copycat horror/scifi films

[jefferiestubes8]

I know that in Canada they have Canadian musicians do cover versions of chart-topping American songs as it is required to have so much % of Canadian artists on Canadian radio.

Now I know they've done some remakes of American movies. Blatant rip offs.
One was a Canadian remake/ripoff of Armageddon & Deep Impact it was Supernova (2005, TV Movie) with the slightly different premise of the Sun is set to explode within a week.)


Virus (1999) -Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland

with was pretty much the same film 3 years later with ghosts:
Ghost Ship (2002) - Julianna Margulies

and now we have a 2010 deep-sea horror film Horror, Sci-Fi film The Rig which is a ripoff of the The Abyss meets the Alien movie franchise meets Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2004) but on a 3 million dollar budget.
see the trailer here.
This ripoff is complete with a hurricane and all. DVD Verdict's review of the DVD trashes it so bad with

it's a glorified student film

It is the dumbest, most lifeless horror film script ever put to digital video.

kudos to Anchor Bay's marketing department for duping me

I realize its cable tv outlets like SyFy that are willing to buy this stuff but isn't this ripoff so blatant it is some idea stealing scriptwriter issue that can stop this legally?

Yes bad movies will happen and marketing departments sell the films as being something else. They even fooled the reviewer at DVD Verdict with The Rig.

 

[sojourner]

Virus and Ghost Ship are totally unrelated.

 

[Pingfah]

Are you actually holding up Starship Troopers II as an example of an original film that has been copied?

There's not an original thought in the whole film to begin with.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

Are you actually holding up Starship Troopers II as an example of an original film that has been copied?

No not at all. I was only using the plot of STII as an example: trapped on a remote outpost fighting off aliens attacking them within the outpost just like Aliens (1986).

Look its a genre and I get that. I think it started with Alien (1979) where an alien is coming to attack the humans within a large complex/facility. Resident Evil (2002) has the same genre idea just not with aliens.

 

[Pingfah]

So what you are saying is that sometimes things that happen in films, happen in other films too.

 

[Greg Cox]

Are you actually holding up Starship Troopers II as an example of an original film that has been copied?

No not at all. I was only using the plot of STII as an example: trapped on a remote outpost fighting off aliens attacking them within the outpost just like Aliens (1986).

Look its a genre and I get that. I think it started with Alien (1979) where an alien is coming to attack the humans within a large complex/facility. Resident Evil (2002) has the same genre idea just not with aliens.

These are all very old ideas. Alien was inspired by classic sf films from the fifties like The Thing from Another World and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. And that's not even counting countless old war movies about outnumbered soldiers trapped in remote outposts like Zulu, Gunga Din, or The Lost Patrol . . ..

And, of course, ghost ships date back at least as far as the Flying Dutchman, the Marie Celeste, and Bram Stoker's ill-fated Demeter . . ..