Sometimes a title is the best thing about a movie. Sometimes the title is, in fact, awesome, and the movie is a complete waste of time. In such cases, someone needs to buy the remake rights, scrap the plot, nuke the story, disappear the characters, and start from scratch: doing justice to the awesome title.
Perhaps the archetypal recent example: Snakes on a Plane. The height of awesomeness for this movie was the moment the final preview ended before the first screening. From there, all downhill.
Less celebrated, I think, but even more worthy: Mars Needs Women. The movie is, by all accounts, dreadful on a Plan 9 scale. But the title is a thing of beauty: suggestive, campy, sinister, amusing, weird. There’s a lot of potential in that title, and someone needs to make a movie worthy of it ASAP.
What terrific titles would you like to see attached to much better movies?
(NOTE: You know what’s not a good answer to this thread? Starship Troopers. Or I, Robot. This isn’t a thread for rehashing old arguments about adaptations you didn’t care for.)
TERRIBLE movie, with almost non-existent effects, owing to the almost non-existent budget. Sadly, the Darryl Hannah TV movie wasn’t much better. You could do justice to that poster with CGI effects nowadays.
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (AKA Doppelganger) – SF movie about a Counter-Earth on the other side of the sun.It turns out everything there is mirror image. That’s it. Yawn. A ten year old could do better
The Terrornauts – schlocky but interesting title. Schlocky but interesting poster. Based, I’m told, on a story by SF great Murray Leinster. BORING movie that had zip to do with the poster (or Leinster’s original story. I’ll bet):
UFO–Target Earth — criminally dull and borig movie that made no sense. None. Some people seem to think you don’t need anything but lab equipment to make a science fiction film, I think:
Sorceress – Nifty Poster. BAD special effects. Really bad acting, editing, and fiolm quality. It looks like a bad European movie dubbed into English, but it was all made by Roger Corman. Yechh. At least it’s entertainingly bad:
Metamorphoses AKA Winds of Change – aAn intriguing idea. They got together a lot of talented comic book artists (Mike Ploog, for instance), animators who had worked on the original Fantasia, and modern rock acts (The Rolling Stones) and were going to make a sort of modern Fantasia, wwith rock music, state-of-the-art animation, and all of it based on mythology from Ovid’s classic poem The Metamorphoses. It should have been great.
It was unspeakably awful. Many of the rock acts never showed, or pulled out. The animation is awful and uninspired. It wasn’t clear what was going on, so they got Peter Ustinov to narrate WAYYYYY after the fact (It didn’t work in The Thief and the Cobbler, either, but that’s another safd story).
I Spit on Your Grave. I haven’t seen it, but it’s basically torture porn from reading an analysis of it. I was kind of hoping for something more…out there.
