He’s been in a stable condition for decades now.
Famous java.
I saw Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid without knowing the gimmick, that they had edited in clips from actual noir movies. I didn’t know my cinematic history very well back then; thought they just had lookalikes and were parodying the style from movies of the '40s. Since I found out, I don’t think I’ve ever gone back and watched the whole thing straight through, but have seen clips. The way the old dialog interacts with new is pretty clever.
I saw Buckaroo Banzai in the theater during its initial run, and didn’t know quite what to make of it. I have a way of describing it that I think I stole from a review; that it’s like watching the twelfth movie in a franchise when you haven’t seen the first eleven. I think that was an intentional part of its humor, to show a larger-than-life hero as someone we’re supposed to already know. You have to just accept the premise and roll with it for the movie to work. I’ve come to appreciate it over the years, and John Lithgow was amazing in it.
Present!
Phantom of the Paradise wasn’t a shitshow. It had the unfortunate luck to come out at roughly the same time as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and while that one failed in regular showings, but took off at midnight showings, Phantom languished in regular showings. Except, for some strange reason, in Winnipeg, where it was a hit.
Anyway, Phantom was a modern retelling of the story of Faust, with heavy doses of Phantom of the Opera, which was way over our teenaged heads at the time. But it had catchy songs (by Williams), a hero (Winslow/Phantom), a villain (Swan), and a girl (Phoenix). Plus, a glam rock singer gets electrocuted on stage by a neon arrow. What’s not to like?
Given Faust and The Phantom of the Opera, it may have been a little too heavy for its intended audience, but it worked for me at the time, and still does. And others too; I recall a Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” episode that had various Phantoms in the opening credits, one of which was the Phantom of the Paradise. If your property is established enough in the public consciousness to be mentioned on the Simpsons, then I’d suggest that you’ve hardly created a shitshow.
My wife and her friends were absolutely the target audience for that. They were living in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, which is where Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio script re-set the drama, and is, of course, where the Lectroids landed and where Yoyodyne was set up.
They all decided to take pseudonyms with the first name “John” and decided that a really weird-looking building was really Yoyodyne. I think that the Yoyodyne plant shown in the film is actually larger than Grovers mill (which is a tiny portion of West Windsor Township, and not a toen in itself). And there are no palm trees in Grovers Mil.
There is still, however, still a mill dam and a mill building, and the Grovers Mill company still has its odd-looking water tower that was supposedly mistaken for a Martian tripod back in 1938. They shoulda worked that into the movie, somehow.
Let us not forget that Yoyodyne’s Galactronics Division plant is in San Narciso, California.
Not picking on you…
That’s the theme of this thread, isn’t it? What defines a shitshow? We can’t even agree. One man’s shitshow is another’s Le grand merde spectacle magnifique!
I think some folks are emphasizing shitshow (the movie is a shambles), others are emphasizing greenlighted (the decision to invest money in a film). It’s just how we be here.
“Why would you think the best person to play Genghis Khan was John Wayne?”, said everybody who saw The Conqueror.
Theodore Rex
Somebody apparently looked at a $33 million budget and said, “Let’s spend it on Whoopi Goldberg solving crimes with a talking dinosaur.”
0% Tomatometer
My god, we have a winner. This trailer is incredible.
Tish! you spoke French!
Not the Mama!
The movie was written and directed by a guy named Jonathan Betuel, who also wrote “The Last Starfighter,” which isn’t a terrible movie at all. He never directed another movie.
The mystery to me is how the guy got the funding to make this. He had next to no track record, the idea is preposterous, and by every account I can find, Whoopi Goldberg didn’t want to make it but had signed something that forced her to.
A film that doesnt make a large profit, that the critics dont like, and the moviegoers dont like is a shitshow. Now sometimes the decision to greenlight a shitshow isnt really a bad idea- at that time- like with Ishtar and Heavens Gate.
So not a lot of films make the cut- a shitshow that was a mistake even before filming started.
Good examples-
Massive financial failure, the critics hated it, the fans did too, and the idea was fucking stupid. Winner!
I remember it as the first movie I was aware of that went straight to video.
I understood that reference!
At the time, it was the most expensive movie to go straight to video. Whoopi was also forced to appear in the film under threat of a lawsuit.
Hasn’t touched a drug in years.
I was an assistant manager of a video store when it came out. It was so unappealing on the face of it, even the clerks would never pick it as something to watch while we were working. Those guys watched just about everything (we had free rentals). So if it was PG and they didn’t want it on when they were working, I knew it was probably terrible. On top of that, I remember putting up the standee for it and wondering how the hell that movie got made. Lots of movies don’t make any sense, but its premise seemed to not make any sense in a horrible, vacuous way.
I read the Wikipedia “plot” description of Theodore Rex. Even THAT is a shitshow. It namedrops characters with no introduction and no subsequent mention, it is half review/commentary and half plot narrative, and worse, it doesn’t end! The plot description just stops. What happens? Is the bad guy defeated? Is there a second ice age? Does anyone care? Did the wiki editor just give up and pop the tape out of the VCR?