These Movie Openings SUCK!

Everyone knows the saying "Aim to put your best foot forward", and alongside being great Twister advice is also pretty spot on when it comes to general day-to-day living.

We all want to make a good impression, and so it's worth taking that extra time to assess the situation and go in prepared so that you don't look like a tit in a meeting, hit all your key points, and in the case of movies, get your audiences so utterly frothing with excitement the cinema is calling in a rabies expert.

Therefore there's nothing that kills a motion picture stone dead than when the opening salvo of shots is about as appealing as eating drywall and washing it down with an asbestos smoothie, as not only are you left internally screaming at the money you've spent on this tripe, but it means the rest of the movie has to work twice as hard to deliver on a worthwhile experience.

So let's take a look at the movies that slipped and fell right out of the gate and bombed so hard they left a bloody crater in the ground.

So let's begin things with a slap right to the bloody face, because let's talk turkey, this is exactly what Aliens 3 was to franchise fans.

At the end of Aliens, we left things on a fist-pumping note, with Ripley, Newt, and Hicks managing to evade the big dark death machine that is the Xenomorph race and are shown resting in cryosleep as they venture onwards back home. This is an earned ending, and the audience too is left needing a nap from the exhausting trials our heroes were put through, however that deep sleep became a nightmare in the opening moments for Alien 3 because Hicks and Newt? Well, they ain't waking up pal.

Killed off-screen and in their sleep, Alien 3 cast away these central characters like garbage only to end up circling the bin itself with its shoddy production, weak narrative, and altogether ropey action sequences. It was like an emotional body blow right out of the gate, but not one that brought about a deeper emotional tone to the film, and in effect, the film winded itself and then staggered about for the next two hours looking for help.

This is an example of the extreme production troubles the movie went through manifesting on the big screen, where the reaper's scythe was used in an effort to cut the fat but ended up cutting the legs off the entire project. Killing characters in such an offhand manner was never going to work well and it's genuinely shocking to note that David Fincher even thought to go down such a ham-fisted route.