From The Idea Hole: This Meets That, Part Two (Cyber Soldiers, Time Traveling Dinosaurs, Crossdressing Aliens, Sadistic Gamers, and Space Chimps)

So I came up with this game called This Meets That, basically working backwards from the way studio executives describe movie plots as combinations of other movies. For a detailed breakdown of what the game is and how I arrive at my mostly random combinations, please see Part One, but the short version is I take two movies, selected at random, and try to come up with an original movie idea by distilling the themes of each movie into one. The more I play this game on my own, the more I think this might be my new standard way of coming up with new ideas for movies and TV shows, and the shallowness of that should probably bother me more than it does. In any case, here are some more movies derived from This Meets That.

1: Iron Cross (Robocop meets Inglorious Basterds)

You take the badass premise of a guy rebuilt as a cybernetic crimefighter, but switch it out so that the crime he's fighting is being a dirty Nazi. Set it during World War II, where an elite American soldier is mowed down and brought back to life with steampunk super science. The twist - he's brought back by the enemy, at first brainwashed into fighting for the Nazis, given the codename of Iron Cross, until he breaks his programming and fights for truth, justice, the American way, and the joy of punching Nazis in the face. I see an 80's action montage as the newly liberated Iron Cross paints over the swastika emblazoned on his armor with an American Flag, then proceeds to take on his greatest foe - Undead Cyborg Hitler! (and possibly Robillsa, Cyber She Wolf of the SS). Your welcome.

And the Nazis are also zombies, I forgot that part.

2: Chronosaurus (Jurassic Park meets Groundhog Day)

Inescapable time loops that, instead of romance and learning a life lesson, now involve rampaging hordes of time displaced Dinosaurs. A military funded time travel experiment goes wrong, creating havoc for the small suburban town nearby, as portals to pre-historic Earth begin to randomly open, releasing murderous creatures once extinct onto an unsuspecting populace. Then, after a day of unimaginable horror, the whole thing repeats the next day as the surrounding area is stuck in a loop. A handful of people are immune and wake up remembering the events of the previous loops, and must continuously live through the attack again and again. I envision a tragic twist ending akin to the original end of Army of Darkness, where the crisis is averted, but the main characters are thrust back in time to the age of Dinosaurs as a result.

Not this, but this picture is still awesome.

3: Mrs. Green (E.T. The Extra-terrestrial meets Tootsie)

An alien trying to phone home, and cross dressing. Okay, here's what I got. I see it as a CGI kids movie about a cuddly alien whose ship crashes in the backyard of a crabby old lady. He hides in her house for a while, watching her behavior and stealing her appliances to repair his ship, but eventually she sees the alien and instantly drops dead of a heart attack. Because he doesn't have everything he needs to fix his ship yet, he disguises himself as the old lady using her clothes, wig, and makeup, so he can appear human enough to gather the rest of the items he needs. He can't speak English, but has an uncanny ability to mimic sounds, and speaks using the various snippets he picked up from the old lady before she died, mostly consisting of her yelling at neighborhood kids. The main characters would be a group of kids who lose a ball in her yard ala The Sandlot, and discover the horrible, but still family friendly secret of Mrs. Green.

This, but, you know, Green

4: Gamer Girl (Tron meets Audition)

The story of a man sent into a videogame as living data, and the story of a seemingly sweet girlfriend revealed to be a sadistic torturess. I'm thinking sci-fi horror comedy for the gamer set, about a nerd who scores a date with the girl of his dreams, only to find that she's a killer with a very technologically sophisticated method of murder. She's built a machine in her basement game room that can send a person's consciousness into a computer game of her own design (a virtual reality system much like pretty much every movie from the 90's). She has constructed a virtual world to test the best videogame players she can find against her own abilities, hunting them mercilessly, and of course, if you die in the game, you die in real life.

This, but with sexy dismemberment

5: Space Age Monkey Love Song (Apollo 13 meets Babe)

I was originally thinking along the lines of fully anthropomorphic animals, basically humans with animal heads, in a space exploration setting, before I remembered that Babe actually wasn't like that, and that the animals, while capable of speech and human level thought were still animals in the context of their world, which also had people in it. Its probably kind of obvious, but I'm thinking do a Babe style story about a talking animal who finds himself, but set it amid the animal testing of space shuttles during the Cold War. You would play up the America Vs. Russia angle and have a sort of Romeo and Juliet love affair with two animalnauts from each side, who can only meet and express their love while alone together in space. You could make it accurate and have it be Ham the Chimp and Laika the Dog (a Zeus and Roxanne-esque interspecies romance), or just go the fictional route and make 'em both monkeys. The whole thing could end with a mad dash by all the other kooky astro-animals, trying to get the romantic duo back together, into motherfucking space.

This Thing!

Yeah, I'd watch that. Well, that's it for now, but stay tuned for more as soon as I get my dice rolling again.