Movies that SHOULD have been good, but just weren't

I loved Evening, OP.

I just looked at the trailer - it looks quite good.

I LOVED that movie, are you kidding?

Why do you feel it didn't work, OP?

Hook

Dawson's 51-Load Weekend.

The Safety of Objects

"Bad Times At The El Royale" (2018)

Us (2019)

The Goldfinch

The Counselor was an interesting failure.

The Last Jedi

The Predator

Hellboy (2019)

August Osage County

Just kidding...

The Good Liar - such a huge letdown. And no nudity, of course.

I agree with "El Royale". I must have watched 2/3rds of it waiting for something to happen and then I gave up. "The Counselor" , lasted about 10 minutes. I love Ridley Scott but that was just a sinkhole of ennui.

"Wuthering Heights", early 90s ? edition, with Ralph Fiennes. Ralph Fiennes! yanked the video after 15 minutes.

The Other Side of the Wind

[post redacted because independent.co.uk thinks that links to their ridiculous rag are a bad thing. Somebody might want to tell them how the internet works. Or not. We don't really care. They do suck though. Our advice is that you should not click on the link and whatever you do, don't read their truly terrible articles.]

The House of the Spirits.

The New World

Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil

Jumper (2008).

Meh

Public Enemies (2009) Johnny Depp, Christian Slater, Marion Cotillard directed by Michael Mann

Gaga's Star is Born had good songs and good acting, but the story felt rushed and cliched.

The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot should have been a hoot, but it was strangely boring. Not even the Sam Elliott's old man hotness could save it.

Secret Window

R20 I agree. I had the read the book a few weeks before seeing the movie. I went in thinking it was going to be good, but it wasn't.

A Wrinkle in Time seemed like it had great promise, but it was wasted.

The recent remake of Suspiria. It was way too long, drab and boring. Plus Tilda Swinton playing an old man was totally distracting and unnecessary component of the film.

Inception.

The Nun's Story

Moonlight Mile

The Good Shepherd.

Widows.

Ishtar

I am waiting to see Goldfinch but I did not like the lead actor.. He is not sexy, in my opinion.

Believe it or not, Midnight in the Garden is one of my favorite movies.

I enjoyed The Goldfinch but Elgort is awful. Idk how he keeps getting work

Another vote for The Good Liar, although I think it was the bordelone preposterous plot that did it in...

borderline

The fact Elgort was cast in West Side Story tells us all we need to know about this awful remake

R34 While watching Ishtar for the first time about 2 years ago I was convinced everyone else was wrong - that this was a great movie & Hoffman was excellent! Then the movie left New York and went bat shit crazy bad. Not even fun bad.

Videodrome. Saw it stoned out of my mind & was tripped out by it. Then watched it again on HBO & was shocked how terrible ir was.

Inland Empire--tried it twice and could only 1/2 hour in.

Terminator 3. Lots of good ideas sprinkled across multiple sequels but nothing ever coalescing into something really good. Linda Hamiltion and Edward Furlong should have returned for T3.

Public Enemies is a good example

The Friday the 13th remake. Man they fucked that up.

Ya ya!

R46 I don't know. I'd argue the earlier films worked best because they weren't so slick and didn't have any recognizable actors. A big budget remake just wouldn't have had the same feel no matter what. Having said that, they did fuck up on the kills which should have been the easiest thing to pull off and having Jason take a hostage.

Horror movie remakes are almost always crap. Did anyone really think the Friday the 13th remake would be good?

R49 I was really hoping it was going to be good. I think it's possible to remake horror well if you have the right talent involved and the original vision is executed. It seems like there are always creative disputes that happen and rewrites after rewrites that just bog down the whole thing. Hills Have Eyes, I Spit On Your Grave and even (parts of) Rob Zombie's Halloween succeeded IMO. I'm still hoping someone/some studio can successfully execute the Friday the 13th origin story and relaunch it as another successful franchise. Maybe a trilogy vs. endless "chapters" though.

Star Wars: Epsiodes 1-3 and 7-9.

R51 No one was expecting Rise of Skywalker to be any good after The Last Jedi. The Force Awakens wasn't that great but people still had hope that The Last Jedi would deliver.

MACBETH (2015) starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.

An ungodly mess of one of Shakespeare's greatest plays. Half the dialogue is jettisoned, rendering the plot incomprehensible; what remains is delivered, with scarce emotion, in mumbles or breathy whispers. Drama, character, and coherence are sacrificed for lighting effects, slow motion, and lots of fire & fog.

It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I see what you did there.

R53, Roman Polanski's Macbeth is really good (and very gory).

I've heard that Heaven's Gate owns this thread.

The Two Jakes

Sophie’s Choice.

The Cotton Club

The latest Halloween and Terminator installments. Bringing original stars back and including Carpenter and Cameron in production felt like a really inspired move that really got my hopes up high but in the end both films sucked donkey balls. Halloween '18 was so bad it made even H20 look like a masterpiece in comparison.

Agree about 'Evening'. It should have been great, but it was boring. I forgot all about till this thread.

'A Thousand Acres' belongs here too. Great cast, great original source material, and just......flat as the Iowa plains it was set in.

Reading the name the cotton club reminded me of another movie that could've been much better than it was: Harlem Nights, an Eddie Murphy production.

There were so many possibilities, it even had Della Reese, they never even gave her a full night club number for us to enjoy.

Overproduced yet underwritten, a real disappointment.

Contagion. A good cast couldn't save this mess.

Eddie Murphy. He has an unfortunate legacy of fucked up, shitty movies. That said, he really should have won the Oscar for Dreamgirls.

Evening was a huge bore.

[quote] Eddie Murphy.

Eddie Murphy isn't a movie.

R66 you're fucking witty. Glad you got that fact of the day in before the day expired.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Agree about Evening. Such an impressive cast but I didn't really feel anything or care about anyone. Toni should have just slipped Vanessa some morphine in the first few minutes and then spent 2 hours singing Broadway songs with Natasha, introducing the rest of the cast as special guests.

I recall seeing it in a very warm cinema where I had to stop myself falling asleep and Glenn Close's scream really woke up me.

"Conspiracy" and "Downfall" would have worked so much better as musicals.

[Quote] Halloween '18 was so bad it made even H20 look like a masterpiece in comparison.

And that one has Busta Rhymes as one of the main characters lol

R71 Busta was in Halloween: Resurrection (along with Tyrannosaurus Banks). It was LL Cool J who played the sassy black guy in H20.

Lucy in the sky 2019, Hellboy 2019, Doctor Dolittle 2020, and another one for Bad times at the El Royale. Boring and crappy acting.

R72 my bad. I always get those 2 movies mixed up.

Dark Shadows (2012)

It couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a moody, Gothic horror movie or a silly, outlandish comedy so it awkwardly stumbled back and forth between both instead.

Most of them, actually.

A Thousand Acres

[quote]Horror movie remakes are almost always crap. Did anyone really think the Friday the 13th remake would be good?

I agree with you. I remember some people thought the Nightmare On Elm Street remake was going to be good because Jackie Earle Haley was cast to play Freddie Kruger. But, the makeup was really awful and Rooney Mara was an awful lead actress.

R78, Yes, say what you want about some of the later movies of the Nightmare on Elm Street series. They may have been silly and a bit stupid, but they were NEVER boring until the remake came along. I'd describe the remake as if a vampire took the original and sucked all the life out of it.

Freddy Krueger was the only character in the whole movie with any personality whatsoever. The rest are just like mannequins. I suppose they could have acted like zombies because they were so exhausted from sleep deprivation, but that doesn't make them very interesting for the viewers to watch. Rooney Mara seemed bored, as though her attitude was "let's just get this over with so I can collect my paycheck and go home." But to be fair, the script didn't give her a whole lot to work with. I think they were just so concerned with giving Freddy cool things to do that they forgot to flesh out any of the other characters.

It is just one of the worst horror remakes out there.

[Quote] It is just one of the worst horror remakes out there.

I'll take it over the Prom Night remake.

The Wiz. I don't hate it but it should have been so much better. Sidney Lumet was the wrong choice for director. Diana Ross was on an ego-trip (she was 34 at the time, while the character from the stage version was much younger).

The Irishman

The Post

Ready Player One

Nocturnal Animals

The January Man, 1990. Great cast, script by John Patrick "Moonstruck" Shanley. Awful.

I Love You to Death, 1990. Another great cast, with a terrific story based on a real-life case of a wife trying to kill her unfaithful husband but utterly failing. I wanted to love this but it was so blah.

Time Bandits.

Clue.

There's a whole podcast about these types of films hosted by some gays that some of you may appreciate!

The movie where Meryl Streep played Julia Child. She was so over the top with the scenery chewing, I thought she was going to jump out of the screen and start eating the theater seats.

Marvin's Room

^ I thought Marvin’s Room did the best it could with its very uneven source. I saw the play on Broadway a few years ago and preferred the film.

Diane Keaton has some beautiful scenes.

Love Ranch, starring Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci. Two great leads, a fun premise, a great director (Taylor Hackford) and a strong supporting cast including Bryan Cranston and DL fave Gina Gershon. It all should have worked, and yet it was a total bomb. In fact, I don't even think it got a wide release in the U.S., so not many people had the chance to see it.

Meryl was not the problem with that movie, Amy/r89.

The Light Between the Oceans

Boyhood Hereditary Bird Box Bohemian Rhapsody

Boyhood — really overrated and boring Hereditary - overrated Bird Box — silly Bohemian Rhapsody — way more tame and PG than I would have expected. Unrealistic. It was like someone waved a family friendly wand over the film and said “no real conflict, complexity, drug use, or sex.”

Hereditary was fine up until the last half hour. Seeing Toni Colette fly around her house was great 😆

Hereditary was garbage.

I wasn't a fan of Hereditary, but I thought it was better than Us.

Another vote for The Irishman. Got 2+ hours into it. Deeply disappointed.

The Bonfire of the Vanities. What a disaster. And the book was such a zeitgeist.

I loved Hereditary, but wasn't such a huge fan of Midsommar. I would describe it as Two Thousand Maniacs meets The Wicker Man but about an hour too long.

And similar to that, I loved The Witch but didn't really care for The Lighthouse. It had some good things going for it like the cinematography. It definitely deserves that Oscar nomination. But I had a hard time staying invested in the story (what little of it there was) and characters

Parasite had a thought-provoking message but really dragged in the last hour. Could have edited out 30 minutes without changing it much.

Also, it was characterized as a horror movie, which was completely inaccurate. It was a psychological thriller.

There was nothing that suggested "Evening" should have been great. The original source material was sub-par and masquerading as literature, and the movie, banking on that false notion, threw a lot of high-class names into material that couldn't sustain its prestigious pretensions. Tedious.

The new Halloween was really a dud. They brought back Curtis and Carpenter and threw away all the sequels for THAT? Remember how they kept building it up as if it was some big expose of trauma and H20 ended up handling that subject much better?

I did like Carpenter's music score, though.

r91, if you saw the Lili Taylor-Broadway version, that was the production, not the play, which is a small masterpiece. The Off-Broadway original production was magnificent.

R105 It was good up until the third act. They really wasted Sartain's character.

The Shipping News. All those Oscar Winners in the cast, and it still sucked. Maybe La Spacey was too busy hitting on all the local boys to work on his performance

R108 There are a lot of stories about Spacey and the local boys when he was filming The Shipping News in Nova Scotia, including one where he tried to get a 15-year-old hitch-hiker to go down on him and kicked him out of the car in the middle of nowhere when he refused:

Actually the Goldfinch was good but I almost stopped watching at the halfway point. The director had made me doubt him.

One True Thing (1998)

R110, the movie was good yet you still almost stopped watching it because you didn't trust the director? That's odd.

The movie where the bear wrestles Leo DiCaprio. I've forgotten the name already.

THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS

I was looking forward to seeing THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, I liked the writer and director and the performers. But they all mumbled or whispered and the story was so convoluted that I left and snuck into a different movie.

Nothing special about catwoman.

The Kids Are Alright. I loved High Art and Laurel Canyon and was looking forward Lisa Cholodenko’s first (more) mainstream release. It was just a corny domestic melodrama with overacting by Annette Bening and got a lot of awards for being a gay film too boring to offend anyone. What a letdown.

R115 I agree. Bening's performance irritated the fuck out of me.

R115 I’m pretty sure the lesbian community was offended that a movie about lesbians ended up with one of the women going off and having sex with a man for no reason (would a mainstream movie about two gay men end with one of them having sex with a woman?). You’d think the plot/script was created by a straight man. In 9/10 “lesbian” films, this is exactly what happens, or one of the women kills herself, or they break up so one of them can have “figure myself out” time. That movie sucked.

Agree with R85 about NOCTURNAL ANIMALS. I sat through it thinking there would be a resolution or clarity or an explanation as to what was going on, but it's a lot of interesting and curious scenes with no story line.

Was it a novel within a novel, a movie within a movie, a news story within real life? Who knows? And who cares?

R117 Julianne Moore’s character in The Kids are Alright was bisexual, not a lesbian.

R119 it’s been awhile since I’ve seen it, so I forgot about that. I should’ve said movies featuring women in a same sex relationship. It’s just as bad if it portrays a bisexual woman in her committed relationship with a woman cheating on her with a man....plays right into the “bisexuals can’t be trusted” stereotype. Either way, disappointing.

A Perfect World (1993)

EVENT HORIZON - What a confusing, self-important, flat movie. Was this supposed to be another ALIEN?

COVENANT - And speaking of ALIEN, what was going on in this movie?

The Shipping News

Dammit I missed the comments about The Shipping News above.

New York, New York. Had so much potential, but De Niro was irritating. Liza was fantastic. The "Happy Endings" sequence was cut from the original release. Christ on a cracker, it was supposed to be a musical and they neglected the show stopper, but put it back in for a 1981 re-release..

Whoever mentioned The Good Shepherd is spot on. I tried for the film’s entire run time to like it, but my god what a bore. Wretched script that totally wasted Damon and Jolie. Not to mention it’s also responsible for introducing us to Eddie Redmayne and his weird mouth ticks.

I personally didn’t think Knives Out was as good as everyone said it was. Daniel Craig’s accent kept taking me out of the movie.

[quote] Wretched script that totally wasted Damon and Jolie. Not to mention it’s also responsible for introducing us to Eddie Redmayne and his weird mouth ticks.

What bothered me about this film was that I couldn’t see Redmayne as Damon’s and Jolie’s son. He looks nothing like either.

The film versions of ANNIE and A CHORUS LINE, for various reasons.

I liked EVENING and I love NEW YORK, NEW YORK.

R118 I wish I could have seen every DLers reaction to the opening credits of Nocturnal Animals 😆

R129 it wasn't great but A Chorus Line is still fun.

UP IN THE AIR - miscast and sanctimonious

DRACULA - Francis Ford Coppola’s movie juuust missed being either a good film or a camp classic, whether it was Keanu or the healthy sprinkling of cheese.

GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL - Ralph Fiennes isn’t naturally charming or funny - Daniel Day-Lewis or Hugh Grant or even Richard E. Grant would have been better matches - and his use of kitsch (Tilda Swinton’s casting) showed a misunderstanding of Stefan Zweig’s romantic, suffocating and tragic stories.

Casablanca

The Best of Enemies(2019)- I watched this over the weekend and it wasn't awful, but it wasn't that great.

MALEFICENT....such potential to be dark, scary, engulfing.... instead they turned it into to some sappy feminine redemption crap.

The Devil's Candy is a fascinating examination of why "Bomfire of The Vanities" was such a disaster. DePalma wanted to redeem Sherman McCoy in the end. Tom Wolfe was smart he took the $ and made zero comments on the process.

Elysium—what was Jodie Foster thinking when she used that accent? Why didn’t anyone stop her?

August Osage County

The Other Boleyn Girl—yaawwwnnn.

The film adaptation of Proof.

Crash. Yuck.

R122 - I finally watched it because I had heard such good things about it. It had a couple of moments but I was overall disappointed. Sam Neill looked good at least.

I'm too scared to watch Event Horizon. I chickened out after 5 minutes.

Clue---Not even Tim Curry could help.

Casino Royale---the first one with David Niven.

The Jackal---Upping the ante in weaponry and gore was a big fail. Great cast, no class.

i second The Goldfinch.

It's a disappointment when your favorite book is made into a dud.

Little Women

The Laundromat

Mary Poppins Returns

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

The Post

Florence Foster Jenkins

Suffragette

Ricki and the Flash

Into the Woods

August: Osage County

Hope Springs

The Iron Lady

It's Complicated

Julie & Julia

Doubt

Mamma Mia!

Lions for Lambs

Rendition

Evening

Prairie Home Companion

Prime

The Manchurian Candidate

The Hours

Adaptation.

Music of the Heart

One True Thing

Dancing at Lughnasa

Marvin's Room

Before and After

The Bridges of Madison County

The River Wild

The House of the Spirits

Death Becomes Her

Defending Your Life

Postcards from the Edge

She-Devil

A Cry in the Dark

Ironweed

Heartburn

Out of Africa

Plenty

Falling in Love

Still of the Night

The French Lieutenant's Woman

I think it's better that you don't see movies, R143.

R143 Now is not the time Glenn.

R143 She-Devil is my fave Meryl movie.

R143 The Hours? That movie is one of my top favorites!!! And judging by that long list, it sounds like everything fails to live up to your standards.

No, its just the anti-Meryl troll

G is posting again?

The Godfather 3. Such a disappointment.

My Sweet Cunt

1917

Dunkirk

Both stylishly directed, but I didn't give a shit about any of the characters

I saw the preview for Clue in the theater and the audience seemed to be into it, esp. with that cast. Then, when the movie came out, the response was "ehh". Too bad, with that potential.

Constantine - Casting Tilda Swinton as the angel was brilliant. She has an odd, ethereal quality that worked well. Good visual effects. And Peter Stormare as Satan was awesome. Love him. Keanu could have been good in this; he can play haunted. But it just never pulled together. Overlong maybe?

I don't get it. I thought Clue was beloved? Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Lesley Ann Warren all fabulous?

Ad Astra

Burton's Alice In Wonderland. In theory it should have worked because Burton's movies generally focus on whimsy and fantasy. But it was just appallingly bad. I would add Burton's Willy Wonka as well . It's amazing how awful Tim Burton has become at the type of films that he became famous for.

R155, Well, that IS the point: great cast, mediocre movie. "Clue" was one overlong and mirthless attempt at farce.

R143 No I think his solution is not to see movies with Streep in them.

Popeye. Perfect casting but a bomb. Robin Williams also had a comedic star studded flop with Club Paradise.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I mean how can you go wrong? Hiring Johnny Depp for one.

R138 it wasn’t all bad. I got to make it with Elias Koteas on that project.

[quote] Was it a novel within a novel, a movie within a movie, a news story within real life? Who knows?

Gus Van Sant’s TO DIE FOR with Nicole Kidman & Joaquin Phoenix leaves a very similar impression on the viewer, but that movie is at least somewhat interesting and fun in its grim, lurid, twisted silliness.

R44 respectfully disagree.

I must be the only person alive, but I enjoy T3: RISE OF THE MACHINES more than any other Terminator movie. Yes, it was depressing - but isn’t this a story about an apocalypse that cannot be prevented? T2 has the storytelling edge in terms of sentiment (the whole found family/‘what is a man?’ angle) and most people prefer it an as action thriller because of the bike chases and metalhead aesthetic, but I find T3 is the only Terminator film that goes beyond this and makes emotional sense from a “shit’s fucked and we’re all (mostly) gonna die” perspective.

Nick Stahl is really excellent in it. He’s about the best Furlong’s John Connor could reasonably have hoped to become, given his upbringing and all he went through.

r23, are you making a joke? The story felt cliche? It's the 4th remake it's not cliche it's homage.

r44, he was drugged out and Linda was dealing with her bi-polar disorder which was being discovered and diagnosis.

Perhaps the franchised could have waited for them to get it together. She did with her divorce settlement but I'm not sure waiting for him would have worked.

r88, a lot of those movies weren't bad.

The title suggest it is a bad movie. Great cast, great material, great director - or NOT. Something usually goes wrong.

The Age of Innocence. So painfully correct but deadly boring.

Sweet Baby Jesus - R143 is making a -- you know -- joke.

I Heart Huckabees

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Jude Law flameout.

A Star Is Born (The Lady Gaga Version)

Loved the actors- (I despise Bradley Cooper yet I could not take my eyes off of him- he was EXCELLENT in this) Gaga, Sam Elliott- Such charismatic performances-

The film was beautifully shot, some of the music was excellent

The weak spot was some of Gaga's scenes were very amateurish, that SNL "performance" and song was HILARIOUSLY bad- it was almost comedic..

LOVED the title card at the beginning- It looked so 50's.. Very cool.

Somehow, the film REALLY dragged in parts and never really reached the heights that it should have...

It just didn't work for me. Not bad but not good... And also, its the kind of film that will have no repeat viewing quality.

Nocturnal Animals was pretentious hogwash. I couldn't believe it got a wide release. It was like an expensive student film.

August: Osage County wastes a great cast and leaves out a lot of the play's nuances turning it into a bizarre series of "for your consideration" Oscar clips.

The new Halloween brought back Jamie Lee Curtis and erased all the sequels to end up being equally as inept and idiotic as many of the sequels it pretended it was superior to. At least John Carpenter came back to score it. Does anyone know how Laurie afforded her tricked out Looney Tunes house?

Dracula (John Badham)

While Frank Langella and Kate Nelligan light up the screen, the whole thing is a mess. Ablate a sumptuous mess.

The Wiz.

It should have been a joyful, rousing two hours but instead we got a dour, joyless musical with a sour, frumpy Diana Ross and a horrible wig that made her look like a 50 year old teacher. Plus clunky sets from Sidney Lumet who had no feel for a musical.

Saw ASIB with Gaga and thought it was good...and haven't thought about it since.

R161, I think r138 meant the Matt Dillon 2004 "Crash" that won over BBM was yuck, and not the sexy wound fetish Crash from a few years earlier...

r170, that SNL spot was supposed to be bad. That was the point.

I thought The Goldfinch was a good film, but it should have been a great film. You can't fit 750 pages into a 2 1/2 film without losing intricate parts and flow of a story. It would have served better if it were a 6-8 hour miniseries, like Angels in America.

R177 I agree, it could have worked better as a mini-series. I wonder if it was ever considered for mini-series option at one point.

Stephen King's 11/22/63 was originally supposed to be a theatrical movie with Jonathan Demme attached to direct. There were creative issues between Demme and King about what to put in a film version, Demme left the project and allowed the option to lapse. JJ Abrams and Hulu then got it and turned into a mini-series which turned out ok.

I also thought The Help would have worked better as a mini-series instead of a movie.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. What in the actual hell was that? Keanu Reeves can’t pretend to be British to save his life and Winona Ryder’s English accent was almost as bad as Keanu’s. This movie was long, boring, weird, and oddly campy in some parts. It made no sense.

Ford vs. Ferrari - it was OK, but no real thrills considering it was about car racing.

"Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" misses the mark with the cast of the two leads. Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevigne, who look more like adolescent siblings than space adventurers.

Freeheld- had a good based on a true story plot and good cast. But, it wasn't great at all.

King Kong 1976

King Kong 2005

Speed Racer 2008

La La Land

Dark Shadows

One would think Tim Burton would have gone DARK with Dark Shadows and showcased what he is good at...the camp factor coupled with Johnny Depp just killed an incredible opportunity. The same thing with Dumbo...it should have been magic with Tim Burton at the helm and it missed on so many levels.

I find most Tim Burton films look great on paper but the execution is terrible. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dumbo, Dark Shadows, Planet of the Apes.

^ Totally agree with this. Dumbo and Dark Shadows were big letdowns

Contagion.

The sequel in 3D Sensurround is awful. And I can’t figure out how to turn it off.

“Crimson Peak” - Over-produced mess from director Guillermo Del Toro. Great cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Charlie Hunnam. Some moody, Victorian visuals. But the whole thing could have been done far better in b&w in the 1940’s in half the length. (And this is the picture that Del Toro did, instead of “The Hobbit.”)

And, now that I think of it, speaking of over-produced, all three of those overblown “Hobbit” movies churned out by Peter Jackson. He took a short, fun children’s book and extended it into something more bloated than “Gotterdamerung.”

Poltergeist (1982) I tried to watch this again recently but I think Spielberg as writer and producer had too strong a hand in it. All that happy families stuff just bores me, the special effects were bad, and even the Jerry Goldsmith score was too much.

JoBeth Williams was fantastic though r192, one of the great performances in horror. But I get what you're saying.

Apparently the tonal shifts you're referring to is because Tobe Hooper was the director and Spielberg the producer, but apparently Spielberg directed most of it.

[quote]Dark Shadows

There was no chance in Hell that this movie was going to be good. It was doomed the second they cast Johnny Depp as Barnabas. That Tim Burton was directing was just another nail in the coffin.

I wonder if Dark Shadows will ever be rebooted/remade again as a TV show. The 1991 show wasn't all that bad. The now defunct WB filmed a pilot revival in the mid 2000s, but didn't receive a series orders.

Too many to name, OP.

[Quote] The now defunct WB filmed a pilot revival in the mid 2000s, but didn't receive a series orders.

Who was in it??

I remember watching Shampoo years ago. The reviews were awesome. But it did nothing for me. It was good to see Goldie Hawn dropping the daffy routine and actually play a part

SPECTRE. A convoluted mess.

[quote]The now defunct WB filmed a pilot revival in the mid 2000s, but didn't receive a series orders.

[quote]Who was in it??

Alec Newman as (a very young) Barnabas. Marley Shelton as Victoria Winters. Jessica Chastain as Carolyn Stoddard. Blair Brown as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Martin Donovan as Roger Collins. Ivana Milicevic as Angelique. Matt Czuchry as Willie Loomis.

I really hope that, someday, we get the full story about Poltergeist and who really directed what. With Hooper dead now, we'll never hear his side, but I wouldn't be surprised if he'd been silenced by Spielberg.

A friend of mine said this is why the movie has never really had one of those big, fancy special edition DVD/Blu-Ray releases with retrospectives and interviews with the cast and crew, because they don't want to dig up any dirt on the production. Not really sure why it would matter. It feels much more like a Spielberg movie to me and it's a good one. Whoever made the majority of the film should be proud.

R200 thanks

[quote]I really hope that, someday, we get the full story about Poltergeist and who really directed what. With Hooper dead now, we'll never hear his side, but I wouldn't be surprised if he'd been silenced by Spielberg.

I hope so too. I remember the E! True Hollywood story of Poltergeist had interviews with a few cast members who all pretty much gave the impression that Spielberg stepped in and took away a lot of control from Hooper. I wish that episode was online somewhere because I remember it was fun to watch and they also brought up weird stories that occurred while filming the sequels.

R201 = Zelda Rubinstein.

It makes sense Spielberg would have taken over. He was at his peak as a commercial movie director and producer.

About Alice

Wow I disagree with R192 completely- A near perfect film and JoBeth Williams deserved an Oscar nomination. (And I would have given one to Craig T Nelson and Beatrice Straight as well.... Love that film. I actually cared about the characters.

R181 I agree, though I did enjoy the visuals. I know many people complain that older films and TV shows cast actors that were older than the part but modern films have gone to the opposite extreme. I frequently see actors cast in parts that they look far too young to be playing.

Can I just say “Mamie Gummer” is the most un-fabulous name.

Cadillac Records

Not a movie, but the miniseries 'Self-Made' about Madame CJ Walker could have been wonderful. It wasn't.

I agree R211. I thought some critics overrated it.