The “Battleship” movie is coming May 18, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s out there, it can’t be reasoned with, etc. Everyone laughed when it was announced a couple years ago, then laughed some more when movie versions of Monopoly, Clue, and Ouija were also announced. Movies based on board games?? Madness! The others have fallen by the wayside for the time being, but you can bet they’ll be back in development if “Battleship” is a hit.
And what then? Eventually we’ll run out of board games and have to move on to other common household items. Join us now as we take a startling look into the future.
“Scrubbing Bubbles”
As a young child, I found these animated bathroom-cleaning monsters terrifying. Yes, they only devour filth and grime and are not inherently evil. Nonetheless, their piranha-like swarming tendencies and their ability to render a dirty thing sparkling clean in a matter of seconds are alarming. With some realistic CGI, they could be turned into unstoppable killing machines that go on a rampage after a radiation leak makes them thirsty not for germs but for HUMAN FLESH.
“Tyler Perry’s The Piano”
There was already a movie called “The Piano,” of course, starring Anna Paquin, Holly Hunter, and a nude Harvey Keitel. This one is different. This one is actually about a piano. Utilizing his facility with on-the-nose metaphors and hysterical melodrama, Perry presents the black and white piano keys as living beings, played by actors, three of whom are Perry himself. The ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony on the piano keyboard, but only sometimes. Other times — like, for example, if you play an ebony F-sharp and an ivory G together — it sounds hideous. They all learn to get along when the B-flat (Perry, in drag) gives a stirring speech about the value of discord.
“Humidifier”
In this Michael Bay production, a humidifier runs amok and threatens to make the entire world too humid! (The humidifier is actually a space robot, probably.) In addition to ruining people’s hairstyles, this would make every place feel like Florida, i.e., worse than death. Only Shia LaBeouf and a bosomy gal to be named later can save the day! To be followed by “Humidifier 2: The Moistening.”
“Farrah’s Faucet”
Here is an enchanting animated tale for children, in which a young girl named Farrah discovers that when she turns her bathtub tap to just the right angle, the faucet delivers soup instead of water — hearty, delicious soup! Farrah uses her good fortune to help her impoverished family earn a living by selling the tasty bathtub soup, threatening to unseat the current titans of the soup industry. (That would be Campbell’s, but they can’t be called Campbell’s in the movie. In fact, just to smooth things over, the studio will work with Campbell’s to produce a “Farrah’s Faucet” tie-in soup.) The corporations send assassins to Farrah’s house, but she defeats them because it turns out the kitchen sink faucet shoots lava.
“Day of the Phone Books”
You’ve never known terror like the terror on display in this shocking horror film! It begins peacefully enough, with a suburban homeowner stepping onto his porch one morning and finding that a new phone book has been delivered. At first he views it as a curiosity, a quaint relic from the past, like discovering that someone has left a gramophone on your lawn, or a Puritan. But the man’s amusement turns to panic when the phone books keep coming, day after day, filling his house, with no receptacle big enough to contain them. All his neighbors have the same problem. There’s no way to stem the tide of phone books, no way to make them stop coming! Soon they have covered the landscape, like in “WALL-E,” and all of humanity drowns in unwanted, unstoppable phone books. (Based on a true story.)
— Film.com
