5 Great Movies That Were Turned into Terrible Books

"How ironic it was that the willow-creature, the lovely Mary, pined for her vanished husband while in a closet, close at hand, dwelt one of the finest minds in the cosmos."

Universal Studios
He then uses the Speak & Spell to invent sexting.

E.T. watches Mary while she sleeps and kisses a framed photo of her, and when Elliott puts an ailing E.T. in the shower, we get the most horrifying revelation of all:

"The water came on, soaking Elliott and E.T. The aged voyager shook his head as the water hit. Ah, yes, the shower, where the willow-creature dances."

Yeah, so it starts to border on serial killer shit at that point.

Universal Studios
"To love her, I must become her."

Strangely, not only was it not necessary to devote an entire landfill to storing the unsold copies of this book, but Kotzwinkle even penned a sequel with the assistance of Spielberg, who declared himself a huge fan of his work. This is yet more evidence that it's a good thing E.T. only appeared in one movie 30 years ago.

That's Total Recall the movie; Total Recall the novel is another story. Actually, it's the same story, just a whole lot dumber. Either the novelization's author intentionally decided to crush the thing that made the movie special or he was just tragically bad at being vague about the crucial "Is it a dream or reality?" dilemma. For starters, after "Quail" (Quaid's original name in the script before Dan Quayle ruined it for everyone) has a fight with his "dream girl," Melina, we get this passage:

"... no prepackaged dream would have included that scene with Melina, where instead of fulfillment he had received a painful setback. Only reality did that kind of thing to a man!"

That's not an inner monologue, by the way -- that's the book's narrator clumsily doing away with any mystery the story might have had, basically just to say "Women, am I right?" Then, if that wasn't clear enough, we get this line after Quaid spits out the pill that is meant to bring him out of the dream:

"But this wasn't the end of the dream! This was the confirmation of the Mars reality!"

TriStar Pictures
In this version it's a suppository, though.

You can tell it's exciting! Because every sentence ends in an exclamation point! The novel even goes out of its way to point out that Melina is a model, thus explaining why Quaid saw her face on a monitor before the "dream" started, simply to quash any last trace of incertitude that may be left. And then there's the famous ending: In the movie, Quaid and Melina triumphantly gaze upon the Martian landscape as the image fades to white, and it's up to the audience to decide whether Quaid is in some kind of coma or the two of them are about to have passionate Martian crater sex. In the novel, not so much:

"Quail cast the specter away. He took Melina in his arms and kissed her robustly. He was through with dreaming; reality was much better."

TriStar Pictures
"And then he saw her real boobies and sexed her with his real penis. For real."

The most baffling part is that the movie was already based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, so we're not sure why they didn't just reprint that in size 72 font and call it a book.

When discussing Jaws: The Revenge (the third sequel to Steven Spielberg's killer shark extravaganza), scholars seem to agree that it did exactly one thing right: Sure, it's a terrible movie in almost every aspect, but at least it didn't explain that the shark eats people because of a supernatural voodoo curse.

The same thing can't be said about the novel.

Universal Studios
"This time, it's mystical!"

The even-more-terrible Jaws: The Revenge novelization doesn't just shit on that particular movie (which would be like going on a used toilet without flushing first), but on the entire franchise -- it indirectly suggests that when Chief Brody and Quint were hunting a savage force of nature in the first film, they might have actually been battling a wizard who was remote-controlling that shark with his mind. Which is a perfectly fine premise for a motion picture, now that we think about it, just not this one.

Admittedly, the novel didn't have a lot to work with. The movie's central plot concerns a great white shark following Chief Brody's widow, Ellen, to the Bahamas, where she's visiting her son Mike after her other son was killed by a different shark ... or possibly the same shark, it's not really clear.

Universal Studios Florida
Jaws: The Ride had a more cohesive plot.

While it didn't really make sense that a shark would have a vendetta against a particular set of humans in the first place, author Hank Searls carried on the great literary tradition of saying "Oh, fuck it," then writing something even more ridiculous. Searls' version of the events includes an evil witch doctor named Papa Jacques who seeks revenge against the Brody family. We learn right off the bat that Papa Jacques "hates Michael," and the novel heavily implies that the witch doctor is able to enter a trance and control a great white shark to attack the Brodys:

"It was one of Michael Brody's shirts, stolen by a devotee from his washerwoman's line that day. The houngan fingered his shark's-tooth necklace, sent his mind beneath the sea, and went into a trance himself."

The most frightening part is how much sense all of this makes with the movie. How did a creature with the mental capacity of a fetus know to target a specific family? Because magic, of course. On the other hand, the fact that this is a universe where witches exist would probably explain much of Jaws 3-D.

Universal Studios
And Mario Van Peebles' accent.

The first Gremlins movie is fondly remembered as another inexplicable oddity of the '80s, like Max Headroom or Ronald Reagan. The film doesn't even attempt to explain where the Gremlins came from, but it's hinted that they're of magical origin: Gizmo is purchased at a store manned by an old man who conforms to every Chinese stereotype ever, and old Chinese men are always selling magical shit to white people in movies. Also, these things replicate when wet and turn into monsters if they feed after midnight, so there's that.

Anyway, like most hit movies, Gremlins spawned a boatload of crappy tie-in merchandise, like trading cards, dolls, a breakfast cereal ...

Warner Bros., Kevin Winter/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
... a rapper ...

... and, of course, a novelization by George Gipe. Except that, for some reason, Gipe sat down at his desk, looked at the screenplay titled Gremlins that he'd been hired to adapt into a book also called Gremlins, and immediately started writing about ... aliens. From the first chapter:

"Centuries ago on another planet, Mogturmen had set out to produce a creature that was adaptable to any climate or condition, one that could easily reproduce itself, was gentle and highly intelligent."

Warner Bros.
Don't worry, he doesn't try to fuck Billy's mom.

Turns out this Mogturmen guy is the inventor of the Gremlins and "genetic hero of three galaxies." Already this is starting to sound more like someone's terrible Doctor Who fan fiction than the movie we know and love. The first chapter explains that Mogturmen sent his genetically engineered creations to inhabited planets in a mission to spread peace, like Operation Iraqi Freedom. Unfortunately, the whole thing turned into one big clusterfuck, like Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Apparently, Mogturmen didn't administer that crucial test to see if his creations had the potential to easily spawn large murderous monsters before he started jettisoning them out into space.

Warner Bros.
The only built-in safety mechanism was a crippling addiction to Disney movies.

So what was Mogturmen's fate? At one point, the surprisingly articulate Gizmo recalls that his creator was punished by the other Mogturmens (Mogturmanses?) before suddenly changing the subject, as if remembering that there might be kids reading this shit. OK, there's no way that dude didn't get castrated. In fact, we can extrapolate from what we know that it must have been his attempt to build himself a new dong that eventually led to the events of Alien.

The rest of the book ditches the space opera crap, but the tone is ruined -- when you watch the movie for the first time, you have no idea what to expect next, since it starts off relatively normal and gets more ridiculous as it goes. If they start the story in space, though, then you're like, "Oh, so they turned into cocoons after eating that chicken. Whatever."

So naturally, the novelization's author decided to go ahead and ruin all that.

Bantam Books
The book went to press before they bumped up Myers' costume budget.

Let's say you bought this book under the naive impression that it follows the plot of the movie, so you open it expecting to find a description of a suburban house on Halloween night or something like that. Then you look at the first page, and it says:

"The horror started on the eve of Samhain, in a foggy vale in Northern Ireland at the dawn of the Celtic race."

Yes, the book starts thousands of years in the past with the story of a young Irish boy named Enda. Enda murders the king's daughter Deirdre, succumbing to a curse on the druid day of the dead, Samhain, which would eventually become All Hallow's Eve, which would eventually become Halloween. It's always a good sign when the slasher movie novelization you just bought begins with a history lesson.

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"Elm Street was named, in 1865, after then Mayor Jonathan James Elm, a descendant of the town's original settlers. During the Prohibition era, Elm Street served as a secret transportation route for alcohol between Al Capone's Chica-"

Flash forward to 1963 -- young Michael Myers' mom confesses to her mother that Michael's been hearing voices, having violent dreams, and wetting the bed.

Compass International Pictures
The next time you're watching one of these movies, please remember that mental image.

Young Michael complains of voices that "tell me to say I hate people," and it's heavily implied that he's actually possessed by the dead boy from the prologue. Turns out Enda's soul was cursed to relive the events of Samhain for all eternity, and now he's slowly taking over Michael's brain:

"It was the voice. The voice stirred up the hatred. It had done so in his dreams, and now it was doing so in real life. It had begun with the strange pictures in his head at night, pictures of people he had never seen -- oh, maybe in comic books or on television, but never in real life."

So basically, sweet innocent Michael Myers is just the victim of some ancient Celtic curse/demon thing. In fact, he's not even the first person in his family to suffer this fate, since it's mentioned that his great-grandfather went through similar problems. Had Michael's mom simply hired a good exorcist, the next nine movies could have been prevented (or the spirit would have moved to another member of the Myers clan, perhaps that famous cousin in Canada).

J.M. McNab writes and podcasts for Rewatchability.com.

Related Reading: You know that trippy light show at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey? It was totally explained in the novelization. Oh, and did you know Who Framed Roger Rabbit started with a book that featured the titular rabbit murdered via machine gun. All this should be proof that books aren't always better than movies. But if you need more evidence, click here.