Five awful debut movies from legendary directors
Some directors knock it out of the park with their debut films: think Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out for three examples covering three very different generations of cinema.
However, a great director isn’t required to debut with a great movie. Sometimes, filmmakers who go on to achieve greatness take a little longer to reach their full potential. While plenty of auteurs hit big from their first feature and continued on in that vein, others gradually improved over time.
Making a film is hard enough at the best of times, let alone when you’ve never made one before. The following five found that out the hard way, as their first efforts were regrettable to say the least. On the plus side, they all recovered to enjoy stellar careers, and some of them went on to win Academy Awards and change the face of cinema.
You only get one chance at a first impression, and these directors blew up that chance sky-high. That said, it wasn’t too long before they atoned for their cinematic sins and made an impression that quickly banished their ill-fated debuts to history as anomalies.
Five awful debuts from legendary directors:
‘Grand Theft Auto’ – Ron Howard (1977)
While older TV viewers will always remember him as Richie Cunningham from Happy Days, a different generation knows Ron Howard as a major director. He gave Tom Hanks an early break with Splash, won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, and delivered a holiday staple with How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And that’s just a slice of his wild filmography. Still, even Ron didn’t get it right every time—his very first directing job proves that.
In 1977, Howard released his debut movie, the low-budget comedy Grand Theft Auto. Produced by the great Roger Corman, who also launched just about every other famous director’s career, the film also starred Howard and was co-written with his father, Rance. None of this goodwill paid off, however, as the finished product turned out to be a complete car crash. An unfunny, unoriginal take on vehicular mayhem, Grand Theft Auto is a lot less fun than the video game series it shares a name with. Thankfully, Howard’s next movie, Night Shift, was a vast improvement, saving his legacy.
‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ – Scott Derrickson (2000)
Directing an entry in a classic horror franchise doesn’t sound like a bad first job. Unfortunately, this is the Hellraiser series, which went downhill pretty quickly after the original. By the time the fifth film rolled around, subtitled ‘Inferno’, they couldn’t even be bothered to release them in cinemas anymore. Instead, Inferno was a direct-to-DVD release, as well being the directorial debut of one Scott Derrickson.
It was hardly a warm welcome for the young filmmaker, despite what the title might suggest. Inferno looks, sounds, and feels cheap. The inventive scares and memorable kills from the earlier films are gone, replaced by a sense of a concept running out of steam. Some horror fans call it “underrated”, but the general consensus is that its low-profile release was well-earned. Fortunately, Derrickson used it as a stepping stone to better things. His next film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, was more imaginative and far scarier. He would go on to diversify with The Day the Earth Stood Still and Doctor Strange, but his biggest hits remained in horror with Sinister and The Black Phone.
‘Nomads’ – John McTiernan (1986)
It’s one thing to direct a genre-defining action movie; it’s quite another to direct two back-to-back. This is what John McTiernan did in the late 1980s. In 1987, he made his second film, the Arnold Schwarzenegger juggernaut Predator, which spawned a series that is still thriving today. The following year, he stepped behind the camera and brought us Die Hard, which spawned a series that… oh wait, never mind. Alongside these mighty accomplishments, McTiernan also gave life to the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, as well as Last Action Hero and The Hunt for Red October.
Over a decade before working with Pierce Brosnan on The Thomas Crown Affair, McTiernan directed the future James Bond in a much worse film. Nomads has Brosnan playing a Frenchman (for some reason) who stumbles across a group of wanderers living in and around Los Angeles. Aside from the novelty of Adam Ant as one of the vagabonds, there’s little reason to watch this sluggish horror. It’s slow, unfocused, and thinks it’s saying much more than it is. If only McTiernan had waited another year to make his debut, he could have opened with a real banger.
‘Murder à la Mod’ (Brian De Palma, 1968)
Unfortunately for New Hollywood icon Brian De Palma, his career has been bookended by some utter trash. These days, the once-revered auteur churns out sub-par cop movies with all the production value of a preschool nativity. While he seems to have accepted the fate of mediocrity, his fans choose to remember his more celebrated days. Blow Out, Scarface, Carrie, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible – De Palma’s contributions to popular cinema are numerous and impressive. The stuff he made before this, however, well…
The New Jersey native began his career with documentaries before taking on his first feature-length project in 1968, which was Murder à la Mod, an experimental murder mystery. Made on a shoestring budget, the movie chronicles the life and death of a jewel thief (Margo Norton) and the subsequent fallout of the snuff film made of her murder. It’s got some nice ideas, but is just too off-the-rails and rough to be considered any good. David Nusair of Reel Film Reviews put it best when he called it “De Palma’s first (and worst) feature-length endeavour”.
Even though he gets full marks for creativity, he was let down by an unsatisfying execution.
‘Piranha II: The Spawning’ – James Cameron (1982)
The old saying ‘first the worst, second the best’ has never been more applicable than to the career of James Cameron. His sophomore feature was none other than The Terminator, one of the most iconic movies of the 1980s and it is still influencing sci-fi and horror films to this day. Obviously, we all know what happened next—Aliens, Titanic, all 500 Avatar sequels—but what about what came before Arnie and his rubber face? That, regretfully, was Piranha II: The Spawning.
The sequel to the original Piranha—a low-budget rip-off of Jaws—gave the ferocious fish a new advantage. To quote Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, “they fly now”. Cameron was always going to be facing an uphill battle to make something like this work, but his progress was hampered even further by megalomaniacal producer Ovidio G Assonitis. The crew he hired didn’t speak English, which caused all sorts of issues, and the director was barred from the editing room. Cameron tried his damndest to distance himself from this schlock, but it continues to follow him around like a bad smell. At least he was able to move on to bigger and better things.
