Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Movies that suffered from the hype...

Okay, we know i love goofy movies, but, growning up in a rural area i didn't always get to see movies as they came out. Because of this, i think a lot was lost with some of these movies because i couldn't/didn't get caught up in the moment.

Animal House- Growing up, this was supposed to be the funniest all time movie event of pubescent adolescence. Instead, i found it extremely boring and long. The ending was flatter than my moms pancakes.

Rocky Horror Picture Show- yes, we all know i love it, but... I missed all the real fun with it...the late night showings, the bread throwing, etc... Its a great little movie to watch, but it needs that audience participation to get the full body. I found one such showing when i was in college waaaaaay back when, and it was a bust.

Okay, some newer movies that made my not so great to dear god break out the shovels and cover this shite! list...

Ghost World- I know this was supposed to be the great little film that could, but instead to me it was the worst lost two hours give or take of my life. Self indulgent navel gazing at its worst.

The Royale Tannebaums- I didn't think it possible for Gene Hackman to be in a bad movie...I was wrong. I would rather be beaten with the sharp end of an ax than sit through that again.

Marooned- The boringest space movie ever next to..

2001:A space odessy- Dear god in heaven make it stop. The single crappiest, most overblown piece of trash it has ever been my misfortune to sit through. I know that as a scifi fan i am supposed to love it, but i just cant.

Blazing Saddles- Now, 7/8's of this movie is hysterical. Honestly, but the ending, where it seemed that Mel simply didn't know how to end the movie and threw everything in there was awful. Really, just awful.

Nightmare on Elm Street- I loved Heather Langenkamp, had a serious teen crush on her...but
I laughed the entire movie. It wasn't scary, it was funny. I remember at the time all my classmates going "oh, and the nails on the pipe like fingernails on a chalkboard...." and they would launch into a discription of how it made their flesh crawl or something. I don't claim to be any kind of hero/stud, but when i saw it for the first time, i remembered all those kids and the first thought that came to mind was ...well, cats is the polite way of saying it.

Smokey and the Bandit- Wow. How bad was it? I remember seeing the ads, hearing how great it was, and being so disappointed that it seemed like all the fun and action only lasted about fifteen minutes at the end of the film.

The biggest problem with me is, if a movie doesn't grab me, i don't waste any more time on it, i don't buy it, rent it, or think about or remember it.

Catch the new The Day the Earth Stood Still yet? Great special effects but Dana Andrews was so much more believable. I like some of Keanu's stuff but Dana was a god. Might as well remake The Blob without Steve McQueen or the motorcycle..or a blob.

How about No Country for Old Men? It lost me, got to the end and I went, "Wtf? Is there a second disk? That's the ending? What the hell was that!" I was as disappointed with that as I was with Leaving Las Vegas ..and the less said the better on that one.

It's ages since I've seen it but I seem to recall that Nightmare (at least the first one) is actually meant to be pretty funny in places and is more about the creepiness than it is the gore or the almost anti-hero nature of Freddy. Kind of like the Scream films, but not to quite the same level of knowing silliness.

A similar one for me thugh is Halloween. I didn't see it until I was in my mid-twenties by which time I'd heard all about how it's one of the best and scariest horror films ever and while I did enjoy it some I did end up wondering what all the hype was about. It's good and has a few jumps in it but it didn't really scare me very much at all.

A bunch of my friends saw "Little Shop of Horrors" and were all "It's so funny. You've got to see it. You'll love it." I saw it. I said "meh".

I also wasn't impressed when I finally say Forrest Gump. Although I remember that before the film was rleased I saw a billboard saying "Gump happens" and being intrigued.

Liked Ghost World, but that didn't stop me from picking apart all the bits that had nothing to do with the graphic novel. [snerk]

Never ever ever liked Rocky Horror. My indifference changed to hostility when I worked a crappy college job where somebody put the damn soundtrack on every single damn night the entire time I worked there. Sweet Jeebus. [shakes head]

An overhyped movie that made me want to stab myself all over with forks ? Rushmore. Bleah. Skeeved out by the "likable" hero's stalker-ish behavior towards the supposedly sexy/screwed up widow. Bill Murray phoned in a performance of the same guy he always plays in every movie. Yawn.

But I've gotta' disagree with rickshaw about Blazing Saddles. I love the absurd wrap-up (ie-- "Do the French Mistake.")

I hear a lot of complaints about 2001 (my wife, for instance, hates it), and it's hard for me to be objective about the movie because I read the novel first. I can't really say for sure that I'd have been able to discern some of the plot on my own because I came in knowing what was going down and that may have coloured my perception, but damn if it isn't an excellent rendition of the book. My only complaint would be the extended journey through the stargate was a overly long and indulgent on Kubrick's part.


I saw this movie as a kid and loved it, but more for what was (at the time) the coolness factor of Freddy. I went back and saw it a few years later and appreciated the creepier bits a bit more (that scene near the beginning with the lamb was well done). I don't think it was meant as an intensely "jump out of your seat", scary but had some interesting ideas. Of course every two-bit horror flick has trampled those into the ground (including the increasingly worse sequels), so it's lost some of it's "freshness", but it was innovative in it's own way.

An interesting "Non-sequel" to the film is "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" where he returns to the characters (and actors) and does an interesting dissection of this franchise he inadvertently created. It's overlooked, but interesting.

No one has to agree with me on every single item. We all have different tastes. Here, you can cry despair at what you have been inflicted with, and if it matches not what others have recieved, fear not, for thou art safe in the bosom of friends.

One that was a big letdown from the preview was "Independence Day." All the really cool "blowing up stuff" was given away right there and what was left for the actual movie was... not so good. I actually enjoyed it more for what it was when I watched at home a few years later with zero expectations. It just couldn't live up to that preview.

No Country For Old Men. The Coen Brothers have made some fun and/or interesting films. This was not one of them. I walked out with twenty-five minutes left to go;Maybe the third time over all that I've been both bored and disgusted enough with a film to leave before it ended.

The first time IIRC was for The Big Chill. Everyone had zero depth, except maybe the corpse. Aside from the corpse, everyone whined wayyy too much, when as far as I could tell their main problems were having too much money and too much free time. To paraphrase Tom Servo, I'd have slapped the entire film, if I only could have.

Second time was for The Reflecting Skin. For those who have never seen the latter, just picture a two-hour 1980s Calvin Klein Obsession ad crossed with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and not in a good way.

Oh yes, speaking of the Coen Brothers: Barton Fink? Did not get it at all. I was actually kind of annoyed by it.

Repo Man. Pure unadulterated junk as far as i was concerned.

I might have liked 2001: A Space Odyssey if I'd been a bit older..I dunno.. but when I was a kid I got used to going on base (Dad was military) and often the Saturday Matinee would be a Sci-Fi movie. I was really excited to get a chance to see a show that had been hyped to helenback. I fell asleep less than an hour into it.
It was just a quick nap, I got up and took a trip to the little boys room and hung out in the lobby until the movie was over.

I was kind of ticked, the week before I'd watched Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla and since I never really got into rubber suit monster movies I was really hyped for some more action packed sci-fi. Even cheezy sci-fi would have satisfied me but no00ooooo....

Oh man, Independence Day was the worst movie ever! There is just about nothing good about it. It makes Will Smith, Bill Paxton and Jeff Goldblum look slike utter chumps.

I saw Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street when I was real young (like 13 I think) and loved them both. I still love them to this day for that, so its hard to not be biased. I think thats an easy thing for anyone to fall into. On the other hand, by the time I saw Smokey and the Bandit on TV, I was the same age but it was obvious it was utter crap.

Most recently Atonement was the biggest let down. I was all set to be blown away by it and it was the most boring movie of all time. It could easily be a cure for insomnia.

Other movie let downs? Basically almost every Stephen King book translated to film has failed with very limited exceptions (I'd say the made for TV movie of Salem's Lot and Children of the Corn are the two exceptions). The Shining is good for pure guilty pleasure value of enjoying Jack Nicholson be what I suspect is actually himself.

Have you people LOST YOUR MINDS!!!

Has the stress of potential no Legion inflicted your thinking?

Independance Day is the GREATEST MOVIE....EVER!!!!

sigh,

no raising children these days.

My Vote:

Million Dollar Baby. Come-on, a chair. A CHAIR!!!! Okay, technically, a stool.

Anything and everything to do with the Matrix.
The only good thing I can say about those movies is that the special effects were well done.

"I, Robot". Great job butchering a sci-fi classic

Actually, I enjoyed that one. But I'll sit through anything with John Turturro in it...

I lost interest as soon as Trinity started falling all over Neo, which means I never bothered to watch the second and third films.

In fairness, though, at least that franchise didn't have Jar Jar.

I love Barton Fink. If you've ever tried to write something and failed (or write something and get stuck), I think this movie captures the feeling extremely well.

The movie has an interesting story behind it, in that the Coens were under contract for and working on Miller's Crossing, and got completely and utterly stuck and just couldn't move forward on the project. They went away for a few weeks and wrote Barton Fink, then spent a few months getting the money and cast together, shot it, released it and THEN went back and finished Miller's Crossing.

Barton Fink went on to win the Palm D'or at Cannes. Pretty good for a side-project.

Dedman i gotta say at first i was against it but after seeing it i really liked the movie all i can say is they didn't butcher it they just "borrowed" the name and some elements of the Asimov classic and made a new movie off of it. it was a good popcorn flick.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was the one-and-only time my Dad ever took us over the river to Philly to see a movie-- and he made it a surprise. Didn't know what we were going for until we got there. But, we wound up doing something else in between buying the tickets and the start of the movie... and his watch stopped. So-- we wound up walking in 10 minutes late!

I had NO IDEA what we were watching when we went in. I thought-- "This CAN'T be a nature film-- can it?" So right there, the first part of the film was screwed for me. I dug The Blue Danube, but really had to adjust my mindset to be PATIENT enough to deal with the long, long, LONG stretches of NO dialogue at all-- and even when there is dialogue, it all seems incidental. Like, every time people are talking, you're waiting for something to happen... AND IT NEVER DOES!!!

I should mention we saw the film in the only theatre in Philly outfitted for C I N E R A M A. Wide, WIDE curved screen, and 3 projectors working in an overhead booth in the center of the theatre. WILD! It made it a purely visual, sensory experience more than a "movie".

As for the "star gate" trip... EVERY single time I watch it, the beginning of the sequence feels like a rip-off, because the way it is shot, there is NO indication of what the F*** is happening!!

I tried figuring it out as it went. Others were not so patient. A LOT were not so patient. The theatre was not very crowded that day, but I can accurately say that 75% of the audience-- 75%!!-- WALKED OUT in the middle of the stargate sequence! So they never saw the ending of the film!!

A few months later, I read the novel... and THEN I "got it". Later, I went to see it on a reissue, and finally got to see the beginning. That night, we stayed for the following show as well, and watched up to the end of the "Moon" sequence before going home.

After that, I went to see it on at least 3 different reissues, spaced about 2 years apart. Each time, it was shown in the biggest room in the area-- the only one around here that, even in the early 70's, was set up with a STEREO sound system! Like I said, it was a visual and sensory experience, far more than a movie. I always used to stay for the very end of The Blue Danube, as the music continued about 5 minutes after the lights came up.

When ABC ran it (about 1976), that put an end to the reissues. Damn. It's only okay on TV if you see it uncut and in widewscreen format, but no matter what size tv you got, it AIN'T the same.


By comparison... 2010 by Peter Hyams, I feel, is one of the BEST sci-fi movies ever, ever made. It's really good to watch the 2 films back-to-back... but at least a day apart to let each one have maximum impact.

Hey, everyone has their favs. Those types of Scifi never really worked for me. Too much cerebellumining fuh mah tastes. I like my SciFi down and dirty. Its part of the reason that i didn't care for many of the later star trek stuff. People seemed to do more talking that actioning. I likes my ak-shown!