Possibly hijacking the thread a bit…
Having not read the LEG comics… What was Quartermain’s role in the League? Everyone had some sort of use… Quartermain seemed like he should be the leader becausse he’s an old guy with tons of adventuring experience but brings nothing to the table powers-wise.
I know Mina’s powers were overplayed in the movie but still existed somewhat in the comic.
EC, I don’t think anybody’s called Star Wars bad–at least, the 70s/80s movies. I brought it up in response to a remark made about hte crapfeast known as ROTK, except of course I don’t admit any such adaptation was ever made. ;j
AQ was (according to the books) likely the best marksman and best tracker in the world, as well as fearless, a keen eye, etc. Perhaps some minor supernatural power “from the land”. His skill passed the natural and went into the supernatural in my mind. In gaming terms, he was the PC with the highest level. 
Nemo has no supernatural powers either, note.
In the Comic, Mina was not shown as directly having any Vampiric powers (or any powers at all), but they were alluded to. Or not, depending on how you read it. (She seemed able to “mind control” for example)
Only Hyde, if I remeber right, and I always read it as “force of will” rather than anything else.
If you read the addendum to the LoEGII TPB, you’ll see that both Mina and Alan come to be more than human, but as of the events in the two books, neither is. IMO, that is.
I just ran across a good part from a notably bad movie, a Z-grade Mad Max ripoff from Roger Corman called “Wheels of Fire.” In it, the hero’s little sister, a happy young post-apocalypse party babe played by Lynda Weismeier, is captured by the bad guys. So they strip off her clothes and tie her naked and spreadeagled to the hood of the bad guys’ car for a victory procession into camp.
It’s a really iconic image and it stands out powerfully in a film that’s otherwise an almost complete piece of garbage. Of course, they messed up on the cinematography – the shots were mostly medium to landscape shots, whereas a couple of nice, foreshortened closeups would have made the image a lot more powerful. Still, you have to give them credit for coming up with such an image when no one else had.
There is one other nice bit in it. After the bad guys capture Lynda they drag her back to their camp, where they rape her a lot, in a non-graphic sort of way. That’s pretty much par for the course in these kind of films and is just part of its general boringness. The innovative part is a scene after she’s been passed around the camp a lot, where she’s begging two scrawny-looking evl minions for a scrap of the feast they’re eating, and this is really bottom of the line begging, offering them sex for food scraps. One of the guys turns her down, pointing out that they had her twice last night and could have her again without giving her any food.
What’s innovative about this, and you really have to have watched a lot of bad movies to know this sort of thing, is that you rarely see the good guy’s women or sisters affected by rape when they get raped. They don’t LIKE it, but their personality doesn’t change much. Lynda’s character’s spirit has clearly been broken here, and if the acting hadn’t been so wooden that it was really evident that this was just a bunch of poor actors speaking lines, it might have been a powerful scene.
Maybe someday in another filmmmaker’s hands, it will be.
Live on a Plane, I don’t know if I’m the one you’re thinking of, but I definitely mentioned that scene on this Board before.
Some others:
Roger Moore’s first James Bond outing Live and Let Die was disappointing to me, but the chase scene with the double-decker bus was great. Especially the ending, which was clever.
I’ve mentioned before the generaly forgettable SF movie The Angry Red Planet. At the end one astronaut has his arm covered with Space Amoeba, which is eating away at him. In a lesswer movie, the Space Amoeba would completely consume him and become a secondary monster, rampaging through the halls until killed. In a TV movie they’d develop a miracle cure that would solve this in one shot. But the movie actually gave what seems to be a reasoned and workable solution (!!!) It’s in the best traditions of sciene fiction, and feels completely out of place in a cheapo film like this.
Lady Caroline Lamb isn’t a bad movie, but considering its subject matter and the screenplay author, it’s deadly dull. But the Debate Scene in Parliament is absolutely priceless.
Many of the shots and sequences in Heavy Metal are awesome, but the stories are airy persiflage. It’s like thy couldn’t be bothered to actually put together a coherent and believable story. In that, the movie is a perfect duplicate of the magazine.
Silent Running.
For its time, the visuals were outstanding. The story, however, was lame.
But there is this one scene where Bruce Dern teaches the robots to play poker, and they start cheating him. Priceless…
No, they made Connery’s Alan Quartermain the leader because Connery was Executive Producer. You think he was gonna give himself the role of recovering drug addict?
I, too, liked the book (although I’m really annoyed at the rape scenes that Moore feels compelled to put in so many of his works) and its coy “see where I lifted this from” sense. But I can see why Connery changed it the way he did – would you really rather see a flick about the takeover of Fun Mancu and the Yellow Peril, and have to deal with charges of racism? (Not to mention Nemo harpooning the Egyptian mob at the beginning and calling them “A Mohammedan rabble”? Or the Kemp as the Invisible Man with his senseless violence?)
Once Connery got Quartermain as main hero, I’m not surprised at his introducing Tom Sawyer (!) as his protege. What the hell else is Quartermain going to do, since he doesn’t have an addiction to overcome, but pass on his wisdom. At least the additions of Sawyer and Dorian Gray fit into the spirit of TLoEG. Making Mina a vampiress outright gave her an interesting edge. And they kept Nemo an Indian. Beliebve it or not, it could have been far, far, far worse.