“Ballistic” is a pretty good name for a movie that features a lot of gunplay. If it hadn’t already been used on this turkey, it would have been a better name for the Christian Bale gun-kata movie, Equilibrium, which is a fun, largely mindless action romp with a highly generic title.
But speaking of ridiculous dystopias, anyone remember Solarbabies? Its terrible movie about a group of teenagers using the power of friendship, rollerblades, and a magical glowing orb that’s never really explained, to overthrow an authoritarian government that’s stolen the oceans, and somehow, the title is still the worst thing about it.
Ah, this reminds me of a movie whose title ought to be a clever pun, which I find incredibly annoying.
Gymkata (1985) was a martial arts movie starring Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas. The title is a portmanteau pun of “gym” (as in gymnasium) plus “gymkhana” (Indian word for sports clubs and, by extension, competitions at them, including equestrian and motor sports) and “kata”, the choreographed motions in a martial arts routine. Clever, huh? Except I just find it annoying.
I recall a conversation I had with a friend, circa 2001, that ended with me saying “Attack of the Clones? THAT’S what they’re going to call it? Are you f’in serious??”
Oh, more fun stuff about Gymkata, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Gymkata earned a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Thomas as Worst New Star at the 6th Golden Raspberry Awards. It has developed a minor cult following as an unintentional comedy for its dubious premise, poor production quality and strange setting. Maxim lists the film as the 17th “Worst Movie of All Time”.[7]
The 1993 Filipino comedy film Gin Kata, starring Herbert Bautista and directed by Nestor Arsenal, is titled in reference to Gymkata.[8]
I second The Black Gestapo. I was expecting a WWII flick, but it turned out to be a Blaxploitation classic.
I remember Siskel and Ebert saying the title of this movie put a lot of people off seeing it, since they thought it was a fantasy. (On the other hand, I imagine a lot of others wanted to see it for the same reason.)
Ha! I remember seeing the trailer for that in the 1980s, and thinking, “isn’t that the kid from Witness? I guess he isn’t really Amish – but he’s already making poor choices in role offers!”
I got that at a thrift store because it looked interesting. Marlee Matlin must have been very desperate for work, to take that role.
I remember a kids’ movie from the 90s called “Magic In The Water.” Apparently, the movie wasn’t very good either.
Another time, we were all at my brother’s house, and the cable guide had an afternoon movie called “Killing Zoe”, which is his daughter’s name. He said, “Let’s not watch that” and my sister added that she had actually seen it and it wasn’t very good.
The Prophecy, 1995 movie starring Christopher Walken and Viggo Mortensen? It’s actually an awesome movie and one of my favorites. It had four sequels, which were okay at best but that first movie was great.
Is that the one with the paper mill mutant stomping around in Maine (actually the Pacific NW) starring Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire? God, it was awful.
The original TMNT comics were a deliberate parody of four trends in comic books at the time: teenaged heroes (eg Teen Titans), mutants (eg X-Men), ninjas (eg Electra) and anthropomorphic protagonists (eg Cerebus or maybe Usagi Yojimbo although that may have come later).
The funny thing is that once TMNT took off it spawned a whole host of parodies of its own.
