Cutthroat Island (1995)

[bucho4prez 0]

Just picked it up on blue ray, thats right, blue ray. I think there should be a special ep with just career murdering movies.

[ScooterMcFudden 9]

This movie was in the Guinness Book of World Record for the biggest box office flop, ever and it rightfully gained this honor! It's a track wreck full of dead babies crashing into a flaming bus load of nuns!!! It has everything, bad writing, behind the camera feuding, re-write hell... It's one epic story of the perfect storm of screw ups all contributing to this masterpiece of awful!

[FatCynic 0]

Puh-lease do this movie. It is insane. Gina Davis...what happened?

[denimgremlin 1179]

I second all of these i just caught it on cable the other day, i could barely get through it, every line is spoken like they're trying to do a one liner but they arn't funny.

[SlidePocket 707]

This and "The Long Kiss Goodnight" the next year tried to make Geena Davis a huge action star considering she and Renny Harlin were married at the time, but when both faltered at the box office (even though the latter was actually pretty cool), their marriage ended and Davis's movie career never fully recovered.

 

Matthew Modine beat out a very long list of actors to play the male lead in this movie. Michael Douglas was the first choice, but dropped out because Davis's character was more expanded upon than he is. Other choices included Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Liam Neeson, Jeff Bridges, Ralph Fiennes, Charlie Sheen, Michael Keaton, Daniel Day-Lewis, Tim Robbins and Gabriel Byrne, before Modine was eventually cast.

[denimgremlin 1179]

here's how bad this movie is, judging by this thread I apparently watched it back in May and I have no memory of it.

[Merkin Muffley 24]

When this movie came out I was ready to like it, I wanted to like it, I even tried to like it. Unfortunately there's just not anything there to like. I even rented the VHS, even though I'd seen it in the Theater, thinking I must have been in a bad mood, or something the first time I saw it.

[nrkist 71]

When this movie came out I was ready to like it, I wanted to like it, I even tried to like it. Unfortunately there's just not anything there to like. I even rented the VHS, even though I'd seen it in the Theater, thinking I must have been in a bad mood, or something the first time I saw it.

 

Yeah, this is a movie that is such a win on paper. Treasure Island - huge budget - big stars - family blockbuster...and then it FoodFight!'ed itself. It's a film that seems intentionally designed to make anything enjoyable about it gross/boring/gross/uninteresting. If you haven't watched this film and are expecting some high seas adventures, it's like discovering the Star Wars prequels are infact some really drawn out trade disputes with confusing and uninvesting action sequences peppered in between. It's really one of the blandest films ever made...when it isn't being suddenly offensively ridiculous. It's so bad it's bad. It seems like a possible 'good film', or at the very least a 'good-bad', or mayhaps a 'so-bad-it's-good'. It is infact 'bad-bad', as impossible as that may seem.

 

Harlin had the reverse Midas touch. He could apparently turn gold to coal to dust to seasonal allergen.

[Ofcoursemyhorse 1043]

I wonder who blamed who more for this movie failing Renny or Geena.

[Elektra Boogaloo 3371]

I remember seeing this in the theater (I would've been like 12) and I remember being disappointed. And there is this trivia gem on IMDb, that I think we need Blake Harris to investigate it.

 

Matthew Modine several years later went on record to explain some of the reasons why the film's costs spiraled so much and became such an expensive flop. He cited one example where cases and cases of V8 juice were shipped out to Malta, expressly for director Renny Harlin and his wife Geena Davis. Towards the end of the shoot, the juice was served up for everybody as there was an entire room of it to be dispensed with. He also said that every scene had three cameras in constant use, resulting in tons and tons of film being used for every shot.

 

An entire room of V8?! Is this some weird sex thing that I don't understand?!

[Ofcoursemyhorse 1043]

At least it wasnt Clamato.

[taraba 1]

I don't know how this movie hasn't been covered yet. It was on HBO the other day so I recorded it because I couldn't remember if it was good or not. It. Is. Not.

 

It involved Gina Davis walking around with a treasure map that's on her father's scalp stuffed in her pants. So when her father died she scalped him for the treasure map he had tattooed there and is just pulling it out the entire movie. Plus the movie sets up awful sex jokes. She says to Matthew Modine "Let me show you something" and then starts digging around for her dad-scalp map in her pants and he replies "Thanks but I've seen one before". Also to try to stop them from escaping a city in a carriage a ship starts firing on the town with its cannons and destroys several buildings in the town but doesn't hit them in the carriage. Gina Davis jumps off the carriage onto a roof and runs through a room full of people above faster than the carriage that's being drawn by horses running at full speed below her.

[Ofcoursemyhorse 1043]

Geena Davis was easily the more talented in the relationship. She was better in this and Long Kiss Goodnight than both of them deserved.

[Bash83 0]

Before Pirates of the Caribbean there was Cutthroat Island. Almost bankrupted a studio, tainted Gina Davis, dialogue that desperately wants to be Guy Ritchie.     

[RyanSz 3140]

What's probably the most shocking thing about this movie was that in order to fund it, Carolco cancelled the only other movie that they had in the pipeline at that time, a film called Crusade that had Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger starring in it, to fund this movie. Cancelling that film cost the company 13 million right off the bat  and so they also had to sell partial rights to other movies they had such as Stargate and Showgirls. So that's showing how much this company either didn't know what the hell it was doing or how much they thought they had a smash winner on their hands that they would cancel a film with the one of if not the biggest movie star in the world in it in order to make a pirate film easily 20 years past that genre's expiration date.

The only thing I actually remember about this was a trailer I saw for it on another VHS that spent more time promoting the various merchandise for the film, such as shirts and birthday party decorations, than the actual movie. This movie is also another example of why I can't stand a lot of the reverence given to Roger Ebert's reviews as he gave this crapfest 3 out of 4 stars, this isn't his worst example as he really gave the rating for what he called the "skill" shown in the movie but he doesn't delve into where he saw it.