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We all make mistakes. For most of us, they’re not much more consequential than buying the wrong kind of milk, but in Hollywood, it might be signing onto a seven- or eight-figure project only to realize it’s garbage. Those who can’t just write it off on their taxes sometimes take extreme measures to make sure it never gets seen or at least make the experience as unpleasant as possible. Sometimes, they design it that way from the get-go.

5 Blade: Trinity

Wesley Snipes had some potentially legitimate beef with the producers of Blade: Trinity. He believed other Black actors were the subject of discrimination on the set, suspected the movie’s only purpose was to set up spin-offs for its white stars, and also, it was Blade: Trinity. His reaction, however, might have been a little overboard. He refused to communicate with director David S. Goyer outside of...

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Many Trekkies will be able to tell you that the first two seasons of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" were somewhat rocky. The story goes that, during those first two years, show creator Gene Roddenberry wanted to assert total control over the series, a reaction to his having been booted from the "Star Trek" feature films several years before. Roddenberry, however, butted heads with other producers on "Next Generation." It seems that he and other producers were re-writing scripts at the last minute, with Gene's personal lawyer, Leonard Maizlish, sometimes writings drafts in secret. Roddenberry was also hellbent on enforcing a strict narrative rule forbidding interpersonal conflict between the show's main characters. The show's other writers hated this rule, as interpersonal conflict, they felt, was the fastest path to drama and story. 

Even during these rocky seasons, however, "Star Trek: The Next Generation...

In the mid-1980s, Whoopi Goldberg exploded onto the entertainment scene via her self-titled, one-woman Broadway show, which was considered so electric and essential that HBO filmed a performance and aired it within a year of its stage premiere. At this point, Goldberg was a force of nature, a comedic dynamo capable of zipping from one deep-tissue character study to another with the ease of Richard Pryor. Meanwhile, her big, brilliant brain seemed to run a mile a minute, like the one possessed by her friend and colleague Robin Williams. Whoopi, it seemed, could do anything. Movie stardom seemed a cinch.

It was. Kind of. After making her dramatic debut in Steven Spielberg's "The Color Purple," she scored a smallish hit with Penny Marshall's comedy thriller "Jumpin' Jack Flash." That led to two more star vehicles in the 1987 duo of "Burglar" and "Fatal Beauty," but they didn't take.

Typically, when a star has a new movie coming out, they promote it as much as possible. But Whoopi Goldberg once did the exact opposite, taking legal action to prevent one of her movies from ever reaching theaters. And somehow it wasn’t the movie where she solves crimes with the help of a talking dinosaur.

Back in 1988, Goldberg starred in The Telephone, an experimental dramedy about an out-of-work actress who spends most of her time holed up in a small apartment making phone calls. It’s kind of like an avant-garde theater piece (specifically Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice) crossed with a Bob Newhart routine — but not as good as that makes it sound.

Weirdly enough, The Telephone was the only film ever directed by actor Rip Torn, of The Larry Sanders Show, Men in Black and drunkenly breaking into a bank that one time fame. And it...

When cinephiles of a certain sensibility talk about the best decades for horror, they’ll probably point to the 1980s with its explosion of cutting-edge special effects and home video-induced demand for material. Or they might point to the era of Universal Pictures’ domination in the 1930s, followed up then by the moody Val Lewton thrillers of the 1940s. Maybe even a very unpopular kid will try to make an argument for the 2010s, at least until everyone pulls the A24 hat over his eyes and kicks him out.

But moviegoers would be foolish to overlook the 1960s. The decade saw not only two amazing horror flicks from Alfred Hitchcock but also caught the genre in an interesting time of transition. Filmmakers built on the Gothic approach of previous decades by adding a psychological dimension, finding new chills in an established model. Furthermore, the decade saw the first steps toward the ho,...

Though there had been earlier efforts, like Ealing Studios’s Dead of Night from 1945, the horror anthology film came into its own in the 1960s with titles like Kobayashi Masaki’s Kwaidan and the Poe-centric Spirits of the Dead from directors Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. Hammer Films’s rival Amicus churned out no fewer than seven of them in a 10-year period starting with Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. But the one that really got the omnibus rolling was Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath from 1963, an Italian-American co-production that resulted in two different versions of the film.

After the success of 1960’s Black Sunday, American International Pictures took a more active hand in producing several of Bava’s later films, altering them in the process to suit American audiences that tended to skew younger. The Aip cut of Black Sabbath rearranges its three segments, tones down some...

To celebrate the release of Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours on Blu-ray – an excellent film based on the true story of Aron Ralston and his struggle to escape entrapment in the American outback – Owf has been challenged to compile a list of the 10 best films that focus solely (or almost) on a single character. It’s not a common occurrence in cinema – I assume because a majority of viewers easily get bored with one character very quickly – but this technique has been attempted before, to varying degrees of success.

The benefits of having only one primary character is that the development of these protagonists can be much more in depth, ensuring that a stronger bond between audience and character can be forged. The downside though, is that you have to really like them and root for them wholeheartedly.

It’s an ambitious technique to attempt, but below are what we consider...