I finally finish this assignment that’s been making my life miserable for a fortnight, so to celebrate I head for the video shop. I just got a DVD-drive and there’s nothing sweeter to the attention-span challenged than a movie you can stop occasionally to surf the web when you’re bored. I had to search around the shop a bit for one I haven’t seen before. The last really great film I rented was Heat. So I’m looking for something in the same vein. LA Takedown finally convinces me it might be that movie.
What? WHAT? Not only is it in the same, vein, it’s THE SAME &**£$"! MOVIE!!! Same heist! Same “buy you a cup of coffee?” line than Pacino can carry off and this schmuck can’t! The only difference between the two films is that Heat was enjoyable and La Takedown is a pile of yak droppings.
Somebody might have warned me. Was LA Takedown a TV movie or something? Was it by some chance made beforeHeat, at least granting it a modicum of credibility? Or is it, as I suspect, a big pointless rip-off?
The last such film I remember was Teenwolf Too. I enjoyed Teenwolf, being about ten when it came out, so I was hoping for a little more than I got… which was a scene-for-scene reproduction of the original. What on earth is the POINT of this crap? Huh? Huh?
I mentioned this in another thread, but it bears repeating: The Big Green. It was The Mighty Ducks with soccer instead of hockey (which are essentially similar sports), down to the last detail.
I hate to break it to you, Ross, but not only was L.A. Takedown made first, but they were directed by the same guy, Michael Mann. Haven’t seen it so can’t compare the two, but you might want to research who’s “ripping off” whom next time.
I saw Cruel Intentions 2 in my local video rental store. Reading the back of the box, it appeared to be the exact same plot as the original, only with no-name actors. It even had a character that died in the first film.
Cruel Intentions has not right having a sequel. If there was any goodness in the world, the original would have never existed.
Anyway, I remember paying good money to see Mimic. Not that Alien/Aliens style knock-offs aren’t a dime a dozen, but when they went into the subway tunnel room thingie filled with eggs and a giant momma critter, I just wanted to cry. Did the guy who “thought that up”, if you can call it that, have no shame at all? Did he think that maybe we’d never seen Aliens? Was it just a suppressed memory he had? God, that movie sucked.
Well ID4 or Independence Day, is just a mis-mash of scenes from other movies.
A Thousand Acres is about this wealthy man with a large farm that he decides to split up and give to his three daughters before he dies and then they all start in with the back-stabbing and such but befor you say ‘King Lear’ know that it was based on a book call A Thousand Acres.
All three ‘Back To The Future’ movies are basically the same scenes done in a different time period each time. Have you ever noticed that when you watch a scene you can match it up with a corresponding scene in one of the other movies?
Paradise was the same movie as The Blue Lagoon, only with Phoebe Cates rather than Brooke Shields. Of course, being about 13 or so at the time, I didn’t care that Paradise was a total rip-off. I got to see Phoebe Cates’ muffin.
You can show all three at the same time, and when you feed their soundtracks to the same speaker, you get Pink Floyd. But you have to be careful to do it right.
Never actually watched the movie, nor do I remember the title, but a few years back, I’d see a sci-fi movie cover at the video store that depicted a starship that looked eerily like a Y-Wing from Star Wars. Upon closer inspection, I saw that it was a Y-wing, and in the background was a slightly modified A-Wing. Apparently, someone had written a crappy sci-fi script and they just recycled the same models from Star Wars.
It also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Jane Smiley was quite straight forward about it being a modern update of Lear. Updating Shakespeare to a modern setting is hardly a new thing. Robert B. Parker used Lear as a starting point for Hugger Mugger. Forbidden Planet is the Bard’s The Tempest, and a better story, to boot. I would consider ripping-off to be using someones else’s ideas on the sly or copying someone without their knowledge or permission and doing it badly. Do it well, and it’s an homage.
It isn’t unusual to remake a movie with a bigger budget and call it a sequel. T2 is more a remake of The Terminator than a continuation and it’s a great movie. Teen Wolf, Too remakes Teen Wolf (badly), substituting boxing for basketball. The Evil Dead was remade as Evil Dead 2.
In the case of the Terminator and Evil Dead movies, the second movie is what the dierctor wanted to make in the first place, but didn’t have the money for. After the unexpected success of the first low budget affair, they were given a much larger budget for a sequel, and took the same story, changed some details, upped the effects a lot, and made the movie they wanted to make.
The situation in the op sounds like Mann remade his own movie for the big screen when he had the chance. I saw the same thing happen a few years ago with the movie Malice, which was a mostly inferior remake of the tv movie “The Operation”, but with better dialog (by Aaron Sorkin).
The thing is, Cruel Intentions 2 was never meant to be a sequel. That “movie” is actually the pilot of the tv show, based on Cruel Intentions, which was supposed to be called ** Manchester Prep**. For some reason (cough) the networks decided that the pilot was too racey, so the show never aired. Instead it was marked as the prequel(not sequel) to Cruel Intentions.
As for being the same friggin movie…I saw a TV movie, which was released January of 93’(good ole imdb…) called ** Survive The Night** which was about three women who are in Brooklyn at night. They accidentally do something to piss off some gang members, and then are ruthlessly hunted by said gang members. Later that year, in October, ** Judgment Night** is released. It has the same plot, and the only difference is that the cast is male and better known. Then of course there’s ** Dante’s Peak** (feb. 97’)vs ** Volcano**(april 97’) of which the major difference is one takes place in Calli the other in Oregon… With either set of movies, it seems to me that one script-writer cribbed from the other, but the diffence in release dates are so small as to be unable to assign blame conclusively.
There are also some rip-offs of flicks where the rip-off is pretty good (though rip-offs all the same). For instance, Reservoir Dogs, though a great flick, is a rip-off of City on Fire with Chow-Yun Fat.
Though a lot of American remakes of foreign films pale in comparison to the originals (Three Men & A Baby, The Vanishing).