# The Best (blank) movie not written/scripted by (blank) **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 15, 2014, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883 "2014-01-15T16:58:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2014, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/21 "2014-01-16T17:37:55Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > Well Powers claimed that “On Stranger Tides” was inspired by taking Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride – but only AFTER he’d been paid off for “Pirates of the Caribbean 4: We Got Us A Franchise!” So these inspirational claims must be taken with a grain of salt. If you’ve read the book and seen the movie, the similarities are STRIKING. I’ve never played the video game. The truth is it’s hard to say where story elements originated. For example, the movie _Pirates of the Caribbean_ had a naive young hero joining a group of pirates in order to say his love interest who was the daughter of an authority figure. Now none of this was present in _Pirates of the Caribbean_ ride. But it was present in both _On Stranger Tides_ and _Monkey Island_. So does that mean the movie take these ideas from the book or the computer game? Did the computer game take them from the book? Hard to say. Because the same plot elements were also present in _[Swashbuckler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swashbuckler_(film))_ and _[Yellowbeard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowbeard)_ and _[Pirates](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_(1986_film))_ and _[Captain Blood](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_(1935_film))_. At some point you start wondering if anything new has been added to the genre since Pyle and Sabatini. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2014, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/22 "2014-01-16T18:27:05Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > The truth is it’s hard to say where story elements originated. For example, the movie _Pirates of the Caribbean_ had a naive young hero joining a group of pirates in order to say his love interest who was the daughter of an authority figure. Now none of this was present in _Pirates of the Caribbean_ ride. But it was present in both _On Stranger Tides_ and _Monkey Island_. So does that mean the movie take these ideas from the book or the computer game? Did the computer game take them from the book? Didn’t both Stranger Tides and PotC have a scene where the young lead meets his true love when she is rescued from the flotsam of a ship sunk in a pirate attack? Not SURE about that, but I seem to recall it … Did Swashbuckler, Yellowbeard, Pirates or Captain Blood present voodoo magic as an everyday part of the lives of the pirates? Don’t remember them so well … ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2014, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/23 "2014-01-16T19:04:21Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > I can see it as a John Carpenter movie, but when I thought about it, it lacked the powerful, simple musical score that propels a lot of his movies and drives up the tension. The Thing would be the best example, the score is really strong there, but most of his movies have that, and the lack of it makes it not-so-Carpenter-ish. But in terms of story and theme, I agree, and in terms of “plucky herione” the weather lady in the Fog is a reasonable analogue to McGowan’s Cherry Delight (though she did lack a machine gun leg, which now EVERY horror movie heroine should be REQUIRED BY LAW to have). I had read that Rodriguez wanted Carpenter to score the movie, but it didn’t work out. So after watching the movie I assumed Rodriguez just straight up lifted some of Carpenter’s scores, but wiki says it’s original music ‘inspired’ by Carpenter. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2014, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/24 "2014-01-16T19:30:22Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > I don’t see Quatermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth as Lovecraftian at all. > > To me, the best Lovecraft movie that didn’t actually use Lovecraft was the first **Hellboy** picture. It’s also the only Lovecraft movie with the good CGI effects you need to pull it off.(And I Include the Lovecraft Society’s flicks, good as they are, in that assessment) Despite wearing its influences on its sleeve, _Hellboy_ doesn’t strike me as particularly Lovecraftian. Sure, it’s got tentacly elder gods in it, but you can generally defeat them by punching them really hard. Plus, there’s a whole array of supernatural forces in the Hellboy universe that are basically friendly (or at least benignly neutral) to humans - the title character in particular. The thing that makes Lovecraft Lovecraft is the sense of cosmic futility to the stories - that the entire human race are basically ants, and the best possible outcome we can hope for is that we can avoid being noticed for a little while longer before something comes along and stomps us into oblivion. Hellboy doesn’t have that. Humanity, in Hellboy, is _important_ - not just in terms of being necessary to the schemes of the great and terrible, but these beings are constrained by human philosophy. Hellboy himself exists because, in order for the apocalypse to happen, it has to be started by a being with free will, which is what gives Professor Bruttenholm the window to raise him as a hero, instead of a monster. I think that’s ultimately antithetical to Lovecraft’s aesthetic. In a proper Lovecraft story, free will is one of those pathetic lies we tell to comfort ourselves against the howling, endless dark. In Lovecraft, when a character has a little bit of human in him, and a little bit of monster, the monster always wins. Hellboy takes a fundamentally opposite tack from all that - I think you could make a good case for calling it “The best Robert E. Howard story not written by Robert E. Howard,” but Lovecraft? No, it’s too swashbuckling, too optimistic. Quatermass captures that sense of futility and unimportance better than anything else I can think of outside of Lovecraft’s own works. _Quatermass and the Pit_, in particular, paints the human race not as special, or noble, or destined for a special place in the universe, but an accidental byproduct of some long-dead alien race’s experiments. We’re basically toxic waste - an idea made explicit in “Mountains of Madness,” but one that underlies Lovecraft’s entire oeuvre. Hellboy is basically Lovecraft drag - it’s got all the elements, but turned up to eleven and presented as a grand adventure. Quatermass doesn’t have the outward trappings of Lovecraft, but it’s got his soul. Or, at least, his disembodied brain sealed in a brass canister. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2014, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/25 "2014-01-16T19:36:00Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > Possible spoiler in my response, for anyone who hasn’t seen Hellboy yet, and really, you should: > > I was under the impressions that were “coming through” the portal were definitely Lovecraftian menaces, specifically that Cthulhu’s tentacles were what was oozing through the gate near the end. > > Though I’ll grant you it didn’t HAVE to be a Lovecraftian creature, Hellboy seems to have his own mythos. That’s not Cthulhu, it’s one of the Ogdru Jahad, the Dragon of Revelation. _Hellboy_ was unquestionably inspired by Lovecraft, but it’s not part of the Cthulhu Mythos, and is fundamentally incompatible with it - the creation myth described in the comics owes more to Tolkien than anything else. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2014, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/26 "2014-01-16T19:47:43Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > The truth is it’s hard to say where story elements originated. For example, the movie _Pirates of the Caribbean_ had a naive young hero joining a group of pirates in order to say his love interest who was the daughter of an authority figure. Now none of this was present in _Pirates of the Caribbean_ ride. But it was present in both _On Stranger Tides_ and _Monkey Island_. So does that mean the movie take these ideas from the book or the computer game? Did the computer game take them from the book? Just to add to this incestuous spiral of inspiration and counter-inspiration, I know for a fact that the third Monkey Island game, _Curse of Monkey Island_, drew heavy inspiration from the theme park ride - I used to sleep with one of the writers. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2014, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/27 "2014-01-16T20:02:03Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Despite wearing its influences on its sleeve, _Hellboy_ doesn’t strike me as particularly Lovecraftian. Sure, it’s got tentacly elder gods in it, but you can generally defeat them by punching them really hard. Plus, there’s a whole array of supernatural forces in the Hellboy universe that are basically friendly (or at least benignly neutral) to humans - the title character in particular. The thing that makes Lovecraft Lovecraft is the sense of cosmic futility to the stories - that the entire human race are basically ants, and the best possible outcome we can hope for is that we can avoid being noticed for a little while longer before something comes along and stomps us into oblivion. Hellboy doesn’t have that. Humanity, in Hellboy, is _important_ - not just in terms of being necessary to the schemes of the great and terrible, but these beings are constrained by human philosophy. Hellboy himself exists because, in order for the apocalypse to happen, it has to be started by a being with free will, which is what gives Professor Bruttenholm the window to raise him as a hero, instead of a monster. I think that’s ultimately antithetical to Lovecraft’s aesthetic. In a proper Lovecraft story, free will is one of those pathetic lies we tell to comfort ourselves against the howling, endless dark. In Lovecraft, when a character has a little bit of human in him, and a little bit of monster, the monster always wins. Hellboy takes a fundamentally opposite tack from all that - I think you could make a good case for calling it “The best Robert E. Howard story not written by Robert E. Howard,” but Lovecraft? No, it’s too swashbuckling, too optimistic. > > Quatermass captures that sense of futility and unimportance better than anything else I can think of outside of Lovecraft’s own works. _Quatermass and the Pit_, in particular, paints the human race not as special, or noble, or destined for a special place in the universe, but an accidental byproduct of some long-dead alien race’s experiments. We’re basically toxic waste - an idea made explicit in “Mountains of Madness,” but one that underlies Lovecraft’s entire oeuvre. > > Hellboy is basically Lovecraft drag - it’s got all the elements, but turned up to eleven and presented as a grand adventure. Quatermass doesn’t have the outward trappings of Lovecraft, but it’s got his soul. Or, at least, his disembodied brain sealed in a brass canister. Only the Quatermass series doesn’t really deal in futility. In Lovecraft the hero typically faints away and can’t do anything more. The threat of the Elder Gods is still there \* in Quatermass the hero fights back against the Alien Evuil and defeats it – The blobby thing in The Quatermass Xperiment/The Creeoping unknow gets electrocuted (in the movie. In the original teleplay it’s somewhat different – but it’s still beaten) In Quatermass II/Enemy from Space the Blob thing gets prematurely exposed to oxygen, burned and poisoned, and its space home gets nuked. In Quatermass and the Pit the (for once no-blobby) alien tjhing (The Spirit of Hob) gets destroyed by Iron (differently in the movie than the teleplay, but same idea). There’s no futility/inevitability at all \*In The Call of Cthulhu, the wakened Cthulhu gets smashed and broken up by the ship in a rare case of positive action by a Lovecraft character. but he’s reassembling like the T-100 before – presumably – getting back into his bed at Rlyeh and hitting the snooze alarm. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2014, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/28 "2014-01-16T20:48:08Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Only the Quatermass series doesn’t really deal in futility. In Lovecraft the hero typically faints away and can’t do anything more. The threat of the Elder Gods is still there \* in Quatermass the hero fights back against the Alien Evuil and defeats it – The blobby thing in The Quatermass Xperiment/The Creeoping unknow gets electrocuted (in the movie. In the original teleplay it’s somewhat different – but it’s still beaten) In Quatermass II/Enemy from Space the Blob thing gets prematurely exposed to oxygen, burned and poisoned, and its space home gets nuked. In Quatermass and the Pit the (for once no-blobby) alien tjhing (The Spirit of Hob) gets destroyed by Iron (differently in the movie than the teleplay, but same idea). There’s no futility/inevitability at all That’s fairly typical for Lovecraft, too, whose characters aren’t nearly as lily-livered as people seem to remember. In _The Thing on the Doorstep_, the protagonist is on trial for murdering the wizard who had taken over his friend’s body. In “Dreams in the Witchhouse,” the protagonist stops the witch’s attempted child sacrifice, causing her to be destroyed by the power she sought to raise - but he’s later killed by her familiar. “The Whisperer in the Darkness” involves a shoot-out (off camera) in which one of the monsters is killed. “The Dunwich Horror” and “Call of Cthulhu” are both relatively action-filled stories of narrowly-averted apocalypse. Aside from Cthulhu’s boating accident, there’s the raid on the swamp-cult, and in “Dunwich,” the magical showdown between Professor Armitage and Wilbur Whately’s twin brother. _The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward_ involves a plot by a cabal of immortal wizards to rule the world. The protagonist does faint at one point, but in the end, personally kills the main villain, and causes the destruction of the rest of the cabal. There’s lots of other stories where the narrator is primarily an observer to someone else’s destruction (“Rats in the Walls,” “The Colour Out of Space”) or which function essentially as a travelog so Lovecraft can describe ideas or locations that intrigue him (“Shadow out of Time,” _The Silver Key_), and plenty of stories of people with sensitive dispositions completely losing their shit because they saw a boogeyman, but Lovecraft was a pulp writer, and a lot of his protagonists were proper pulp leading men: arctic explorers, archaeologists, and other sorts of adventurers, who quite often succeed at beating back the horrors of the void, but always with the understanding that the void will win in the end - it’s that sense of futility on an existential level, not a personal one, that I think exists in the Quatermass movies. ---
**Author:** ![Orr\_G](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ee59a6/32.png) [@Orr\_G](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Orr_G)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2014, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/29 "2014-01-17T20:29:56Z")
I just came across something that I think fits the OP, and should be fairly obscure. [The History of Future Folk](http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_History_of_Future_Folk/70245246?trkid=13462100) is the best Cory McAbee film that Cory McAbee had nothing to do with. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [January 18, 2014, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/30 "2014-01-18T12:30:06Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Sure, it’s got tentacly elder gods in it, but you can generally defeat them by punching them really hard. TV Trope: [Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu) ---
**Author:** ![erysichthon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/d07c76/32.png) [@erysichthon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erysichthon)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/31 "2014-01-24T04:24:01Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > Good call, films like “Total Recall” and “Blade Runner” don’t really work the real real vs. fake real the way Dick did … to their benefit. I’m no fan of Dick’s writings. I have not read any of his books, and I have TRIED to read several. They just plain bored me. There are so many MUCH BETTER science fiction writers that Hollywood could have fallen in love with … sigh. No, there aren’t. There are no “much better” science fiction writers than PKD. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/32 "2014-01-24T05:08:07Z")
> [@steveroo](#): > > No, there aren’t. There are no “much better” science fiction writers than PKD. We shall have to agree to disagree. He’s boredom on a plate, in my experience. ---
**Author:** ![Penfeather](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penfeather/32/384_2.png) [@Penfeather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Penfeather)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/33 "2014-01-24T06:02:12Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > I always thought _Quatermass and the Pit_ was the best HP Lovecraft story to not actually feature any elements of Lovecraft’s mythos. And the Doctor Who story [The Daemons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_D%C3%A6mons) is the best Quatermass story that isn’t actually Quatermass. ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2014, 6:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883/34 "2014-01-24T06:33:34Z")
> [@steveroo](#): > > No, there aren’t. There are no “much better” science fiction writers than PKD. The only PKD I’ve read is “Imposter”, which is in one of my end-of-the-world anthologies. Then I saw on Wikipedia that the Gary Sinise movie “Imposter” was based on that. So I read the synopsis and was surprised that they kept the ending…EXCEPT…the bomb doesn’t destroy the Earth, it just destroys ‘a large area’. Well, what the hell is the point of that??? If you’re going to keep the unusual ending, keep it all the way ffs. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-best-blank-movie-not-written-scripted-by-blank/678883.md?page=1)