If Tim Burton had spent a little more time on the script and a little less time hiring EVERY actor in Hollywood, it probably would have turned out better.
But it has Joe Don Baker! How could you not like it? 
The Butterfly Effect - Although it wasn’t flawless without him, I blame this mainly on Ashton Kutcher. The editing and direction are done quite well, and all other acting is fairly good; but they could have cast a dying salmon as the lead role and it wouldn’t have made a difference except: :eek: Super hot Ashton isn’t in the movie?!?!! Why would anyone go and see it!?
I second Underworld and LXG.
As much as I love Kill Bill, and it isn’t in any way dire; I’ll have to mention Volume 2. When I learned of the scene that was deleted (and not even shot… but it was in the original script) of Yuki’s revenge… I don’t see how QT could have cut that out…
It would have added that Extra action and gore that everyone was missing from the film, and make some people (who love the first… and hate the second because of the lack of action) enjoy it.
The Village had a little more potential from the hype it got… but I still enjoyed it.
Well, as long as we’re tossing vitriol in Tim Burton’s direction, let’s not let him get away with Planet of the Apes.
Christ almighty, when I saw the previews, the setup looked really, really interesting. A completely different take on the humans-versus-apes conflict. The preview I originally saw led me to believe that Mark Wahlberg would end up being a William Wallace-like character, leading the armies of humans against the apes in repeated conflicts in an effort to establish their own country.
Little did I know we’d have one big fight, it would suck, and the twist would be a complete ripoff of a Kevin Smith comic.
To paraphrase Chappelle-as-Rick-James, I wish I had more hands, so I could give this piece-of-crap four thumbs down.
Troy. Get rid of Bradd Pitt AKA I can’t even be troubled to ACT the freakin part I was hired for. Oh, and let’s change the story so the ol’ Pittster looks like a big hero.
Nearly every sci-fi in the 80’s, most in the 90’s. No the robots don’t have to kill us. No techonology isn’t evil, people are evil.
**LXG ** is on my list.
AVP. I was **so ** looking forward to this: then I heard what Paul did.
Those are only recent ones. If I went home and went through my collection, I’m sure I could find a LOT more.
Day of the Triffids – the book was a blueprint for the perfect monster movie: great monster, great scenes of terror, and a solution that requires work to defeat them. The movie came up with a magic solution, and was just plain dull otherwise.
Fletch – the book was written almost entirely in dialog. It was a taut thriller that drew you in and kept you there (the cover of the book had no picture, just the text of the first few paragraphs. You read it and you were hooked). So they turned it into a self-indulgent and unfunny comedy to show off just how much of a jerk Chevy Chase can be.
Alien – could have been a decent film if the crew of the Nostromo hadn’t been dumber than a brace of Darwin Award winners.
I’ll also add The Matrix – most of which was just plain dull.
Day of the Triffids felt to me like two movies kind of bolted together: one a fairly routine monster movie set in a lighthouse, the other a vivid and scary fantasy about the end of civilization itself. The latter I found very effective, and watched the movie wondering how they were going to resolve it. Answer: show people going to church?! What the fuck? :smack:
It would have been interesting, but in my opinion, the movie was long enough already and the Yuki thing would have seemed pointless. Kewl, sure, but pointless.
Read the book.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Johnny Mnemonic . I was enormously excited to hear it was being made, and then equally disappointed to see the result. William Gibson’s original was so cinematic and visual that, with no more than a little reformatting, the story itself could have been the screenplay. Instead, they made Johnny more or less a good guy instead of a criminal, almost ignored the War Whale, and left out the climactic fight on the Lo-Tek’s killing floor.
What’s Johnny without a razorgirl?
Of course, it’s hard to get any kind of good movie out of a plot where everybody knows the ending and it’s a Deus ex machina. 
I second that choice! God, what a waste of potential!
Wonder if they’ll ever make a movie out of Wolfe’s A Man in Full?
I think it was done on one of The Simpsons “Treehouse of Terror” Halloween specials.
Tengu already named the Ray Bradbury Theatre half-hour adaptation. Specifically, it was episode #3.6, broadcast 11 August 1989. Kiel Martin (formerly “J.D.” from Hill Street Blues) played Eckles, the hapless butterfly-stomper. The cheezy effects stole some of the story’s (heh) thunder but otherwise the adaptation was bang-on. I really don’t see how you could stretch this to a two-hour film, unless the last half was some lame attempt to “fix” things.
The Postman
How Costner make the Rockies scenes look unengaging and detached was such an egregarious mistake–I will never know, and not hope to know, how he did it.
Which, apparently, they are doing. For some inexplicable reason, there’s giant bats in the world after the butterfly gets smashed. (Hmmm, where have I seen a movie with giant bats before? Oh yeah, Graveyard Shift, what festering piece of dreck that was.)
Achilles is a hero and as far as I can remember, his characterization in *Troy *was pretty close to source material although the plot and some of the other characters were not.
Granted, I was a bit dissapointed by the movie but it wasn’t an unmitigated disaster like most of the other films listed in this thread. The biggest problem I had with it was the loss of the gods although I thought the way they handled their absence was nice.
After reading the Illiad this summer, I was somewhat glad they took the gods out. They would have been more distracting then anything else, IMHO.
I remember seeing that play years ago, and almost drifting off to sleep during it. Then there were suddenly scenes which perked my interest, and made me think this wasn’t so bad after all. Then I realized those were scenes where the lines were pulled from Shakespeare!
Judge Dredd. Take Britain’s most popular comic book antihero, who comes prepackaged with not only some of the coolest adventure and crime-based stories set in a uniquely fascist future, but has a cavalcade of characters that are just aching to be utilised almost exactly as portrayed already… and then fuck it up royally by changing everything that made it fundamentally what it was.
[ul]
[li]Do not have an origin story that has no real motivation for character development.[/li][li]Do not include Judge Hershey and not utilise her.[/li][li]Do not have a backdrop of Mega-City One, then have most of the story take place outside the city boundaries in a rather dull featureless wasteland.[/li][li]Do not take Dredd’s helmet off.[/li][li]Do not take a character like Fergee and turn him into whiny Rob Schneider.[/li][li]Do not introduce the classic, and wonderfully realised, Angel Gang and then kill them off twenty minutes later.[/li][li]Do not have stupidity like a fireball chasing the lead characters, but then have it flowing in the complete opposite direction you have already established it travels.[/li][li]Do not pretend that Armand Assante is Sylvester Stallone’s cloned twin brother.[/li][li]Do not include a character in the story that is from a completely different 2000AD series (i.e. Hammerstein, from ABC Warriors).[/li][li]Just don’t.[/li][li]Please.[/li][/ul]