10 Films That Probably Started As A Drunken Bet

There’s a reasonably famous urban legend about a well-known sci-fi author who bet a colleague that he could not only knock out the most hackneyed story imaginable, but also sell it to a major publisher for a substantial advance.

The author then became a victim of his own success when his readers went nuts over the book, sending it to #1 on the bestseller lists and demanding not just a sequel, but an entire series and several spin-offs.

In Hollywood, where recycling is an art form, such bets seem to be made on a weekly basis. Sequels and reboots aside, there are enough creaky concepts in modern movies to make you wonder if someone pulled the trigger on them simply to prove H L Mencken’s adage that nobody went broke underestimating the good taste of the American public.

If you want to watch the winner and runner-up from American Idol’s first season in a rip-off of the old Connie Francis movie Where The Boys Are, watch From Justin To Kelly (or don’t – it’s an affront to all that is good in the world). If you’d prefer to see Marlon Brando playing a mad scientist with an ice bucket on his head, there’s the third film version of The Island Of Dr Moreau.

Some movies are best viewed while in an altered state, but each of the following was clearly conceived with the aid of fermented beverages.  

You have to admire the audacity of a production company that makes a movie about leaping, flying sharks that can use rope ladders, mounts it on a budget of $1.98 and casts Tara Reid as the female lead. The Asylum’s office parties must be epic.

For good measure, they throw in the kind of action scenes you’d expect to see in a movie like San Andreas: a Ferris wheel crashes into a skyscraper, the Hollywood sign is destroyed, sharks fly into power lines etc. The cheap digital effects means it all looks about as convincing as one of Nicolas Cage’s wigs, but that only adds to the fun.

As any meteorologist will confirm, the only way to combat a Sharknado is to fly explosives into the eye of the storm, causing it to rain sharks that can then be picked off by a sharpshooter. Should one swallow your girlfriend, it’s no biggie, just feed yourself to the shark while carrying your trusty chainsaw. It worked for Ishmael in that Melville story.