Star Trek: First Contact (1996) – aka The Next Generation Movie That People Actually Like. In contrast to Generations, which was essentially a standard two-parter story with enough of a budget to hire William Shatner, this story took the demonstrably most dangerous foe from the series, the Borg, and then amped it up beyond what we’d already seen in “The Best of Both Worlds” and added a time-travel dimension to it. The personal struggle for Picard is also more authentic, with his long-buried PTSD at his Borgification coming to the fore. The action’s notably good for a TNG project.
“You told him about the statue?”
The Gambler (aka Kenny Rogers as The Gambler) (1980) – Based very, VERY loosely on Kenny Rogers’ signature song (in that there’s a gambler, played by Kenny, and a significant portion takes place on a train), this TV movie proves the perfect vehicle for Kenny’s first starring role, as a gambler maintains a poker face and doesn’t show much range of emotion. Also stars Bruce Boxleitner [double-checks, yep, I spelled it right] as a young wanna-be gambler with a worse poker face than Bill and Ted.
The Wasp Woman (1959) – Somehow I’d never seen this before, although I’d seen most of the “best” clips (“best” meaning shots of the unconvincing make-up and gloves for the wasp woman’s transformation). An aging model, the head of her own cosmetics company, experiments with the wasp equivalent of honeybees’ “royal jelly,” and demonstrates that just aging gracefully isn’t a bad option, all things considered.
Abandoned movies:
The Broken (2008) – It took forever for this movie even to feint at what the story was going to be. When it turned out to be “doppelganger comes through from other side of the mirror and raises hell,” I turned it off.
Hellriser (2017) – “Hey, let’s start the movie with a big expository dialogue scene between the vice detective and a new-to-this-town hooker about the guy who’s been killing hookers! Then we’ll immediately have that hooker get grabbed by the killer-guy, so I hope you weren’t emotionally invested!”
The City of Gold (2018) – No, no, no. You don’t START a Raiders of the Lost Ark-esque adventure flick with a deep dive into the protegonist’s resentment for his father (Christopher Atkins!). Save that until we actually like him.
Mutant Swinger From Mars (2009) – Smugly campy “lost” B-movie. So in love with its own conceit that I couldn’t even make it through the introductory material about the supposed auteur.
Of course, as Jonathan Frakes pointed out, that one’s worth seeing just for the “drunken Troi” scene. I think my favorite part, though, was watching Cochrane explain to Riker that he never actually started out to be a famous guy, and just wanted to invent something that would make him loads of money so he could retire to an island full of naked women somewhere. Though a lot of people involved in the making of the franchise have insisted Cochrane is not an expy for Gene Roddenberry, it’s hard not to see the parallels: guy starts up a schlocky TV show in hopes of making some quick cash (and having opportunities to hit on some of the attractive starlets on the set such as his girlfriend/eventual wife Majel Barret, for one), and accidentally creates a whole popular franchise that gives rise to a huge geeky fandom.
One wonders if Roddenberry ever came to second-guess himself, maybe to think that if someone had traveled back in time to tell him what he was going to achieve the way the crew did with Cochrane here, he might similarly freak out and try to run away from his future fandom too. I mean, look what fame and fortune and fandom have done to the likes of George Lucas, Joss Whedon, and Steven Spielberg, just to name a few. Live long enough, and you get to watch your fandom divide into starry-eyed idealists who believe you can do no wrong no matter what you do and jaded hecklers disappointed by your later works who are convinced your earlier success was just a fluke and you’ve actually been a no-talent hack all along; and all this headache when all you really wanted was to make a bunch of money and then retire to an island full of naked women somewhere far away from all these obnoxious geeks!
Kinda gives you a perspective on that one William Shatner “Get A Life” Saturday Night Live sketch which he later said in his memoirs was really done only half in jest.