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"The two scorpions face off and a Matrix-style fight ensues over the opening credits. After one scorpion wins, it rears up and raises its arms like a pro wrestler at the end of a match. I swear to God, I wish I were making all of this up."
—Agony Booth's recap of 3000 Miles To Graceland
"Meanwhile, some old guy is telling Carmen Electra that she has to speak to the Spartan council on behalf of Leonidas. Otherwise, Xerxes will take over and confiscate her Nintendo Wii. I am not making this up."
"Of course, Ernest stumbles upon Goliath by accident, and eventually he and the good doctor end up riding the runaway cannon away from pursuers that include Mellon's wife, a team of British secret service agents with horrible accents, a bad guy who wants the jewels for his private collection, a farmer with a pitchfork, and a pair of vacuum cleaner salesmen. I'm not making this up."
Remember that part in that movie that made you go, "What the hell?" Try explaining it to your friends one day.
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Okay, you know this one. But admit it, if we'd told you the line back in the day, you'd have laughed at us. Despite Darth Vader's Prophetic Name...
- More examples are found in later Star Wars movies, including everything in this Robot Chicken quote:
- House and House: The Second Story. The first House is about a Vietnam vet horror novelist who moves into the haunted house of his aunt(dead by suicide) where his son had disappeared a while back and must unravel the mystery of his son's disappearance while trying to survive assault by grotesque creatures pretending to be his wife, little trolls, an undead marlin, flying garden equipment, severed body parts, the monster in the closet and his slightly annoying neighbor, Norm Peterson. Well, George Wendt, anyway. Not to mention the zombie of "Big Ben", the jerk from his Vietnam unit played by Night Court's Richard Moll amidst war flashbacks.
- House: The Second Story is about a guy whose parents are mysteriously killed when he's a child and later he moves back into the family home, learns about a magical crystal skull that was buried with his great-great grandfather, tries to rob the grave with his best friend, Charlie, and almost gets strangled BY his great-great grandfather who is supposed to be young again when he rises from the grave but is "...just a hundred an seventy-year old fart." Also the skull attracts all kinds of evil attention such as a prehistoric caveman who comes out of the jungle that appears in a bedroom during a Halloween party, South American (Aztec, I think), soldiers from the temple behind the fireplace and the zombie/ghost? of the great-great grandfather's former friend-turned-enemy. Oh, there's also John Ratzenberger as Bill, an electrician and adventurer and a prehistoric caterpillar/worm puppy that drinks beer, which undead grandpa feeds to it with a baby bottle. Oh and Bill Maher is also in it, which is just downright weird.
- First Knight: Roger Ebert used this trope in as many words in his review: "Guinevere determines to part from Lancelot, and favors him with a farewell kiss, which Arthur happens to see. And he responds very badly, sentencing them both to a public trial for treason, which begins by being less than convincing and only gets worse after Malagant arrives and shouts out 'Nobody move - or Arthur dies!'"
- It's bad enough that it's an attempt to film the Arthurian legend with no magic, pageantry, or chivalry whatsoever. That sort of liberty makes it worse. And the ending! King Arthur dies so Guinevere and Lancelot can be together. And Arthur blesses that union!
- Perfect Stranger: Halle Berry did it.
- Riki-Oh has got so weird by the end that you'd expect just about anything... but probably not the Warden transforming into a 12-foot-tall demon.
- The manga made a little more sense, saying the warden practiced some martial art which let him charge his muscles with ki energy and hence allowed him to grow and made his body like rubber...but that's like saying being shot in the stomach is better than being shot in the chest.
- That's perfectly logical. What you wouldn't believe, on the other hand, is that he ends up forced into a meat grinder.
- That's simply Rule Of Cool. Or rather, Rule Of Mess. Besides, Riki had punched a few holes in him previously, so it wasn't like he threw the Warden in and the Warden just stood there and let himself be Ginsu'd.
- Ever try summarizing The Rocky Horror Picture Show to someone unfamiliar with it?
- As a matter of fact, one editor did. "An alien, transvestite, mad scientist seduces 2 wholesome, All-American kids who have just gotten engaged just after making an incredibly hot Frankenstein's Monster to have sex with. Oh, and there's also cannibalism." He was rewarded with blank stares for the next 2 minutes.
- ...and it's a fucking musical! (maniacal laughter)
- Not to mention that it was written by Richard O'Brien, host of The Crystal Maze.
- This editor can do you one better. Ever go to see "Rocky Horror" and come to the gradual realization that you were the only person in your group who had any idea whatsoever what you were all getting into?
- Better: Try explaining the audience participation bits to people. Particularly the parts where folks will dress the part.
- The 3-D Imax film Haunted Castle includes a scene in which, to quote Wikipedia, "Johnny [the hero] is taken on a roller coaster ride through Hell that includes stops in a performance hall where the souls of the damned are trapped inside robot-monkeys. They are forced to perform for an audience of demons while a wrecking ball swipes them off the stage and destroys them one by one."
- Whenever this contributor tries to describe Eraserhead to someone, they always think it's a comedy. "This guy finds out that his girlfriend has had his baby, so they get married, but the baby is an embalmed cow foetus and its crying drives the girl away, so the guy has to raise it by himself, and a deformed lady lives inside his radiator and a topless guy with burned skin wanders around and he dreams that a giant penis bursts out of his neck and knocks his head off and a small boy sells his brain to make erasers. Oh, yeah, and throughout the film, he has to fight giant mutated sperm."
- And there's a dinner scene involving man-made miniature chickens.
- Supposedly the film was based on director David Lynch's troubled state of mind when he was a young, unwilling father living in a Philadelphia slum. Does that help?
- One review puts it this way: "I offer the following as my blessing to you all: may you never be able to grasp how Eraserhead makes any kind of sense whatsoever."
- Clue, based on the board game, had 3 different endings. In one of them the only surviving member of the cast who didn't murder anybody shoots Mr. Boddy, the guy whose murder the cast was investigating. It made perfect sense.
- In the film Murder By Death, whose only saving grace is that, as a spoof of the classic murder mystery film, it doesn't have to make sense. It, in fact, goes completely out of its way to throw a final "WTF?" moment at the viewer just when the story seems to be over. Trying to describe it, though, will make the listener think you should be certified.
- Try watching the ending to the film Society without reeling in confusion and disbelief.
- The climax of Little Miss Sunshine: The 8-year-old girl does a burlesque routine to "Superfreak". Her family bonds by joining in. Obviously, she doesn't win the titular contest.
- My fingers refuse to fix this spoiler tag. Probably because I'm still laughing.
- There's an excellent science fiction short film by Neil Blomkamp called Alive in Joburg. If you watch it, you won't be disappointed - however, the plot synopsis tends to make people laugh. "Well, aliens land in Johannesburg and end up forming their own social class underneath the already oppressed black South Africans, furthering apartheid which is already present in the city." Most of the people this editor has explained it to think it's a comedy.
- I once did use almost this exact same phrase to describe Alive in Joburg, causing the would-be-viewer to call it "probably the most brilliant thing he'd never seen."
- The film Magnolia, which begins as a drama about the interrelated lives of its large cast of characters, contains no fantasy elements whatsoever until the ending, in which frogs rain down from the sky. Literally. Furthermore, none of the characters appear particularly surprised by this, and react as though a rain of frogs is a perfectly ordinary event. However, frog falls have also happened in real life, as well. Still, when they're taken stoically...
- This troper was just laughed at when he mentioned that The Hulk movie was directed by Ang Lee, better known for Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
- Unless they were laughing at the "Don't make him Ang Lee" thing.
- Ang Lee attempted to make the Hulk intellectual. Not just the movie, which was infamous for its lack of action, but also the big green fella.
- This Troper has made it a habit to tell his friends that the only thing wrong with that movie was that Ang Lee thought we cared about what was going on inside the Hulk's head, rather than getting angry and smashing. Ironically, some of the reviews he's seen for the new Hulk movie starring Edward Norton lambasted it for not putting enough emphasis on what the Hulk was thinking about.
- The Living Daylights. James Bond goes snow-sledging on a cello case. And successfully escapes villains on skis and in snowmobiles who have machine guns this way.
- The Man with the Golden Gun has a villain with 3 nipples whose sidekick is Tattoo, and a car chase between the duo and Bond ends when their car gets wings and flies...
- You forgot to mention that in the middle of the chase, Bond's car does a 360-degree flip in midair, which would normally be a Crowning Moment Of Awesome, except it was accompanied by a slidewhistle. The Man With The Golden Gun is the master of I Am Not Making This Up.
- Dr. No had a flamethrowing tank painted like a dragon engineered by this Chinese/German dude with metal hands...
- You Only Live Twice involved a plot to steal space capsules in orbit.
- And lest we forget, its script was written by Roald Dahl.
- Live and Let Die has Bond walking over crocodiles and a villain who dies like in a Looney Tunes short, inflating and blowing up like a balloon.
- And don't forget the Voodoo thing, in an otherwise tech-only setting.
- Kung Pow: Enter The Fist has a love affair with this trope at every possible occasion. A Dragon named Betty, gopher-chucks, an infant kung-fu master, a stomach-plug, a magical talking tongue with a face, a warrior cow, and French aliens flying pyramid spaceships are only the more memorable examples. Oh, and did I mention gopher-chucks.
- Yes, you did, but you missed out the hot, young, female Obi Wan with only one tit.
- Did you notice that the sheer insane awesomeness of Kung Pow made the troper 2 points up completely miss the hot, young, female Obi Wan with only one tit? That's power, friends.
- In 1987, there was actually a movie made called The Cure For Insomnia, which is 87 hours long. The film had no plot, and was merely a man reading a book with occasional Stock Footage put in. Its purpose was to create a movie so unbearably long, it would help people fall asleep, thus the title. Therefore, it is debatable whether or not to even consider it a movie in the strictest sense.
- The movie Thunderpants was a British film featuring such respected character actors as Simon Callow, Stephen Fry and Ned Beatty... about a young boy whose uncontrollable flatulence is eventually harnessed by NASA in the first ever fart-powered space launch.
- Chinatown. It's a murder mystery about the LA Department of Water and Power, and possibly one of the best detective pictures out there. Also, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is arguably a sequel to it, or at least set in a neighboring universe.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was ostensibly bowdlerized because in the original book its namesake character had been shot and killed.
- Disney animators developing the character of Ursula in The Little Mermaid looked to drag queen Divine as an inspiration. That is less believable than the false story of Marilyn Monroe being a basis for Tinker Bell from Peter Pan.
- Considering that Disney is a Gay-Friendly organization, this isn't so surprising. Then again, that isn't something people used to consider.
- In 2003 a movie came out that no one expected to be very good, that was expected to be a flop, that was based on a Disney ride... and that starred Johnny Depp. Needless to say, Pirates Of The Caribbean was an very unexpectedly fun movie.
- Forget "fun." In 2003, Johnny Depp co-stars as an amusingly drunk pirate captain in a campy action-adventure movie, based on a Disneyland ride, with a lot of screentime given to CGI zombies...and got an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Tell me you saw that coming.
- Speaking of Disney, in case you haven't heard, would you like to know the name of the movie that they're releasing in October 2008? Beverly Hills Chihuahua. It seems to look as bad as it sounds.
- It's also even weirder: said dog is in fact the descendant of Aztec Warriors.
- And voiced by George Lopez.
- Conversely, most movie fans believe that any film with Uwe Boll's name on it sucks hardcore, and for good reason. After all, Who Would Be Stupid Enough to splice actual footage from a video game into a film, without any context? Boll did it in his version of The House of the Dead that very same year.
- Speaking of Boll, his latest movie, Postal, is opening on 4 screens nationwide. Yes, 4.
- Roberto Benigni wrote, directed, and starred in the movie La Vita è Bella, a comedy that sets a significant portion of its action in a Nazi concentration camp. The movie was nominated for several Academy Awards, and Benigni became the first person to win Best Actor for a non-English speaking role. The next movie he wrote, directed, and starred in was a live-action adaptation of the classic Italian story Pinocchio. That doesn't sound so crazy, until you learn that Benigni, a 50 year old man, cast himself as Pinocchio. (It wasn't pretty.) As a result, he achieved another first; he became the first actor to win the Worst Actor Razzie award for a non-English speaking role.
- My Dinner With Andre: a couple of men chat with each other in a restaurant, for almost two hours. The critics loved it.
- This troper saw it and thought it would have worked better as a radio play.
- Coffee And Cigarettes: Many many people meet in various cafes for coffee and cigarettes and have rambling conversations. These include Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, Steve Coogan, Alfred Molina, Cate Blanchett, Cate Blanchett, Steve Buscemi, The Rza, The Gza, and Bill "Groundhog Day Ghost-Bustin' Ass" Murray.
- And the White Stripes show up to discuss the scientific contributions of Nikola Tesla.
- In an early episode of South Park, Eric Cartman made a comment about how all independent films are about "gay cowboys eating pudding". Seven years later, Ang Lee released a film version of Brokeback Mountain. When Brokeback Mountain came out, Trey Parker was quoted as saying, "If there's any pudding involved, we're suing."
- South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut is somehow more offensive than the show. Saddam Hussein tries to seduce Satan with a dildo. A talking clitoris offers spiritual enlightenment.
4 3 small children watch shit porn involving one's mother. A song features the constant iteration of "shut your fucking face, uncle fucker!" Another song, also performed by small children, celebrates the horror of war. It was hilarious.
- Don't forget that Satan gets the only song without any profanity in it. And that the basic conflict is about the USA going to war with Canada over a cartoon.
- Brian Boitano, superhero.
- And it was nominated for an Oscar.
- For Best Song, for "Blame Canada." The songs nominated for Best Song are always all performed during the main ceremony; "Blame Canada" probably set a record for most "bleeps" during five minutes of an Oscar telecast.
- Not to mention that the song was performed by Robin Williams on the show!
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind ends with 30 minutes of monotonous, repetitive sounds and virtually nothing else. It was otherwise a great movie.
- And yet, people think that version is better than the director's cut, which actually shows the interior of the ship — more or less...
- Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001 had an interesting, wholly coherent plot and was a great book. The film of 2001 was a series of concerts with occasional incomprehensible scenes between them.
- But they're great concerts. The spaceship sequence to the Blue Danube Waltz is a big favorite of this Troper.
- Not Clarke's fault; it was all Kubrick. Still, try explaining the first 20 minutes of "one of the greatest Sci Fi movies ever" sometime: "Well, there's a desert, for, like 5 minutes, and then the sun comes up and there are some monkeys. And a big black square, uh, thing. And one of the monkeys kills something with a bone. And then there are spaceships." What?
- Actually, there's a completely silent black screen for 5 minutes before the desert. This is part of the film. You could miss it easily in a dark theater, but if the first time you see 2001 is on DVD, you will likely spend time wondering if something is wrong with your TV set, the DVD, or both.
- Oh, and don't forget the big cat with literal glowing eyes. On Earth, in one of the greatest Sci Fi films ever made.
- The book and film were written simultaneously, so the 2 being the same would be redundant even if it were possible. Still, would it have hindered the greatness of the film if more of it was coherent?
- It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World ended with the characters being crippled and captured by the police. Its remake, Rat Race, ended when its characters gave the money to charity.
- The movie Stepmom is about the relationship between a stepmother and her stepdaughter. One sequence has the latter calling the former at her high-paying job, insisting that something truly horrible has happened and she needs consolation right that second. The stepmother quits the job right on the spot so she could rush right over. The scene plays out as though something truly horrible happened, such as physical assault. The stepdaughter, in tears, tells what happened... she was called "Frosty the Snow Bitch". Narmtacular.
- Dune: "30,000 years from now the rulers of the galaxy settle things with knife fights and the most precious commodity is a condiment made from the barf of giant worms which lets you see the future." 'K... This Troper clearly recalls seeing the 1984 David Lynch version in theatrical release and receiving from the ushers a handbill with a glossary of terms to make sense of the dialog.
- Even stranger is the film version of Dune that never got produced, but would have featured production design by H.R. Giger and Salvador Dali as the Baron Harkonnen.
- The Emperor, actually. Which isn't far off.
- And music by PINK FLOYD. Seriously, this troper wants to invent a Sliding machine just to visit the Alternate Universe where this version happened.
- This troper had the incredible good fortune to interview Jodorowsky about ten years ago. It was to have a different band for each planet - Pink Floyd for Arrakis, Tangerine Dream for the Atreides homeworld and Magma for the Harkonnen homeworld. Production design by Giger and Möbius.
- The plot of Ken Russel's Altered States, a movie disowned by Paddy Chayefsky who wrote the book on which it was based: William Hurt's character is a neuropsychologist obsessed with the universal human collective unconsciousness. He travels to Mexico where he participates in a ceremony with some Native Americans who use a drug made from sacred mushrooms to evoke a common experience in the user, a collective memory of the first primordial self. Cue insane hallucinatory sequence of the process of the metaphysical birth of the universe and some bizarre Biblical imagery rendered by Indian cave art. Back in America, Hurt experiments on himself by combining psychoactive Mexican mushrooms and an isolation tank. Cue insane hallucinatory sequences with William Hurt wearing a multi-eyed, multi-horned goat's head and flying on a flaming crucifix. Eventually William Hurt undergoes regressions, first psychologically and later physically, into a primitive hominid because, well, Everythings Better With Monkeys. Several hallucinatory sequences, a few brats on the way to marital separation, one chase scene and a metaphysical and evolutionary apocalypse later, William Hurt turns himself and Blair Brown into primordial ooze during sex and learns to control the altered state of his new existence though The Power Of Love.
- Try just about any adaptation by Russel, such as Tommy, which among other eye-poppers includes a drunken hallucinatory sequence with baked beans pouring out of a TV set.
- The Sixth Sense. You know what I'm talking about: Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time!
- This Troper figured out the 'twist' just from a friend's description of the film. It takes a certain kind of mind...
- Along with twist endings, can we get into Lucky Number Slevin? I mean, who would have guessed that poor Slevin was actually the kid that had his parents murdered, then was taken in by the hitman, who raised him to get his revenge on The Boss and The Rabbi!?
- More like who didn't? I mean, the kid at the beginning had to have been cast for his uncanny resemblence to Josh Hartnett.
- Or maybe Josh Hartnett was cast for his uncanny resemblance to the kid...
- Night of the Lepus is a B-grade horror movie about giant killer rabbits. Yes, that's right. Giant mutant killer rabbits. Which are, of course, very obviously just cute little bunnies running around on a scale-model set. Amazingly, in spite of this utterly ridiculous premise and even worse special effects, it stars DeForest Kelley and Janet Leigh.
- John Carpenter's Dark Star. The astronaut protagonist, confronted with a talking, intelligent bomb threatening to explode, temporarily revives his near-dead Captain from cryo-sleep and communicates with him through a radio. The Captain suggests the protagonist try to reason with the bomb by teaching it phenomenology. The protagonist does this, and the bomb gains a God-Complex and explodes, killing everyone involved, after proclaiming "Let there be light."
- Leprechaun In Space... just Leprechaun in Space.
- And don't forget that swearing a blood feud involves a B-movie actress showing of her tits.
- Benji Takes a Dive is a short about Benji, the dog, going scuba-diving. That's not the weird part. In this short, a group of reggae-singing fruit and vegetable puppets take on the role of the Greek Chorus, but that's not the weird part. The weird part is that there's a villain in the form of a puppet Soviet spy dog whose mission is to prevent an American from being the first dog to scuba-dive.
- Most of John McClane's improvised stunts in the Die Hard series qualify. But none equals Live Free or Die Hard/Die Hard 4.0.'s car thrown at helicopter.
- That qualifies as I Am Not Making This Up? Other than the fact that it was an obvious stunt, there's no problem with believability. Particularly when comparing it to other Die Hard moments.
- I can only think of 3 more unbelievable: bungee jumping with a fire hose, blowing an airplane which is taking off, and another scene in the 4th, in which he does crazy manoeuvres with a truck until he manages to take down an F-35 jet.
- There was a live action Death Note movie in Japan. No, seriously. And the person who played Light's father? Chairman Kaga from Iron Chef. Really.
- The weirdest part: there are 3 of them. And they're an Alternate Universe to the original. L lives. Mello doesn't show up. Near shows up as a Thai kid who is Good With Numbers.
- Increasing the Ia NMT Uness is that L kills himself by writing his name in the Death Note before anyone else can, preventing anyone else from killing him in that manner.
- Chairman Kaga from Iron Chef plays many, many Japanese roles...
- The kicker: the song playing on the trailer? "Dani California", Red Hot Chili Peppers.
- Pete's Dragon: Helen "I Am Woman" Reddy in a tavern full of fishermen, rolls on top of a beer barrel, going faster and faster until it spews white foam all over the place. Other fishermen follow suit.
- The Full Monty. Unemployed British men decide to become strippers. It's a comedy.
- It is also an exploration of the misery of unemployment in British mining towns.
- "Let's find a rock. I mean, a big ass rock. Or maybe something like a cinder block is better? I'll hoist it up, and drop it on your face..."
- Two of the men end up kissing after running through people's back yards,each clad solely in a jockstrap.
- The classic cult film "Death Race 2000" is about a dystopian future where the sole form of entertainment is a bloody cross country race. The racers get points for killing people. But that isn't even the crazy part. David Carradine's character beats up Sylvester Stallone. No, really.
- Hey, I'll buy that. I'll go with Kung Fu over pose muscles anyday.
- The remake strips it down to fights between the racers and replaces Stallone with Jason Statham.
- Sylvester Stallone, Italian Stallion
- Black Moon: A girl fleeing from a war between the sexes comes across a manor house with — among other things — a pudgy brown unicorn, screaming plants, an old woman who's breastfed and keeps a gigantic pet rat, people who come back from the dead, fires that spontaneously relight, and a gaggle of naked children chasing a pig. The film even begins with a disclaimer saying that it's not meant to make sense.
- Happiness of the Katakuris: A film about a family that opens a hotel, only to have most of their guests die in various ways. Features musical numbers, a karaoke interlude in the middle of the film, claymation segments, and a grandpa that blasts off into the sky at the end. Yeah, it's a weird movie.
- If you know the ouevre of Takashi Miike, you know that's probably his most normal film.
- The movie There Will Be Blood features a scene in which one of the main characters describes oil drainage in this way: "If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw, and my straw reaches across the room and starts to drink your milkshake, I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!" That dialogue sounds rather strange, but writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson Wasn't Making It Up. In 1924, Senator Albert Fall, who was under investigation for taking bribes, used this exact metaphor for oil drainage when testifying before Congress; Anderson's script simply paraphrased Fall's remarks.
- Epic Movie and Meet The Spartans were so bad, they could in themselves be an example. However, by far the weirdest thing was that they were number one at the box office.
- This entertaining review and spoiler of the latter movie frequently uses this phrase to deal with the awfulness.
- Who Would Be Stupid Enough to reference Juno, Hannah Montana, Kung Fu Panda, The Simpsons Movie, The Incredible Hulk, Hellboy, Hancock, Iron Man, Sex And The City, Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, The Love Guru, Alvin And The Chipmunks, Enchanted, Superbad, Wanted, Beowulf, Night At The Museum, High School Musical, and Jumper in a film called Disaster Movie? Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer did it.
- There is a Professor Layton live-action movie currently in development in Japan, marking what is possibly the first movie to be based on a puzzle game.
- So? Brett Ratner wants to make a Guitar Hero movie. You bet I wish I was making it up! At least he only wants to make that movie, and its not in development, but that's still the stupidest thing ever.
- Said game is more like an Adventure Game in which NP Cs are always needing some random guy visiting their town to solve their puzzles. Plus the game has a plot, so it's not like making a movie based on Tetris.
- In The Spiderwick Chronicles, Seth Rogen eats Nick Nolte!
- Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. The basic premise of the movie is that Jesus has to fight loads of vampires because they are eating the lesbians of Vancouver. Oh yeah, did I mention that the theme song includes the line, "everyone gets laid tonight"? And at the end of the movie they do indeed all get laid tonight. It also includes scenes of Jesus killing vampires by staking them with toothpicks and, in one of the greatest scenes of movie history, Jesus consecrating a bottle of beer and spitting it over a crowd of vampires, killing them instantly.
- If you think Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter and The Last Temptation of Christ are blasphemous, those films are small potatoes compared to Him!, a gay pornographic film released in 1974 themed around Jesus Christ. The film, which, in 1979, was cited by Michael Medved in his bad-movie book The Golden Turkey Awards, is thought to be a hoax. However, an actual review by Screw magazine along with a vintage poster propagate the idea that the film actually existed. No copies of the film have surfaced after initial release, and there is no information available concerning the film's director, Ed D. Louie.
- And speaking of bizarre films of which no generally-available copies exist: If you thought (as many did) that Benigni's above-referenced Life Is Beautiful was in poor taste, try The Day the Clown Cried, an unfinished 1972 film starring and directed by Jerry Lewis. This drama, featuring a clown imprisoned with children in a Nazi death camp, ends with the clown entertaining the children in the gas chamber and actually shows the children laughing and then dying. I WISH I were making this up. Lewis reportedly keeps locked up the only copy in existence, and refuses to discuss it in interviews; he's only allowed select Hollywood insiders to view it.
- What about the movie Head, starring The Monkees, a completely bizarre disjointed non-narrative jumble. Oh, and it was written and produced by Jack Nicholson. And the movie's name was chosen so that the sequel could be advertised as being 'from the people who gave you Head'. No, seriously.
- Considering that the film begins and ends with the apparent suicide of Mickey Dolenz and could be read as an extended dying hallucination...No, seriously.
- Just about every aspect of the film Southland Tales. It takes place in an alternate present in which, because of the Patriot Act, a Marxist underground movement headed by Cheri Oteri and Amy Poehler has formed. Their plan to win the election is to have The Rock, son-in-law of the Republican vice presidential candidate, film the double-murder of Poehler and Wood Harris by an apparently racist cop, who is really their friend Seann William Scott, that he's on a ride-along with. Scott's twin brother has been in a drug-induced coma for the last few days. Then Jon Lovitz does kill Poehler and Harris, which is actually a coup for Oteri, who is sleeping with Lovitz. Their plan goes wrong when porn star Sarah Michelle Gellar and her porn star topical-reality-talk show cohosts steal the tape because they think it's of her and The Rock having sex. What these characters do not know is that all these events were orchestrated by Wallace Shawn, who had The Rock delivered through a rip in the space-time continuum, creating an amnesia-stricken doppelganger, and killed the original so he could use the other for political extortion. Then we find out that that Shawn's mother actually orchestrated those events to create a new Messiah, who turn out to be Shawn William Scott and his twin, who are actually doppelgangers created when he delivered The Rock. For some reason, The Rock knows that the fourth dimension will collapse upon itself when the two Stifflers shake hands; when they do, the weapons-loaded ice cream truck they're in ascends into the heavens, and the world ends. Oh, Justin Timberlake narrates and has a drug-induced music video dream where he lip-synchs to "All These Things I've Done" by the Killers while he's covered in blood, pouring beer over his head, and groping Marilyn Monroe lookalikes.
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The film's initial MacGuffin is the alien corpse at Roswell, with which Indy was apparently involved somehow. After serving as a Mac Guffin Delivery Service for the Soviets, he gets away by locking himself in a refrigerator at a nuclear test site, which is blasted away intact with no harm to him despite visible heat damage to surrounding objects. Then suspicion of being a double agent ruins his career, and a James-Dean-wannabe shows up looking for his help finding the titular Crystal Skull and returning it to El Dorado. To do this, they need to follow the clues left by a man who was driven insane by looking at the skull too hard. The skull turns out to be the skull of an alien related to the one found at Roswell, who was part of a ruling council who were seen as gods by the pre-Mayan people that built El Dorado. A Ukranian scientist then puts it back onto the head of a crystal skeleton to gain all the knowledge in the world, making her explode. The entire city then turns into a giant flying saucer, which disappears into an Alternate Universe. Also, the "gold" turns out to be knowledge.
- This Troper found the man-eating ants and the Mutt of the Jungle scene (with the hilarious looking monkeys) way weird than any of that stuff.
- And while we are talking about Indiana Jones, this editor found out that Arnold Toht (the main villain from the first film) was originally going to be a cyborg with a machine gun/flamethrower for an arm and a light for a right eye. To take it further, this was proposed by Spielberg and was rejected by Lucas who claimed it was too far-fetched. Wow. Just....wow.
- The only reason the plot of the first movie no longer qualifies is because of Pop Cultural Osmosis: Hitler is trying to get a Jewish religious artifact so he can get unlimited power and it ends with the power of God coming out to kill a bunch of soldiers, one of which has his face melted off.
- So this Sean Connery film, Zardoz, features a floating head telling people that guns are good and penises are evil, and so Sean and his band of raiders friends dressed in what are really orange nappies ride around in horses killing people on a beach, except Sean gets to rape the women. Except he gets captured by the social elite of this world who cannot reproduce, and shown a film of a woman shower to prove he gets aroused. Then as he's accepted into the elite world, he finds out that some odd man actually controls the flying head called Zardoz he worshipped, as the name 'Zardoz' actually comes from the book The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. And then at the end he and a one of the elite society women get together, and the final shot has them sitting down, getting old, and getting covered in cobwebs. An embarrassing first film when he was young? Try one of the first films he did after he finished with James Bond!
- Oh, and pretty much all of the women throughout the movie are topless. Just, y'know, doing whatever they'd normally be doing, only without any clothing above the navel. Really.
- The film version of V For Vendetta ends with Parliament blowing up, with V's corpse somewhere underneath, whilst a crowd in Guy Fawkes masks watched on and Evey confuses Finch as to whom V was. And 1812 Overture was playing. This troper is almost certain the graphic novel of the same name had a similar ending. Without the Overture, though.
- The Last Starfighter, the musical.
- The Happening. A science teacher and his wife flee across the Northwest USA when people start randomly committing suicide, with methods as novel as getting themselves willingly ripped apart by lions and starting up a combine harvester and letting it run over them. The suicides are originally thought to be caused by some massive terrorist attack, but it is later revealed that the plants did it because humanity poses a threat to them, communicating over vast distances and mobilising the wind so that the spores carrying dangerous neurotoxins that the plants emit, shutting down peoples' self-preservation instincts, are spread across the land. Oh, and the spores apparently don't attack you if you aren't in what they deem to be a big enough group. Or if you use The Power Of Love.
- This troper has read the original script, in which it wasn't just heavily implied to be The Power Of Love, it was official. Elliot was going on about how the plants had turned into a mood ring and released the suicidal gas on the old lady because she was angry, but they would be safe because they were in love. Also, at one point in the movie Elliot found a little girl whose family had saved her by tying her up, preventing her from killing herself. So the hero of the movie unties her and just wanders off. Naturally, the kid drowns herself, and he doesn't even feel responsible or guilty or anything. JerkAss.
- Pretty much the entire premise and plot of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It's one of this troper's favorite movies, but it still fits. The exorbitantly huge Nautilus is steered with ease down one of the canals in Venice, Twain's barely literate mischief-makers Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn grew up to join the Secret Service, and the villain turned out to be Professor Moriarty, nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, who was apparently Only Mostly Dead.
- Theodore Rex. Whoopi Goldberg plays a cop who teams up with a dinosaur. At one point, the dinosaur is used as a metaphor for interracial dating. Goldberg hated working on it so much she wanted out.
- The climactic fight scene in the Get Smart movie takes place in a moving car. That's on fire. And driving on railroad tracks headed toward a train. And has an airplane attached to it by a flag on the back of the airplane. Which got stuck to the car after Maxwell Smart climbed out of the plane and swung down into the car on it.
- This troper invoked "I Am Not Making This Up" several times when recounting the plot synopsis of M. Night Shyamalan turd Lady In The Water to some stunned friends. The movie involves a Water Nymph named Story who has to simply look at some important person so she can be carried back to her water nymph kingdom by a giant eagle. Except wolves made out of grass want to kill her, but there are these monkeys made out of trees that can stop the wolves made out of grass, but they won't, so there's this big drawn-out sequence where characters decipher what to do based on an old Chinese bedtime story. M. Night himself plays a starring role in the film, and there's actually a significant portion of the movie dedicated to jabbing film critics who don't like his movies.
- Mel Brooks made a silent movie. In 1976. He called it Silent Movie. It's about three guys who want to make a silent movie. The only audible line is delivered by a mime—specifically, Marcel Marceau, the most famous mime in the world. The line?
"Non!"
- And the DVD has audio tracks in English, Spanish, and French. And subtitles.
- While Alien 3 was considered inferior to the first two Alien movies, it could have been much, much worse. One preliminary script changed the Aliens' reproductive ability from chestbursters into an alien virus that morphs humans into Xenomorphs. The virus then eventually evolves the ability to infect technology and turns an entire space station into a gigantic alien.
- It gets even better. William Gibson wrote this version.
- Worse? That version would have been AWESOME. One way or another.
- In Star Trek: Insurrection, Troi and Crusher have a brief discussion that serves no purpose other than to establish that breast firmness no longer matters in the 24th century. I wish I was making this up.
- You forgot the part where Data overhears this, and questions Worf on the firmness of his breasts after Worf claims he is now in Klingon puberty.
- Deafula is a vampire film about a deaf vampire. Done entirely in American Sign Language. Yes, it actually exists.
- This Troper wonders how the hell has this list come so far without Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Seriously, I'm not even going to try to summarize this one...
- Here's just one example of the film's weirdness. As it opens, we're treated to a sketch about "The Crimson Permanent Assurance." This sketch involves a bunch of accountants who revolt against their oppressive bosses. Then they proceed to launch the building like a boat and become pirates, taking over a financial district easily. Then, once they have bled the district dry, they sail off to find more companies to pillage. However, before they can get anywhere, they fall off the edge of the Earth. All this, and we haven't even gotten to the title yet.
- Don't forget that this segment actually gets separate credits from the rest of the film and later accidentally invades the feature.
- Two more: Every Sperm is Sacred, a song about why Catholics don't use contraceptives, sung in part by school-age children, and a segment in which a convicted criminal is killed by being chased off a cliff by topless women on rollerskates.
- Three words: Find the Fish. We see a long hallway with men turning wheels on the wall. We meet a man with extra elbows in his arms, a blond dominatrix with faucets for nipples, and a green-skinned elephant-man in a tux serving cocktails. We're asked to find the fish. So, this is what LSD feels like.
- The upcoming movie Crank 2: High Voltage—yeah, Chev is still alive. The Synopsis? Chev is back and has his heart stolen and replaced with an electric heart that requires regular jolts of electricity to keep working. He must get his real heart back before the new heart dies from power loss. Go look it up, if you don't believe me.
- The X Files: I Want to Believe: The Russians are using stem cells to restore consciousness to decapitated, kidnapped victims. This, somehow, relates to a 2-headed dog. Mulder is exonerated of murder charges for simply talking to one suspect. A psychic proves his powers by bleeding and dying at convenient times.
- Oh, and at one point the camera focuses on a portrait of George W. Bush in an FBI building... and the opening notes of the X-Files theme start playing.
- The Dark Knight has several scenes where the Joker is dressed up as a nurse, and yet he's not any less intimidating in the least.
- Except the take where not only he is dressed as a nurse, but with a red wig. It's simply HILARIOUS.
- Don't forget the Vote for Harvey Dent campaign sticker which for this troper made the outfit even funnier
- Why is Highlander 2 not on this list?
- The Parent Trap remake. It's pretty good and mostly family friendly except for the part where one twin and the other are having a poker game. The bet being skinny dipping in a lake in the dead of the night.
- Cloverfield what if I told you that a terrified child rampaged through New York while a heavy, horny loser catches it all on amateur video? Oh, and the shaky camera work was so ridiculous that theaters posted motion sickness warnings on the door.
- Okay, you win! I'll accept the shaky camera, and actually like it, cause it adds a sense of realism. But, the monster is some alien's kid? WHAT?!
- Who said anything about an alien? Hell, that thing came from Earth.
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters [sic]: The characters were created millions of years ago in Egypt, where they escaped a root poodle by driving a Jeep, and were sent into space by time traveling Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's death causes the enslavement of Whites by Blacks and then the credits start. This sequence is an acid fueled nightmare with Claymation versions of the characters being eaten, turning into a robot and fighting giant Carl, then Carl turning into wizard who becomes a naked man in space. Robotic Ghost of Christmas Past from The Future travels to Earth and space in order to prevent incest from destroying the world. Carl is crucified and strapped to a monster who destroys the city. Dr. Weird turns himself into a eunuch, then blows his skin off to avoid paying rent. Frylock is either Weird's son or father; the former is, also, a lesbian with a fake rubber vagina. A talking watermelon reveals that it is the Aqua Teens' father, then the film, abruptly, ends.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars features, as a major villain, Jabba's uncle Ziro the Hutt, who was originally planned to be a normal, amoral, slimy Hutt, speaking in Huttese. One day, George Lucas burst in and said, "I want him to speak Basic and sound like Truman Capote!" From there, the whole thing went right into Hilarity Ensues mode, as Ziro quickly was made to radiate gay stereotypes. Explain it to anyone, and two questions enter their mind immediately: "Who could have seen this coming?", and "Are you friggin' kidding me?"
- ... this troper skipped that movie. After the EU claimed Hutts could spontaneously change sex and already had a male to female uncle/aunt for Jabba named Jilac this troper could see Ziro occuring in the E.U., but in canon? At least Jilac dies and Jabba personally kills her kid by bodily crush as it rode around on the Hutt equivalent of a tricycle.
- In the movie Hitman assassin kills fictional Russian president. Later he kills president’s impostor. Interpol takes him immediately from Russians because they have arrest warrant for him. While still in Russia he is rescued by CIA because someone owed him a favor. Even in most movies politics and law don’t work that way.
- The 1960s Casino Royale. 6 different directors led to a wildly disjointed...er..."plot." The only reason it can be called a "James Bond" film is because MI-5 has instituted protocol calling all their agents "James Bond." The ostensible main plot is a card game between Peter Sellers' Bond and Orson Welles that ends with them both being anticlimactically shot. The climax is when the real Bond's illegitimate daughter with Mata Hari is captured by a UFO piloted by his nephew Jimmy, aka Woody Allen, who swallows a nuclear bomb, destroying the casino with all the "Bonds" inside, as well as cowboys, Indians, the French, old-timey Nickelodeon police, and a flying, bubble-blowing roulette wheel.
- The title of the The B-movie Attack of the The Eye Creatures.
- Fantasy Mission Force. The premise: a band of mercenaries must rescue the allied generals from the Axis in Canada because they couldn't get the likes of James Bond, Rocky Balboa, or Snake Plissken to do the job. This film is one of the penultimate examples of So Bad Its Good.
- Snakes On A Plane: a crime lord decides to dispose of a witness by filling the plane he’s on with hundreds of poisonous snakes, that are driven wild by the flowers the people on the plane are wearing.
- However this pales in comparison to Snakes On A Train where an illegal immigrant has been cursed. She vomits snakes which her witch-doctor boyfriend must catch so they can be put back inside her once they meet up with somebody in America. She ends up turning into a 50 foot snake and eats the whole train.
- Don't forget that the snakes are put on the plane in Hawai'i, where there are not only no native snakes, but every incoming plane is checked for snakes.
- The trailers for The Forbidden Kingdom acted as though Jackie Chan and Jet Li played two rivals who had to team up and fight something. In reality, the "We can fight each other when it's over." was just one measly line in the movie, and they were essentially both the hero's mentors (the rivalry wasn't even that important to the plot). Did I mention that the trailers didn't feature the real main character at all?
- Gymkata. It's strange (and entertaining) enough to see real-life Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas kicking ass and taking names in a Ruritanian Death Course with the power of gymnastics, but the weirdest part is that it was based on a book.
- Quantum Of Solace - the original short story. Bond is at dinner at an island governor's place. After dinner, the governor tells him the story of an airline stewardess's failed marriage. The End. Now a Major Motion Picture.
- Futurama: The Beast with A Billion Backs: Fry enters a relationship with a woman who has numerous boyfriends. A Chthonic monster, literally, fucks everyone in the world. It proves to be a nice, though obsessive and demanding, creature that sends everyone to Heaven. Robots, despite their murderous hatred of humans, grow bored without them. They invade Heaven on a literal ship of the damned and maim the monster. It throws everyone out of Heaven but Fry asks to stay and maintain his relationship with the monster. He cannot stay, however, because it has become the sole partner of the polygamous woman.
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