I used to think the movie with the stupidest title was “The divine secrets of the ya ya sisterhood”. I have no idea if the movie is any good or not, because the title is so stupid, I would never want to watch it.
There is a new contender for the stupidest film title ever though. Tobey Maguires new film “Seabiscuit”. I know this is something to do with Horse racing, and the name comes from a horse (stupid horse names is a whole thread in itself). Seabiscuit sounds like the story of an undersea snack for divers. Maybe it’ll have a sequel called Aquacake, or a maybe one set in the future called Spacesandwich.
Any other nominations for stupidest film title ever?
Never heard of Seabiscuit over here (I assume you mean the horse). Is it famous over there? As such, the movie carries the sole responsibility for stupidity of the name in my head.
The Big Hit featured a character who couldn’t pay his kidnapped daughter’s ransom becuase had recently been bankrupted by the failure of his latest film, Taste the Golden Spray.
On reflection, I guess a really bad film title would be a forgettable one. I meant to give some examples…
…but they slipped my mind.
Some of the titles cited by Harry and Michael Medved in The Golden Turkey Awards are actually quite comical, including I Dismember Mama; Rat Fink a Boo-Boo (it was supposed to be Rat Fink & Boo-Boo but the printer mistook the ampersand for an “a”) and The Incredibly Strange Creatures that Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies.
The horse “Seabiscuit” was pretty famous – I’m not a follower of sports, but even I knew about the horse, although I knew nothing about the details. OTOH, younger people, who didn’t grow up in so much of the cultural fallout of the Depression, might not be so familiar. On the Third hand, such movie titles are pretty common and defensible. You could argue that Bird is a stupid name for a movie about a musician, but any fan of Parker would argue the point against you.
My choices for badly-named movies (in that they’re misleading):
Sorceror – The remake of the French movie The Wages of Fear. The title (and the trailer, for that matter) might give you the idea that this is about some Carlos Castaneda-ish shahman or something. It’s actually a pretty good flick about down-and-outers trying to transport highly explosive dynamite (with some of the nitro pooled dangerously at the bottom) through South American jungles to an oil-well fire. Even after I saw the movie, I couldn’t understand the title. (It turns out to be the name of one of the jeeps).
Dreamquest – sounds like a D&D adventure, or another shaman movie.
Sometimes a movie title is deliberately obscure or misleading (Get Shorty, Million Dollar Legs (I understand)). That’s no problem.
BTW, aside from lacking a hyphen, what’s wrong with Eight Legged Freaks? Seems pretty descriptive and accurate to me.
The Blair Witch Project should have been called Give me $6.00 while I slap your face and laugh at you, you Rube!. At least then we would have known what we were getting ourselves into.
Current nomination: Dumb and Dumberer. Yes, I know what it’s playing off of, but it’s just stupid.
And I hate to diss a Pixar movie, but John Lasseter’s upcoming automobile-based film seems to be saddled with the totally uninspiring name of Cars. Then again, I thought “Finding Nemo” was a tad doofy when I first heard of it…
I dont know if the title “Dude Where`s My Car” is stupid just by itself or if it is a negative influence on me for watching the movie(which is stupider still).
Roger Ebert has said that “The Other Side of the Mountain, Part II” should have been called “This Side of the Mountain”, and “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,” which was released a year after the first movie should have been “I Know What You Did the Summer Before Last”
Actually, if you’re looking for stupid movie names, then The Never-Ending Story II has to take the cake (isn’t that like ordering two “bottomless” cups of coffee?), followed pretty closely by The Return of the Living Dead II and The Return of the Living Dead III.