I was not expecting What we do in the shadows to be so good. Memorable!
I have to admit that I didn’t have high hopes for “Eurovision Song Contest- The Story of Fire Saga” when I first saw the Netflix blurb and my wife suggested we watch it.
It turned out to be a lot funnier than I expected, probably because they tone Will Ferrell down some, and Rachel McAdams and Dan Stevens are a lot funnier than I had expected.
Don’t get me wrong- it’s a silly movie. But it’s a funny and endearing sort of silly, not a just dumb sort of silly like a lot of Ferrell’s other movie.
Scrubs – I thought the promos NBC ran for it before it aired made it seem really dumb, but it turned out to be really good.
The Orville, for similar reasons as the above. Fox’s promos made it look like it was some really stupid Seth McFarland comedy that happened to parody Star Trek. I avoided it, until other people started talking about how good it was. Turned out it was a fairly good homage to Star Trek, with a few silly jokes thrown in.
The Emperor’s New Groove - Between the stupid title and my general loathing of David Spade, I stayed away from it when it was in theatres. Years later my kids got into the spin-off show on Disney Channel, which I found pretty funny - Eartha Kitt and Patrick Warburton made the show - the main characters were sorta bland.
We borrowed the original movie from the library and I ended up laughing my butt off. Easily the best thing Disney released under their own name (as opposed to Pixar) in the 00s.
Going back a few years - why would someone put a kid’s college animation project on the TV, for gods sake? A Grand Day Out - turns out that Nick Park was rather better than we knew, and Wallace and Gromit were suddenly national icons.
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I may be mis-remembering this, but: I remember Roger Ebert writing about seeing a poster for “Hot Tub Time Machine” in a theater lobby with a friend. The friend commented that from the title it sounded like it was going to be a terrible move. Ebert disagreed; he told his friend that the producers obviously had a lot of faith in the movie to give it a title like that.
I enjoyed it about as much as I expected, but that’s only because Ebert reviewed it favorably - without that, I probably would have gone in with much lower expectations. But I think the title pretty much had to be what it was. It was just perfect for that movie.
About 30 years ago my sister lived with me for a couple of years. She had a habit of going by the video store on Friday evenings and getting movies she knew nothing about just to have something to watch. Most of them were crap, but one day she brought home Tremors. I had never heard of it and, given her track record, I had no real interest in it. I was doing stuff in another room but I could hear the movie and after about 10 minutes I went and asked her to start it over so I could watch it too.
As to Galaxy Quest, I actually had the opposite experience. My wife and I had seen the trailer for it and we were eagerly anticipating it. When it came out, the review in the local paper was an F; the reviewer really didn’t like it. We decided we didn’t care, we were going anyway and we loved it.
It’s cold were I went to college and the nights long and lonely so I’d go to the local video store for their 5 movies for 5 days for 5 bucks and get whatever they had. I worked my way through most of AFI’s 100 best movies ever made list, (Some Like It Hot is #9 !??!? really, Film Institute people?)
Also some others not on the list. Sucide Kings stands out as memorable unknown for me at the time. Also Beyond the Law was much better than I thought it would be.
I think that movie owed everything to Edmund Gwenn as the scientist. He made you believe.
A year or so ago I borrowed Ishtar, expecting to laugh at how bad it was. But it turns out to be a really fun movie. Maybe people went in with different expectations, since it had Dustin Hoffman in it, but release it a few decades later with Will Farrel, and it’d be a hit.
We took our 9-year-old to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, hoping as we usually did with kids’ movies that it would at least be halfway entertaining. Instead all three of us found ourselves laughing our asses off most of the way through.
Way back in the 80’s a friend who worked at a radio station scored free preview tickets to a new action movie starring that guy from Moonlighting. Bruce Willis in a thriller? We were sure it was going to suck.
For me, a few that come to mind that were, maybe not exactly great, but at least much better than I was expecting:
Adventures in Babysitting
Sky High
Pirates of the Caribbean
National Treasure
Transformers
Something that they all had in common is that they all wound up being mostly romps, with a palpable sense of fun and adventure.
Of those, by the way, I think Sky High was legitimately great. It’s still one of my all-time Top 10 superhero movies, maybe even Top 5.
That was my reaction to Arnold’s The Last Action Hero. Funny, reflective, self-deprecating, and rather poignant, in my estimation.
I caught a few weeks of a marathon of the TV series “Las Vegas” which ran from 2003 to 2008. I saw the first episode and was “meh” about it. But then the second one came on and I was hooked. It took several weeks but I watched them all.
Back in the day my room mate and I were bored one weekend, so we took in a double feature at the local art house: Repo Man and Songwriter. Two completely different movies that were both excellent and two of my favorites to this day.
A couple of decades ago, I heard that Disney was making a movie based on one of their theme park rides. C’mon, man, that’s just desperate. Who’d have thought that Pirates of the Caribbean would be so great?
And back when it was released, the ads for 12 Monkeys made it look like nothing but a stupid brain-dead grimdark thing that thought it actually had some depth. But a friend invited me over for dinner, and we watched it afterwards, and it turns out to be one of the best time-travel movies ever.
Another vote for Pirates of the Caribbean. That remains the only movie I’ve ever seen in the theaters that I knew nothing about before buying the tickets. Our landlord was doing something to our house and we had to make ourselves scare for a few hours. We went to the theater and nothing sounded good, so we chose the one that had the closest showtime – PofC. I was expecting to sleep through it. Turned out to be great, although I think the sequels suck.
For years I avoided SpongeBob SquarePants. I figured it was just another kids show that had a few adult fans, like Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny do. When I actually saw an episode, I laughed my ass off and realized that, non this is an adult show masquerading as a kids show. I’m not exactly a fan, but I’ll certainly watch it if it’s on.
Father Brown Mysteries. I was expecting cookie-cutter mysteries, and got something, instead, wise and thoughtful. Okay, yeah, there’s a “formula,” but the ensemble is great and Mark Williams does wonderful things with the title role. Much better than Chesterton’s original stories!
I knew nothing about Into the Spiderverse, and it turned out to be the best thing I’d seen in years.
What?!? That’s unpossible!
Which is why I’d avoided the series. Okay, now I’ve gotta watch…
Oh, and as the credits rolled on Spider-Verse in the theater, my best friend (who HATES animation and superheroes) said “What are you doing Friday? Let’s see this again!”