The 1984 version of She, starring Sandahl Bergman, allegedly based on H. Rider Haggard’s novel.
Winds of Change, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Japanese anime, based on Greek mythology, with a disco soundtrack.
(Actually, if you can stomach the music, the movie itself is not that bad.)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Changed enough of what was in the book to completely remove its absurdist charm.
I was going to say this.
A Wizard From Earthsea.
Oh, and the two Riverworld ones-the 2nd sucked even worse than the first, and I didn’t think that was even possible.
Ellen Raskin’s Newbery Award-winning book The Westing Game was made into a movie so bad it wasn’t released. It eventually turned up on cable a few years later, and the reaction was so bad, that the movie was renamed Get a Clue so people who had read the book wouldn’t seek it out. Even as a standalone movie, not compared to the wonderful book it is very loosely based on, it is still a stinker.
The book is extremely complex, and really needs a mini-series, not a two-hour movie, but it was sliced and diced in an attempt to get it down to two hours, which totally collapsed the delicate structure of a very intricately plotted mystery. Among other things, one of the many red herring solutions became that actual solution, and the actual solution from the book was abandoned.
It’s just so much awfulness packed into two hours.
The 1988 version of Asimov’s Nightfall was pretty horrible…
I, Robot which appears to have borne no relationship to Isaac Asimov’s book about robots.
There was a truly awful film adaptation made of “Nightfall” way back when, too.
ETA: simulpost!
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Other than the fact that the car flies and floats* and the character’s names, it has nothing in common with the movie. No fairy-tale kingdom, no romance between Potts and Truly (they’re already married in the book), no child-catcher, etc. Or vice-versa, no trip to France where they have to foil a 1930s style gangster who’s planning a bank robbery. It also has a hovercraft mode that that the movie misses.
That said, the movie wasn’t actually…bad…mostly, it just isn’t an adaptation of the book.
*But in the movie, isn’t an actual person who can talk back via some kind of display
Exit to Eden, book by Anne Rice. Erotic fiction about an S&M island. The entire plot of the movie (Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell as cops who go undercover on that island to capture Iman, who is a wanted criminal) doesn’t exist in the book.
And, of course, on a fetish island that features Dana Delaney doing full nudity and leather outfits, we don’t see Iman wearing anything too revealing. We DO see Aykroyd in a gimp outfit, and Rosie wearing tight leather.
Dontcha hate it when you read to the bottom of a thread and the very last post has your answer? 
(Edit: Well, it WAS the last post but some people got in while I was typing)
It seemingly had no relation to the book because, well, it had no relation to the book. It was a case of “Hey, our rights to this property are going to expire if we don’t use them? Well, shoehorn a couple concepts into this unrelated sci-fi flick already in production and call it I, Robot. That took care of that!”
The movie “based” (inspired would be a better word really) on Earthsea and I, Robot (fun movie, but not Asimov’s book) have been mentioned. I nominate the latest so-called “Hobbit” trio of movies. Just plain awful, and sorta not really the original story.
My niece grew up watching that terrible cartoon that claims to be Wizard from or of or whatever Earthsea. The first time I let her read my copy of the actual books, she was blown away and threw out the movie.
Speaking of cartoons and kids, my son was truly amazed at how powerful and awe inspiring the animals in Kipling’s The Jungle Book were versus the bumbling, singing idiots in the Disney animated version.
Starship Troopers, the Puppet Masters, pretty much anything written by Robert Heinlein.
I dread the day somebody tries to make a movie of Stranger in a Strange Land. RAH’s writing style is such that something is lost as soon as you transfer it to another medium. Having said that, Puppet Masters was probably the best candidate to try, and it didn’t work.
Same problem with Frank Herbert’s Dune. Very complex, dense book and it’s hard to transfer that to screen. The mini-series they did on the Sci-Fi channel some years ago was a pretty fair attempt and I enjoyed it, but that story is best experienced by reading the book.
I liked the “Puppet Masters”, but as long as we’re on an SF kick here I’ll throw in “Damnation Alley”. (OK, points for the buggy, but that’s it.)
When the movie adaptation of “The Firm” came out, all the critics said, “If you haven’t read the book, you will love the movie, and if you have read it, you won’t like it.” I had read the John Grisham thriller; the friend with whom I saw the movie had not. She loved it and thought it was one of the best movies she’d ever seen, whereas I said, “That’s not in the book!” so many times, a man sitting in front of us turned around and told me to shut up. :o
[Moderating]
burpo the wonder mutt, I realize that your intent was not malicious here, but we ask that posters not add material to within quote boxes. If you want to reply to two separate points within a quote, you can put all of your replies at the end, or close the quote and then re-open it.
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is terrible while the book is actually really good.
The Giver is also a horrible film version of a really good book.
You’ve convinced me to try the book.
That one broke my heart.
I may end up going to Doper Hell for saying this, but…Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (yes, the first one, with Gene Wilder).
Actually, the two worst offenders I can think of are Pitch Perfect and Big Year, but both of those movies are fictionalized accounts of nonfiction books.
Well, those and Starship Troopers. I would consider The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I thought that was based more on the radio series than the book. (I won’t throw in the TV series, since that’s the only one where Trillian is blonde.)
For some reason science fiction and spy novel seem to fare badly in the adaptation department. Besides examples given above:
Ice Station Zebra by Alastair MacLean – huge difference between the book and the movie, although the movie was still pretty good
The Osterman Weekend by Robert Ludlum. No similarity at all.
Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell – the original 1951 The Thing pretty much changed everything, although it was a good enough story in its own right. Carpenter’s 1982 film was surprisingly faithful.
The Space Frame by Manly Wade Wellman got turned into Invasion of the SAucermen*, which actually included the basic story inside it, but buried it in grade Z schlock. When they remade it as Invasion of the (the) Eye Creatures they lost even the smidgen of the original story.
Similarly, Mimic by Donald A Wollheim was pretty much buried in made-up-stuff for the movie. The original story, to be honest, didn’t have enough for a full-length film, but it would’ve made a decent TV show, or segment in an anthology film. It’s a nicely creepy little Twilight Zon-ish story.
we Can Remember it for you Wholesale by Philip K. Dick also suffered from too little material for a movie. They exhausted most of it in the first half hour of Total Recall, then stole the rest from Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization, right down to the mind-reading mutants who revealed that the hero was basically his own enemy. And the hero, Quayle (whose name got changed to “Quade” because we had a Veep then with the name “Quayle”) was more of a Woody Allen type than a Schwartzeneggar. When the remade Total Recall they stripped away even more of its origin, and added incredibly stupid stuff.
The Mind Parasites is actually an unapproved version of Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. If you thought the Disney version was bad, this one is awful. With Leonard Nimoy, believe it or not.
Murray Leinster’s The Wailing Asteroid wasn’t exactly a great novel, but ity didn’t deserve to be turned into The Terrornauts
There’s a special department in movie hell for adaptations of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allen Poe. These are almost uniformly bad and virtually unrelated to the original story or inspiration.
Disney’s 20,000 Leagues was pretty decent, although it took surprising liberties with the story. Disney and Verne should’ve been a perfect match, but then they went and screwed up In Search of the Castaways, and never did another. Around the World i9n Eighty Days was pretty decent, too.
I list the names of the movies here
Verne:
The Mysterious Island (1929) – they seemed to want to make 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to dot it, and rewrote it all badly. Then they slapped the name of another Verne novel on it.
Valley of Dragons – was supposed to be “Off on a Comet” Hah!
The Light at the End of the World – Yul Brynner, Kirk Douglas, and Samantha Eggar. It’s still bad
Five Weeks in a Balloon – when you’re adapting Verne, don’t try to turn it into a musical comedy
The Mysterious Island (1960) I love Harryhausen, but Verne this ain’t. And, like 2010, it would’ve benefited from losing the narration.
From the Earth to the Moon – this one has NOTHING to do with the book. And screws up its science, as well.
Wells. Adaptations of Wells seem to pretty much miss the point he’s trying to make. *The Man who could Work Miracles was probably the best, and *The Invisible Man * wasn’t bad:
The Time Machine – George Pal got some of the visuals down pretty well, but he seems to have ignored the central point that in Wells’ extrapolated future the Morlocks were really the common man/working class that had been oppressed for centuries, and finally ended up Eating the Rich (as the saying used to go) – the Eloi, who were the useless and unskilled descendants of the Upper class.
The Island of Lost Souls/Doctor Moreau – the first movie version managed to get the creepy down better than the other versions, but they all lacked the subtlety of Wells’ invoking Jonathan Swift’s “Land of the Houynhnms” ending in which he poked satirical fun at civilization.
Village of the Giants – supposedly based on Wells’ Food of the Gods, but it’s just awful. Even Giant Boobs can’t save it.
Food of the Gods – even when they used the right title, it didn’t help.
Empire of the Ants – nothing to do with Wells, although it’s worth seeing this low-rent “Them!” to see Joan Collins controlled by ants.
Edgar Allen Poe:
All of the Corman adaptations are pretty darned awful, although there are memorable scenes in his Masque of the Red Death. There have been numerous Black Cats and Ravens, but you really can’t expect anything from a movie based on a short poem. The Oblong Box has nothing to do with Poe’s story, although the presence of Vincent Price and Christopher Lee gives it a touch of class.
H. Rider Haggard – The late version of She has been mentioned, but the others aren’t much better, except for the Merian C. Cooper 1934 version. King Solomon’sd Mines has been filmed numerous times, none of them faithfully. The 1984 version with Richard Chamberlin, Sharon Stone, Herbert Lom, and John Rhys-Davies was particularly awful, especially considering the star power.
Most adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft have been pretty abysmal too, until the past few years. The Lovecraft Society’s version of **The Call of Cthulhu[/B[ and The Whisperrer in Darkness, and the new German version of The Colour out of Space aren’t bad, but everything else I’ve seen has changed his stories so radically as to be completely unrelated.