Friday Film Idea Foolery

[Katie-Ellen]

Lunchtime UK time.

Titles of novels or films/movies that don't exist, but we'd head that way if they did?

No direct spoofs.


'The Night of the Killer Coffins' (they hunt in packs) Someone wrote a creepy short story about a coffin 'from overseas' that could catch and kill you - snap your spine in half then pack you straight up. Not only could it, but it did. That larned a bunch of grownups to be so daft as to play hide and seek with that revolting thing in the house.

(Who remembers 'Night of the Lepus'? Giant mutant (GM for short? ahem - carnivorous killer bunnies)

'Soleyman' and the Knights of St John: The Great Siege - (of Malta. WHY isn't it a movie yet?) The book exists. The Turks had already defeated the Knights of St John and driven them out of Rhodes. The Knights had resettled in Malta. They were pirates; a menace to Turkish shipping. Time to move them on again. What a story...men of absolute iron on both sides. Movie please (cost a bomb to make it, or else CGI. They did '300' and the daft one after that, about Marathon. This could do with the same treatment)
You've got an old, magnificent sultan who swear he will drive them into the sea, and an old, venerated zealot of a grand master...

'POTUS 44' - the biopic (some day) A love story.

'Mandrake'...a dystopian horror. A partial reversal of The Hand Maid's Tale. We've all eaten so many antibiotics, hidden in so many plumped up foods, and all those lady pills weed down the loo and recycled...and they survive the water treatment process, yes they do....there are fewer and fewer men being born...and the one's we've got are all getting man boobs. Now what. And what if you were the mother or the wife of one of the few? The Maenads are on the street, hunting....ughhh





Might be too scared to watch that actually.

Something lighter.

'Scone Wars - The Full Jam', Devon v Cornwall cream tea Dons, their passionate famiglias and of course, their heavies.


Go on. Friday! Appal us with some more!

 

[AgentPete]

'Soleyman' and the Knights of St John: The Great Siege - (of Malta. WHY isn't it a movie yet?) The book exists. The Turks had already defeated the Knights of St John and driven them out of Rhodes. The Knights had resettled in Malta. They were pirates; a menace to Turkish shipping. Time to move them on again. What a story...men of absolute iron on both sides. Movie please (cost a bomb to make it, or else CGI. They did '300' and the daft one after that, about Marathon. This could do with the same treatment)
You've got an old, magnificent sultan who swear he will drive them into the sea, and an old, venerated zealot of a grand master...

I've had several (book) pitches for this over the years. Agree that is has major potential. Also, Malta is frequently used as a film location, which is a bonus. I suspect it will actually happen, one day.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I actually saw Night of the Lepus, at Kings Cross Cinema in London, when it was released in 1972. It had a surprisingly strong cast, and the dire special effects of having real bunnies leaping over the camera as if they were on the rampage produced much tittering.

That old fleapit of a cinema closed decades ago, but it had one disconcerting special effect of its own in the building's structure, which vibrated alarmingly whenever a London Underground tube train passed beneath! This caused screaming from the audience, especially during horror films.

A similarly daft film was The Mothman Prophecies. Based on a legend from West Virginia, it too had a talented cast of actors who should have known better. The plot sees Richard Gere hunting the giant Mothman, without a lot of success—a film critic observed that he'd have had a lot more success if he'd simply turned a light on and swatted it with a rolled-up newspaper!

 

[Katie-Ellen]

The Mothman was rather obscure, indeed.

Saw Night of the Lepus on hols in a Suffolk farmhouse. It was haunted, but not by bunnies. There was something in an upstairs room. It terrified my mother but she kept quiet in case she had imagined it, and next day it terrified me. I didn't say anything either, and it was many years before I found out what it probably was. A residual despair, a bankrupt farmer. Lots went bust after the Napoleonic Wards. This one had 5 children, and only the Speenhamland System to help.

@AgentPete; oh, look-a here . Someone did...sort of...an animated film it says, though that was not what I had in mind. An Italian company, naming it 'The Diary' because of Balbi's diary; the reason we know so much of the story.

 

[Robinne Weiss]

Years ago, my husband and I worked at a Jewish camp. The unimaginative cooks had an unvarying weekly schedule. 'Dairy spaghetti' (every meal was designated meat or dairy, of course) was Wednesday night's dinner. It also happened to be square dance night for one of the school groups one week. Unfortunately, dairy spaghetti met a particularly virulent tummy bug that was passed to all 125 kids during square dancing. We called it The Night of the Living Dairy Spaghetti, and it would have made a spectacular cinematic splash...

 

[Paul Whybrow]

A potential film project, with many ethical ramifications, is a spin-off from the Walking Dead franchise—'Confessions of a Vegetarian Zombie'
(with apologies to noted vegetarian Agent Pete)

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Shower a zombie with salt apparently, you help it return to rest in its grave. It is suffering, says the folklore, doesn't WANNA be a zombie.

 

[James Marinero]

'Soleyman' and the Knights of St John: The Great Siege - (of Malta. WHY isn't it a movie yet?) The book exists. The Turks had already defeated the Knights of St John and driven them out of Rhodes. The Knights had resettled in Malta. They were pirates; a menace to Turkish shipping. Time to move them on again. What a story...men of absolute iron on both sides. Movie please (cost a bomb to make it, or else CGI. They did '300' and the daft one after that, about Marathon. This could do with the same treatment)
You've got an old, magnificent sultan who swear he will drive them into the sea, and an old, venerated zealot of a grand master...

There's also The Sword and the Scimitar (Simon Scarrow) - fiction within the accurate historical context. A really good read. In a more modern setting was the siege of Malta in WWII. Again fiction within the accurate historical context The Kapillan of Malta (Nicholas Monserrat).