Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Movies I love which everyone else hates

Proving that personal taste overrides popular opinion, here is my top 10 of movies which I love but are critical/commercial flops:

  1. Ghosts of Mars: not one of John Carpenter's better efforts, but I just love the spacepunk ethos of this movie and the super-cheesy fight scenes. I admit I'm biased because I had a nightmare which bore a very close resemblance to this before I'd had any exposure to the movie.
  2. Event Horizon: basically Hellraiser in space, but the acting is surprisingly nuanced, its awesomely scary and the ship design is lovely and gothic. Sam Neill and Lawrence Fishburne are just great in this.
  3. Last Days on Mars: a more realistic version (sort of) of Ghosts of Mars - Zombies of Mars! Olivia Williams is deliciously bitchy, the music is great, apart from the zombies its a pretty realistic depiction of a research colony on Mars, and Liev Schrieber is a wonderfully understated hero.
  4. FF: Spirits Within: I saw this in the cinema when it came out, and it blew my mind. This was the first convincing 3D movie and a gamechanger for the industry. I love the monsters' designs, I love Aki, the sequence where the city is falling and they're all trying to escape is just amazing cinema. Not so fond of the ending and them modelling Gray on Ben Affleck.
  5. Volcano: so so stupid, but so much fun. Tommy Lee Jones chews the scenery, and the scenery is all lava! I love lava :)
  6. Atlantis: the Lost Empire: I don't know why everyone hates this, its a Disney movie with NO SINGING (yay!), with a really cool story, some amazing designs and animation.
  7. Con Air: Nicholas Cage is hilarious, John Malkovich makes an awesomely nasty villain, there's planes and fighting and John Cusack running around wisecracking. I had a hard time choosing between this and the Rock.
  8. In the Mouth of Madness: again, not sure why this is considered a flop, its the best Cthulhu/Lovecraftian movie ever, Sam Neill is wonderful as a skeptic descending into insanity, the whole premise of the book writing reality is just awesome, and its really really creepy.
  9. Knowing: Nicholas Cage is nice and depressed in this, the aliens are creepy, its main shocks come from a horribly realistic plane crash, there's great classical music, and the apocalypse sequence is probably one of the most affecting in cinema. Could have done without Rose Byrne hilariously screaming, "Think of the children!", but hey, you can't have everything.
  10. The 13th Warrior: Best Beowulf version ever. Antonio Banderas is probably one of the few sympathetic Muslim heroes in mainstream cinema, the viking warriors all manage to get across their personalities without much dialogue at all, the villains are suitably scary, the landscapes are misty and atmospheric, and there's some great battle/fighting sequences. Don't buy it though; they were quite cruel to animals during filming - horses died unnecessarily.
I could probably add another 20 bad films I love, but these were the first ones which came to mind. Enjoy!