The Day the Earth Sat Still


Knock off movies.  Why are they made?  Money obviously.  But how much money do you really get out of a poorly done knock off movie?  I’d like to actually find that out to see if it is actually worth the waste of space to have those movies out on the market.  There are so many of them and so little care put into them.

This article has been sparked by this week’s clip of the week from The Soup.  The clip they showed was from a SyFy channel movie called Battle of Los Angeles.  Clearly, the movie was ripping off of Battle: Los Angeles.  And clearly SyFy does not have the same budget that the theatrical film did.  Surely they can still make a decent television movie.  Right?  Not from the clip I saw.

I now have a copy of the movie that I may or may not have gotten through shady means.  I have yet to watch it.  I feel the need to, however, because of how bad it is, and my incessant need to give everything a chance.  I have little hope in this, as I do with the two other films that come to mind which I have not seen, Snakes on a Train, and Transmorphers.  What I saw of Battle of Los Angeles was a man who threw a grenade at an alien.  The grenade was thrown back to him.  He got scared and decided to do the only thing that he could think of.  The man somersaulted about five feet away and watched as the grenade blew up in an explosion the size of a typical footstool.

This is possibly one of the worst things I have seen from a television movie.  Sure, I’ll admit I don’t watch many television movies, but surely you could get better quality that the adult equivalent of a six year old playing war.  Surely you can’t put very poor quality stuff out and expect people to be fully engaged in the tension you are trying to build.

Is this quality relevant to what I began my blog rant with?  Not completely.  It’s also not completely unrelated.  The problem with most of the knock offs is the lack of writing involved.  A person goes “That’s a good idea!  We can do that too!”  Change the name.  Very, very slightly, change the setting.  You’ve got yourself a knock off that you can promote because of the popularity of something else.  Nobody watches them for originality.  No.  It’s like taking a brand name board game and making a movie.  People know the name, sort of, and feel that they will get the same experience.  But they won’t.

Why must we be subjected to this stuff?  I’m still not sure why.  I don’t know who would spend money to obtain these movies.  I don’t know how these movies are still being made.  It annoys me.  The complete lack of originality.  The lack of visual quality.  All of it just bugs me.  They don’t get good actors either.  And they aren’t so bad they’re good.  Most of them are just plain bad.

I can’t be bothered to even complain any more.  I just want to leave you with this.  If I made a movie right now called Green Lamp, and put it out right before Green Lantern, and it was about a superhero who got his powers from a ring, would it be a good idea or bad?

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