John Barrymore, who plays both Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde in this movie, was such a gifted physical actor that the initial part of his transformation has no makeup. It’s him contorting his body and appearance all on his own.

This adaption of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson was written by Clara Beranger (who was one of the original faculty members at USC School of Cinematic Arts) and was directed by John S. Robertson, who The Byrds wrote the song “Old John Robertson” about.

Henry Jekyll (Barrymore) is led to believe that all men have two sides at constant war for their souls: a good and evil brain, basically. A potion that he creates allows him to access that evil side of his being, unleashing Edward Hyde. Yet by the end of the film, the potion is no longer needed and the transformation comes whenever Jekyll becomes upset.

Robert Wiene is best known for directing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but this is yet another masterwork. It’s been remade four times, as Mad Love in 1935, The Hands of Orlac, Hands of a Stranger in 1962 and Body Parts in 1991. They all are versions of the 1920 novel Les Mains d’Orlac by French writer Maurice Renard.

It also was kind of sort of remade as The Hand, The Beast With Five Fingers, The Crawling Hand, Les Mains de Roxana and segments in Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors and Body Bags.

Concert pianist Paul Orlac (Conrad Veidt) loses his hands in an accident only to receive a transplant of the hands from an executed murderer, a fact that begins to drive him insane. The surgeon tries to tell him that a person is not governed by hands, but by the head and heart. But Paul knows — he’s now obsessed by the idea of killing someone.

Now that he can no longer play piano, Orlac is destitute. He goes to ask his father for money, only to find him stabbed by the same knife the killer once used. It gets worse. He’s unsure if he killed his father or not, so he goes to drink, and meets a man who claims to be the killer. Could the surgeon have transplanted a new body on the hands of the killer? Perhaps. But whomever the man is, he begins to blackmail Orlac.

There’s a twist which I won’t give away — why spoil a movie that’s 98 years old — but this movie is still a great watch so many years later.

Directed by and starring Victor Sjöström, this 1921 movie is based on the 1912 novel Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! by Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf. It’s considered one of the first horror films ever made due to its atmosphere and it features both groundbreaking special effects and narrative innovations such as flashbacks within flashbacks.

Lagerlöf and A-B Svenska Biografteatern had a contract to adapt at least one Lagerlöf novel every year. Sjöström had made three of these adaptions, which had been well-received by audiences, critics and most importantly, the author. Lagerlöf was initially skeptical about how film could capture the book’s occultism and mysticism. The filmmaker went to her home and acted out the movie all by himself. Lagerlöf responded by offering him dinner.

This movie has the alternate title The Stroke of Midnight in the U.S., as how do you sell it? Is it horror? A fable? A drama?

The film takes place on New Year’s Eve, a time when a dying Salvation Army sister named Edit wishes for the chance to speak with David Holm. He’s currently drunk in a graveyard, telling the story about how the last person to die each year must drive Death’s carriage and collect the souls of the next year’s dead. And the person who told him? They were the last person to die last year. A fight breaks out not long after, with David hit in the head and him being picked up by his friend, driving the carriage of Death.

What follows is the bleak story of a man whose addictions have caused him to destroy his family and even doom the one woman who tried to save him, Enid, with consumption. His disease nearly killed his family as well, as his wife Anna locked them in a room and David broke in with an axe to attempt to see them.

If that sounds like The Shining, it is. Kubrick isn’t the only director inspired by this movie. Ingmar Bergman obsessed over the film — watching it once a year and calling it the “film of films” — and even refers to Death in The Seventh Seal as a strict master, the same words used in this movie. He also made The Image Makers, which is about the making of this movie. Charlie Chaplin also said it was the best movie ever made.

The most expensive film ever made at the time, Waterworld lives in the same rarified air as Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate, except that it was one of the highest grossing films of 1995.

The thing is, while it cost $175 million, it made back $264.2 million worldwide, as well as having a profitable video and cable release. It’s still making money, because the stunt show based on the movie, Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular, is still running at Universal Studios Hollywood, Universal Studios Singapore, Universal Studios Japan and Universal Studios Beijing 27 years after the movie was released.

Writer Peter Rader came up with the idea for Waterworld during a conversation with producer Brad Krevoy literally as a Mad Max rip-off. He probably also read the comic Freakwave by Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy*, which had been nearly optioned as a movie. Co-writer David Twohy even outright said that he was inspired by The Road Warrior and the filmmakers hired that movie’s director of photography, Dean Semler, for this film.

Before filming began, Steven Spielberg warned star Kevin Costner and director Kevin Reynolds not to film on open water, a lesson he learned from Jaws. They didn’t listen and watched the set sink. And hey, Reynolds quit before the movie was done because he and Costner fought so much.

So what did this all lead to?

Waterworld is way better than it’s been said to be. It is, quite literally, Mad Max on jet skis. Costner is the web-footed Mariner, a man who recycles his own urine as drinking water because since the polar ice caps melted, the drinking water is quite limited and the Earth is just plain filled with water. He saves Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and a kid named Enola (Tina Majorino), protecting them from The Deacon, a one-eyed Dennis Hopper, and then uses the map on Enola’s back to find the only dry land on Earth, which is the top of Mount Everest.

It just takes two hours and fifteen minutes** to get there.

*Ironically, McCarthy would later co-write Mad Max: Fury Road.

**The Costner cut is three hours long.

For all the power of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, no one has been able to translate the first Marvel superhero film properly to the screen.

First there was the 1994 Roger Corman-produced film, one made simply to secure a copyright and never intended to be seen. Then, there were two films made in 2005 and 2007, Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, that had some star power but ultimately didn’t do well. The creators should have taken a note from the cartoon versions, as both the 1994-96 series and the 2006-07 Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes captured much of what makes these heroes so special. Unlike the Avengers, they are two things, a family and also adventure scientists, not truly superheroes.

Despite the first two trailers building big excitement for the movie, it failed at the box office, earning only $120 million on a budget of $167.9 million. Why?

Well, first off, no one could line up on what movie they were making.

Let’s start with Josh Trank, who became the youngest director to have a number one at the box office with his first movie, the superhero found footage film Chronicle. He had a fresh new take on heroes and all seemed great.

Right?

X-Men: First Class was another well-regarded superhero movie and the writers, Zack Stentz and Ashley Edward Miller, started writing the script. Sounds awesome!

Right?

Except that their script followed Avengers as the way and had Dr. Doom as a herald of Galactus and was very comic book-oriented, which Trank did not like. So he wrote his own script.

Remember when comic book movies didn’t pay attention to the source material?

Trank left Slater out of discussions with Fox Studios and withheld certain studio notes. Slater added “I never saw 95% of those notes,” and left after six months and was replaced by Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter writer Seth Grahame-Smith, with a final script written by Dark Phoenix (oh no, I have to watch that one soon, huh?) director Simon Kinberg.

And then, some stuff went really wrong.

During filming, producers Hutch Parker and Simon Kinberg rewrote Trank’s original script and gave the film a different ending. Despite this, execs demanded reshoots, saying that this movie felt more like a sequel to Chronicle than Fantastic Four.

To compound matters, Fox ordered their own changes to the film without Trank’s supervision, changing and omitting certain major plot points from his movie. Now, that’s usually where movies go wrong, but there was also reports that Trank was erratic on set. I tend not to believe these things and then he posted on Twitter days before the release.

“A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve received great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”

How did a movie with a budget like this one get so far into filming that the studio was blindsided by how dark the film was? How could a movie be that close to release and not have an ending decided on or filmed? How bad was the movie before Avatar editor Stephen E. Rivkin was hired to fix it in post with Trank referring to him as the director of the new cut? Were comic book fans so angry that Johnny Storm was black that they made death threats and Trank had to sleep with a gun under his pillow?

Look, I haven’t made a big budget Hollywood movie, but I have some theories.

Indulge me.

The biggest problem is that we’ve already seen the origin of the Fantastic Four. We want to see them in action, we want to see the drama between Dr. Doom (Tony Kebbell) and Reed Richards (Miles Teller), we want to see the Human Torch (Michael B. Jordan) and the Thing (Jamie Bell) pick at each other, we want to see Sue Storm (Kate Mara) prove that she’s the real heart of the team.

The original origin of the FF doesn’t make sense today, with them needing to go into space before Russia, but that’s an easy fix. And as pushed out of the spotlight as Sue was in the 1960s comics, she’s not even on their first flight. Doom is. She gets called in at the last minute.

In fact, the movie is an hour and twenty minutes past when the conflict between Doom and the heroes kicks off. Until then, we see Reed, Doom and Johnny get drunk and petulant after learning that they won’t be the ones going into the Negative Zone — never referred to as such — so they take the trip without telling anyone and chaos (and powers) ensue.

Not really the stuff of heroes.

You know when a movie is bad? When Marvel kills off its actors — except Michael B. Jordan, who redeemed himself by playing Erik Killmonger in Black Panther — in a comic.

You can’t really blame Kate Mara. She wanted to read the comics to prepare and Trank explained to the cast that it was unnecessary as the film was an original story not based directly on the comics. Well, at least she met Jamie Bell on set and they got married. She was also allegedly bullied by the director on set, which isn’t as bad as getting into a fistfight with him, as Miles Teller discovered.

It’s sad because this movie had every chance to succeed. I still can’t fathom how a script isn’t locked down on projects with this much money and so much on the line. But hey — I just write about movies. I don’t write movies.

Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Münchhausen, or Baron Munchausen, began his life as a series of urban legends and tall tales that were collected by author Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785 as The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (or Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia). Since then, these stories were further exaggerated and finally made into a series of movies, including the Georges Méliès-directed Baron Munchausen’s Dream, Münchhausen, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen and The Very Same Munchhausen.

The third entry in Terry Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination”, preceded by Time Bandits and Brazil, this is a film that was made during a battle between Columbia CEO Dawn Steel and Gilliam. As the film’s budget blew up, so did the war.

Gilliam blamed the whole thing on the simple fact that the new regime didn’t want anything to do with the old regime’s films. Except they released the movie to just 117 theaters, which is literally nothing. He would later say, “The joke is, if you look back, we got the best reviews and we were doing the best business in the opening weeks of any film they had released since Last Emperor. We actually opened well in the big cities — we opened really well. A friend who had bought the video rights said he had never seen anything so weird — Columbia was spending their whole time looking at exit polls to prove the film would not work in the suburbs, and so it would be pointless to make any more prints. He said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” There it was. Then it becomes this kind of legend–which it deserves to be… even if it’s the wrong legend.”

Yet what emerges on the screen — the legend of Baron Munchausen (John Neville) — does not seem impacted at all by the trauma of making the movie. Even the movie itself goes against the structure of storytelling, with the real Baron interrupting the play that starts the movie and taking the viewer on a journey through his life. Whether the story he’s telling is true or polished to be even better than the truth is up to you.

Yet the Angel of Death — which looks directly out of Cemetery Man which makes complete sense when you see Michele Soavi’s name in the credits as second unit director  — is true and it’s been hunting the Baron, who is saved by young Sarah Salt (Sarah Polley) and together they escape in a hot air balloon to find the Baron’s old friends, the super-fast Berthold (Eric Idle), master rifleman Adolphus (Charles McKeown), Gustavus (Jack Purvis) who has remarkable hearing and breathing abilities and the strongest man in the world, Albrecht (Winston Dennis).

I’m struck by the fact that the Baron is actually an idea — a man who may or may not exist yet one who rallies for ideas and creativity — and ideas can’t die, as even when the Angel of Death finally claims him, he’s just telling a story and says that this was “only one of the many occasions on which I met my death.”

With cameos by Oliver Reed as Vulcan, Uma Thurman as Venus, Robin Williams as the king of the moon, Sting as a soldier sacrificed because bravery is demoralizing to other soldiers and citizens, and so many more events, this is a movie made by an imaginative artist seeking to give you that same joy and ability.

When you look at a movie that bombs, you need to separate whether it’s a bad movie versus just a movie that lost money. But let’s face it, Jupiter Ascending is in no way a good movie. It kind of makes movies like Valerian look like they make sense. And after years of proof, we can just finally admit that The Wachowskis did a decent movie in Bound and ran out of ideas after Grant Morrison spoke up about how much The Matrix took from The Invisibles. Well, that’s somewhat wrong because, if anything, this movie has too many ideas and bombards them into your eyes. Maybe ran out of good ideas is the right term to use.

I love that this movie was an attempt at whole new mythology and that it has some grandiose effects. But despite my incessant love for the very worst in cinema, it didn’t even move me. And trust me, I’m never a so bad it’s good fan. I want my bad movies entertaining works of missed-the-mark secret success oddball greatness. This misses even that mark.

If you told me that Jupiter Ascending was an adaption of an existing piece of media, it’d all make more sense. But I really feel like I got Leonard Part 6-ed here, being asked to care about something that has no reason to be cared about.

Lana Wachowski’s favorite book, The Odyssey, was one inspiration, with her saying “It was making me super-emotional. The whole concept of these almost spiritual journeys and you’re changed.” She also brought up The Wizard of Oz yet misrepresented the narrative by stating “Dorothy is pretty much the same at the end as she is at the beginning. Whereas Odysseus goes through such an epic shift in his identity.” I would argue that Dorothy, although she can go home at any time, needed to find the confidence, growth and friendship she’d need in Oz to succeed back in Kansas. Also, if all of these narratives seem to suggest that Jupiter Rising will have the same normal person is the messiah in a conflict they never knew about as The Matrix, you may have seen one of the Wachowskis’ films.

One of the statements the filmmakers made was “We were, like, “Can we bring a different kind of female character like Dorothy or Alice? Characters who negotiate conflict and complex situations with intelligence and empathy?'” Yes, Dorothy has a protector, Toto, who’s always barking at everyone. And that was sort of the origin of Caine.”

The problem is, they created a female character who seemingly only allows the world to carry them through the story instead of being a dynamic and fully-agented part of it.

This time, our would-be heroine is Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), who is a maid so poor that to get the telescope of her dreams, she must sell her eggs. And, of course, when she sells said eggs, that’s when aliens known as Keepers realize that she’s the heriditary Queen of Earth, named for her father’s favorite planet. But he wasn’t Russian, but you probably guessed that.

Yes, Earth is really just a petri dish, a place where elite aliens can harvesting the organs they need to produce a youth serum called ReGenX-E, which sounds like a Rob Liefeld character. There’s been a death in the House of Abrasax, the most powerful of elite alien houses — think Dune — and the rich kids are battling over their inheritence. Those kids would be Balem (Eddie Redmayne), who has inherited the refineries of — irony — Jupiter and is threatened by our heroine; Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), who has more mysterious motives and Titus (Douglas Booth), who has spent his inheritance on a spaceship that is a combination of a Gothic cathedral and the Playboy mansion and you know, why isn’t this movie just about that?

As the aliens go to harvest Jupiter’s eggs, they really want to kill her before she’s saved by Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a half-human, half-dog with a nose so good it can smell someone across the universe. No, really. He’s been hired by Titus to take Jupiter, who also controls the Keepers, so immediately he’s suspicious. There’s also another alien on Earth, Stinger Apini (Sean Bean), who is half-human and half-bee in case you didn’t catch on. At this point, this feels like the worst RPG I’ve ever had to play and everybody in the party would probably be rules lawyers and I’m getting bummed out. But hey — Jupiter suddenly rolls for intuiton and learns that she can control bees.

Just writing this next part makes me giggle. She’s soon captured by hunters working for Balem who have been bribed by Kalique to bring Jupiter to her palace where she explains that our heroine is Earth’s rightful owner. Then, Titus’s henchmen capture Jupiter — again — and send Caine into deep space but not before Titus becomes all Republic serial villain and revealing his plan to marry Jupiter, kill her and take Earth. Luckily, Caine cosplays Flash Gordon and saves her at the altar, but now she has to get home because Balem has taken her entire family hostage.

So anyways, everyone lives, Jupiter’s family is returned home with no memory of their disappearance — think Men In Black — and Jupiter owns the Earth. Her family then gives her a telescope and she’s like, “Oh you guys,” except you know, she literally is richer than anyone and could just go to any planet now. Such is the happy ending. Oh yeah, and she can now date the dog man, who already told her, ” I have more in common with a dog than I have with you.”

She replies, “I love dogs. I’ve always loved dogs.”

This line was in the ad campaign and that’s when I realized that someday I was going to write a few thousand words about this movie.

I love that someone on Reddit, while Tatum was promoting the movie, asked what it was about. He replied, “Good question. I have the same one myself.”

This is a movie with a dog man who has a gun that barks. Where Terry Gilliam shows up in a scene straight out of Brazil that grinds the movie to a halt. Where a chase scene through Chicago demanded the moment between day and night when the sky is a certain blue, which meant that they could only shoot for six minutes a day for six months to get that scene and man, that feels like some kind of occult practice more than moviemaking and were that true I’d love this movie instead of wondering why it’s over two hours long.

Much like many of the box office bombs I’ve written about, this made a lot of money. But even $184 million worldwide isn’t much when the movie cost $210 million to make, much less even more to market.

Conspiracy theorists went nuts on this, as it raises so many Illuminati and New Age — read that as Satanic to those folks — ideas, like how Earth isn’t the center of the universe, genetic manipulation, fallen angels, the repitlian character of Greeghan being disinformation, the ideas of Madame Blavatsky being spoonfed to audiences and even a title which inverts Lucifer Rising.

It’s also a movie where the lead asks 105 questions, which is way less questions than I have about what I just watched.

So who is this movie for?

Anyone that cares about the Lone Ranger is either ancient or so deeply invested in a character that hasn’t appeared in popular media since 1981’s The Legend of the Lone Ranger. Sure, there were comic books from Topps and Dynamite Comics, as well as a collection of short stories and a 2003 WB TV movie that had Chad Michael Murray as Luke Hartman instead of John Reid. Actually, nobody really saw that movie as it was a pilot for an unpicked up series that was played in summer when nobody really ever watches.

Columbia Pictures had wanted to make a Lone Ranger film since 2002, as The Mask of Zorro was successful. Columbia wanted Tonto to be a female love interest, which would have made a small number of fans upset, but by 2005, the project was in turnaround.

Entertainment Rights eventually brought producer Jerry Bruckheimer in and got The Lone Ranger on board with Walt Disney Pictures, who were looking for another Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. They doubled down on that, casting Johnny Depp as Tonto and had Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio start writing a script that may have been about supernatural coyotes.

Finally, Gore Verbinski was hired to direct and Armie Hammer was selected to play the Lone Ranger. But the film was nearly canceled when Disney CEO Bob Iger and then Walt Disney Studios chairman Rich Ross had concerns over the film’s budget. Once Verbinski, Bruckheimer, Depp and Hammer deferred 20% of their salaries to minimize the overall cost, production began in February 2012. And then Ross was out and Alan F. Horn was in and he was already concerned. After all, bad guy Butch Cavendish ate the heart of the Lone Range’s brother.

Wasn’t this a family movie?

Who was this for?

If you can’t answer that, then how can you put $250 million into production and $150 million into marketing?

Even though the movie made $250 million worldwide — which is a great showing — it didn’t have a chance of breaking even.

So why did this movie get made?

I wonder that myself.

Why does it start not with the origin of its characters but instead with an old Tonto sitting inside a museum display?

Why do the Lone Ranger and Tonto come to blows in the film?

And again, who wanted this movie? I mean, I love The Shadow, The Phantom, Green Hornet, Doc Savage and other radio era heroes, I also realize that I am not the audience that makes you money.

The origin is pretty good, though. Lawyer John Reid is returning to Texas on one of Latham Cole’s (Tom Wilkinson) trains, which also has Tonto and Cavendish (William Fichtner, who I love and would cast in any movie) on board. The Texas Rangers, led by John’s brother Dan (James Badge Dale), have captured Cavendish, who is soon rescued by his gang. With the train derailed, Dan deputizes John just in time to walk into a trap where everyone dies except John, who Tonto believes can’t die thanks to a white horse hovering over the not dead man’s grave. Now, the world may believe that John is dead, but he has a mask, a mission and a silver bullet made from the fallen Rangers’ badges. Tonto tells him to use it on Cavendish, as he thinks that the criminal is actually a wendigo.

How did Tonto come to believe this? When he was young, he rescued Cavendish and showed him a mountain full of silver ore in exchange for a pocket watch. Later, Butch murdered Tinto’s tribe to keep the location a secret, leaving the Native American burdened with guilt.

But man, the rest of the movie is a mess. It’s a big loud mess and I should love it, but I just see so much excess on screen when this could be lean and fun and the same budget could have made five of these movies. How much did this movie lose? Studio president Alan Bergman was asked if Disney could recoup its losses on The Lone Ranger and John Carter through subsequent releases or other methods and he said, “I’m going to answer that question honestly and tell you no, it didn’t get that much better. We did lose that much money on those movies.”

I mean, as written many times, a bomb doesn’t necessarily make for a bad movie. And I’m guilty for looking at those issues as much as the film, just like Verbinski, Bruckheimer, Hammer and Depp all said, claiming that bad reviews were influenced by all the production troubles and big budget.

Westerns have continually failed over the last few years and even though I’m the kind of weirdo who can tell you that there’s a scene in this that is taken directly from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and got the John Ford reference, you have to sell audiences as to why a Western works. That’s why The Hateful Eight works and this doesn’t. Then again, that’s not a big franchise movie and hey, Tarantino picked this as one of his top ten movies of 2013.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this movie is that I had never seen Armie Hammer in a movie before, but knew him from the allegations that he had asked a girlfriend to remove one of her ribs surgically so that he could eat it. Another girlfriend claimed that he repeatedly wanted to eat her flesh and would lick cuts that she had.

Everyone’s kink is everyone’s kink, but wow, dude.

And Johnny Depp…

Anyways. Let’s get past the budget and scandal and think to something Bruckheimer said.

“I think it is going to be looked back on as a brave, wonderful film. I’ve been through this a lot with journalists. We made a movie years ago called Flashdance, and I remember one journalist just giving us the worst review ever. Then, about five years later, we get this kind of love letter – that he totally “missed” it. That he loved the movie, and it’s kind of the same with you that, any time it’s on, you have to watch it. It happens, you know.”

This is not that love letter.

The Lone Ranger is a movie that thinks that putting huge set pieces in the place of human drama equals a great movie. And I get it, I know how blockbusters work, but after two Lone Ranger movies with good Butch Cavendish actors and not much else, do I have to wait until 2057 for someone to do it right? This is a few steps removed from The Wild Wild West, another heartbreaker of a movie because it’s a franchise that only fat old men like me care about and the movie was made to totally not be for us — rightly so, because it needs a mass audience — but it no way connects with anyone other than the whims of its filmmakers.