What good stories do you know that have been made into miserable movies?

[EstimatedProphet]

My favorite example: Nightfall by Isaac Asimov. Great short story, very powerful, made into 2 separate full-length movies that completely fucked up the story! Neither one of them were adapted for the screen by anyone who had even read the story, or if they did clearly didn't get what the story was about at all. And it's not really that hard a story to understand either!

[Omphaloskepsis]

1. "Brave New World" and "Crime and Punishment"..

NBC did TV movies of both.... Amazingly bad.

[EstimatedProphet]

2. I remember the Brave New World adaptation from high school

I liked it at the time, but my tastes have changed drastically since then.

[ruiner4u]

3. I was thinking BNV when I read the op...

you beat me to it...

[supernova]

4. Farenheit 451

Great book. The movie is flat and passionless, the ultimate sin in moviemaking.

[EstimatedProphet]

19. Are you talking about Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451?

I'd really have to disagree with you there.

[Oeditpus Rex]

44. Me too

The film is intentionally gray to reflect the mood of the society in it. Notice how the "rebel" characters are animated and passionate?



(Trivia: The woman who burns her books, her home and herself rather than let the firemen do it is played by Bea Duffel, who was also the old crone to whom Arthur and Bedevere said "Ni!" in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail.") :D

[Fire Walk With Me]

49. That's good trivia!

And I'll add in. I like the film adaptation of "451" as well.

[Seashell Eyes]

29. That's a movie? Good thing I haven't seen it.

I love the book and would hate to see it ruined.

[bertha katzenengel]

5. Does a novel count?

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I don't know how anyone could make this movie and do it justice. It spans almost twenty years. It gives a very good look at life in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early 20th century. Its subjects are abject poverty, the cruelty of primary education in those decades, sexual abuse, alcoholism, religion... its main characters are a girl, Francie and her brother, Neely, a strong and emotionally stunted mother and a weak and deeply loving father, the people in Francie's life, and Brooklyn itself.

IMO no way to make a good film out of this book. You've gotta read it.

[XemaSab]

6. Most of them

The first 2.5 Harry Potter movies were pretty bad.

The worst movie made out of one of my favorite books is "The Haunting" (remake). :puke:

I REFUSE to even see previews for the Golden Compass... I really, really like those books, and I don't want the movie to ruin them for me. :(

[fizzgig]

12. i'm with you on the golden compass

that series is one of my favorites

[XemaSab]

13. But have you sat in the theater twice in the last month

with your fingers in your ears and your eyes tightly shut going "LA LA LA LA" until the preview was over? :D

[fizzgig]

16. hehehe

i haven't been the the movies in a few months, so no :D

[Patsy Stone]

7. Children of the Corn

Excellent short story, piece of crap movie.

[mikeytherat]

27. Question me not, Malaki!

Bad, bad movie.

mikey_the_rat

[begin_within]

8. I'm sure I'll get slammed for this one.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was one of the 4 or 5 best novels written during the 20th century. It was bastardized and cartoonized into a movie in 1975, which most people around here seem to love. Ken Kesey, the author of the novel, hated the film version. It completely misses the point of the book (an allegory about the individual vs. the establishment) and the point of view of the book (the progress of the book's narrator, Chief Broom, from paranoid schizophrenic to fully sane), yet somehow it won all the major Oscars, is rated #9 on the top 250 films of all time on imDB, and is considered a "classic".... yet it's a complete and utter failure in my opinion, and in the opinion of quite a few people I have talked to who love that novel. The only good thing about it is that it might spur some people to read the book.

[Fleshdancer]

9. Memoirs of a Geisha n/t

[Sacajawea]

10. "All The Pretty Horses" by Cormac McCarthy....GREAT book......god-awful movie!

[BlooInBloo]

11. Lion, Witch, Wardrobe - biggest disappointment EVER.

[XemaSab]

14. Oh, I forgot that one...

what an utterly FORGETTABLE film! :(

(With bad CGI, too! :( :( )

[BlooInBloo]

15. And I was soooo looking forward to it, after the awesome LotR series. Sigh.

EDIT: Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer claymation woulda been better than the monstrosity they ended up producing.

[XemaSab]

17. word.

PS If I have to see even a *preview* for another fucking holiday comedy about fucking Santa Claus, some minimal-wage-earning zit-faced teen is going to learn what it is to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day, I can tell you. :o

[PassingFair]

18. You're right. It STUNK UP THE SCREEN.

The BBC TV series was MUCH better.

MUCH better.

[realisticphish]

33. wasn't TERRIBLE

not great, though. Mediocre at best

[BlooInBloo]

35. You're right - "craptacular" might be a better word.

[AllegroRondo]

20. Starship Troopers

Excellent book by Heinlein

Total waste of a movie.

[AllegroRondo]

21. Total Recall a close second

the short story was "I'll remember it for you wholesale", by Phillip K Dick. Excellent little story. the movie just warped the theme and ran away from it.

[YankeyMCC]

22. Another Asimov - "I, Robot"

Such great things could be done with some of his robot stories but no one in Hollywood seems to get it.

[baldguy]

41. "I, Robot" was a good movie.

It had absolutely nothing to do with Asimov's story, but it was a good movie.

[terrya]

23. "Bonfire of the Vanities"

It's a decent book...not as good as his "The Right Stuff" (which was an excellent movie version of the book). But then Brian De Palma got ahold of the movie rights to "Bonfire" and...ugh. Horrible beyond belief.

[av8rdave]

24. Hitchhiker's Guide

The books were wonderful. The movie SUCKED!

[muriel_volestrangler]

30. and the TV series was highly dubious

The script was fine, mostly coming from the original (and excellent) radio series - but the special effects were awful, despite supposedly costing a lot more than the BBC spent on things like Doctor Who or Blake's 7. The only good thing about the TV series was the 'Guide' graphics - which were, ironically, drawn by hand to look like computer graphics.

[realisticphish]

34. mother of god, this

the radio show, then the books were fantastic. Divine, even.

The movie sucked on ice

[Tikki]

25. The Postman....

an excellent book by David Brin. A not so great movie by Kevin Costner.


Tikki

[Fire Walk With Me]

50. For a while, I was reluctant to recommend Brin books due to that movie.

As you say, a shame as he's pretty good!

[Paladin]

26. "Ghost Story"

Peter Straub's horror classic, a genuinely terrifying book, made into a "so what" movie. Yes, it was nice to see the old actors (Fred Astaire, John Houseman, et al)have a final turn, but still.....

[fudge stripe cookays]

36. Alice Krige was fun though...

"Kiss me you little toad..."

[u4ic]

46. I found the movie rather funny

the special effects were hilarious.

The book was very creepy.

This one gets my vote.:hi:

[China_cat]

28. Enemy Mine

The author, when asked for his list of the 10 worst movies ever made listed Enemy Mine.

[muriel_volestrangler]

31. Dune

A book that needed more than a single movie could give it - so the plot and script were all over the place. The worms weren't exactly inspiring either.

[EstimatedProphet]

39. I'm with you on that one

I walked out of it thinking "Huh?"

[baldguy]

42. That's David Lynch's Dune, right?

The SciFi Channel adaption is pretty respectable.

[muriel_volestrangler]

51. I haven't seen the SciFi channel one

but if it's a serial, then it would have the chance of being done properly.

[realisticphish]

32. Thermopylae, into "300"

:grr:

[fudge stripe cookays]

37. "The Memory of Eva Ryker"

One of my favorite books I read in the 1970s. Girl and her mother travel on the Titanic, the mother dies, and the daughter was supposed to be kidnapped. Didn't quite work that way, with the sinking and all.

Decades later, the murder of a couple and the involvement of the cop who finds them RIGHT before the events at Pearl Harbor is tied to the earlier events. The story just blew me away because it was so intricate. Lots of twists and turns.

They made a movie out of it (one of Natalie Wood's last). Eva was supposed to be like 40 years older than the cop. In the movie, they ended up falling in love (!) and the ship was the Queen Mary or something, and it was torpedoed during WWII (!).

:wtf: !!!!!!! GOD I was so pissed they destroyed it. And I don't mean destroyed, I mean mangled to the point that it was barely the same story.

[fudge stripe cookays]

38. "The Boyfriend School" by Sarah Bird.

One of my favorite books of all time.

Cynical, just-scraping-by reporter Gretchen from shoestring indie paper in Austin heads to Dallas to cover the "Luvboree" romance writers convention. There, she meets two eccentric romance writers, and is convinced she can do the same. One of the writers, Lizzie, wants to play matchmaker for Gretchen and her recently-recovered-from-Hodkins brother Gus.

This book made me laugh so hard I almost had to invest in Depends.

It was made into the travesty "Don't Tell Her It's Me" with Shelley Long and Steve Guttenberg. Long was perfectly cast, but Jami Gertz was NOT Gretchen, and they moved the locale from Austin to CHARLESTON for some fucked up reason. Plus, they got rid of Juanita, one of my favorite characters.

Oy.

[EstimatedProphet]

40. That's kind of how I felt about The Princess Bride

The book was a wonderfully satiric look at the idea of romance novels. The screen version tried to turn it into a romance novel.

[fudge stripe cookays]

43. Interesting...

I didn't know that. I love the movie, but that makes me think I'd like the book more.

[EstimatedProphet]

52. I bet you would

The book is much better IMO

[Marrah_G]

45. Clan of the Cave Bear

[EstimatedProphet]

53. I remember Time's review of Clan of the Cave Bear

The writer did the whole thing in the grunting caveman-speak they used in the film. It started out "The Clan of the Cave Bear is dog." Hysterically funny!

[Marrah_G]

54. Yes the reason the movie was so incredible horrid was...

The book was very good, but in the book the Neanderthals used a combination of gutteral sounds and sign language because they just didn't have the developed vocal cords. Now this is very easy to convey in a book, but put that on screen and it was simply awful.

It was a great story that never should have become a book.

Now Fundies would have hated it because it was set in the time that man was gaining numbers while Neanderthal was dying out and we all know that Evolution is just a tool the devil uses to confuse us!

[Adsos Letter]

47. Its not so much that they were miserable movies, but...

...I thought that Frederick Forsyth's "The Day of the Jackal" and "The Odessa File" were so good in their book form that the movies were a disappointment.

[Fox Mulder]

48. Queen of the Damned