Good stuff in bad movies, etc., you wish someone good would steal

Cafe Society
1

I’ve seen a lot of bad movies, read a lot of bad SF novels, and watched some seriously awful anime, and it’s surprising how often even a bad film will have some little frisson of goodness that you find yourself wishing desperately had been done by someone good, someone who knows what he’s doing.

Frex, take the movie “Terminal Virus” a Roger Corman SF stinker. It’s central plotline has HUGE possibilities. In the future, a biotech weapon goes awry, and a virus is unleashed that renders human being poisonous to each other when they make love (yeah, obvious AIDs analogy). It is invariably fatal, uncurable and kills both partners.

This has the effect of dropping the birth rate to zero, heading the human race toward extinction and dividing the sexes into isolated encampments that have a motto of “Shoot first. Shoot second. Shoot third. Do not ask questions.”

A brilliant young scientist comes up with a cure and kindaps a guard at a women’s encampment to test it on. She’s not enthusiastic about the project, neither is the guy the kidnap to test it. Complications ensue.

This story has great potential, which of course was never realized in Corman’s movie. I would have played it that the young scientist, being ethical, tries to persuade the kidnapped gaurd that it’s OK and also tries to romance her into it. It coulda been played for romantic comedy, straight romance, sexy cheese, or any combination of the above, and worked very well. But the Corman flick managed to do … none of the above, it was just … dull.

If only someone good would take that plotline and treat it right.

Not all such bits from bad movies are major plot elements, sometimes they’re tiny things. In the adult anime Dragon Pink theres a scene where the slavegirl Pink is set upon by her master Santa, stripped naked and tied in front of the other membres of their party. Santa’s doing it so he can use her as bait for a particular kind of monster he needs to kill. How does Pink respond? “No, please don’t.” “What do you think you’re doing?” “Not in front of the others.” She just says, “It’s too early.” A very tasty, very revealing bit of dialogue when you think about it. A few steals of that caliber and you’ve got yourself a tasty B movie.

Anybody else find themselves wishing somebody good would redo a bad movie’s plot, use a bad movie’s cahracter(s) etc.?

2

I always thought John Carpenter’s They Live had a really cool premise that could have resulted in a clever, satirical SF thriller with touches of black comedy. Instead, we get 1) Rowdy Roddy Piper and 2) a pointless 20-minute fight scene about putting on a pair of glasses.

I have rarely been more disappointed in a movie.

I will now quickly take cover and await the imminent attacks of the movie’s many fans. :smiley:

3

There’s only one man who can save the Earth, he spends twenty minutes fighting a guy to get him to put a pair of glasses on, and you don’t see the satire?

4

I don’t think Coming to America is a bad movie, but neither is it an especially good movie. It doesn’t deserve to be wiped from the record, nor does it deserve to be regarded as a cinema classic. It pretty much deserves the fate it’s received – to live on as cable filler and be watched by people looking for a little light entertainment.

Yet IMHO Coming to America is noteworthy because it provides a different take on the timewarn “Cinderella story” romantic comedy. Conventionally these movies put the focus on the spirited-but-common woman who lands herself a rich husband. In Coming to America, the central character is the wealthy prince who wants to marry an independent, modern woman instead of a well-groomed noblewoman with no mind of her own.

This twist probably hurt the movie at the box office, since the main audience for such films is usually women so it makes sense to make the heroine the lead character. But no matter what obstacles the Cinderella heroine has to face, she is ultimately trading up. I think it’s more romantic and more interesting to examine the character who wants to marry someone others would consider “beneath him” because he truly loves and values her. (Unlike in more a typical Cinderella tale, in this one the prince falls for the woman with full knowledge that she’s not of his social status.) Coming to America doesn’t spend much time on fleshing out the prince’s character or depicting his inner conflict, but if such a thing were done and done well it could make for an interesting movie.

I also found it a refreshing change of pace to have the “Prince Charming” character be a black African instead of a white European. It’s not just little white kids who have fairy-tale fantasies, so it’s nice to see a movie present non-white royalty for a change. Besides that, the idea that a contemporary European nation would be ruled by a non-figurehead monarchy isn’t even remotely plausible. If you want a real old-fashioned prince in modern times, he’s got to come from somewhere else.

I watch Coming to America whenever I happen to see that it’s on TV, and I always enjoy it. But I’d enjoy it even more if someone made a similar movie that devoted more to developing the characters and exploring the possibilities of the “royal” role instead of the “common” role.

5

An immortal amnesiac battles monsters for a secret branch of the Catholic church.

I love Van Helsing’s premise. But throw in the bad CGI, and “Dracula needs to channel lightning through Frankenstein’s monster to hatch his egg sacs” and it’s just stupid.

6

There’s an episode of the old Twilight Zone that I thought had fabulous possibilities – it’s the one where a bunch of people are trapped in a diner and it develops that one of them is an alien – but which one? And why is he or she hiding? The situation was pregnant with all kinds of possibilities, but they blew off the ending by finally having one guy reach or a cup of coffee with a third hand. The counterman then removes his hat to reveal a third eye. What!? What’s the point of all this – you waste thiis beautiful setup on a stupid sight gag? I think Richard Matheson wrote it – an unworthy effort from the author of some great SF and many of the best TZ episodes. Maybe he had a deadline, or it was a bad week for him.

I eventuallty wrote my own version, a science fiction mystery play for radio called Winter’s Night where I translated the action to a bar in central Massachusetts during a snowstorm. And I gave it a decent ending this time. I eventually produced the damned thing and got it broadcast when I was living out in Salt Lake City. But the only time I could get was 3 AM on a Sunday. I doubt if anybody ever heard it.

I’d love to do it again, but I’d want to rewrite it – after being away from it, I can see all the bad lines and errors. But I still love the concepts and the resolution.

There are a lot of the old Outer Limits episodes that I think could be “mined” for their ideas. Harlan Ellison and Stephen King have gone on record as saying that they loved the old series, but to me it seemed as if the writers would get hold of an interesting science fiction concept and not know what the hell to do with it.

7

Not when those 20 minutes of screen time could be spent exploring the premise in many better, more imaginative ways.

8

The ‘twist’ in that episode is that there are two aliens. One from Venus, and one from Mars, and one is hunting the other (I can’t recall which).

As I recall, the original story had the added twist that one of the aliens was in fact disguised as a dog.

9

No, you’re thinking of Steven Spielberg Amazing Stories. Lots of interesting concepts, but not a good resolution to any of them (even the best was pretty stupid).

10

As I recall, neither was chasing the other – I noted that there were two aliens. And, again, as I recall, this was an original story, not based on any other. That’s not to say that there weren’t similar stories. Fredric Brown’s Puppet Show sounds like what you describe.

No, I’m describing the old Outer Limits, but a lot of the Amazing Stories shows fit that mold, too, I’ll admit. Some of the Amazing Stories were verywell directed, though. And one, interestingly enough, was a story that Matheson had written for the original Twilight Zone, but they never filmed. (It’s the one with the dolls – but I’ve never seen it.)

11

A depressed man, living a life that’s going nowhere amongst shallow and vapid people suddenly finds everything turned literal: he is forced to live the same shallow, vapid day over and over, and nothing he does makes any difference whatsoever.

This premise, the ingenious seed of Groundhog Day goes horribly wrong when BillMurray decides to spend his hellish eternity wooing Andie McDowell, and finally escapes this hell by falling asleep in her arms. WHAT the FUCK?

I mean, consider the possibilities:
-Play with the idea that he’s trapped in this one day for a geological time period: he relives the same day not twice, not a dozen times, but hundreds of thousands of times. Millions of times. Trillions of times. (They hint at this by having him a virtuoso in several fields by the end of the movie, but they could’ve played with it a lot more).
-Play with his descent into insanity. Yes, they show him robbing an armored car. Yes, they show him committing repeated suicide in probably the most inspired sequence in the movie. But what about when he broke down and raped Andie McDowell, figuring that she’d be back to normal and forget about it the next day? What about the ten thousand days he spent slowly infiltrating the White House and then a nuclear silo until he finally managed to cause global nuclear annihilation? What about his torture phase? No matter what he does, it’ll be erased tomorrow; what does this do to a man’s psyche?
-End the movie with the alarm clock going off and the radio announcers giving the same spiel as before: he’s trapped.
-End the movie with one final and additional scene: after he’s finally escaped onto February 3rd, he wakes up the next morning, and it’s February 3 again, and he says, “oh, shit.”

Such potential, wasted by a saccharine execution that that bastion of crappy acting Andie McDowell.

I would love to see Wes Craven remake the movie.

Daniel

12

IIRC, Groundhog Day was preceded by a short indy film that used the same idea. I don’t know if GH stole the idea or came up with it independently,. and I’ve never seen the other film.

I actually like GH, despite the fact that it stars Bill Murray. I wouldn’t put it down as a bad handling of the basic concept.

13

Have you seen it recently? I suspect that it’s one of those movies that if you see as a kid seems pretty good, but if you see it as an adult is pretty painful. Like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Andie McDowell is jawdroppingly bad. I mean, I could act better than her, and that’s saying a whole hell of a lot. And the movie’s ending makes just enough sense to be infuriating. Were it totally random, that’d be okay; but his achievement of Andienookie is just significant enough that we’re left to wonder about what sort of insane God figures that getting into Andie’s Panties finally taught Bill the lesson he needed to know.

Daniel

14

OK, I’m going to have to disagree with Left Hand about Groundhog Day and Evil Captor about They Live.

Groundhog Day is a great movie despite the presence of The Emotionless Andie McDowell. It’s Bill Murray’s most complex and interesting role until Lost in Translation. The script originally called for a time span of 10,000 years, but it was later amended to 10,000 days (which, IMHO, is plenty of time). It’s supposed to be a romantic comedy, not Hellraiser. Considering its genre, it’s freakin’ brilliant. Compare it to any given Hugh Grant movie, for instance.

They Live is one of my favorite movies, but face it, EC, the whole fight sequence is not a parody; it’s just bad filmmaking. Until that scene, the movie is brilliant. But the wheels totally fall off the wagon at that point, and it just never recovers. It’s a bizzare movie because it goes from “excellent high concept” movie to “completely stupid badfilm” in about three seconds. But hey, those are the two kinds of movies I like the most, so it’s a win-win for me.

15

I saw “Groundhog Day” years ago and loved it, but I didn’t realize Andie McDowell was so bad an actress until I recently saw “Three Weddings and a Funeral.” Yeesh.

It didn’t help that her character was such a slut. We’re supposed to be rooting for her?

Hugh Grant is a fantastic actor to convince us that he really wanted her.

16

Don’t bother disagreeing with me as I have not posted wrt They Live. I think **Winston Bongo ** is the drum you should be pounding on.

Another plot I wish they’d steal is the one from Imma Youjo 2, which handled the plot quite nicely but I’d like to see it done in a live action film, preferably an American one as the Japanese live action versions of their anime that I’ve seen all suck. Spoilers all over the place to follow, but it’s an adult anime so this may nto matter.

[spoiler]In Imma Youjo 2, a powerful Count loses his wife and child during childbirth but finds a baby on his doorstep shortly thereafter. He feels the baby was meant for him, to make up for the loss of his wife and child. He takes her to a fortuneteller (it’s set in medieval Europe) who tells him the baby girl is a witch, and should be killed as she’ll wreak havoc if she grows up. The Count refuses, so she tells him the only non-lethal way to avoid her fate is to raise her as a man. Which the Count agrees to do.

When the child grows up to become “Count Mayatola” she runs afoul of some witchhunters who are killing off whole villages in their witchhunts. The witch hunters are a foul and nasty lot who kidnap all the young women in a village when they “purify” it so they can use them as sex toys in their dungeons. When they find out Count Mayatola is really a woman, they accuse him/her of hiding her sex because she’s a witch, and take her into their dungeons to be their latest sex toy.

This of course is exactly the WRONG thing to do, as each and every sexual act they force her to perform, or perform upon her, brings her that much closer to becoming a witch, which means the witch hunters are that much closer to being massacred.[/spoiler]

It’s very similar to Carrie when you think about it, except that I think this plotline is better than Carrie, because the villains truly, deeply deserve what happens to them, and there’s a wonderful clockwork inevitability to the way their very nastiness leads to their doom. Plus, there’s the very nice irony that the witch hunters are totally fucked over when they finally DO catch themselves a witch.

Something like this in a B-movie knockoff would work out very nicely. Hell, the Charmed people could steal it and use it as a story arc – no need to be explicit about what happens to Count Mayatola in the witch hunters’ dungeons, though frankly that added a certain ‘mmph’ to the story AFAIC.

17

Having just re-read my copy of The Twilight Zone Companion, I’ll mention that

(a) the original ending had the alien revealed to be a dog in the diner, and

(b) the final twist of the ending is that the three-handed Martian wasn’t expecting the three-eyed Venusian to show up – since the Venusians had intercepted the Martian fleet and fuxxor’d their plans. The viewers were waiting for one alien, and got two…

18

You know, you used to be one of my favorite posters, until this thread. Anyone who dislikes both Groundhog’s Day and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is my sworn enemy for life. Now I’m going to have to hunt you down like you got six fingers.

Well, okay, I might be exagerating slightly. But only slightly!

19

Mine is just a scene within a Robin Williams movie. I can’t remember the name of the movie, though I think it’s “What Dreams May Come.”

Williams dies and wakes up in heaven. The landscape is made of paint. It’s just stunning, visually, though I can’t recommend the rest of the movie.

20

On the contrary, this thread has served its purpose well. I was wondering after the movie what sadistic lunatics had recommended that I watch such a travesty, and I figured posting about it here would flush y’all out. Now I know who you are.

Beware.

Daniel
:wink: for the mods