Novel, Film, and Theater Hybrids

Gentle Ben Hur

Thrill to the heartwarming saga of a 600 lb. brown bear who befriends a lonely young boy, wins a chariot race, and witnesses the crucifixion of Christ.

50 Shades of Grey Poupon

Do you really need to know what Col. Mustard wants to do with that candlestick, and where and to whom he wants to do it? I didn’t think so.–Tom Hartley

Twilight: Breaking Bad

Boring, morose teenagers take all the fun out of selling drugs.–Tom Hartley

Going Clear on a Day You Can See Forever

To the surprise of no one, Barbra Streisand learns that in a past life she was an evil galactic overlord.–Tom Hartley

Manos, The Handmaid’s Tale

In the future women will be subject to cruel mockery by a guy in an orange jumpsuit and his adorable robot companions.–Tom Hartley

The Art of the Deal of the Fugue

A composer in the early stages of dementia sets out to make music great again with his endless variations on “Deutschland Über Alles”.–Tom Hartley

Amelie, The Wrath of God

A whimsical gamine goes berserk on the Amazon.

A Brief History of Time Bandits

A brilliant disquisition on cosmology founders hilariously when six dwarves spill out of a black hole.

The Earrings of Madame Da Funk

African-American history from slavery until modern times is reenacted by metaphorical jewelry.

Chloe in the Dog Day Afternoon

A lawyer ponders infidelity with a hostage.

Little Women Who Run With the Wolves

…try valiantly but can’t keep up, which is probably just as well.

Suddenly Last Summa Theologica

The prolonged agony and hideous death of an effete young man at the hands of ravenous street urchins brilliantly sums up all that can be understood of Christian theology.

The Runaway Bunny Jury

Desperate jurors avoid being profiled by ingeniously disguising themselves as birds, flowers, boats, rocks, and fish.

The Scarsdale Diet of Worms

Drastic weight loss through unrecanted heresy.

Call of the Wild Duck

A plucky dog survives life in the frozen Klondike with the help of a symbolic duck.

Old Man Riverdance

Paul Robeson is kicked to death by stampeding robots.

The Best of Mr. and Mrs. Bridges of Madison County

A conventional Midwestern housewife married to an emotionally distant and even more conventional husband writes to a no-nonsense advice columnist asking what she should do about her affair with a charismatic photographer who sees her inner soul and finds her G-spot. P.S. She’s lying about the sex.–Amy Culbertson

Middlemarch of the Penguins

Dorthea’s already unpleasant marriage to the elderly Rev. Casaubon grows even more dreary when she must trudge seventy miles through Antarctic blizzards to the sea, fleeing hungry predators, while Casaubon sits on an egg. —Jamie McCrabby

Gulliver’s Travels With My Aunt

The Lilliputians have nothing on Aunt Augusta. A young traveller is traumatized by strange lands and even stranger relatives. —Jamie McCrabby  

Picture of Dorian Gray’s Anatomy

No comment.–Tom Hartley

Amerikan Pie

On the morning of the day the music dies, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper awaken from uneasy dreams to find themselves transformed into giant insects.–Tom Hartley

The Beast Who Shouted, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”

Tina’s new boyfriend, Harlan, doesn’t beat her or make her take drugs, but he does make her listen to his wild rants about a bleak, post-apocalyptic future populated by talking dogs and implacable ticktockmen, and ruled by a sadistic, all-powerful, sentient computer whose greatest joy is savaging Harlan’s brilliant television scripts with dumb rewrites.–Tom Hartley

Bride of Frankenstein’s Head Revisited

Charles Ryder’s plans to divorce his wife and marry his beloved Julia suffer a setback when Julia is beheaded in a freak wainscotting accident. Fortunately, Julia’s brother, Sebastian, knows a doctor in Austria who can set things right.–Tom Hartley

Of Mighty Mice and X-Men

A retarded super-hero saves a petting zoo from alien attack.Tom Hartley

Deliverance of Things Past

Some hunters get lost in the woods and are rescued by rednecks who torture the hunters with lengthy, obsessively detailed accounts of their unhappy childhoods.Tom Hartley

Lord of the Rings of the Nibelung

Hobbits sing themselves to death.Tom Hartley

The Bell Jarhead

We are at war with terrorism, racism, and  clinically depressed adolescents.

Gone  With the Windows for Dummies

Starting the Civil War; Customizing Your Decimated Plantation; That Scary General Sherman.

The Martian Chronicles of Narnia

The  Lion, the Witch, and Ylla K.

Thus Spake Zoolander

Declaring that God is dead in an interview with Oprah is not a good career move for Ben Stiller.–Tom Hartley

20,000 Bottles of Beer Under the Sea

Al Gore attempts to befriend a giant squid.   A struggle ensues.

Beast in the Jungle Book

On his deathbed, Mowgli is horrified to realize that he has wasted his entire life in the damn jungle.

National Blue Velvet

Dennis Hopper does something unspeakable with Elizabeth Taylor’s ear.

Jurassic Mansfield Park

Fanny and Edmund avert their eyes while Mary and Henry Crawford are slaughtered by velociraptors.

Hey Jude the Obscure

Take a sad song and make it into a tale of deception, despair, and dead babies. Stephen Meyer

The Incredible Lightness of Being There

Turns out Chance makes as much sense in Czech as he does in English.   Daniel Day-Lewis would give his left foot to be in this one.Stephen Meyer

Guarding Tess of the D’Urbervilles

A cynical secret service agent is puzzled by his assignment.   Which  former occupant of the White House  was married to a smoking hot young foreign babe?    There was that Teresa Heinz Kerry, but wasn’t she like eighty, and isn’t her husband still alive?   And not the president?Stephen Meyer

A Room With a View to a Kill

A shocking stabbing in a sun-soaked Tuscan piazza is only the beginning of a tangled web of international intrigue and murder that leaves two repressed English spinsters wishing they’d never crossed the Channel (thank God there’ll never be a bridge or tunnel to make it easier for those nasty foreigners to despoil England’s green and pleasant land!)Stephen Meyer

For Your Eyes Wide Shut Only

The latest Bond girl is suitably kinky but she towers over the diminutive double-o, even without heels.   After an exhaustive and scientifologically-conducted search, a suitable replacement is found: a gal who knows how to slouch and, more importantly, when to keep her mouth shut.Stephen Meyer

The Mayor of Casterbridge on the River Kwai

Provincial English politician and obsessed Japanese war criminal form unlikely duo in this quirky buddy road pic;   traveling around Southeast Asia solving crimes and undertaking local infrastructure projects, their bond deepens as they learn important life lessons, about each other and, more importantly, themselves.Stephen Meyer

The Little Old Curiosity Shop of Horrors

Tourists searching out knicknacks and antiques enter a quaint souvenir store BUT THEY DON”T COME OUT!!!   Audrey Tautou plays one of the hapless customers and no one is sorry when she vanishes.Stephen Meyer

Maggie Simpson: A Girl of the Streets

After her flighty  father loses his job at the nuclear power plant, the poor little four-fingered waif is forced to fend for herself on the lower east side of Springfield;   at first johns find her inability to speak alluring, but eventually booze, drugs and std’s take their toll and she is found dead in the alley behind the comicbook guy’s shop.Stephen Meyer

How Green Was My Valley of the Dolls

A remote Welsh mining town is turned topsy-turvy by the arrival of a flock of boozy, pill-popping scantily-clad Hollywood starlets, there to film a steamy sub-B bodice-ripper;   many of the devout teetotal locals are so scandalized they disappear down the coal pits, never to be seen again.Stephen Meyer

Lilies of the Field of Dreams

Horrified nuns at first blame their black handyman when ghostly ballplayers show up at the convent;   turns out to be the work of an over-hyped would-be auteur who got lost on his way to Iowa.   “Is this all a $150 million budget buys these days?” gripes one of the sisters; “that Durham Bulls cap SO does not hide the bald spot” snarls another; “it’s his waterworld, we just live in it” muses the Mother Superior.–Stephen Meyer

Stuart Little Dorrit

The denizens of the Marshalsea can’t sleep a wink after the mysterious appearance of a hyperactive mouse in a tiny mechanized sportscar.  “Oh dear,” frets LD,  “if only  I had a morsel of cheddar to bait a trap….oh, that’s right, if I could afford some cheese, I probably wouldn’t be living in a freakin’ debtors’ prison!!!”–Stephen Meyer

Melvin and Howard the Duck

The budding relationship between a reclusive billionaire and a dimwittted  milkman is tested by the arrival of a space alien  in the guise of  a foul-mouthed fowl.    The paranoid scizophrenic  creator  of the Spruce Goose doesn’t bat an eye at the sight of a talking man-sized duck, but poor Melvin never recovers from the shock an descends into a life of check kiting and forging wills.–Stephen Meyer

Patch Addams Family Values

A jolly clown nose-sporting pediatrician stops by to cheer up poor Puggsley, laid up  as the result of  another guillotine mishap.   After Lurch and Fester ply the doc with some of grandmama’s cauldron brew and take him down to the playroom for his date with the Spanish maiden, let’s just say this MD won’t be making house calls any more.–Stephen Meyer

Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot the Piano Player

A dimwitted cop meets a timid musician with a mysterious past, and together they push Estelle Getty out a window.

No One Writes to the Colonel Mustard

A colonel attends the funeral of a local musician who was the first to die of natural causes in several years, unlike the host of the funeral who dies of blunt force trauma after being knocked over the head by a candlestick in the parlor.–Garrett Nichols

Arms and the Man Who Came to Dinner

Hollywood actor runs weapons for PETA.–Tess Link

Return of the Native Son

Determined to see the world, an English country girl has her skin cosmetically darkened and embarks on a career as a jazz singer.–Tess Link

How Green Was My Valley of the Dolls

A singing Welsh family migrates to Hollywood hoping to make it big, but instead get caught
in a maelstrom of sex, drugs, and Patty Duke re-runs.–Tess Link

Of Humane Bondage

A Handbook of Painless S and M.–The Boss

The Incredible Lightness of Being John Malkovich

Years ago, in Czechoslovakia, a portal opens into the mind of John Malkovich but no one cares enough to enter.–J.N. Barkin