Followers of this thread might like this long read.
I always fancied myself as a writer and I love cinema, so.......
I put it together for a movie page but the editor of the page (A taste of cinema) was an obstinate beaut who criticised my writing style. I basically ended up losing my temper with him and told him to FERK off. After so much effort and research, it was jettisoned. But I kept the piece and here it is.
" 8 Films that directors would like to forget"
Even the most talented of directors have blemishes on their otherwise stellar CV’s. The films that they shy away from mentioning in interviews, the films they won’t acknowledge or gush fondly about.
Many of the pictures featured here are by definition “poor” quality movies. That’s not to say they are completely devoid of at least some entertainment value however. Come with me and check over the movies that these lensman would prefer you didn’t mention…..
Steven Spielberg – 1941 (1979)
Straight off the one-two knockout success of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the man surnamed “play-mountain” was given pretty much a blank cheque from two eagerly indulgent Hollywood studios and his choice of project to take on. The movie he decided to helm remains perhaps his greatest folly – yet is still one of his most interesting pictures in retrospect.
A WW2 comedy action picture set in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the panicky ultra-jingoistic US reaction to entering the conflict, 1941 is a mess, with too many characters, too little storyline and a lot of noise and mayhem in place of proper laughter. Scripted by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale (who would of course enjoy a much more fruitful working relationship in the 80’s with Spielberg via the Back to the Future series), 1941 is a strange beast.
A huge ensemble cast, a series of very loosely interconnected stories, with no real character development - the film seems to veer one way then the other, with no real sense of direction and a reliance on slapstick in place of funny lines. It shamefully wastes the comedic talents of the late great John Belushi as well. Not a great rap-sheet for a “comedy”.
In its defence though…..
There are some outstanding set-pieces and special effects – the fighter plane dogfight down the alleys of Los Angeles, the Ferris wheel collapse, and the chaotic Busby-Berkley dance-hall fight scene set to the rolling music of The Quiet Man – which Spielberg handles with his customary excitingly kinetic flair. John Williams patriotic fanfare of a score is also memorable, perhaps the best thing about the film.
And there are some TRULY GREAT moments – The opening Jaws parody, John Candy knocking on the house door after flattening Lorraine Kelly with it, The Japanese officer trying to fit a wireless radio through the hatch of the submarine “We’ve got to find a way of making these things smaller”, Christopher Lee, Slim Pickens and Toshiro Mifune arguing in German, English and Japanese.
The film is also something Spielberg keeps returning to and stealing ideas and themes from in his subsequent career – the nostalgic obsession with the 1940’s, the fascination with aircraft and flight, the broken family, the ordinary guy stepping up to be a hero – all in there.
When 1941 was released, it actually made a decent return, but nowhere near what the two studios involved (Universal and Columbia) expected. Its box office receipts were dwarfed by other big-budget films of the year such as Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which took audiences to galaxies far, far away, not some earthly conflict that most were trying to forget. It was savaged by critics and was later regarded disdainfully by Spielberg – “I’ll spend the rest of my life disowning this picture”.
David Fincher – Alien 3 (1992)
Nowadays David Fincher an established top-drawer director with an envious track record of innovative, challenging and visually extraordinary pictures. Seven, Fight Club and Zodiac are testament to his unique creative gift. Despite some hiccups along the way (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?), he has generally produced absorbing, intelligent and fascinating films. All stylistically great to look at and varying in style and subject matter.
Fincher’s 1992 Hollywood baptism by the troubled Alien “threequel” is something he rarely discusses however, and is clearly still pained by 25 years later.
Only 27 years old when he was selected to take on directorial duties for the Fox Sci-fi horror franchise, many eyebrows were raised by the choice of a young feature debut director who had experience of shooting commercials and music videos (Notably Madonna’s “Express Yourself” promo).
Many fans of the series - this writer included - feel that the third film is an absolute disaster. It is something the series has never truly recovered from.
No amount of re-editing or false “Director’s cuts” can mask what is essentially a bad film. I won’t list everything wrong with it – that would take up an entire article to catalogue. Let’s just say that the script is a mess - the characters you cared about from the previous picture are jettisoned in a maddeningly casual manner, and the ones that are left in the story you couldn’t care less about and have nothing interesting to say. The story has none of the fear of atmosphere of the first film and none of the drive and excitement of the second.
Alien 3 had an unconfirmed number of different writers attempting to shape its story - and it shows. It is disjointed and lacks cohesion. The picture originally started shooting without a completed script – absolute madness when you consider the budget and scale of the production. (Although that’s never stopped Michael Bay making a picture before).
Worst villain of the piece was the studio. Fox seemed to have little faith in the project, and despite a huge budget , corners were cut and unfairly for Fincher, they handcuffed his creative vision and made it impossible for him to deliver a sequel anywhere near as good as the first two pictures.
Fincher has avoided questions about the film and has distanced himself from it for decades. He did once however comprehensively address the film and his frustrations with the Hollywood process as follows:
“There were a lot of enormously talented people working on that movie. It's just a movie starts from a unified concept, and once you've unified the concept it becomes very easy to see the things you're not going to spend money on. And if a movie is constantly in flux because you're having to please this vice-president or that vice-president of production .. . I think a movie set's a fascist dictatorship--you have to go in and know what it is you want to do because you have to tell 90 people what it is you want to do and it has to be convincing. Otherwise, when they start to question it, the horse can easily run away with you and it's bigger than you are. So that was a movie where the time was not taken upfront to say, "This is what we're doing, and all of this is what we're not doing." So as we were shooting, a lot of people--I suppose in an effort to make it "better" or "more commercial" or more like the other ones they liked as opposed to the one that you liked--took to being extremely helpful, so that this could be more James Cameron than James Cameron. And of course you're sitting there going, "Guys, remember I don't have any guns. I don't have any tripod guns or flamethrowers or any of that!" If a movie gets off on a wrong foot, when you've never done it before you assume everyone is going to be there to help you right the ship, but really you're beholden to a lot of banana republics. I worked on it for two years, got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated Alien 3 more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me. It was a baptism by fire. I was very naive. For a number of years, I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be, which is stupid. I thought, "Well, surely you don't want to have the Twentieth Century-Fox logo over a shitty movie." And they were like, "Well, as long as it opens." They didn't care”.
Oliver Stone – Alexander (2004)
A colossal production that had been gestating in the mind of Oliver Stone for 40 years, Alexander was finally given the greenlight after Ridley Scott’s Gladiator took a vicious hold of the 2000 global box office and spectacularly revived the Hollywood love affair with sword and sandal epics.
The story of the young prince of Macedonia, schooled by the great philosopher Aristotle, who never lost a battle in 15 years of global conquest. He named 70 cities after himself, tried to introduce one common language and currency system across his empire and swiftly rose to rule the entire known world at the time of his death at just 32 years old – cause of death unknown.
It should have been incredible – Stone a proven old hand master director (and talented screenwriter) with a unique gift for shooting war scenes (no one can shoot visceral in-your-face violence like Stone- a twice wounded Vietnam grunt). There was scope to tell a sweeping epic story and reveal more to modern audiences about a fascinating man whose life reads more like a god of Greco-Roman mythology than real-life flesh and blood mortal
As with several films in this article, despite very clear problems with the final films, there are elements of greatness mixed within.
Which tends to make them just that bit more frustrating to watch.
And as with Alien 3 above, various edits of Alexander have been released, to try and switch the emphasis of the main character and tighten up supporting characters and the love triangle storyline that weighs down the middle section of the 3 hour running time. But the film is still carved from the same founding rock, so any slight difference doesn’t really impact on the film as a whole.
The ponderous screenplay by Stone chose to focus more on the upbringing and conflicted titular character rather than his extraordinary achievements and possible motivations. The question of Alexander’s sexuality and relationship with his confidant and trusted friend Hephaestion is clumsily handled and just doesn’t cut it.
And the casting is way off – Colin Farrell just doesn’t have the charismatic gravitas or boldness to capture the essence of such a huge historical figure – He is trying too hard to pull faces and emote in this. Val Kilmer pretty much plays Phillip the one-eyed king exactly as he portrayed Jim Morrison in The Doors movie. A drunken bore with a larger than life ego. Angelina Jolie hisses her lines in a strangely Romanian “wampire” accent and camps it up to the point of comedy. The strange decision to use Oirish accents for many of the Primary actors portraying the Macedonian soldiers was also truly bizarre.
There are some positives to be found in the picture here though. The Battle of Gaugamela is thrillingly staged and a real “blood-and-thunder” spectacle (despite of a sub-Braveheart pre-charge speech to his troops from Farrell). And the narration provided by Anthony Hopkins (as the aged Pharaoh Ptolemy) is rich in language and description, and not without stirring evocations of greatness “I’ve known many great men…but only one colossus…..”
Or (intentional?) humour: “It was said later that Alexander was never defeated in his lifetime, except by Hephaistion's thighs”.
Stone himself, stung by merciless criticism of the film after the initial release, went on the defensive for a while. He had wrestled with critics of his cinematic output for pretty much his entire career. “Controversy” was pretty much a prerequisite word in every review or press release when it came to his incendiary output.
Eventually his passion for the project appeared to have finally been exhausted, as he stated in a 2005 Independent interview: "Alexander was a winner... pity the film wasn't," he says sadly. He grimaces. "Alexander never lost a battle in his life. And I have let him down. He was a fighter, the sort of man who would have gone after Osama bin Laden and never given up…….”
David Lynch – Dune (1984)
Another in the series of post-Star Wars sci-fi epics that had good intentions but missed more target points than it hit, David Lynch’s ’84 Dune was the result of a decade long spell in “development hell”.
Based on Frank Herbert’s’ mind-bending series of novels, it was originally mooted as a project for eccentric Chilean visionary Alexandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain). Jodorowsky envisioned a 14-hour running time with a script “the size of a phone book”, featuring a cast of Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, and Gloria Swanson amongst many others. The feature was to have the hottest creative minds of the time around, including HR Giger, Dan O’Bannon, Chris Foss and French Comic-book God Jean “Moebius” Giraud to work on the design elements of his galactic masterpiece. Pink Floyd was to provide a psychedelic soundtrack for this space epic. What an enticing mix.
Sadly, the picture ran out of funding and no-one really “got” Jodorowsky’s oddball vision. So gradually his dream died and the original attempt died a horribly slow death during the late 70’s.
A brilliant account of the whole process of invention, vision and sad failure can be seen in the 2013 documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune”. Highly recommended.
So after a few years on the skids, the project was revived by Italian Mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis, who initially tried to get Ridley Scott on board. Scott passed however, so De Laurentiis hired David Lynch after viewing The Elephant Man.
From the outset, the production was a huge challenge to take on, with the mammoth scale and density of Herbert’s original novels proving far too complex and lengthy for a two-hour feature. Rather than an even costlier, commercially risky franchise, it was decided to compress the script by relying on voiceovers, rapid-fire exposition form characters and huge confusing jumps between locations and characters.
The story itself (in the film version) is 10,000 years into the future - a power struggle between two great dynastic empires over a rare spice (melange) that makes interstellar travel possible. The only location of this wonder drug? The arid desert planet Dune (Arrakis). A young hero takes charge of his destiny, becomes a messianic Christ figure, topples a vile enemy, saves the universe etc.
There are a lot of problems with Dune. A lack of action, dislikeable characters which are hard to identify with, a script packed confusing techno-babble, some ropey-looking special effects (despite the £40 million dollar budget).
A flame-haired punkoid Sting in a giant metal nappy is perhaps the lowest point of the movie.
There are also some remarkable visuals in the film and the sets and production design are extraordinary. A sweeping Brian Eno score is a tremendous asset as well, at least injecting the film with some desperately emotion and drama that it sorely lacks.
Released in December 1984, Dune wheezed to a £30 million total at the US box office (on a budget of £40 million)and was universally panned by critics and fans of Herbert’s original books.
Along with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Dune became a cult film with the underground art student set, with its striking visuals and general Lynchian weirdness gathering a following during the VHS revolution of the 1980’s. Several different edits exist, including an “extended edition” that runs for 186 minutes. Lynch refused to have his name on this version and the director is listed as “Alan Smithee”, the pseudonym used by directors who are unhappy with a project and wish to be disassociated with it.
Now, over 30 years later, Lynch is starkly honest over his decision to direct Dune rather than Return of the Jedi, which George Lucas had earmarked him for: about Dune. In an interview in the aftermath, Lynch stated: “I started selling out on Dune. Looking back, it's no one's fault but my own. I probably shouldn't have done that picture, but I saw tons and tons of possibilities for things I loved, and this was the structure to do them in. There was so much room to create a world. But I got strong indications from Raffaella and Dino De Laurentiis of what kind of film they expected, and I knew I didn't have final cut”
Joel Schumacher – Batman and Robin (1997)
Batman and Robin. It’s lauded as the worst superhero movie ever made. A total travesty, dumbing down the Dark Knight and overdosing on campy bat-nipples and silly Schwarzenegger ice-related puns.
Space, time and sanity do not permit us to examine the countless problems with the film here. It goes without saying however that the picture was almost the death of the franchise and a huge blow to the superhero movie genre.
It was only with Christopher Nolan resetting the Batman series to the original dark, moody and magnificent format with his trilogy that the caped avenger was resurrected . The immense box office generated by the rebooted series showed that when the source material is treated with respect, comic book movies can be runaway successes.
Back in 97’ however, the series was still a huge money spinner for Warner Brothers, who, despite a mixed critical response were thrilled with the huge returns for 1995’s Batman Forever (the most profitable film in the series up to that point) giving director Joel Schumacher free reign to indulge himself. The studio’s main proviso seeming to be: Make sure you get loads of toys and merchandise in shot that we can sell at Christmas.
With that sort of business plan, what could go wrong?
To be honest, the series was already faltering when Schumacher came in along with Val Kilmer for Batman Forever, after Tim Burton had jumped ship, taking Michael Keaton with him. Schumacher replaced Burton’s Gothic perma-dark vision of Gotham with an OTT carnival feel that harked back more to the 1960’s Adam West TV series. Cartoonish villains such as the Riddler (Jim Carrey in his most annoying mid-90’s gurning phase) and Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones in an embarrassingly forced performance).
Despite the flaws of course, the picture made truckloads of cash at cinemas worldwide. Plus the rampant commercialism and abundance of merchandising that goes hand in hand with Hollywood Blockbusters were also flying out of the toy stores. So when Batman and Robin rolled around two years later, Warners were content to let Schumacher do pretty much his own thing.
Which, even the director himself has admitted – was a tragically wrong move.
The picture is an excessive, overblown disco-lit nightmare with abysmal acting, a toilet paper of a script and a nonsensical storyline.
Critically savaged in the media and hated by fans – the DVD of Batman and Robin is probably used as an ashtray or mug coaster by many – It still managed to rake in $200 million on a budget of an estimated $140 million. But the trauma and guilt clearly still affected Schumacher himself, who in an extraordinary 2014 interview with Variety magazine stated:
“…….I never did a sequel to any of my movies, and sequels are only made for one reason: to make more money and sell more toys. I did my job. But I never got my ass in the seat right…..There’s nobody else to blame but me. I could have said, “No, I’m not going to do it.” I just hope whenever I see a list of the worst movies ever made, we’re not on it. I didn’t do a good job”.
Russel Mulcahy - Highlander 2 (1990)
The problem with some sequels is that….they don’t actually need to exist…. On an artistic level, anyway.
When an original picture wraps everything up in a satisfactory manner and leaves no loose ends…there is no real need for follow ups or prequels or spin-offs. Some sequels of course exceed the originals – Godfather 2, The Empire Strikes Back for example. Brilliant movies that take everything good from the first movie and make it even better.
But of course history has taught us that solely money talks in tinseltown, and wherever a studio executive or a producer spies a glint of silver, they will mercilessly exploit it for financial gain. Hence the unwritten law of diminishing returns.
Highlander (1986) is a unique fantasy sci-fi actioner about a race of (almost) invulnerable “Immortals” who fight each other in excitingly staged sword battles down the centuries, killing each other off by severing their unfortunate opponents heads until (as Freddy Mercury bellows on the soundtrack) “There can be only one”. It features Christopher Lambert as 15th century Scottish clansman Connor McCloud (with a tortured French accent), and Sean Connery as his Egyptian-born, Spanish-named mentor Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez (who speaks with a broad Edinburgh accent). McCloud must seek out and kills the other remaining immortals across the globe and during countless years, until only he remains to receive the ultimate “prize”.
Confused yet?
Don’t be – the original film is terrific fun, with loads of flashy visuals (Mulcahy was a renowned pop video director) a Queen soundtrack (don’t run away – it’s actually pretty cool), a time-hopping storyline that is both as clever as it is silly, with the ultimate bonus of Connery at his slyly charming best.
Anyway, without spoiling it, it’s all wrapped up after 2 hours running and resolves every plotline in a pleasingly hermetic way.
It didn’t make much in the US on initial release but was much more popular in Europe, pulling in a small profit. It sat on video rental store shelves (remember them)? and was regarded more of a “cult” picture due to its strange plot and rock n’ roll MTV visuals and Queen soundtrack, than an out-and-out “blockbuster”.
Fast-forward to 1991. Highlander 2: The Quickening hit cinemas. Again, helmed by Russel Mulcahy and starring Lambert and Connery.
But this sequel was indeed unnecessary. Whereas the original had a somewhat bonkers but enjoyable and cohesive story, Highlander 2 took this key element and threw it out of the window. It had a confused plot, some ropey special effects (despite a huge budget), silly scenes that made absolutely no sense or impact on the audience, and a sleep-walking Sean Connery clearly wanting to walk off set to practice his golf drive.
At the premiere, director Mulcahy walked out after 15 minutes. He was frustrated about studio interference and lack of financing. He was absolutely right, too. The production was plagued by money problems and a meddling studio that butchered the script and story until it was an incomprehensible mess.
It’s bad…Really, really, really horrifically bad. It currently holds a 0% approval rating on Rotten tomatoes.
And there it should have ended for the Highlander series.
Yet in subsequent years it has had an ironically immortal lifespan, with (to date) six films, multiple TV series, animated shows, comic books, novels etc.
Through the power of the internet, Mulcahy himself has had a more recent crack at a “Renegade” Director’s edit, to attempt to make the final film more to his original vision. It is a slight improvement (anything is!), but still can’t mask the fundamental problems that riddle the movie.
It leaves one wishing: “Can’t there be only one?”
Michael Bay – Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
With a critical (perhaps criminal?) record like Michael Bay, you’d surely think he wouldn’t be too self-depreciating. Despite his regular-as-clockwork media maulings in reviews, his pictures generate immense sums of money.
And Hollywood lives for money.
Not so for the second in the series of his mega-budget toy/cartoon sci-fi beat-em-up series, however.
The story isn’t really worth analysing here – its’ your standard “Good robots beating up bad robots and annoying human characters running around in between them, dodging bullets” fare .
One noticeable thing about Bay films is that they seem to induce huge migraines in viewers, with the epileptic editing style, booming soundtracks and screamed dialogue. It becomes difficult to follow the action, indeed who is fighting who (and indeed what for). Bay makes the kind of pictures that you forget what happened approximately 30 minutes after viewing them.
To be fair to Bay, he knows his formula for success and tends not to stray far from it. He makes noisy blockbusters with pretty much zero character development and lots of explosions, gunfire and alluring women in hot pants leaning over car bonnets. (Strangely enough, he fell out with his lead hot-pants female Megan Fox very publicly, and engaged in a bitchy war-of words with her in the media. They’ve since made friends again and Bay has cast her in his more recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films)
Yet in the wake of the release of the second movie in the Tranformers series, he appeared to be tiring of the studio and media pressure and stated he was unhappy with the final product. He primarily blamed the production-crippling Hollywood writers’ strike for many of the flaws in the film when in 2011 he gave the following sound-bite in an LA Times interview:
“Look, we got burned on the last movie. The big thing was the writers’ strike, it hurt the film and it made it hard on everybody. We had three weeks to get our story and, really, we were going into the movie without a script. It’s tough to do that. It was too big of a movie. There were too many endings or too many things that felt like endings. There was so much animation [in the visual effects postproduction work], too, and we ran out of time. We used the schedule of the first movie for the second movie but on the second one way more labor was needed for the animation. And then it felt like we were writing the script in the edit room, trying to put together a story.”
Bay later apologised for the film in a more direct manner, and took more direct responsibility for it, simply stating that it was:
“Crap”.
Pretty understated for Mr Bay, that.
John Landis – Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)
“Hey, you wanna see something REALLY scary?”
A young director on a hot streak, having made the highest-grossing comedy in history at that time (Animal House).
An enticing fantasy/horror/sci-fi project featuring 4 stories created by talented filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, George Miller, Joe Dante and John Landis.
Based on the much-loved Rod Serling series that haunted and inspired millions of American children.
What could possibly go wrong?
In Landis’ case, pretty much everything.
Twilight Zone: The Movie is featured in very small print on the Curriculum Vitae of pretty much everyone involved with creating. It was up until recent years unavailable on DVD/Blu-ray, and very rarely screens on television, certainly in the UK. Which is a shame as it has some moments of absolute brilliance and a deeply unsettling feel to it.
But the picture is forever associated with a real-life horror story that cost three lives and it becomes only too clear why many have washed their hands of involvement in it when one studies the making of the film and the horribly tragedy that scarred it.
Landis in fact shot three segments of the film – the wonderfully eerie opening prologue and epilogue scenes featuring a cheerfully creepy Dan Ackroyd.
Sandwiched in between is an original story (rather than a remake of an old episode) entitled “Time Out”. Based very loosely on the series episode “A Quality of Mercy”, the segment follows an angry embittered bigot Bill Connor (Vic Morrow) who sits in a bar with his friends, ranting about being passed over for promotion in his workplace in favour of a Jewish colleague. Connor makes angry slurs about Blacks, Jews and Asian people and is threatened by a group of black men in the bar who resent his racist views. He leaves the bar enraged, and as soon as he does so, is inexplicably catapulted through time and space, being cast in the role of the very people he hates – a WW2 Jewish refugee pursued through occupied France by Nazi soldiers, a Black man in the Deep South being lynched by redneck KKK members and a Vietnamese man being hunted by American GI’s through a jungle swamp.
The story itself is well handled and generally exciting and unsettling. Morrow becomes more and more hysterical and fearful as his nightmare progresses, and the switch of time and place is well-handled. The ending of the segment is also very much “just desserts” for his character.
The real nightmare for Morrow and everyone else involved occurred on set however during shooting of the original ending of the segment. In a key stunt sequence during the “Vietnam” scene, Morrow was to carry two Vietnamese children under his arms across a river whilst being attacked by US forces in a helicopter.
The series of stunt explosions rigged across the river location had a catastrophic effect on the helicopter, which was clearly flying too low. The pilot lost control, and in an instant, the vehicle spun and plummeted to the ground, instantly killing Morrow and the two girls. Morrow (age 53) and child actress Myca Dinh Le (age 7) were both decapitated and maimed by the helicopter rotor blades, the other unfortunate child actress Renee Shin-Ye Chen (age 6) was crushed to death by one of the landing skids. The whole grisly incident was captured on film, and the footage was used as prosecution evidence during the lengthy and sorry legal affair that followed.
The court case revealed that were many violations, such as child actors working during night and in proximity to explosions, without the presence of a teacher or social worker. Health and safety laws were ignored and precautions and checks were not made. Landis admitted some responsibility, but escaped a jail sentence after being tried for manslaughter.
He was never as high-profile in Hollywood again, and found his subsequent career somewhat diluted after an up-to-that point stellar rise.
In 1991 he was quoted: "I live with the "Twilight Zone" every day of my life."
