10 awful movies that shamelessly ripped off much better films
Shameless plagiarism is an accepted part of the film industry. The German Expressionists inspired Orson Welles, Orson Welles inspired Martin Scorsese, and nearly every filmmaker since has been inspired by Scorsese in one way or another. Stories are constantly retold, too. Samurai become Jedis, The Odyssey becomes a folksy Coen brothers classic, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula becomes a right of passage for nearly every auteur in Hollywood.
If you wanted to get philosophical about it, you could even argue that no story is truly original, even if the screenwriter is named David Lynch or Hayao Miyazaki. This is an argument particularly well-suited to Hollywood, which has descended evermore rapidly into an echo chamber of remakes, franchises, prequels, and sequels.
However, there are some movies that try to capitalise on the success of another film or franchise without giving credit where credit is due. We’re not talking about actual remakes or even mockbusters from tongue-in-cheek production companies like The Asylum, whose blatant copying is part of the joke (Paranormal Entity, Snakes on a Train, and Atlantic Rim are just a few of their credits). We’re talking about filmmakers who brought too much inspiration and not enough creativity to their projects.
There are some instances where terrible knock-offs can be excused because of their vanishingly small budgets, but when that leads the filmmakers to simply pirate actual footage from other movies, as happened with the Turkish version of Star Wars, it’s a little harder to be sympathetic. Then there are the Hollywood movies like Saturn 3 and Underwater that have big budgets and bigger stars and no excuse whatsoever to be as dismal and derivative as they are.
10 awful movies that shamelessly ripped off other films:
Don’t Speak (Scott Chambers, 2020)
Not many movies were released in 2020, but even if you were desperate for something new, Scott Chambers’s Don’t Speak wasn’t it. Set in a farmhouse in rural America, it follows a family who falls prey to a mysterious monster who hunts by sound. In order to survive, the characters must make as little noise as possible.
It’s a great concept, but unfortunately, it had already been done to terrifying effect only two years before in John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place. His film astonished audiences with its ability to follow through and sustain a clever concept that could have been nothing but a gimmick. Its suspense, character development, and sparing approach to showing the monsters made it one of the most satisfying and original horror movies of the decade. But even with this blueprint, Don’t Speak didn’t accomplish any of that. It shows the monsters, has no character development, and defies belief by simultaneously copying A Quiet Place almost beat-for-beat while failing to have anything resembling a plot.
Pet Graveyard (Becca Hirani, 2019)
By the title and the poster (a yellow-eyed sphynx cat seated on a pile of human bones in front of a dark graveyard), you’d probably assume that Pet Graveyard was a blatant ripoff of Pet Sematary, the 2019 version of which had a similar poster and, you know, basically the same title.
But you’d be wrong. Instead of following a grieving family who discovers a burial ground that can bring the dead back to life, Pet Graveyard follows a group of teens who enjoy the oh-so-fun practice of “drinking”, in which they are able to enter a liminal space between life and death. Unfortunately, this gives the Grim Reaper and his pet cat a door to the land of the living. In other words, it is a shameless rip-off of Flatliners, which was released in 1990 and remade in 2017. In Flatliners, a group of medical students find a way into the afterlife by stopping their hearts. Despite drawing on several fairly classic movies that had already been remade, Pet Graveyard is a dull slog with brief moments of levity during the scenes where noticeable acting occurs.
Saturn 3 (Stanley Donen, 1980)
There are some terrible movies that deserve at least a little grace due to budgetary constraints, but there were no excuses (zero, to be exact) for the 1980 Alien wannabe Saturn 3 because it was nothing but potential. Director Stanley Donan, the Hollywood veteran who made Singin’ in the Rain, replaced John Barry, the production designer on Star Wars and A Clockwork Orange, as director of the film. Its stars include Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, and Harvey Keitel, three vastly different performers at completely different stages in their careers. From the outset, this film was a tangle of contradictions that could have been glorious, but instead, it’s, well, a movie. Barely.
Douglas and Fawcett star as a couple who live on a base orbiting Saturn. Things go from domestic bliss to Alien-lite when someone from Earth murders his way to their ship, bringing his robot manservant with him. It’s an absolute mess that tried to capture the space-based terror of Ridley Scott’s Alien, which had been released the year before. Instead, it’s a bizarre ‘80s flick featuring a nude Kirk Douglas, a leered at Farrah Fawcett with the most intense perm known to man or woman, and Harvey Keitel playing a deranged third wheel. If this sounds fun, it isn’t.
Sudden Death (Peter Hyams, 1995)
What is the one thing the Bruce Willis classic Die Hard is missing? Hockey. Obviously. So when Belgian martial artist-turned-Hollywood martial artist Jean-Claude Van Damme decided to fix this glaring oversight, it seemed like a necessary step for the film industry. But Van Damme is not Bruce Willis and Sudden Death is not, to put it kindly, Die Hard.
Van Damme plays Darren McCord (not to be confused with John McClane), a fire marshal at a hockey game who finds himself the lone salvation to the entire arena, which includes his kids, when a group of domestic terrorists hold the place hostage and threaten to detonate explosives. It hits all the same beats as Willis’s classic but fails to capture the emotional heft, the campy condescension of Alan Rickman, or anything close to the charisma of its star. Van Damme may be a professional at hitting people, but being sympathetic is a much steeper slope to climb.
Sudden Death even fails to effectively copy the title. “Die hard” is a play on words that alludes to the phrase “old habits”, such as McClane’s action skills “die hard”. It doesn’t mean a fast or a painful death, but this shallow interpretation is the perfect encapsulation of the failures of Sudden Death on every level. There are some who defend this movie, but to them, I say, “Watch it again.”
The Man Who Saves the World (Çetin İnanç, 1982)
There are many reasons why someone might want to copy George Lucas’ Star Wars, money being the first, second, and third of them. Or maybe you’re just a person who loves space and samurais and wants in on the pastiche. It’s hard to know exactly what Turkish director Çetin İnanç had in mind when he made The Man Who Saves the World because it is such a blatant remake of George Lucas’ work that it’s difficult to find any point of view whatsoever.
“Remake” might even be too generous a word because İnanç actually used unauthorised footage and sound effects from Lucas’ film in the movie. So maybe it’s more of a pirated version of Star Wars intercut with low-budget practical effects and furry costumes. To its credit, it does feature some impressive martial arts work, suggesting that İnanç might have been more inspired by the Hong Kong action scene than the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. But trying to make sense of this film is a fool’s errand.
The Last Shark (Enzo Castellari, 1981)
When Jaws was released in 1975, it changed Hollywood blockbusters forever. Sleekly edited with a pulse-pounding soundtrack and heavily promoted for its summer release, it was the highest-grossing film of all time and spawned countless knockoffs. Some of those knockoffs were somewhat successful in their own right, such as Deep Blue Sea and, more recently, The Meg. But others were so bad they even made the Jaws sequels look like masterpieces.
Of these shockers, The Last Shark might take the cake. Also known as Great White, this 1981 trainwreck was Italy’s answer to Jaws and was directed by spaghetti western icon Enzo Castellari. Sadly, he showed no inventiveness here whatsoever. Set in a small resort town called Port Habor that looks identical to the town of Amity Island in Jaws, it follows the familiar tale of a beach town beset by a shark who preys on local tourists. They even managed to cast actors who looked like Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw. It was so similar to Spielberg’s film, in fact, that it was pulled from distribution in the United States for plagiarism, which is a very tricky task.
Firebird 2015 AD (David M. Robertson 1981)
Given how groundbreaking it was, it’s not surprising that George Miller’s dystopian desert world of Mad Max has become part of the cinematic language, with everyone from John Carpenter to the Costner flop Waterworld taking cues. But of all the iterations it inspired, the low-budget Canadian movie Firebird 2015 AD deserves special mention.
It’s set in the near future (2015) and imagines a world in which the US government bans cars ostensibly in order to conserve natural resources, but mostly just to control the masses and keep the petrol reserved for the shadowy political elites. A renegade group of joyriders escape to the desert to enjoy their cars and are pursued by a government enforcement agency. There is a distinct lack of stunts – the most distinctive and groundbreaking aspect of Miller’s films – and the whole thing lacks a sense of danger, let alone peril. The actors don’t seem to know what the story is, and there is even green grass, a feature that would never make it into the wasteland of a George Miller film. Miller made Mad Max on a minuscule budget of about A$350,000, so there are zero excuses for a ripoff that probably had a similar budget to be this bad.
Leviathan (George P Cosmatos, 1989)
One of the most innovative aspects of Ridley Scott’s Alien was its depiction of astronauts as blue-collar workers akin to truck drivers or coal miners. Their work on the spaceship isn’t full of gleaming surfaces and crisp white space suits. It’s grimy manual labour carried out by an underpaid and overworked crew. There are plenty of Alien knockoffs that disregard this altogether, but to its credit, Leviathan keeps it in. Unfortunately, it gets pretty much nothing else right.
Set five miles under the surface of the ocean; it follows a group of deep-sea miners who are attacked by a mutant monster. It may be set in a part of the cosmos more than a million miles away from the spaceship in Alien, but Leviathan’s set and costume design are so similar that if you put the same actors in them, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. There are the same mind games between the crew members, the same steady picking off of each one, and the same parasitic, animatronic-style monsters. What it doesn’t have is the tightly coiled suspense, the iconic protagonist, or the restrained, flawless conclusion. Instead, it goes completely off the rails. Even its most credible claim to originality – the underwater setting – was ruined when James Cameron’s The Abyss was released later that year and put the underwater sequences to shame.
Underwater (William Eubank, 2020)
The 2020 movie Underwater is a knockoff of a knockoff. Set miles under the ocean, it follows a group of deep-sea miners who are attacked by a mutant monster. Sound familiar? Why this movie exists is an utter mystery. The special effects are laughable, the actors seem like they’re working off of different scripts, and, most glaringly, it’s already been done. Several critics pointed to its similarities with Alien, but it is such a direct copy of Leviathan that its screenwriting credits should include the authors of the 1989 film.
Kristen Stewart plays the lead character, presumably as a nod to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley. But where Weaver projects tough, monosyllabic determination, Stewart projects nihilism right up to the ending that does not earn its bleakness. There is an attempt at environmental messaging, but it’s nominal and certainly doesn’t justify rehashing old territory. And even more damning, the poor underwater special effects do not hold a candle to Cameron’s underwater sequences in The Abyss that were created more than three decades before.
King Solomon’s Mines (J Lee Thompson, 1985)
The filmmakers behind the 1985 action/adventure movie King Solomon’s Mines were opportunistic. The 1885 novel of the same name had already been adapted for the screen four times by then, but director J Lee Thompson thought he had a new way of turning the tale of a group of adventurers on an expedition through an unknown part of Africa into box office gold: copy Indiana Jones. The poster for this movie says it all. Featuring the same comic book-style artwork and almost the exact same font, it depicts star Richard Chamberlain brandishing a pistol (exactly like Indie’s whip) and wearing khakis and a fedora.
The similarities don’t end with the artwork. Sure, it’s a parody of sorts, but the comedy isn’t funny, which significantly undermines the whole enterprise. Instead of being Indiana Jones’s version of Austin Powers, it’s J Lee Thompson’s version of Indiana Jones is its great misfortune. Never has Raiders of the Lost Ark looked better than when you’re watching this film.
