and that cheap, so … good candidate.