So I came across this trailer on YouTube for a cheesy-looking 70’s British werewolf movie. One scene in particular (starting at 0:41) immediately struck me. The bit, and its staging, looks almost exactly like a scene from the equally cheesy (yet kid friendlier) 80’s horror/comedy/adventure movie Monster Squad - see for yourself and tell me if I’m crazy. I can’t believe this is coincidence, but this stumps me - in the days before YouTube and such, how did the creators see this trailer?
Any other examples come to mind? The more obscure and odd either movie in the connection is, the better!
It’s a fake. There was no such film. This fake trailer deliberately copies Monster Squad, not the other way around.
Note that the title is “Grindhouse trailer” See IMDB entry for Grindhouse.
Even without that, it’s an obvious fake. The awfulness of the special effects, even Doctor Who at its worst wasn’t that bad, and the shot of Colonel Saunders is a giveaway.
These coincidences exist probably in my own mind, but . . .
In the “Star Trek” movie with Malcolm McDowell, two scenes that I noticed:
One is where McDowell looks at his (watch?). Something about it reminded me of “Time After Time,” but I don’t know that he actually did that in the movie.
When Levar Burton is tied up, it (to me) looked very similar to the scene in “Roots” where someone was tied up. Was that Burton (in “Roots”?) It’s been a while.
There was a incident about ten years ago, when three movies came out with strikingly similar scenes. Two of the movies were “Dark City” and “Requiem for a Dream.” The title of the other movie (the only one of three I didn’t see) eludes me. All three movies came out so close together that it was generally considered impossible that any of them could have been a direct swipe from the others.
Any way, the scene in question has a man - the main protagonist in each - walking along a beachfront boardwalk and walking up a long pier at dawn. In each movie, he’s going to meet a girl who is standing alone at the very end of the pier.
The third movie is House of Sand and Fog. The interesting thing is that the girl that the guy is waiting for in each film is Jennifer Connelly. Oddly, it was a coincidence that these scenes were so similar:
The Thomas Crown Affair and Entrapment. Both released 1999.
Both have a beautiful woman investigating a playboy/thief. Both women are experts in their field - and yet so very alone and disrespected by their male workmates. Both women end up at the protagonist’s private hideaway and make comments about all the other women who must have been there. Both men reply that they have never brought another woman there. Both women fall in love with the thieves and abandon their careers.
Both starring men (Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan) played James Bond.
Now someone will come along with a cite about how it was done with ironic deliberation.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Dreamscape. Both 1984. In both movies Kate Capshaw sees the villain reach into a victim’s chest with his bare hand and pull out the still-beating heart. In both cases, the victim lives, briefly. A Fish named Wanda and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, both 1988 – at the end, a villain gets run over by a steam roller. And lives (At the end of The Naked Gun, also 1988, we also get to see the villain get run over by a steam roller. But he’s dead. Since he was already dead, though, and this was a Zucker/Zucker/Abrams movie, we can’t say that he wouldn’t have lived after the steamroller if he’d still been alive.)
In some cases, the similarity is due to the director. Ridley Scott has a couple of images he’s come back to more than once:
-----At the end, the Villain is being sucked into the void, and is only able to hold on by his fingernails, before the hero/ine blasts him. Alien and Legend
----The Hero finds himself being engulfed by a gang of oriental kids on bike at bight. Bladerunner and Black Rain.
The first view of the secretary in Dr Strangelove almost exactly mirrors the first shot of Lolita in the eponymous Kubrick movie. (Both sunning themselves lying on the ground perpendicular toward the viewer , in the former instance, indoors!)
While not surprising given the same director, it is obscure since no one but myself has drawn attention to it.
I’ve heard that the 1968 version is quite different and had a quick look on IMDb, where I found the comment;
but I can’t find if the specific, repeated scenes I mentioned above were in the original. I admit, I’d actually *like * to know that there was some deliberate game going on between the two productions.
These sorts of accidental resemblances are more common than you might suppose. For instance, consider this plot: A young housewife with a businessman husband who ignores her is fascinated by the adventures of a free-spirited young woman. When she falls and hits her head, she gets amnesia and believes herself to be the young woman she has been fantasizing about. She gets into real adventures fighting criminals where her life is in danger. She begins an affair with a much more exciting man than her husband. Since she has amnesia, neither she nor this new man know she is married. The adventures end happily with the crooks being caught, but then the woman recovers her memories. Her boring husband wants her to come back home with him. The man she has been having an affair with is willing to give her up, but she realizes that she actually loves him more than her husband, so she chooses to stay with him. This is the plot of both American Dreamer and Desperately Seeking Susan, and they came out too close in time to each other to be influenced by each other. Here’s a thread where we found a bunch of these:
Did you go to the timestamp Leaper specified? The two scenes both involve a guy in a phonebooth, turning into a werewolf, while trying to warn someone about the next werewolf attack. Moreover, the transformation takes place during a “cut” caused when the camera circles around the booth (clockwise) and the audience’s view of the transforming is blocked by the corner of the booth. It’s clearly exactly the same scene, although knowing that one of them is a fake trailer made by Quentin Tarantino makes the homage much less surprising. The guy can probably rant for twenty minutes at the drop of a hat on how great The Monster Squad was.
(Actually, it was pretty great, at least when I was twelve. I wonder if it holds up at all?)
A Film Noir-style anime called The Big O also has a woman on a pier. I suspect that it’s a reference to some famous old scene, but I don’t know what it is.
