The Bonfire of the Vanities was a disaster.
No, not Tom Wolfe’s book about New York excess during the rah-rah 80s. I mean the movie.
You remember it, don’t you? Tom Hanks in a role that seemed tailor-made for William Hurt, Melanie Griffith vamping it up in a sparkly dress because the director didn’t think the young Uma Thurman was sexy enough, Bruce Willis as a disaffected journalist, Morgan Freeman as a black judge lecturing the cast on decency in place of Wolfe’s cynical Jew, buxom California girls trying and failing to impersonate New York social x-rays…what should have been an over the top romp was a box office bomb that nearly derailed a couple of careers. It was a prime example of how not to adapt a good book for the silver screen, or at least what Esquire used to call the Hell Plaza Octoplex.
And it’s far from the only good book that was somehow destroyed in the transition from page to film. That all-time Tony Curtis howler The Black Shield of Falworth was based on a book by Howard Pyle, after all, while the Will Smith version of I, Robot bore as much resemblance to Isaac Asimov’s original as it did to romance novels named things like Love’s Scabrous Infection. For every critical or box office triumph like Lord of the Rings or Maurice, there a dozen mediocre-to-terrible versions of good books as close as your Netflix rental.
Really bad books are no exception.
If anything, Books So Bad They’re Good can be better fodder for adaptation than bestsellers or classics. They usually don’t come with a built-in fan base that will storm the premiere and leave the director’s limp and unresisting corpse swinging from the nearest lamppost. Often the rights are very cheap, which helps the profit margin, especially for DVD sales. A clever screenwriter can smooth out enough rough spots that the film is actually better than the book, or at least more popular. And they give work to starving actors, directors, special effects geeks, and others who can and do use terrible movies to learn their craft well enough to make a decent film if they haven’t chucked it to all to sell insurance in Oil City, Pennsylvania, or another booming metropolis.
Although movies based on BSBTG can and do draw on any genre, they’re particularly prevalent in science fiction and fantasy. I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it’s the vast store of pulpy space operas that can be bought for a song. Perhaps it’s because a lot of directors still don’t know what to do with elves or aliens. Perhaps it’s simply that anything that can be licensed for coloring books, exploding toys, or action figures tucked into a Happy Meal is a bigger box office draw than the average bodice ripper or hard boiled mystery.
Regardless, here are two fine examples of BSBTG that were turned into MSBTG :
Perry RhodanMission Stardust aka …4...3...2...1...morte - If you think Star Trek in all of its variations is the longest running and most influential science fiction media franchise, you would be wrong. That honor, such as it is, almost certainly belongs to the immortal (literally) German space opera Perry Rhodan.
The Perry Rhodan series began back in 1961 as a relatively innocuous near-future German weekly tabloid about an American astronaut and his adventures as he leads Earth to its destiny among the stars. After fifty years, literally thousands of installments, and more aliens, telepaths, battles, explosions, character deaths, mouse beavers (yes, mouse beavers), space ships, sacrifices, and similar delights, Perry Rhodan, who will live forever unless someone shoves him out an airlock into the event horizon of a black hole, is still going strong. And since the same idiots aliens who gave Perry immortality gave him 20,000 years to straighten out Earth and lead her people to the stars, there's no end in sight. The books are no longer published in English (although the editions published by superfan Forrest Ackerman and his wife Wendayne are now collector's items), but "Furry Rodent" is still well remembered by fans of a certain age.
Despite being a top seller in German-speaking countries for decades, to date there's been only one Perry Rhodan movie, the 1967 German/Spanish/Italian/Monegasque co-production …4...3...2...1...morte, known in America as Mission Stardust. Based on the first few installments of the Series That Will Not Die, the movie features a cast of Swedes, Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Canadians in a badly dubbed opus that looks like the bastard offspring of You Only Live Twice and Forbidden Planet using props from cult classic Diabolique repurposed from a Vidal Sassoon studio. The plot, such as it is, involves bad aliens, a female alien who wears “spacesuits” adorned with what appear to be giant pasties, gangsters, and Perry Rhodan himself falling in love with Pasty Woman and her embarrassingly fake silver-white wig. Even better, a character manages to get himself crushed by a giant steel door without gushing blood all over the stylish Tuscan villa occupied by the villains. Ah, the good old days!
The Year of the Angry Rabbit/Night of the Lepus - I've cheated a bit with this one. The Year of the Angry Rabbit is actually a reasonably serious cautionary tale about the effects of too many rabbits overrunning the Australian ecosystem. It would not have been an easy film to make, but its themes of overpopulation and the folly of human intervention might have made an interesting film a la Silent Running, especially if a major studio had given it a try.
Unfortunately, it was optioned as a horror movie. By people who were used to making Westerns. And cast over the hill stars like Janet Leigh (yes, really), Rory Calhoun, Stuart Whitman, and, God help us all, DeForest Kelly (yes, really) in a tale of giant, man-eating bunnies rampaging across the American Southwest.
You read that right. Bunnies. You know, bunnies. The soft, friendly little creatures that so often figure in Easter cards and Cadbury’s Crème Eggs commercials, only blown up to the size of a Cadillac Escalade and given a fondness for human flesh. That rabbits are not particularly frightening doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone involved in this ludicrous film. Even worse, the production couldn’t get any Southwestern jackrabbits or wild hares, so they used domestic bunnies, big eyed and soft furred, to portray the rampaging hordes. Evidently the director thought that if the bunnies were big enough they’d be scary by definition.
He didn’t count on the inherent cuteness of the domestic bun-bun. The rabbits used in the film were so adorable that even photographing them in EXTREME CLOSE UP and smearing ketchup on their faces didn’t make them look them remotely menacing. They looked like ordinary, everyday domestic rabbits smeared with ketchup. A few hapless humans reportedly had to be stuffed into furry costumes for the “action” sequences where the rabbits rend their prey, which sounds more convincing than it looks on screen. Think “Scott of the Sahara” and you’ll get the picture.
Even worse, the production evidently spent so much on ketchup that they couldn’t afford actual miniature sets for the rabbits to cavort about in. Being inventive, if not particularly talented, they seem to have bought out the dollhouse section of the local McGrory’s for the little plastic chairs and tables and appliances the rabbits stomp on and demolish. The scene where rabbits trash a dollhouse while humans cower and dodge ketchup in the “basement” is a classic, although I’m not sure of what.
Best of all is the line uttered by a sheriff as he pulls up at a local drive-in to warn the teenagers that they need to stop imitating the title animals whatever they’re doing and head to the hills:
“Run for your lives! There’s a herd of killer rabbits headed this way!”
So, True Believers – what’s your favorite example of a hilarious bad movie made from a BSBTG? We all could use a laugh, especially after the week we and the planet have had….