A Bad Title

There’s a new movie opening next week called The House with a Clock in its Walls. I don’t know about the movie: it looks like a cheap excuse for special effects and Jack Black. And it’s a bad sign that it’s been relegated to a post-Labour-Day opening, meaning that the studio doesn’t have high hopes. But there’s one thing we do know for sure: that is the worst title in the history of movies.

Just to make sure, I looked up some lists of the worst movie titles of all time. There are some bad ones, but I think we may have a new loser here. Actually, I was a little disappointed by much of the bad title lists. I was expecting some of the all-time awkward names (I Love Trouble, Cutthroat Island,  Moon Over Parador) but for the most part, they were just strange and/or bad movies with appropriate titles (Santa with Muscles.) I mean, I have no doubt that Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was a terrible movie, and it’s a terrible premise. But once you’ve made that movie, what else could you really call it?

Lately, the bigger problem with movies titles is that they’re vague. Edge of Tomorrow was a title that didn’t tell you anything about its intriguing and exciting concept. And one of the all-time great movie titles, Snakes on a Plane, was nearly called “Pacific Air Flight 121” and only changed back at star Samuel L. Jackson’s insistence. And they made a movie about tiny people fighting for control of a forest, and what did they call it? Epic. I had trouble finding it in IMDB, because if you just search for “epic,” it returns all the movies that are classed as epics instead. What could be vaguer than naming something with a genre?

But The House etc... could be worst.There have been other movies with overly-long titles (The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain) and overly literal titles (Life as a House) and titles that make an interesting concept sound boring (John Carter,) but it’s amazing that they put them all in one movie.