Badmovies.org Forum

I'd like to hear everyone's opinion of the movie that had the most misleading ad campaign. I'm talking about a movie that was advertised in a certain way, but when you saw it, it was NOTHING like what you expected (and this REALLY p**sed you off).

My nominees are:

* THE ATTIC - A movie from the 1970s starring Ray Milland. The TV spot showed one of those wind-up mechanical monkeys banging a pair of cymbals together. At the end of the ad, blood trickled out of the monkey's mouth. In reality, the movie was about Ray Milland and his daughter (I think she was played by Carrie Snodgress), living in a house and getting on each other's nerves. I think something weird happened with the monkey at the end, but it was all in the daughter's imagination or something (and you had to wait 90 minutes for anything to happen). Anyway, the movie was a boring piece of crap.

* ANY MOVIE FROM "SUNN CLASSICS PICTURES" - This is the company that cranked out all those terrible documentaries like SASQUATCH, and IN SEARCH OF NOAH'S ARK back in the 1970s. In many cases, the trailers contained numerous scenes that were not even in the movies.

* THE GODSEND - I remember the ads that absolutely SATURATED the airwaves when this movie was released. The tag line was "For God's sake, take it back." The movie was sort of a cross between THE OMEN and THE BAD SEED. It was one of those movies where you keep waiting and waiting for something to happen, but nothing ever does. It was rated "R," but I seem to remember that there was no blood or nudity or anything - certainly not enough for it to have been rated "R."

What are some others?

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I remember the movie Screamers which promised "Men turned inside out!" but was, in reality, a cheesy children's fantays movie from Italy.  This was back in 1980 or so, around the time Corman also shoved Humanoids from the Deep in our faces.  New World released both.

For me, it's VENOM. The ad campaign was extraordinaraly deceptive. It was something like "The danger of PSYCHO, the mystery of THE BIRDS, the evil of The OMEN, the terror of JAWS..." And when I saw the movie in theatres, VENOM was nothing more than a boring hostage drama with a snake running around the house. IMO, it's not even a horror film. What hyperbole!!!

Here's a link with the poster.

http://www.moviegoods.com/movie_product.asp?master_movie_id=7308&movie_nss=

How about 1998's Godzilla?  Remember when it said it would have...well...Godzilla in it?

Brother R

Wasn't "Signs" fairly off-target in that the movie was not really the 'alien-horror-thriller' the ads made it out to be?

Fearless Freep wrote:
>
> Wasn't "Signs" fairly off-target in that the movie was not
> really the 'alien-horror-thriller' the ads made it out to be?
>
>

But . . . Signs was an alien-horror-thriller.


"Badgers? Badgers?! We don't need no stinking badgers!"

SIGNS: alien-horror-thriller, well, one out of three ain't bad. There were aliens.

It was more of a "coincidences ain't coincidences, they happen for a reason, however hoaky" gimmick flick.

heheh THE ATTIC was filmed here in Wichita Kansas, I live a bliock away from the house LOL

Friggin' Hart's War! The ads made it seem like a Great Escape type flick, with bombs, and shootings, and blood and snot and all the things people like me go to movies for. In reality it was....I still don't know what it was! It didn't know what it wanted to be. War flick? For about 15 minutes. Court Room drama....yeah let's toss that in there too. Social commentary...why not?

Unlike Windtalkers, which was entirely composed of war movie cliches, Hart's War was a hodge podge of many, many, different cliched genres. The title should have been... " A Few Good Men, who In The Heat of the Night plan The Great Escape, from Stalag 17 on Von Ryan's Express, and ultimately become Hogan's Heroes".

Fight Club was grossly screwed in the ad department. When I saw the previews for it, all they made the movie out to be was one with guys fighting in a basement, and people who made soap. No mention whatsoever of anything to do with Project Mayhem, the duality of the Narrator, or escape from consumerism; just fighting. Man were they ever wrong. ::sigh::

Scottie

I actually like ads that only display a portion of the storyline. I'd rather go into a movie thinking the entire thing would be about Story A, but then Story A ends halfway through, and is merely a disguise/leads into Story B.

>>But . . . Signs was an alien-horror-thriller.
 But.....NO!!! It wasn't It was EXTREAMLY boring!!! I would rather drink the rancid milk from a cancerous bag-lady's swollen infected breasts than to watch that "thing" again.

While I enjoyed the film, even if I had hated it, it doesn't change its genre. All of M. Night's films are slow. Signs had parts intended to be horror, thriller, and it definitely had aliens. Even if it was crap, it still falls into that category.

No, I gotta agree, SIGNS was more of a family drama that seemed to have aliens included as an afterthought.  Definitely misleading, and also the worst movie I saw in the theater last year [mainly due to the many scenes of comedy included at inappropriate moments, keeping the film from building up any kind of tension.]

FIGHT CLUB's ad campaign was terrible.  When I saw it I thought, "This movie is gonna suck..." just because that's usually the case when you can't tell what a movie is about from its advertising.  Thankfully, I was wrong this time.

I first saw THE ATTIC on disc fairly recently--I was definitely surprised by the film being nothing like its ads, which used to scare me when the movie was first released.   .

No. it most certainly falls in the lame/crap/sensless/not-worth-watching catagory

Ooh, good one. When I saw the trailer, I thought it looked like the dumbest movie imaginable. "It's a club where-- get this-- guys fight each other!" Fortunately, it turned out to be much, much cooler.

Formula 51. I thought it was going to be a cool little action movie. I got Samuel L. Jackson in a kilt! ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGG!!!! Dissa-freakin-pointing!!!

I totally agree with you!  I never wanted to see it because it looked stupid.  But then my brother's teacher was raving about how cool it was and how it had a twist ending kinda like the sixth sense and I was like "what"? So I ended up seeing it and I feel that it made me a better person on the whole. cause that movie kicks!


Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a bannanna.
     - Groucho Marx

I have to agree with Chadzilla. Screamers is the most misleading. The ads, the poster art, the taglines are all for a completely different movie that does not, to my knowledge, exist.

I remember the newspaper ads scaring the crap of me as a kid, then being disappointed when I finally got my hands on a copy of the movie years later.

The box shows this vascular, skeletal, screaming zombie thing, with a tagline about inside-out men. The movie is some 19th-century adventure tale about a scientist using fish men to recover sunken treasure. What the hell happened? Did they decide to go with a different script after the publicity was already in the works?

H2O... Where is the water in this movie... oh... maybe the script was water down...

What happened was that Roger Corman's New World Pictures bought the distribution rights to some Italian Fantasy movie.  The head of the Marketing Dept. at the time, who was none other than Jim Wynorski, fabricated a completely false ad campaign.  The movie made money, lots of it (from an exploitation perspective that is).  But lawsuits were threatened and Wynorski quit to go make his own movies.  Or so Urban Legend has it.  Wynorksi was also a reporter for the Starlog Group at one point, and the honesty of his reporting came under a cloud of suspicion as well, then he left to go work for New World.  Hmmm.

Chadzilla wrote:
>
> What happened was that Roger Corman's New World Pictures
> bought the distribution rights to some Italian Fantasy
> movie.  The head of the Marketing Dept. at the time, who was
> none other than Jim Wynorski, fabricated a completely false
> ad campaign.  The movie made money, lots of it (from an
> exploitation perspective that is).  But lawsuits were
> threatened and Wynorski quit to go make his own movies.  Or
> so Urban Legend has it.  Wynorksi was also a reporter for the
> Starlog Group at one point, and the honesty of his reporting
> came under a cloud of suspicion as well, then he left to go
> work for New World.  Hmmm.

Actually Chadzilla, their is more to the U.S. release of SCREAMERS than meets the eye.

Originally released in international theatres as ISLAND OF THE FISH MEN with English dubbing done by the production company Medusa Distribuzione and Dania Film, the Italian film was picked up by American production company United Producers Organization. The American company basically hired director Miller Drake and effects technician Chris Walas to shoot a new beginning sequence with Mel Ferrer and Cameron Mitchell. Also, some additional effects scenes were added in with the assistance of Walas, the international English dub was replaced with a new English dub, some music was added in with small cues from Sandy Berman, and the title was also changed to ISLAND OF MUTATIONS.

The film was compleated and United Producers Organization needed a more experienced distributor to handle the release and thus went to Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Corman was indeed impressed with the re-worked film and struck a deal with the American company. With that, Corman added in some additional music cues of Pino Donaggio from PIRANHA (1978) and changed the title to SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK due to trying to capitalize the early slasher genre at that time despite the fact that the film itself is NOT a slasher film. The film's release bombs and Corman could not figure out what to do with it. Enter Jim Wynorski who claimed that he could make the film marketable. Corman let's Wynorski take the film and re-title it SCREAMERS, creates a trailer that shows a man being turned inside-out, and gives it a misleading ad campaign that claims you will see the man turned inside-out scene in the film. The film is released and made money, but due to the misleading camapigns and the audience being let down with a false promise riots broke out at a few drive-in's. This resulted in New Word taking the prints back and, by making a few copy prints of the man turning inside-out scene from the trailer, added in the scene. And because this scene was added in the prints and not the original 35mm neagtive, most recent video releases don't have the scene due to being transfered from the original negative itself.

I would really like it if the original ISLAND OF THE FISH MEN and SCREAMERS would be released together on DVD, it would make a great viewing.

The U.S. release of THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES. The American release was titled THE SEVEN BROTHERS MEET DRACULA when in fact the seven brothers DON'T meet Dracula but instead fight his vampire henchmen. Hell, the U.S. title is even more misleading due to the fact that their are seven brothers and one sister in the film (which, in the U.S. trailer, the announcer claimed "See the Seven Brothers and their One Sister Meet Dracula!").

Another one is THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA. It was released in America was COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE with the ad campaign saying "The Prince of Darkness marries the Queen of the Zombies" (and this NEVER HAPPENS). And the U.S. title is also misleading as Count Dracula has NO vampire bride.

And the fact that these two were released by the same distributor is more unbelievable.

Chris K wrote: "The U.S. release of THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES. The American release was titled THE SEVEN BROTHERS MEET DRACULA when in fact the seven brothers DON'T meet Dracula but instead fight his vampire henchmen. Hell, the U.S. title is even more misleading due to the fact that their are seven brothers and one sister in the film (which, in the U.S. trailer, the announcer claimed "See the Seven Brothers and their One Sister Meet Dracula!").

Another one is THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA. It was released in America was COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE with the ad campaign saying "The Prince of Darkness marries the Queen of the Zombies" (and this NEVER HAPPENS). And the U.S. title is also misleading as Count Dracula has NO vampire bride.

And the fact that these two were released by the same distributor is more unbelievable."

I have these movies on DVD. THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES and THE SEVEN BROTHERS MEET DRACULA are on a two-sided disc with one version on each side. THE LEGEND . . . is the complete version. THE SEVEN BROTHERS . . . is the U.S. version, which is re-edited with about 15 minutes missing. The movies are actually fun to watch.

I also have THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, which is VERY 1970s ("mod" clothing and hairstyles). It is one of the more violent Christopher Lee DRACULA movies. I think the version titled COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE is also available on DVD, but I believe it is from one of the "cheapo" DVD distributors.

Chris K. wrote:
>
>  
> I would really like it if the original ISLAND OF THE FISH MEN
> and SCREAMERS would be released together on DVD, it would
> make a great viewing.

This is so a Blue Underground concept, Mr. Lustig...you reading this?

And thanks for the info.

The first film that came to mind when I saw the title of this thread was Sam Raimi's DARKMAN. The film was released in 1990, when BATMAN was still a hot item, and the studio obviously wanted audiences to view DARKMAN as something in the dark superhero vein. The trailer really made me think that DARKMAN was going to be a superhero flick, and I had to see it several times before I could completely accept it as the gothic horror film that it is.

When I saw people posting about SCREAMERS, I initially thought they were writing about the Peter Weller film, which also had a misleading ad campaign. I was hoping that the entire film would feature Weller & Co. fighting those little spinning robots that scuttle through the ground, but those robots were dispatched with pretty early in the film.

BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES. Definitely. It's got two.