Five Knock-Off Films That Just Don't Give A Damn

Most of the time, it feels like there isn't an original thought on the planet left to be had. You've no doubt, in your lifetime, heard countless songs that use the same chord patterns, or similar melodies; you've seen shows like CSI and NCIS and SVU all blur into a single mega-adventure of attractive people talking about DNA; and like three million people post internet threads daily that start with the words, "Am I the only one who..." when the answer is clearly, every single time, "No, no you are not; now, kindly remove yourself from my sightline, you sheltered cockwit", regardless of how that question ends.

But still, that doesn't mean we should stop trying altogether, right? But if that is the case, no one seems to have told the people who made these movies.

Or, more likely, someone did tell them, but as with everything else in their lives, they just didn't give a shit.

Chop Kick Panda

The truly shameful Chop Kick Panda is one of a glut of Disney/Pixar/DreamWorks rip-offs that popped up - somewhat surprisingly - on everyone's favourite, shadily accessed streaming movie service, Netflix, a couple of years ago. (Netflix merely distributed, not produced, the films.)

Not content with merely hosting a hollow shill of the already hollow animated Jack Black vehicle Kung Fu Panda (and not just one, either), Netflix went full Balinese street market with their animated feature range for a while there, dropping a slew of films with blatantly plagiarised concepts that included What's Up: Balloon To The Rescue!, The Little Cars (at least eight of them),The Frog Princess, Animals United (a Madagascar rip-off), and Tappy Toes, because imagination, effort and originality are for chumps.

Chop Kick Panda centres on Zibo (not Po), a janitor (not noodle-shop employee) in the panda and/or general anthropomorph kingdom. Not content with his mundane everyday life of mopping up monkey sweat and crane shit from the floor of his dojo, Zibo dreams of one day becoming a master of the martial arts (this part is exactly the same). Somehow, in a little more than 40 minutes, Zibo manages to achieve his dream of becoming a living weapon before facing off against the nefarious tiger (not snow leopard) who threatened his people's way of life, or his dojo, or whatever. I'll be honest - I didn't get all the way through it. I have a feeling that he probably wins, though.

Atlantic Rim is a very subtle homage to little-known machines-vs-monsters flick Pacific Rim that takes the themes of international focus, representation and co-operation championed by the latter film and star-spangled skullfucks them into an American-as-gun-toting-apple-pie cavalcade of massive things beating the living (or artificial) Christ out of each other in and around the general vicinity of the United States before the military ultimately wins and everyone retires to the bar for a round of victory tequila shots. I'm not kidding - that's how this movie ends. Not with the protagonists experiencing quiet reflection on an escape raft after narrowly getting out with their lives. Just out, getting hammered, because it's Tuesday. No big.

Probably the most tragic thing about Atlantic Rim - a production of notorious 'mockbuster' sausage factory The Asylum - is that relatively renowned Hollywood screen vet Graham Greene ended up in it as the clearly out-of-shape admiral in charge of humanity's last-ditch effort at survival. Keep in mind, this is the same man who was once nominated for an Academy Award for getting through making a very, very long film with Kevin Costner without committing murder-suicide.

 Another Asylum masterpiece, 2007's Transmorphers actually had the least ground to make up, quality-wise, between itself and the original, "superior" version. And yet, despite the low, low bar set for them by Bay and LeBeouf, The Asylum still decided to just turn in whatever happened to be left on the camera at the end of the day's shooting.

The linguists among you will notice, of course, that the word "Transmorphers" makes zero sense, which should give you a fairly accurate indication of precisely how much effort went into every other aspect of this film. Quick English lesson: the prefix "trans-" means "across", "beyond", or "changing thoroughly"; "Transformers" cross or change forms. That makes sense, as much as a movie about warring, sentient alien robots throwing down on Earth can make sense. But Transmorphers - "changing changers" - is total gibberish, and I kind of hate The Asylum for rolling with it when they could've gone with Multiformers or Roboshifters or Big Friendly Terminators.

Man, Lance Henriksen, what happened to you? One minute, you're playing a noble android in revolutionary action/sci-fi films alongside Sigourney Weaver and becoming one of the only two people in history to have been offed by an Alien, a Predator and a Terminator, and the next, you're here, with a script built on desperation and the insane whims of C. Thomas Howell, who made his film debut in ET and let his career just roll quietly downhill from there.

In this entirely unnecessary exploitation from - yes, I'm sorry, but they're responsible for so goddamn many of these - The Asylum, Howell's forensic anthropologist Michael Archer finds a series of clues (NOT A CODE) among the works of Leonardo Da Vinci that lead him on a trail to... well, you've been on Easter egg hunts. He's after treasure. It's in the title. But he finds "enlightenment", because Da Vinci was a Buddhist, I guess? Don't be weird about it. Either way, this movie sucks.

Boy, as far as insidious attempts to rob unwitting, kind of slow people of their money go, this one takes the cake. Unlike Netflix's similar mock-up Kiara The Brave, the packaging for Braver didn't even try to distinguish itself in any way from the Pixar original. They just went with the comparative form of the word "brave" and ripped off the poster so shamelessly that Derryn Hinch wouldn't even know how to begin to condemn it.

Brighton-based Brightspark Production Ltd, which was also responsible for similarly lazily titled Tangled sham Tangled Up, unsurprisingly ran into trouble with Disney/Pixar over the film, which is kind of insane because aside from the DVD cover and title, Braver has almost nothing in common with the international wallet-puncher. To begin with, it looks like this:

That's the film's protagonist, Princess Angela, who sometimes appears to be the world's tiniest human, most notably when she's standing next to her father, the King (unless he is just abnormally large). Unlike Brave, which benefited from a staff of skilled animators who knew how and had dedication enough to spend hours crafting individual locks of Merida's bouncy red hair in glorious HD 3D FutureVision, Braver appears to have been animated by kidnapped orphans who only used pencils for the first time six hours before marathoning out this entire movie in a day and a half.

It's still better than Transformers, though.