Some of cinema’s most classic movies have spawned some awe-inspiringly bad low budget rip-offs. Here’s our look back at some of the worst...
Every now and again, a film will come out of nowhere and clean up at the box office. Regardless of budget, there are some ideas so potent that, with the deft handling of a talented director, can be made into films that immediately capture the imagination.
The Terminator and Halloween are two examples of films made with meagre resources that went on to have a lasting cultural impact, and whose ideas have been shamelessly copied and regurgitated in countless cheap, hurriedly made cash-ins in the years after their release.
Here's our list of seven influential blockbusters, and the very worst films inspired by them...
The Terminator
A seminal 1984 sci-fi thriller that launched James Cameron's directing career and made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. Inspired by two episodes of The Outer Limits, both written by legendary SF writer Harlan Ellison, the movie's unrelenting pace and cyborg design inspired numerous homages of varying quality.
....which inspired: Eve Of Destruction
Anticipating Terminator 3's deadly female cyborg by more than a decade, Eve Of Destruction was clearly modelled on The Terminator's template, with a humanoid military robot who cuts a swathe through an unsuspecting city, this time New York.
Released in the same year as Terminator 2, it's remarkable just how dated Eve Of Destruction now looks, with its killer cyborg, Eve (played by Dutch actress Renée Soutendijk) decked out in a fabulously kitsch red miniskirt and matching leather jacket.
Despite her wardrobe malfunction, Eve's a crack shot with an Uzi, has a neat line in one-liners (her favourite motto is a tremulous "I'm very sensitive"), and can only be terminated with a bullet through the eye...
Have some cringeworthy copycats of your own? Add them to the comments!
