I think for me it’s alien: covenant. I was really interested in the ideas explored in prometheus and covenant just expanded on them. I don’t get much into the details of why it is or isn’t a good movie.
Luckily, though, HBO ran raised by wolves which really delved into ideals about AI and planet seeding etc. So that itch got way scratched even if the run was cut short.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Tron Legacy
Guyver: Dark Hero
Strange Days (get the ultimate extended edition fan edit if you can.)
Wild Wild West
Demolition Man
Judge Dredd
Highlander II
…
Jacob Barlow vs the Demonic Toys
There are a lot of fun movies that are considered garbage.
Demolition Man was prime AF!
What seems to be your boggle?
Mostly this:
Liking Highlander II is so far out of my worldview that I didn’t realise it was an option. What was it you enjoyed about the film?
Keep in mind i am not at all going to claim it is… Good. or logical… or any of that, but it had the almighty BALLS to go big with being WEIRD.
Strange Days is one of my favorite movies, ever! Tough I think it got good reviews but failed at the box office. (I stand corrected, it polarized the reviewers according to Wikipedia.
Highlander two? Man, you do you, but that’s an acquired taste. I’d have a hard time picking to place it above or below Rise of Skywalker.
If you enjoy so bad it’s good: In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.
Everything goes above Rise of Skywalker. Even Human Centipede.
The first Human Centipede was a fucking brilliant psychological horror. The second and third were just awful garbage.
Judge Dredd was quite good even though Stallone took the helmet off a bunch. IIRC he was willing to do the whole thing in helmet, but I bet the money guys needed to see his face.
Never thought I’d see the Angel Family on film, that was wild!
Bonus: The actor playing psychotic cannibal Pa Angel would go on to be the kindly farmer Herschel on Walking Dead.
Karl Urban did a better Dredd. He doesn’t take off the goddamn helmet for even one second :o
Oh, he definitely did, but I think the Stallone version better captured the absolute bonkers feeling of the comics.
I just hope the next time someone tackles it we get the Dark Judges storyline, but that might be too expensive to pull off outside full animation.
Damn, never made that connection about herschel. I like Stallones dredd just because it’s so quotable.
Eat recycled food. It’s good for the environment and okay for you.
Wait… Stallone Dredd, or Urban Dredd? Because the Stallone one was awful and a crime against the source material, while the second should have had an immediate sequel.
League I can’t even put into the “so bad it’s good” category, as much as I’d like to. I think I can’t forgive them for wasting such a cast and such a source on the result.
I hated Legacy, but entirely for reasons having to do with loyalty to the original; it isn’t faithful to the original vision, IMO. That aside, I can grant it was better than it was received.
🤝 on Strange Days. Fantastic soundtrack, too. Did it get bad reviews? I thought it did reasonably well.
Same for WWW - didn’t it do well? I thought it was brilliantly irreverent of history. Fun times. Same for Demolition Man!
Highlander II, though… No. Just no. A running joke with a couple of my friends is that they insist we all saw it together in the theater, but I insist I’ve never seen it. They say it was so bad that I just blacked out my memory to avoid the emotional trauma of having seen it. Honestly though, I have no memory of the film yet a deep revulsion at the idea of watching it.
Stallone Dreadd.
I am in complete agreement with everything you said about it being a crime against 2000 AD Dreadd, yet if one can excize rob schnider from it? It’s popcorn. I’ve asked a few fan editors to have a crack at it because for me it has the same issue as Constantine. It is its own thing I can both appreciate it for being its own thing while also being a crime against the source material…
Urban Dredd? I kept hoping netflix would pick that up as the pilot to a mega city one police proceedural. that was just some solid movie making and wish we’d gotten more, though conceed ‘what would you do for a sequel?’ thus the idea of direct to stremaing platform show giving any of a number of plots time and space to breathe.
For me Tron Legacy was a case of ‘disney squandered what they had, then when that one airbrushed movie bombed and they got the MCU they shelved Tron’ … likely permenently. Had a fun soundtrack. Ya the father/son story is a cliche but it’s more an excuse to tour the world more than anything. I liked Legacy’s look as both Kevin’s use of late 80’s ‘money is no object’ hardware vs late 70’s likely PDP based hardware alongside software changes. After all by the end of the eighties the Unix Wars had happened and the landscape had changed. Plus Uprising, while flawed, had promise and showed what life was like in the early days of the regime when CLU kept a facad of normalcy.
Strange Days feels like one of those movies a LOT of people sleep on and gloss over. I am seriously recommending finding the fan edit scene and seeking it out, because the work done just… elevates it.
I can respect your opinions of Highlander II. again, fan edits do a lot to save this one for me but even at base ‘eh it’s in the slush pile of shit movies I can run in the background. It’s goofy it’s dumb… run with it.’ Then again I’ve kinda hated most of the highlander movies past the first one for having very little that interests me. Though I did love the show. It was a fun ride even when it got weird. Though I will admit it is guilty of helping popularize the ‘katanas are just better’ trope.
See, Constantine I had no issue with because I had never read the source. I thought it was fine, as a movie.
Urban Dredd almost makes me cry. It was so good, in so many ways. Maybe it, too, wasn’t faithful to the source, which was pretty intentionally campy and Dredd was more grimdark than even the comics. But I just loved Urban’s Dredd; he is Dredd for me. An Urban-less Dredd is like imagining Deadpool without Reynolds. Sometimes the actor embodies a character so well it overshadows even the source.
I agree completely with what you day about Legacy. Tron does and should reflect the technology of the times; computers have gotten more glossy and organic. I just love the inner universe and aesthetic of the original Tron, and it’s hard to compete with first love.
Yeah, I think Strange Days was just too weird for the time. I think if it were released today it’d do better. The target audience was still too niche, maybe, back then. I need to watch it again; I haven’t seen it in forever.
I think it’s best if we just not speak of Highlander. The first is among my favorite movies, and as you say the series was surprisingly not at all bad. But all of the sequel films (3, right? God let it be only 2 abominations)… best left in the oubliette of forgotten memories.
The problem with Strange Days is… the same problem cyberpunk as a genre has.
it served as a warning. A lot of people in the world took it as a blueprint.
It certainly turned out that way, didn’t it?