Who Names These Movies?



NOTE: You didn't miss the last installment of LAUGH: Ghost Hunters, look at Friday's entry below..

A quick check of Netflix for something to pop into the instant watch queue and I couldn’t help laughing. How much does a producer hate his own movie to name it such ridiculous and sometimes vague names? The title is often the big give-away if a movie sucks. Enjoy these very real actual titles for horror movies and determine the “suckage” of each:

“Sharp Teeth” Nuclear reactor + mutant fish… you get the picture. Just a minute more of his time and he might have named the movie “Radioactive Chum” or “Blood Waters.” The title cracks me up. It makes me think some dude during the scripting phase put a post-it note with a working title on it just to have something to call the crap he was writing. Then, the bozo’s in charge grabbed it up, post-it note page and all and sent it to the printer’s.

“Thankskilling” Do I need to tell you what this involves? Imagine…just close your eyes and imagine “thankskilling…” Yup, a killer turkey at Thanksgiving time. I’m not sure if the terribly inept play on words is worse than the plot line. Jeez, even “thanksgrieving” would have worked better if you just had to do a flick about a killer turkey on the rampage.

“Simon Says” Is this about a killer who orders people to do things they don’t want to? (That would have been pretty sweet!) Nope! Does it even sound scary? Have any idea what it’s about? It has to do with backwoods twins Simon and Stanley who terrorize campers. It’s like someone said, “Okay, what things are in this movie, a guy named Simon and a guy named Stanley…hmm…nothing comes to mind,how about the phrase `Simons Says?'” WTF?

“My Little Eye” (you can’t see me right now, but I’m shrugging). Is this about a gnome-like peeping tom? No! Why is your eye little? Who cares? What does this mean? Why am I not scared? It had to do with a “Big Brother” reality show theme with a horror twist.

“Naked Beneath the Water” A shark flick? Nope! Taken to the other extreme, someone involved in this movie apparently thought too long about the title assuming this had some sort of amazing social statement or was a psychologically transformative film. No, this is actually about a reality show where people try to top each other in killing.

There’s a gazillion more out there. Someone needs to tell moviemakers that the cover art and the name matter the most. I literally will hold up a movie that sounds lame on the write up on the back cover, but the front cover looks so awesome, I rent it.

Just for kicks, see if you can figure out what movies these are below (had a stupid moviemaker named it)

“Bump in the Night” (Titanic)
“Bigger Boat” (Jaws)
“Teenage Fangst” (Twilight)
“The Ugly American” (American Werewolf in London)
"The Fang Gang" (Lost Boys)

I’d love to hear some of your titles…

Comments

  1. I think Thankskilling is a wonderful title. I'm hoping it will be like Attack of the Killer Clowns from Outer Space and it will be incredibly silly and stupid and proud of it.

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  2. Yeah, I wasn't too sure if they realized it was tongue in cheek. I'm wondering what the marketing guys said--hey, guys, after Halloween people still want scary movies, let's give them a Thanksgiving one, then every Thanksgiving we're guaranteed the horror fans will watch it...

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