Event Horizon really pissed me off. An exploration ship goes to another dimension and reappears years later. From clues and a short bit of log footage, the entire crew went mad. Go from this great premise to a typical kill one person at a time through various fucked up methods bullshit formula movie. Explore wherever the ship went or something, not a goddamn sci-fi horror movie along the lines of Alien where people are killed one by one during the film. It’s been done to death.
oh no my friend…
The rave is on an island…in Puget Sound…where an ‘Age of Exlporation’ era SPAINARD mad scientist/black magician has been making zombies for centuries… the “House” of “House of the Dead” barely factors into it…
Oh god, yes. My husband and I called his sci-fi-loving sister when we got home after seeing this opening night, trying to call her in case she was going to a late show. We were too late, but at least we got someone to bitch to about it. It was like halfway through the script, the writer died, and a producer said “Hey, I just saw Hellraiser again last weekend, I know how to finish this.” (Neill’s makeup really sucked when he was in Hellraiser mode, which was a pity considering how high-quality the SFX were earlier in the film.) I hated it so much because it had so much promise, then chucked it all out the window.
Yeah, what a waste that was: a spaceship that’s been on a dimensional trip to hell by mistake and returned possessed by actual demons is a good SF/horror idea - crew all tooled up to fight alien horrors but powerless in the face of pure evil, dawning realisation that All Is Not As It Seems - you could even have Old Nick offer a robot crew member a soul {since that’s what all robot crew members seem to want} in exchange for the souls of the others. Shit, it’s a movie about a friggin’ haunted spaceship - how hard could it be to screw that idea up?
The other one was Deep Impact. I don’t quite get why everyone hates on Armageddon so much. It’s fashionable to bash it, and it’s by no means in the pantheon of great film making, but for a Michael Bay summer SFX blockbuster it delivered the goods.
Personally, a premise that I’m itching to have done right is the Camelot/King Arthur mythos. So far we’ve have the recent Clive Owen/Kiera Knightly vehicle which was mildly entertaining and the utterly forgettable First Knight as well as some other versions over the years but none that truly capture what I see as the potential of a good swords and armor testosterone fest. Something reaching the scope and quality of Braveheart. Beowulf also might fit the bill, though it’s currently in production and it’s unclear if I should be optimistic or not.
Read the IMDB trivia section about the movie. It had a lot of editing and reshooting done to it. Makes sense that it sucked after reading that.
[OT]True. He looked like a giant 7-11 hot dog.[/OT]
Marvel’s The Punisher has a great story line and origin…but 2 movies have managed to screw it up badly.
It would be tough to improve upon Excalibur, which is probably why we haven’t seen an attempt to make a movie faithful to the material in the past 25 years.
A live action rendering of Thunderbirds. Could have been so much fun. Wasn’t. Degenerated into ‘Let’s recycle Spy Kids’.
A live action rendering of The Fantastic Four. Could have been so much fun. Wasn’t. Degenerated into… well, aimless rubbish with (Human Torch excepted) very unspecial FX.
Flatliners – What a great premise for a movie: what do people see when they go through a few seconds of medically induced death on an operating table before being resuscitated? The idea was wasted on a shlocky, hacky movie. I think this was what started my hatred of director Joel Shumacher. The guy has a talent of getting kinda interesting ideas and ruining them (the Batman series, A Time To Kill, 8MM, and Falling Down come to mind).
I toyed with the idea of starting a sister thread:
That movie deserved a better premise
Then I figured, no, better not swamp the SDMB servers. 
I liked Nightwatch. It was odd, surreal, illogical and had plot holes you could stick your arm through, but there was just something about it: maybe the amazing cinematoraphy (like that long falling shot with the nut from the plane) or the clever use of subtitles. Yeah, it could have used a couple more script runs, but I still enjoyed it.
Yeah, and having a fat slob without any particular power as the hero was cool, too.
The Forgotten – Great premise. Kid disappears and every trace that the kid ever existed disappears too. Great mystery, very compelling and terrifing to every parent. What do we end up with?
The aliens did it. 
WTF?
Time machine, the recent movie rendition of the classic Wells novel, started off fairly interesting but turned exponentially less interesting and intelligent and was actually pretty annoying at the end. But the element of time travel alone opens up for so many interesting possibilities that I’d want to see somebody put a lot of thought into the movie and make it better.
I totally agree. I watched this w/ my father when it came out on DVD, and we were, for some odd reason, expecting it to be about windtalkers. It is, in fact, why we rented it in the first place. Very disappointing, and very forgettable.
Yes. There are a couple of images in that movie that still hit me sometimes, namely the car crash and seeing tjat person unexpectedly fly up into the horisont. Both surprising and horrifying. The latter was of course part of the horrible alien wrap-up, but I think I oculd’ve accepted it if wasn’t, you know, such lazy writing and so unsatisfying in comparison to the mystery that the first half of the movie was.
To be fair, we can’t say the storyline diverged much from Crichton’s novel.
Not one of my faves, but I agree that Shadow of the Vampire was indeed great.
My vote is for The House on Haunted Hill. It started off interesting enough, with an eccentric rich guy offering a group of people $1,000,000 each to stay in a haunted house overnight. They later find out that it used to be an insane assylum and they all went mad and killed each other. There was also a psycho doctor who did all kinds of unnecessary surgery. Could’ve been a decent horror flick, right?
Wrong.
They completely cop out at the end and have the souls of the dead people in this big black inky ghost thing. Sigh…so much wasted potential.