Alarmingly Long Movie Title Raises Eyebrows, Doubts

Posted by Josh Radde (josh@filmschoolrejects.com) on March 26, 2008

Some movie titles are just too long. Peter over at /Film just told us about Warner Bros. closing in on a deal to turn Josh Lieb’s upcoming novel I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President into a film with McG on as producer. The film, about a rich boy running for middle-school class president and meanwhile staging a political coup de tat in Central America, does not have a director attached just yet.

Now, I know the titles of films can sometimes be pretty long, but when you compare the number of letters in this title to the number of letters in the principal producer’s name you get a 57:3 ratio (or a 19:1 ratio). That’s just too many letters. There’s not even punctuation in there to separate a main title from a subtitle. What are people going to call this movie? We mainly called Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan just Borat and refer to Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as Dr. Strangelove. But what do we say when we refer to this film? Genius of Unspeakable Evil? Class President? Untitled McG Project?

The story sounds fun enough but I think people are going to start yawning by the time they read that title during the opening credits. Alas, here are my Top 5 Favorite Long-winded Titles*:

5. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1967)

4. Long Strange Trip, or The Writer, the Naked Girl, and the Guy with a Hole in His Head (1999)

3. Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D (1991)

2. The Man with the Smallest Penis in Existence and the Electron Microscope Technician Who Loved Him (2003)

And the granddaddy of all film titles . . .

1. I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney (1993)

* I’ve avoided using films from the early 1900’s where the shorts didn’t really have titles, they were just descriptions of what happens in the film, such as Another Demonstration of the Cliff-Guibert Fire Horse Reel, Showing a Young Girl Coming from an Office, Detaching Hose, Running with It 60 Feet, and Playing a Stream, All Inside of 30 Seconds (1900)

Sound Off: What do you think of this film’s title? Additionally, what would be the long-winded title to the film biography of your life?