From The Idea Hole: This Meets That, Part Four (Centaurs, Poachers, Mermaids, Fairy Cops, and Royal Lotharios)

Okay, here’s the thing. I came up with this weird way of coming up with movie ideas, where I combine two movies at random and try to think of an original idea incorporating the themes of both. We’ve played it on my podcast a few times, and it has always been successful, so I decided to play it by myself and start posting the results on this blog. The last time I posted one, I kind of accidentally came upon a theme, so I decided that from then on, I’d try to follow suit with similar pitches in each post. Being an obsessive completest, I’ve since developed several weeks worth of pitch categories, and I have to stop myself arbitrarily before I go insane. In that spirit, here’s the next one, focusing on a topic near and dear to my heart – Fairy Tales.

1: Fairy Tails – Repo Men meets The Spiderwick Chronicles

First up, a pitch I tried out on a recent episode of my podcast focused on fantasy concepts. It takes the idea of mercenary organ harvesters from Repo Men and the idea of a catalog or field manual of fantasy creatures from The Spiderwick Chronicles. I actually envision this more as a TV show or a comic book than a movie in order to articulate its full potential, but the basic concept would follow a team of rough and tumble poachers who specialize in fairy tale creatures. Each week they would track down a new monster based on a famous fairy tale in order to sell it or a piece of it to their boss, the owner of a curio shop who extracts and re-sells elements of them for various purposes (ground up unicorn horn sold as an aphrodisiac, or fairy wings as a cure for erectile dysfunction, etc). Each week we’d presumably have the mission, with a lot of banter and difficulty, and then we’d go back to the shop to find out the ultimate use for the product, which will often seem ridiculous in light of all the effort exerted to procure it.

2: Mervengence! – The Little Mermaid meets I Spit On Your Grave

This one is a bit in bad taste, even for me, but then again so is one of the movies I’m referencing. Rape, even in the context of a fictional narrative, is always an uncomfortable subject to deal with, but when this combination came up, I couldn’t resist the potential I saw in twisting the Little Mermaid premise into a dark tale of abuse and revenge. It would start out with the most sweeping, hopeful tone possible as a beautiful young mermaid sings about all the things she wants to see out of the water, getting closer and closer to meeting the strange men she sees from below. When she gets there, far from meeting her prince, she finds the type of gross and despicable pirates you would realistically see in the ocean in a medieval fantasy setting, and upon seeing this beautiful woman, they do exactly what you would expect they would. She is raped, tortured, and discarded, and proceeds to seek out the old sea witch to get her a pair of legs, not to find love, but to seek retribution against her attackers. I envision her getting all of her sea friends in on the action, sending dick snipping crabs, anal electric eels, and amorous Blue Whales (the creature with the largest penis on the planet) to turn the tables on the sexual sadist.

3: Grimm PD – Alien Nation meets The Brothers Grimm

Couldn't find an image, but remember C.O.P.S.? That was a cool show.

I like this idea, except for the fact that its probably a little too similar to another one already in production, specifically the comic book series Fables. Then again, if ABC can steal the idea of Fables and Disneyfy the crap out of it for Once Upon A Time, why can’t I try to turn it into something better? My version takes the same setting of fairy tale creatures in a modern world, except here they don’t live in secret. Modern day humans live alongside magical beings as if they were completely common place, finding them incorporated into all facets of every day life, including for the purposes of the film or series, law enforcement. A la Alien Nation, we have a buddy cop set up with a prejudiced human and a good natured fantasy creature, taking on the unique kind of crime that would result from a merging of these two vastly different worlds, with the human world exploiting the world of fairy tales and vice versa. As for what fairy tale creature the partner would be, it would be easy to make him a werewolf style Big Bad Wolf, but also too similar to Fables. I’m leaning towards an adult sized living wooden doll reminiscent of Pinocchio, incorporating the cursed physical changes brought about by lying and giving him a weakness that also informs a commitment to stalwart law and order.

4: Hoof Beats – Chariots Of Fire meets The Leprechaun

Okay, this one is just kinda stupid, but I’ve tried to commit myself to rolling with the random selections I get, so I’ve gotta go with it. We’ve got a movie I’ve never seen about what I believe are the trials and tribulations of Olympic runners, and a movie series I genuinely love about a fairy tale creature dealing with the modern world in the only way he knows how (which in his case happens to involve murder). I’m ditching the leprechaun and instead using the general conceit of a fantasy creature, changing it to one more suitable to the sport in question, namely, a Centaur, who has dreamed of Olympic gold ever since the original Olympics in Ancient Greece. He gets the courage to come out of the closet and reveal himself to the world for what he is, only to meet prejudice and scorn as he must fight for his right to compete against the dual arguments that he has too much of an advantage racing with humans given his horse body, and that he is more horse than human, and thus should try racing in the Kentucky Derby instead. Yeah, sorry, even I think this one’s lame.

5: Prince Charming – Cinderella meets Heartbreakers

And finally, one that I like, but that I think might have limited potential as a movie, let alone a series. I’m actually kind of stealing from myself, as the main conceit of this one is taken from the fairy tale pilot I wrote last year called The Huntsmen (or rather the show bible I wrote for it, as it would be an element introduced later in the series). Basically, we take the idea of Prince Charming, and the fact that it seems like there is more than one of them, showing up in multiple fairy tales, and posit that instead of one character, there are several, all brothers in the same family, attempting to take over the various empires of the world through intermarrying into them. They are a family of handsome con artists forcing their way into the famous fairy tale stories we know, romancing princesses into giving them their money and royal title. Inevitably we would follow our main character, a Charming who starts out as selfish and conceded as them all, until he makes the mistake of falling in love with the woman he’s been tasked with bamboozling, and when he tries to get out of the grand scheme without revealing his true self to the woman he loves, he runs afoul of his brothers, who all come calling to figure out what’s taking him so long, and upon finding out the problem, try to sabotage him.

Well, that’s it for now. Damn, is that Heartbreakers poster not the most fucked up example of photoshop you've ever seen for a mainstream movie? Anyway, see you next time for my takes on several Sword and Sorcery Epics. Or maybe more Nazisploitation, I haven't decided yet. And then like 12 other ones, with more spilling out of my face every day.