I’ll have to second the “Wha?” to whoever said Manhunter wasn’t great. Hell, the climactic scene set to “Inna-Godda-Da-Vida” alone was worth the price of admission. In-fucking-credible.
Re: Zelazny
I recall reading somewhere that Zelazny swore off movie adaptations of his books after his novel “Damnation Alley” was so totally butchered in that “So bad it’s funny way.” Wish the Misties had gotten hold of it.
OTOH, I’m GLAD the Misties got their hands on “Outlaw of Gor.”
I agree completely! And there will be no crinkle gauze allowed on the set. Not one shred. And perhaps the actors will actually be able to act. Juliana Margulies, I am looking at you.
My nomination is The Borrowers. I positively loved all those books when i was a little girl and love them still, but that movie stunk. A lot. It almost makes me want to hate John Goodman, but The Big Lebowski and various other movies make me forgive him.
The thing is, the creators of a movie often have little or more likely nothing to do with the packaging of the video. There is an obscure 80s movie that for some reason I quite like called Flashpoint. Two Border Patrol officers find an old body in a Jeep burried in a wash in the desert, the point of the movie is them trying to find out who the body belonged to while strange things start happening, people start getting killed, etc… When the movie was released on video, the splash on the box revealed who the body belonges to, which just ruined the whole point of the movie. Besides, I am sure Animal Farm would be fun for the whole family, some people will just have more fun than others. 
As to the subject of the thread, 101 Dalmations was a wonderful novel that wasn’t much like the Disney annimation. It was somehow very, very British, and at times dark( Cruella was very definitely going to kill and skin the puppies ), and not at all the happy yappy movie that I remember the Disney adaptation being.
And it’s such a good book, too! One almost literally doesn’t have to suspend disbelief to read the story; it develops so naturally, and the plants are so intuitively reasonable that it all makes perfect sense. I felt silly when I first bought it, because I had seen the movie on television when I was a kid, but I ended up enjoying it immensely.
I may be wrong, but isn’t that exactly what she’s planning to do to them in the Disney version?
FWIW, I think Starship Troopers was pure genius.
The Beach managed to make the book worse, which is pretty difficult to do. It seems like they took the book, then took a lot of acid, then just started filming whatever came to mind. Horrific.