Five Films That Could Never Become Books

Every Oscar season, there are at least a few movies which are based on books which get nominated for the prestigious award. This past year The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Slumdog Millionaire, based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, were both up for best picture. In truth, a lot of the greatest films of all time were based on books, so there is no reason for the trend not to continue. However, I was curious about how things would play out the other way around. I could imagine Seven Samurai, one of my favorite films, would make a great novel. It would be like The 47 Ronin on steroids.

Then again, there are some movies which would just never make it on a page. I don't mean bad films necessarily, because even they have points which would be interesting to explore further in a book. What I'm talking about are movies which are so far removed from the literary arts that to put them into print would be equivalent to a crime against humanity.

Note: The following is by no means comprehensive, but a sampling of a list I might later expand.

1. Child's Play
This film is the lowest of all the slasher flicks as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps some B-movies are worse, but half of the time they're at least funny because of how bad they are. When we talk about great literary villains, we are talking about Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, Iago from Othello or, using a very relaxed definition of the word 'literary', the Joker from the DC Comics universe. Chucky wouldn't fit into the mold of any of these villains, nor can he stack up against them. Now, I'm sure at this point, you're all saying that this is the case for all slasher film villains, but I say you're absolutely wrong.

Freddy Krueger was a child murderer who got murdered, then comes back to kill people in their dreams as revenge. That sounds amazing. You would have dream sequences to write about and tons of imagery to work with. You could play up his backstory and develop the character into something more than just an evil dream-killer. Seriously, he's just a very short bit of exposition away from being the next big villain.

Next up is Jason Voorhees. People think that because the guy doesn't speak, he can't be a good character. However, Jason's got tons of backstory involving religious themes and issues with his mother. He's basically the Freudian dream of a villain. He's strong, silent, obsessed with fulfilling his mother's mission and pushed with a rage that transcends death itself. Tell me that isn't great writing in the waiting and I'll say you're a fool.

Finally, after everything from Pinhead to Jigsaw, we find poor old Chucky. Chucky is a fucking doll. He's got the soul of a serial killer... so what? I could punt him. His size really does negate a lot of the fear that he could generate. I know there are people who will say that him being small would be even scarier because it would be unexpected, but I think the little bastard would just fall short (pun intended). Unless the book was made to be comedic, this one just wouldn't work.

2. Hostel
It could be a headline article in a snuff magazine, but not a book. I don't want to spend much time on this film, but just ask yourselves an important question. If this film made you cringe when it was just a moving image, wouldn't it just be taken to an unbelievably horrific level as a novel?

Bret Easton Ellis shocked the world with his book American Psycho, but even that book was an aspect of social satire. He was saying how this rich man could get away with any act of brutality merely because he was so high-powered and handsome. At its most base level, Hostel could be considered the mentally-retarded illegitimate offspring of that idea. Will people sit through torture videos for two hours? If the people getting tortured are sexy... yes.

The film really is just a sign of the times and proof that we are totally inured to violence. In truth, the visceral nature of the film really can only work as just that... a film. As a book, this would be the kind of reading which would inspire people who are fans of Charles Manson to go out and have some fun.

3. From Justin to Kelly
Kelly Clarkson is fine on her albums and in music videos and I'm pretty sure she's okay with that. I jam to Kelly in the car some times and I know she's all into what she's doing. Justin Guarini was just a media whore because he didn't win American Idol. At this point, even he has realized his career isn't going anywhere fast. I think that to allow this abortion of a film to become a book, we'd have to lobotomize half of the world first.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for musicals. I was into that whole scene in high school and did my tenure performing in things like Hello Dolly and West Side Story. Fuck, I even understand High School Musical and its place in modern culture. The thing is that these things know they're musicals and don't expect much more. A musical couldn't be a book because you'd lose the music and thus, would lose most of the good stuff. You could work around it and make it okay, but I'd have to see it to believe it. I mean, The Producers had almost no music in the original film I believe, and that transformed into a Broadway sensation.

The reason I single out from Justin to Kelly as an impossibility for a book is mainly because of how bad it was. Something as awful as From Justin to Kelly was bad in concept and execution. Hell, I think it was a terrible idea in script format, so making it a novel would be like trying to make a wedding cake out of shit.

4. Transformers
I'm just saying this, but when most of your plot points are explosions or flashes of Megan Fox's midriff, it wouldn't be a good book. For the first part, maybe a pop-up book and for the second, maybe great erotic fiction, but that's about all I could see for this one. It wasn't the greatest of films despite the amount of money it took in. Remember, The Birth of a Nation (1915) made millions of dollars and that's considered one of the most racist films ever made.

There would be ways to salvage this into a workable book, but the director just seems to see them and run in the other direction.
Q:Dialogue?
A: No. We're gonna have the protagonists just run and scream the entire time as things explode behind them.
Q: Love Story?
A: No. She's just really really hot and every guy in the audience will want to bang her.
Q: Character development?
A: (crickets chirp)
Q: Well, certainly there's got to at least be some conflict between the machines and the humans which we could dramatize as the man vs. technology theme?
A: I said there were explosions.

Enough said. Game over.

5. The Da Vinci Code
Wait... it was originally a book? You're kidding me, right? But who would pay to read a piece of shit like... how many copies? Well, I've lost faith in humanity.