List your worst film adaptations.

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Jurassic Park. In fact, Sphere and Congo were also butchered. Crichton deserved better.

Most of Stephen King's stuff. It and The Stand actually should have been decent movies.

Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. WTF

The abomination based on Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House". I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to read that wonderful short novel after seeing the film.

+1.

The adaptation of the Watchmen wasn't great either.
Les Miserables--although, come on, you can't really adapt that GIANT book without losing some of the background stories that made it so compelling.
I've also never seen a Terry Pratchett adaptation that wasn't terrible.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Great book but the movie was so bad. It was like a low budget film with a bunch of random scenes put together and no character development. A lot of my friends like the movie.

TIMELINE and HARRIET THE SPY.

The Golden Compass
The Wizard Of Oz
The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy
To Kill A Mockingbird

Just off the top of my head.

Bloodrayne. Then again, I hear that all of Uwe Boll's stuff is horrible, so...

how anyone could take a terrific book like dean koontz's 'watchers' and make such an awful movie from it is beyond belief. then......then......then.........they made a sequel that was even worse! aaaaauuuuuuugggggggghhhhh.

The Dario Argento and Joel Schumacher adaptations of Phantom of the Opera
Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes
M Night Shaylames The Last Airbender

Battlefield Earth, no contest.

On the other hand, The Green Mile is one of the best I've ever seen.

I feel that in many ways (particularly Hammond's character and Lex's) it was improved. But one bit that I felt got royally screwed up was Gennaro being turned into a snivelling coward when he was heroic in the story. Other than that, good adaptation.



Actually, with the exception of Watchmen, all these adaptations have had their creators involved, and even Watchmen did if you count Dave Gibbons as a co-creator. Michael Crichton helped write the screenplay for Jurassic Park, and Douglas Adams had pretty much written everything that went onto the screen for The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Terry Pratchett has been involved, to my knowledge, with every Discworld live action adaptation by Sky. And all four of those (counting the Pratchett adaptations as one) I thought were good movies. Watchmen and Jurassic Park were both good examples of pragmatic adaptations, as was The Colour of Magic. Hogfather was quite close to the original story. And The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, while not the best possible adaptation, still stands as a good adaptation in its own right.

If I had watched it, I would have listed the Hammer Horror version of The Quatermass Experiment. However, I've only watched clips, and I would consider it intellectually dishonest to denounce it based on that.

I would have to say that most of the worst adaptations that I've actually seen are a few of the James Bond films, mostly Diamonds are Forever and The Man With the Golden Gun. Not to mention Die Another Day, which technically is an adaptation of the original Moonraker novel.

Oh, and while David Lynch's version of Dune got many elements right, it screwed up the story and themes big time. Oh, and Batman and Robin. 'Nuff said.

EDIT: Bugger, and I forgot to mention The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Battlefield Earth sucked to begin with so there wasn't much to screw up.

The Handmaid's Tale. Honestly, read the book before watching that film then try and tell me it's any good.

In fact, watch that film without the book, you'll still think it's crappy and you'll probably wonder that the hell's going on half the time.

I don't get all the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy hate though...

liked the sci/fi channel's version of dune much better than lynch's. greatest hats ever. the character of paul may be impossible to cast.

i would like to see the dune story reset to modern day earth. think that would be way interesting.

Neither do I. It could have been much better, but it was a damn good adaptation regardless.




I agree about your sentiments on the Sci-Fi Channel adaptation. It had crappy special effects, but the story and performances were pretty much dead-on to what Dune should be.

But as for setting Dune on modern-day Earth, well, all I can say is WTF? I could list the many reasons why that would NOT work, and I could mention that the nearest equivalent has already been done, as Lawrence of Arabia!

Moonraker
Dune (the serial, not the David Lynch's movie)
Total Recall : adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story entitled We Can Remember It for Wholesale ; the film is good itself but as an adaptation it's total BS.
FarCry