Yes, but two whiffs doesn’t change the fact that the premise is interesting enough to deserve a good movie. 
(My favorite critical comment on The Island is, quoted from memory, "Michael Bay doesn’t have a script; he has a deck of cards with the suits “EXPLOSION”, “FISTFIGHT”, “CHASE”, and “SEX SCENE” that he shuffles and deals at random.)
Another MST3K stinker: Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. Though it’s old hat now, the idea of someone’s consciousness being drawn into a false reality and having to fight the totalitarian system was totally new back when it was made (1970s?). Unfortunately, it sucked. It was shot on videotape. And all the actors were terrible, except for Raul Julia, who also kind of sucked too.
It could have been a revolutionary tale that predated The Matrix by decades but as it is it’s one of the worst movies Mike and the bots ever riffed on.
BrainGlutton has a point. The movie took a novel that I found to be a real page-turner, and just sucked all life and entertainment value out of it, despite having a pretty top-notch cast.
Yeah, but they were great chases and explosions!
I’ve said it before:
If you’re making a movie about teenaged vampires called “The Lost Boys”, why not go all the way with the dark Peter Pan retelling? Make the protagonist a girl romanced by the lead vamp, and seduced by the promise of never having to grow old or assume adult responsibility. Give the vampire hunter a hook for a hand. It could have been cool.
Instead we got a very '80’s vampire movie starring the Cories.
Well, here’s one that apparently no one saw but me: The Trigger Effect. Premise: the breakdown of societal order when the power goes out everywhere, and no one can get news about what’s going on.
At least, that should have been the premise. Something large, an ensemble cast maybe, spanning across several towns. Instead, we get one rather dull family’s reactions and attempt to escape, without any real sense of the scale of what should have been city-wide anarchy. They just plain blew it.
That’s actually pretty brillant. Where were you twenty years ago when they made the damn thing!
Actually the original premise was to have them be evil little kid vampires.
Yeah, IMDB writeup here.
Forget science goofs; Hollywood is full of people who couldn’t do science if their lives depended on it. What really kills my suspension of disbelief is when people act in ways they never, ever would in real life.
I’m not talking about major characters evincing unusual emotions – I understand that. I’m talking about background people, or crowd behavior, so implausible that I turn to my spouse and groan, and she knows what I mean without discussion.
At least one such moment occurred in Deep Impact. The heroes are fleeing from the coast in anticipation of a giant tsunami from the impact. They’re taking a limited-access highway from DC to the mountains. Only one such highway exists, and it was specifically built for evacuating DC: I-66.
I’ve driven on I-66 many times. I can state with absolute certainty that in the event of the end of the world, the heroes would NOT be able to pull out of the flow of traffic and drive off to safety on the shoulder of the road.
People will pull onto the shoulder on a *normal * day (when there even IS a shoulder – parts of the shoulder are used as an additional lane during rush hours) to block shoulder cheaters from running ahead of stopped traffic and merging back in. These same drivers would NOT wait patiently to die so that Tea Leoni could drive on an unobstructed shoulder to reach the next plot point.
It was just as stupid as the conceit in The Italian Job that the computer-controlled stoplights would be changed to create a massive traffic jam at every intersection and then switched to allow the thieves to speed through. When you get a massive traffic jam, human behavior “blocks the boxes” and you can change all the red lights you like from your laptop without clearing actual physical cars out of actual physical intersections…and everyone watching knows it. It’s just stupid. Only the limousine-and-helicopter set could think such things are plausible.
For a movie premise that deserved a better movie, how about Highlander II?
The concept that earth’s resources were pooled to create a shield to replace the ozone layer and keep out lethal solar radiation – but now the ozone has replenished, yet the Shield Corporation won’t tell us because it would jeopardize their profits – so now an evil corporation, that once saved the world, literally keep us in darkness – what a concept! Could have been a fantastic movie.
Instead, we got the second worst movie I’ve ever paid money for. Just abysmal in every sense of the word.
Sailboat
Kind of a hijack (and not directed to Sailboat obviously) but what bugs me about audiences is when they bitch and moan about people in movies who are reacting the way they would in real life. Especially children.
Example: people bitching about Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds.
“All she did was scream and cry.”
…Yes because if you were 9 years old and you just saw buildings explode and people vaporized, aliens, corpses, flaming trains… you’d be perfectly normal and not at all near catanoic with emotional shock.
I don’t think anybody minded the *realism *of her screaming. But why put her there if she’s just gonna be freaking out for the bigger part of the movie?
Out of curiosity, what’s the worst?
I just wanted to point out that this story started life as (if memory serves) an award-winning short story of the same title. It truly was the execution that was awful in this case, as the idea was poked and changed and unmercifully padded. And by PBS, no less, who you’d think would have known better.
Me, I’d like to see a decent adaptation of Fredic Brown’s Arena one of these days. Especially now that they have CGI, and can do justice to the visuals. The idea has been ripped off innumerable times, most notably by the original Outer Limits (“Fun and Games”) and the original Star Trek (who credited Brown, but really just slapped his name on an episode they were already writing with a smilar plot, I understand).
…because then Tom Cruise’s character is just some dude with no one to protect or look out for… And Dakota FAnning is the cutest child ever birthed by mortal woman? THAT’S WHY.
That was one of John D. MacDonald’s two forays into science fiction / fantasy. It’s a shame he didn’t stick with the genre. I love his mysteries and the Travis McGee novels; I think he would have been rated up with Asimov and Heinlein if he had stayed with SF.
Because she freaks out better than 99.9% of the juvenile female acting population. And sells lots of movie tickets in the process.
Well, the Schumacher film did have a Wendy and Peter, but the emphasis was on the title characters. I think some interesting parallels do exist with the Pan tale, so long as you ignore the Coreys.
Judge Dredd. Somewhere there is a good Dredd movie waiting to be made, but that lumbering Stallone-fest, despite some good moments {Mean Machine, although he lacked the wording on his dial, and the ABC robot} was not it. Dredd is not a good guy, an irascible cop with hiding a human interior: he’s a fascist bastard. He doesn’t have a life, he doesn’t have friends, he doesn’t have a cute catchphrase or a comic sidekick - his entire life is spent being a faceless, dehumanised automaton for a repressive system. That’s why he never takes his helmet off - it doesn’t matter what he looks like; he is the system, up close and personal. “I am the Law” is not just a catchy warcry, it’s an existential statement.
That’s an interesting idea for a movie, and one that’s been well-explored in the comics - is Dredd a hero or a villain, a saviour or an oppressor? - but I guess it’s easier to jettison it in favour of the standard “gruff cop finds human heart” line.
As well as the social satire and black humour of the original, the makers also missed that very British sense of absurdity that makes the comic such fun. Dredd vainly tries to keep order in a complete madhouse, where the unemployed mutilate themselves by growing giant noses or head eggs into a bucket in order to stave off boredom or to try to get rich - but he never gets the joke. The population are clowns, created by the system that entraps them, and Dredd’s their straight man.
There are, y’know, ideas behind that comic strip: it’d take a good director to bring them out, but it can be done - Terry Gilliam managed to capture a lot of the right kind of flavour in Brazil, ditto Paul Verhoeven in Robocop. Sam Raimi has a nice sense of the absurd. Bryan Singer can suggest intelligent ideas without beating you over the head with them. Peter Jackson’s horror movies have exactly the right sensibility. It’s perfectly possible to make a good Dredd movie. There again, I guess it’s always easier to just hit the cliche button and count the opening weekend grosses.
What’s infuriating about the Judge Dredd movie is that it wasn’t even terrible, so fans can’t even seek comfort in the mantra that “Hollywood always screws comic book movies up” - it was a perfectly entertaining futuristic actioner with some nice touches - it just wasn’t Judge Dredd.
I knew you’d say that.
Screw The Matrix (although I actually liked the whole series)!
As a gamer I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Tron does this concept to a T, and was very entertaining (although it’s cheesy, it really is pretty good).
YES! Thank you!
I just don’t get it, Hollywood makes movies like it all the time! Think of films like Dirty Harry, Heat, etc.
Why the Hell can’t they get the Punisher right?