Movie selection mistakes

In My Humble Opinion
1

Over in this thread, about good or great movies we’ve never managed to catch, I mentioned that I hadn’t seen Rollerball. (I know, shame on me. Go to the other thread to castigate me.)

Then, after I posted, I remembered there’s a story about my not having seen that movie. I was at the video store, browsing around (half the time I know what I want; half the time I’m looking for ideas), and I spotted Rollerball on the shelf in the cult section. I said, hey, yeah, I need to see that, and I picked it up. This was at Hollywood Video, where they put the actual cardboard photo/marketing box on the shelf to catch your eye, and the tape is behind it in the featureless white plastic case with just the movie name on the spine. In this case, that original box wasn’t there, but I knew what Rollerball was about, and I knew I wanted to see it, so it didn’t bother me, and I picked up the movie.

I get home, pop in the tape, and I discover that I have not in fact rented Rollerball, the Norman Jewison film starring James Caan, but Rollerblade, an extremely low-budget action/sexploitation sleaze-o-rama. I have a fascination for bad movies, so I did watch some of it (fast-forwarding a lot; it’s pretty awful), but it certainly isn’t something I would have chosen consciously. I just didn’t notice that the title on the white box wasn’t what I thought it was.

And now, to this day, I still haven’t seen Rollerball. It’s not that I was traumatized or anything; dumb bad movies usually roll off my back. In a weird sort of way, it’s more that I had my chance at Rollerball and missed it.

Anybody else do anything similar? Thought you were renting (or going out to) one movie, and it turned out to be something else, something unexpected and totally different? Could be good, could be bad, it just wasn’t what you thought it was. I don’t mean renting a movie and finding out the movie had been mis-marketed, and wasn’t what you thought it would be (like the Don Johnson/Rebecca DeMornay movie was sold as an erotic thriller, but has absolutely no sex in it). I mean, you either misread the title, or there was a different tape in the box, or you walked into the wrong theatre, or whatever.

Anyone?

2

Whoops – small clarification – the Don Johnson/Rebecca DeMornay movie referenced above actually does have a title: Guilty as Sin. Sorry 'bout that.

3

This is similar, yet on the other hand it’s completely different.
For some reason I had it in my head that SpaceQuest would be a good movie to see. Don’t ask me why. I convinced my wife to go with me, so we got the tickets and walked into the theater. There were about 6 other people in there. This thouroughly convinces my wife that we ought to blow it off. This was at the Metreon in SF. 12 or so theaters to choose from, so we walk down the hall and sneak into The Beach which was actually pretty good.
Several weeks later, in a fit of stupidity, I rented SpaceQuest. I nearly shot myself in the head after subjecting myself to that absolute piece-o-crap movie. I informed my wife that she had no idea what kind of torture she had saved us from on that fateful night at the Metreon.

4

So I went to blockbuster with a girl I’d been seeing (we’d just met a few days prior to this). We didn’t have any particular movie we wanted to see… and so after looking around for a while we found An Awfully Big Adventure. Hey, it’s got a cute name and it stars Hugh Grant. Must be a fun romantic comedy, right?

nope. Quite depressing in fact.

Just one of the many various reasons the girl vanished off the face of the earth a week after I met her.

5

When i was about ten years old my parents were having a dinner party and rented a video to keep us kids busy while the grown-ups did there thing. It was a busy day and mom didn’t have a lot of time at the video store and picked up a movie (I think was the “Groove Tube” but i probably got the name wrong) that had some child friendly cover art.

so anyway… We throw the video in for a group of kids age 9-13. Its porn. Well maybe not porn, but to a 10 year old boy it was as close to porn as i had seen. It was more like soft core sex comedy. Naturally we kept it on…until we were checked up on. We ended up watching harry and the hendersons… it just wasn’t the same

6

I once took the video box for A Time to Kill (Schumacher [blech] movie of the Grisham [ack] novel, starring Sandra [yawn] Bullock and Matthew [swoon] McConaughey) off the shelf in the video store and rented it. I got it home, glanced at the title, which seemed to be right, put it in the VCR, and watched an Italian movie about a rapist with leprosy, starring the great Italian actor Nicolas Cage.

Turned out to be an Italian movie entitled Tempo di uccidere, which translates (I assume) as “time to kill” (for my capsule review of which go here).

7

This is why I don’t go to the Metreon. If I see a movie like Star Wars at the AMC I feel ripped off. If I had to pay the $35 DOLLAR (or whatever the fuck it is) ticket price at the Metreon, I’d feel doubly ripped off. Plus the fact that the Metreon is just to strange for me. Every time I step in there I feel like I’ve been teleported to LA.

8

I tried to get a movie I’d remembered from 30 years ago staring Catherine Deneuve.
What I got was the remake version where she has a bit part as her original character’s mother.

9

My sister is a big fan of George Clooney. So, she and her husband go to rent a Clooney movie for a nice “date”-type evening. The one they wanted was (One Fine Day?), some kind of light romance.

They actually rented From Dusk to Dawn.

Nothing further need be said.

10

Like Hollywood Video, my local video rental store puts out the cardboard box as a display, but the videos are all in plain (opaque) plastic boxes behind the display box. One evening we grabbed the tape behind the “Clerks” box only to find when we got home that we had “Citizen Ruth.”

aargh!

11

Went out to study a really bad flick called “Sniper” starring Tom Berringer. There was just this one particular scene I’d heard about that I wanted to check out… but I knew it’d be a bad movie.

Now I know what you’re thinking:
“If it was bad, then it couldn’t get any worse, right?”

Open case.
Insert tape.

Lovely music with scenes of an ocean.
Title sequence with Disney logo…

(What the…???)
Of course, I’m thinking, at this point, “Whaddya mean Disney did a movie about a sniper?”

Continue credits.
“Free Willy 2”

You never saw anyone hit an eject button so fast…

12

Hey, I liked From Dusk till Dawn!

Some of these posts remind me of one of my favorite scenes in Trainspotting- when Renton switches his friend Tommy’s tape of sex with his girlfriend with a soccer highlights video. I can still here it- scooooooooooooore!!!