10 Things I Hate About Movies - Part 2.

2. Writers out of their depth or lacking in imagination.

This might be a little subjective as well (get ready for that word a lot), and I'm no expert, however it's pretty much all I do now so I think I'm pretty well versed in the overall field of horror/monster movies. If you can't stretch your imagination you shouldn't even venture into the genre (this also leads me to #3), it's already so saturated these days, with little indie studios and even more indie groups, thinking it's an easy style. It's not, really, it's not - so just stop thinking it is.

Specifically I want to use a movie called "Monster Brawl" to make this point. I'm not a wrestling fan, but this seemed, on paper, like a great idea for a fun little movie. A championship matchup and finally a fight to the death with monsters. Hardly brilliant, but the potential was really there for an amusing movie - especially when you have Dave Foley doing commentary and Lance Henriksen as the announcer. What a load of dull-assed crap it turned out to be.

With characters like "Lady Vampire" and "Zombie Man" I should’ve just stopped watching. So lazy, unimaginative and dull. And since when does a Cyclops fire lasers from his eye? That's not imaginative, that's just really dumb - a laser? Really? They couldn't think of something more interesting? They just settled on Laser Eye Vision? Was this written by a child? No, a child would’ve come up with something better.

And then when they carted out "Frankenstein" I watched to punch someone. I know idiots for ages have been referring to the Monster as Frankenstein, but that doesn't excuse it. And when they admitted their mistake and called anyone who would correct them a dick, I realized the level of intelligence I was dealing with. Just dull, lazy writers way out of their depth but still thinking they're clever. Scooby Doo had more complex monsters than this shit.

 Look, you don't write a political thriller or police drama without being well versed in those concepts - although I'm sure it does happens, just neither of those are genres I usually watch - than why does anyone find it acceptable to venture into the horror/fantasy/sci-fi world thinking they can just churn out some lame junk and expect anyone to buy it? I can only assume it's because of two (insulting) reasons, reason number 1, fans of those genres are just idiot fanboys (and fangirls) who have no real taste in movies and will watch anything and reason number 2, it's an easy style because you can just make shit up without having to back it up with anything logical.

Both those reasons are grotesquely insulting, if anything fans of these genres (real fans) are more discriminating. I think they only reason they get made is because maybe that powers that be think we're all idiots too and they themselves don't know any better so they think it's brilliant so why not do it. Just crank out the cheap crap for a quick buck.

It seems for every 100 low-budget genre movies, we'll see maybe 5 with a decent scripts. Until Horror Movies are officially considered A-List movies, we'll continue to get C-List writers churning out their crap scripts. It's a bit of a catch-22, the only way it's change is if something massive changes within the industry. For every Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson, there's about 1000 desperate writers just wanting to pay the rent and a producer who just wants another overly expensive car he doesn't really need.


*I also want to point out, I’m well aware that some of these issues I’m bringing up are not always directly related to the people I attribute them to. In some cases it’s a bad writer, or a bad director or a bad producer  - sometimes it’s not necessarily a “bad” anything other than circumstances. Making movies is a massive undertaking and is incredibly difficult, and sometimes, along the way, people lose sight of what they’re doing or creative differences arise and in the end there still has to be a final product. Sometimes that final product is just slapped together in order to meet a contractual obligation and that’s when crap movies happens.

And sometimes they just suck because they just suck.