Ok so I am working reading a Brian Keene book and I am vaguely aware of his "City of the Dead" and "The Rising" books being made into movies. This got me thinking when I read Matheson's "I Am Legend" and heard that Will "Aww hell naw" Smith was going to be the lead character in the adaptation and to this day have not watched it as I refuse to have my vision from reading the book ruined by some hollywood asshole who thought he could get big bucks off a great book by making a subpar movie with a big name actor.

So my question is "What books that have been made into movies are the worst? And did it change the way you looked at the book or author?"

What's interesting is that a bad adaptation of a book does not automatically have be a bad film per se. Take BLADE RUNNER for example. An absolutely wretched mangling of Philip K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRONIC SHEEP? that ditched everything except the most basic concept of the novel and still, somehow, is one of the greatest and most influential science fiction films ever made.

I'm also stunned, each time I revisit either of them, how different Clive Barker's novella THE HELLBOUND HEART and his own adapted movie HELLRAISER are. As an adaptation, I think, HELLRAISER shits the bed. Taken on its own merits, it's a masterpiece. So that's why my feelings about the currently in-the-works remake are ambiguous.

I agree with you, not all adaptations make bad movies, such as Blade Runner, and unfortunately Clive's books really don't do well translated into movies. Although considering the time in which the original Hellraiser (movie) came out it was probably better than the campy horror that was out at the time, but no where near the quality of the book.

Since I dodged the actual question with my previous reply, here's my candidate for WORST MOVIE ADAPTATION ever:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0249380/

Everything that worked so well in the novel was completely lost in the movie version. I suspect the film was trying to be gritty but instead it comes across like the worst kind of amateur filmmaking done by bored people on weekends. The explicit sex in the novel never stopped the breakneck pace of the narrative yet in the film we are bored senseless with a five minute montage of a woman posing with a gun in a bathroom.

For once, a remake would be most welcome!

Flowers in the attic was a pretty bad movie. It was like they took a page or two out of each chapter and used that for the film. Loved the book, hated the movie. I would have loved to have seen Wes Craven's version of it.

Holy shit, I forgot Lawnmower Man was a King adaptation. The worst part is there was a sequel made too. Never saw it, so I can't comment on how good (or probably bad) it was but I think it was more rehashing of the CGI bullshit that the first one was. Hard to believe that Pierce Brosnan ever got another acting job after that, not to mention a stint as Bond.

In my opinion though most King books (with the exception of a few) don't translate well into books, which is a shame. For example, "The Dreamcatcher" was a much better book and the movie lack so much information that I thought made the book good. I think that because Mr. King does put so much information into his books and so much has to be cut out to make it a regular length movie that it loses a lot in the translation.

The shining...great book, the film such a let down!!!

I had to do a lot of thinking on this one. But I finally decided on going with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The book was amzing to say the least and the movie just pissed me off. I made sure I watched the movie for the first time after I read the book and I just came up dissapointed.

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I would say Dean Koontz's Watchers is right up there. Great book...piss-poor movie, no thanks to Corey "Lost Boys" Haim...

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