10 Sci-Fi Movie Ideas Too Good To Fail (That Did It Anyway)
8. Barb Wire - Casablanca... In SPACE! (But Also Starring Pamela Anderson)
This one was a pretty understandable failure, if we’re
being honest.
All it takes is a few words to turn a brilliant premise—“Casablanca in the future”—into an awful one—“Starring Pam Anderson in the Humphrey Bogart role.”
Yes, for some inexplicable reason this adaptation of the Dark Horse comic of the same name cast former Playboy Playmate and Baywatch heroine Pam Anderson as its hard-drinking taciturn heroine, a space age bounty hunter-cum-occasional-nightclub-proprietor who finds herself tasked with the safe transport of a pair of black market contact lenses (yes, seriously), and a girl who could prove the saviour of—honestly, need we go on?
The concept of a gender-flipped Casablanca set in
post-apocalyptic America has plenty of potential, but none of it was mined by
this drab affair which manages to be too self-serious to qualify as fun camp, but
far too incompetently made and blatantly silly to be much good as anything
else. The flick flopped at the box office despite its relatively small nine
million dollar budget and put the kibosh on further adult sci-fi comic
adaptations from big studios for a while thereafter.