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Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

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  • Title: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
  • IMDb: link

Released in 1994, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is little more than the window dressing of a plot to allow Jim Carrey to go crazy on film for 86 minutes. The film was heavily rewritten after Carrey was cast and much of the scenes were improvised on set to take advantage of Carrey’s humor and growing popularity. Much like his role in Batman Forever, Carrey is unleashed where films like The Mask, The Truman Show, and Dumb and Dumber made more effort to fit his style into the larger context of the film.

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In the Lost Lands

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  • Title: In the Lost Lands
  • IMDb: link

There’s a moment, perhaps 80-minutes into the film, where our protagonists battle cursed skeleton warriors inside a hollowed-out nuclear reactor which provides the only momentary thrill of an otherwise dreadful adaptation of a George R. R. Martin short story featuring a witch (Milla Jovovich) with pulsating eyeballs and a hunter (Dave Bautista) traveling through a dystopian desert in search of a werewolf. Filmed on a modest budget for large-scale sci-fi/horror, In the Lost Lands earned back one-ninth of the film’s cost. The term is often overused nowadays, but this is what a true flop looks like. It did no better with critics than audiences with its hackneyed storytelling and half-developed concepts finding little to no support.

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The In Crowd

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  • Title: The In Crowd (2000)
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back to the year 2000. The 90s and early 2000s saw a glut of erotic thrillers including Wild Things, Poison Ivy, and Embrace of the Vampire. Susan Ward starred in a handful of these: Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, Wild Things 2, and The In Crowd (which did get a theatrical release after a bit of trimming got its R-rating slashed down to PG-13). Although none of these would be classified as good movies, it’s the last of these for which I remember the actress far more than her later roles Sunset Beach or Make It or Break It. And she’s really the only reason to check back in with the film 25 years later.

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Escape to Witch Mountain

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  • Title: Escape to Witch Mountain
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back 50 years to the Disney adaptation of Alexander H. Key’s novel. The film, which whitewashes the protagonists and tones down the violence for a younger audience, is an odd tale of two orphans (Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann) with paranormal powers who are adopted by rich industrialist Aristotle Bolt (Ray Milland) obsessed with the subject. Bolt’s interest in them causes the pair to flee to a spot known for bizarre phenomena called Witch Mountain. Eventually revealed to be extraterrestrial witches, the two kids are reunited with their people at the end of the film flying back into space.

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The Fantastic Four

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  • Title: The Fantastic Four (1994)
  • IMDb: link

After holding onto the movie rights for nearly a decade, and with the clock ticking down, German producer Bernd Eichinger reached to Roger Corman to produce a super-hero film on the cheap for only $1,000,000. With only a month of shooting, but several months of post-production, the film seemed to be ready for Labor Day 1993, until it wasn’t. Parties disagree whether the film was ever meant to see the light of day, or simply as leverage to keep the rights in Eichinger’s hands, but either way the film was pulled and never release theatrically. And so the stories began about The Fantastic Four movie that never was. And yet, speaking before Fantastic Four: The First Steps hits theaters, one could make a case that it’s better, or at least certainly not worse, than any of the FF films that did get released over the next 30 years.

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