Movies that are just too long.

[LilCerberus]

trek_geezer Wrote:
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> I think Pendragon's War of the Worlds is too long
> and too bad. It's not bad enough that the movie is
> so terribly made (I'm talking bad and not
> laughably so), but it lasts three friggin' hours,
> 1.5 of  which are of the guy walking around. I
> could only finish the movie by fast forwarding
> through all the damned walking.
>
> --------------------------------
>
>


I don't know why, but I found Pendragon's WOTW to be strangely bearable, even at an excruciatingly gratuitous three hours. My usual argument is to compare it to The Wizard of Mars (1965), which in my opinion has ten times more walking around scenes than WOTW, even at a lousey eighty minutes.

Still, I think WOTW has it's moments, and I would have to disagree on the laughability of it's shortcomings. Anthony Piana's pushbroom makes for an 'adequate' running joke, and I found the exchange between Ogilvy & the Potsman, the dancing skeletans, & the voodoo doll Barbi pretty funny.

The only thing that really bugged me was Anthony Piana's incoherant mumbling as he narrated, but then the audio in A Certain Sacrifice (1985) was way worse.

I suppose that ultimately, I've become desensitised to Tim Hines' level of ineptitude after suffering through the werkz of Larry Buchanan, Tom Laughlin, and more recently, the Polonia brothers.

[akiratubo]

In case anyone's interested, I finished with my editing of Kong.

I started with 3 hours, 7 minutes and finished with 2 hours, 16 minutes.  Not as much bloat as I thought!  Rarely did I omit a huge swath of footage at once; I found myself trimming almost every individual scene.

Whew!

It was difficult (and kinda pointless, I'll go ahead and admit that) but it was FUN!  Editing was always my favorite and strongest subject in my film and video classes.

[Just Plain Horse]

Andrew Wrote:
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> Five hideous words:  "The Trial of Billy Jack."
>
> Deanzille, aka "Godzilla" (1998) is also padded
> all to heck.  I could have done without the
> "Jurassic Park" raptor scene ripoff with the baby
> Godzillas.  
>
> Oh, and "Jungle Hell" could have cut out one or
> two scenes where Sabu beat up Kumar without losing
> anything.  I would not cut any elephant footage
> out of that one though, it really makes the film.


Bambi Meets Godzilla is as long as the "Deanzilla" movie should have been. In regards to Jurassic Park, I could have done without either of the sequels- the Spinosaurus was nice, but otherwise, a complete waste of my time. Another complete waste of time was the Quatermass movie with Brian Donlevy in it. You could trim that to about 10 minutes. The Gappa movie was pretty long, too. It should've been about 45 minutes, not 90. Also, for some reason, just about any movie dealing with Yeti, bigfoot or the like could lose about 20 to 40 minutes. Snow Creature in particular could be reduced to about 25 minutes. I dare you to watch it from beginning to end- I swear I thought time had stopped about halfway through...

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

I thought the second LOTR movie just dragged and dragged.  Its just one long battle.   Of course, so is the source material.  Speaking of LOTR, take a look at this, by David Brin.  
http://www.davidbrin.com/tolkienarticle1.html
Whether you agree or not, its an interesting take on the story.  I read this, re-read the series, and got really annoyed at those eleves, hiding away while the useless Hobbits did all the work.
-Ed

[Just Plain Horse]

lilcerberus Wrote:
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> Larry Buchanan's "It's Alive!" (1969) probably
> would've made for a good episode of Night Gallery,
> or Tales From the DarkSide, or something, rather
> than a feature length TV movie. It seems that the
> story it'self was just too short for the runtime,
> so each scene is stretched long & drawn out
> far beyond what is acceptable.
>
> I think It's Alive could've worked, even with the
> cheesy "Guy in a bugsuit that we're supposed to
> assume is a forty-foot prehistoric beast", if they
> tried to tell the story inside of twenty or thirty
> minutes.
>
> Also, I've alway felt that The Entity (even the
> editted for television version) was way too long.
>
> Considering that everything about this movie was
> constantly way over the top, I can't help but feel
> like they made it too long on purpose. My theory
> is based on the assumption that Sidney J. Furie
> probably started out with what could've been a
> good idea, but got nervous about how the subject
> matter, as well as it's graphic depiction, would
> be percieved by fundamentalist groups, or
> misunderstood as schlock, so they decided to keep
> piling stuff on until the result was a movie that
> was overlong, overacted, & overdirected, with
> a very annoying soundtrack.
>

Oh God, I forgot about the Entity... That was a piece of crap; they should have gone straight from the title sequence to the scene where "it" gets frozen in ice. The whole film is like if Lifetime Network made Poltergeist. I'll be honest, every Adam Sandler movie I've seen feels like it's an hour too long... but maybe it's unfair for me to judge, since Happy Gilmore is the only one I've seen from start to finish. Also, does anybody else think Steven Segal movies should just consist of fight scenes, nothing more? Having to watch people act around him just makes me sad.