My friends and I have often wondered who Jeremy Irons lost a bet to. 
The best way to deal with League is to read the trade paperback, appreciate its brilliance, then say to yourself, “It’s such a shame they never finished that adaptation. It was clearly cursed by God, though. What are the odds that a shower of flaming meters would strike the set on the very first day of filming, obliterating all the scenery and props, killing the director and that kid from ER, but leaving Sean Connery alive and Peta Wilsn alive?”
In Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, the scene where the aliens first arrive and the scene where the mob seizes the van are superb. Some of the scenes of the invaders wreaking havoc are nice, too. Now, I’d be the very first one to point out that this wretched flick bites the hairy banana; but even so, I’ve borrowed my library’s copy of the DVD several times just to see those scenes again. I slept through most of the others.
I would nominate all of The Brothers Grimm and Men in Black 2 for this. Both movies were full of great moments, but in both cases those good moments didn’t come together to make a good movie. I’d also like to salvage all the action scenes from the Appleseed remake. To plot was decent but could’ve been done better, and the toon-shaded characters looked very out of place against the gorgeous backgrounds. But the action scenes, especially the opening bit, are a joy to watch.
I actually thought the addition of Dorian Grey to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a good touch. but that is counter-balanced by the addition of Tom Sawyer, which was just stupid, stupid, stupid. Oh, and a car. And a submarine in Venice. In fact, just about everything else was monumentally bad.
There are a couple of really great scenes in The Lost World that make the rest of the movie hurt that much more. The arrival on the fog-covered island is great, really moody and foreboding. And the scene with the raptors moving through the tall grass and leaving those winding trails behind them is one of my favorite visual images from any movie.
In “Barbarian Queen” there’s an interesting subplot where the queen’s younger sister, raped and kidnapped and then raped some more by bad guys, develops what appears to be a case of Stockholm syndrome, but maybe not. After she’s captured by the bad guys a second time, she volunteers to be the bitch, or “consort” as they called it in those days, of King Argan, the chief of the bad guys who raped her. Teramis is clearly having a weird sexual relationship with Argan, following her around in a strappy black number and asking him for puppies. Even when she finds her sister chained up naked and being tortured during a fabulous dungeon tour with Argan, she refuses to help her sister or even acknowledge that she knows her. But later, when Argan’s subjects are in open revolt and he’s fighting for his life with sis, Taramis plants a shiv in Argan’s back just when he’s about to skewer sis. So I wound up thinking that Teramis’ behavior was a naive response to being in such a brutal situation, and that she’d refused to help sis in the dungeon because Argan was in power there, but she shivved Argan later because, with his subjects in open revolt, he was clearly out of power.
In any event, Teramis is by far the most interesting character in the movie, because all the other characters behaved like the most forumulaic heroes and villains in a 50s era Comics Code approved comic, except for the nudity and sex and the death by kegels. I wish the movie had been about Teramis rather than her sister, because she, unlike everyone else, was kinda interesting.
Since I, Robot has been on so many times I wonder of VIKKI has taken over at HBO, I find myself hanging around for the scenes with Sonny: the interrogation room scene, then the later scene where he draws his “dream”, towards the end where he holds a gun to Dr. Calvin’s head and…[spoiler], as he goes to get the nanites “I think he wanted me to kill you…”, etc. Take Sonny away, and it stunk. (Well, James Cromwell was as good as he could have been in that role…)
Of course, I’m convinced the only reasons those scenes work are due to Alan Tudyk’s fantastic voiceover work.
The after effects of superheroing scene from “Daredevil”. Probably my favorite scene from any superhero movie and makes that movie not a complete loss.
I haven’t read the graphic novel, or I suspect I’d have disliked the movie even more. My main point is that the movie gave no good explanation for Hyde going from running along rooftops to saving the Nautilus.
I don’t know if I’d call Saturn 3 a bad movie—alright, so it ain’t Casablanca. But it isn’t Orgy of the Dead, either—but I thought the evil robot “Hector” was pretty genuinely scary. Primordially unsettling, I guess I’d call it—he mostly moves like he’s “alive,” but the jarring mechanical elements and their motions throw it off. Add to that the monster’s size, his stalking through the shadowy corridors, and the creepy visceral stuff—poking at eyeballs, exposed and/or violated brains, dog killing—that the robot does…it just works, for me.
Impressive what you can do with fairly primitive SFX, and probably a modest budget.
Well…he was on the Nautilus and probably didn’t want to die if it were to sink. Yeah, there’s a chance that he could have escaped and swam to the surface, depending on how far down they were, but in his mind, he wasn’t 100% he could, so his best bet was to try and save the ship.
Understood and agreed with. In the novel, I remember everyone had a reason to work with the team, although, honestly, most of it was of blackmail or extortion-caliber levels. Quartermain and Mina were the only ones who were doing it for a sense of English patriotism. Again, more interresting stuff there. They even kept the -original- invisible man (a choice they switched in the movie, which I -loathed-) who was a rapist and slowly becoming a psychotic killer (leading to an excellent foreshadowing in the first book, and an excellent piece of drama in the second.)
As a side note, in the original Jeckyl / Hyde story, Hyde was evil, sure, and cunning… But he wasn’t the hulk. In fact, he was smaller than Jeckyl. It was just his willingness to break society’s rules that made him so dangerous.
The idea of Carson Daly secretly being a hitman tickles me, but I thought the rest of Josie and the Pussycats was crap.
You’ll recall that Hyde’s bulk is explained–quite reasonably, I thought–in the second volume. As the dark side of Jeckyl grew, so did its physical manifestation.
Oh, come on. “DuJour means seatbelts!” was pretty funny.
Y’know the TV Movie “Buck Rogers on the Planet of the Slavegirls” that was cobbled out of a two-part ep of the TV series? You know what it would have salvaged it? Some actual, identifiable slave girls. Really, that would have helped a lot. Because as the “movie” stands, it’s about Buck rescuing some women from career as being futuristic waitresses at an Applebee’s type restaurant. It didn’t make a lot of sense.
::reads post::
::considers responding::
::goes over all possible responses to weed out those likely to elicit slap on wrist from moderator::
::eats a cookie and changes thread::
C’mon, you’re not even trying. Possible responses, eschewing the obvious:
“Oh, there were slavegirls in that movie! Which you’d know if you’d read Erin Grey’s contract for the Buck Rogers show.”
or
“Look they threw in Mayans and dinosaurs and a giant space chicken, too. You can’t have everything.”
or
Including slave girls in an episode entitled “Planet of the Slave Girls” would have been SO passe – just what everyone would have EXPECTED. This way, the audience was kept on edge, wodering when the plot would happen."
All too easy.
There were slavegirls!
There were naked slavegirls!
However, they were naked, invisible slavegirls!
I offer my solemn pledge that those are the very best kind of naked slavegirls.
Really.