What instantly comes to mind is the CG garbage Lucas added to Star Wars, but maybe that doesn’t count since it’s not part of the original release.
So, I’ll submit “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” where Sirius (as a dog) drags Ron serveral miles through a tunnel to the shrieking shack. Then Hermione is hit by the flailing limb of the Whomping Willow (which should have killed her right then), but manages to grab it, hold on, grab Harry like a rag doll, throw him down the tunnel, then lauch herself into same. The whole sequence is just too lame to be exciting.
Well, see, he had to be on fire, because if he’d just jumped off the prow, the audience would have spent the rest of the film wondering when he was coming back, because falling from a great height never kills anyone in the LotR movies.
I submit LOTR when Legolas surfs Helms Deep on a shield, and when he jumps up on the Mumak in Pelennor Fields. Both moments did nothing but detract from their respective movies.
Not only that, but water is poisonous to the adult sandworms. If it rains on an unprepared Arrakis, the sandworms all die, which means no more Fremen transportation, no more Water of Life, and no more melange, which is pretty much the most precious substance in the universe. If you make it rain, you pretty much destroy THE bargaining chip you’ve got in the situation that Paul was in. His control of the spice, and his THREAT to destroy it, are what put him on the throne.
Of course, I prefer to think of Lynch’s film as an alternate universe telling of the story, because Shai-Hulud knows that he got enough wrong.
There’s a scene in The Ring 2 where Naomi Watts’ car is attacked by a group of CGI elk. It’s a live-action movie for the most part, but out of the blue she’s attacked by creatures that look like something out of a video game.
SUPERMAN II has already been parodied for this on FAMILY GUY, but it’s still worth mentioning: our hero is about to be attacked, and so he – peels a translucent ‘S’ off his chest to create an exceedingly minor inconvenience before the real fight starts?
Look, any writer can fail to come up with a cool and effective use of the powers that character actually has; who the heck scripts in a new power for the big guy to use in a goofy-looking way that doesn’t really accomplish anything?
Two of my favourite scenes from that movie were seeing the Corvette “flying” behind the plane and when the Vette raced and beat the plane to the airfield.
In the first Harry Potter movie, during Harry’s first Quidditch match, he suddenly stands up on his broomstick and goes all Surfer Dude on us. There is absolutely no reason on earth why he should be doing that! Where would he have even learned to surf anyway, his aunt and uncle kept him locked under the stairs his whole freaking life.
In “Jurassic Park: The Lost World”, Ian Malcolm’s daughter uses her gymnast skills to get away from/boot kick a dinosaur. In the theater where I saw it, someone yelled out “Bullshit!” at that scene, which was the highlight of the movie for me.
It’s an actual martial move that appears in many traditional martial arts forms. However, I have only ever seen it in context of a weapon (staff, sword, etc) and never as a hand to hand technique. The gist of it is that you can avoid a high swing from a long pole weapon and counter attack without having to shift your feet or move out of range.
It’s true practical usefulness is debatable though
Moonraker was definitely a nadir in the Bond film franchise, and it’s filled with visual awfulness, but this scene has to be the absolute worst, because it’s
1.) completely unnecessary
2.) REALLY badly done, even though it would have been trivial to do even this better than it had been. They just badly “looped” the shot of the pigeon, with no attempt to minimize the jerkiness of the move. The damned Puina Cat Chow commercials (“Chow Chow Chaw”) were done better than this.
