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In the latest Going Mad, Madison takes a look at some books that are begging for movie adaptations.

10 Stories that Need To Be Movies

There is very little originality left in Hollywood; that’s a given. Week after week, we are inundated with remakes, sequels, direct-to-DVD sequels, prequels, spin-offs and adaptations of cartoons and television shows. Oddly, one unoriginal strategy in Movieland actually gets a little respect, and that’s when it comes to adapting literary works. Whether it’s the critical acclaim of adapting Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” into Apocalypse Now or even adapting (certain) comic books (Watchmen, History of Violence), there seems to be a line drawn somewhere in film sand that tells the audience that making a movie out of a book isn’t as cheap and lazy as making one out of a video game.

But despite hundreds of movies being made every year, there are still tons of books, stories and – yes – comics that are begging for their chance at the celluloid (well, digital now) screen. With that in mind, here are ten picks I’ve personally come up with that I’d like to see adapted into motion picture form.

10. “The Wolf’s Hour” by Robert R. McCammon

Published in 1989, “The Wolf’s Hour” is a taught and suspenseful World War II epic about a British secret agent who is sent to Nazi-occupied Paris to locate information about a possible new German super-weapon. The twist is that our hero, Michael Gallatan, can transform into a werewolf at will. Think about it for a second: Nazis versus werewolves. There just aren’t many concepts cooler than that. Throw in flashbacks to Michael’s life in Russia before he immigrated and how he became a lycanthrope, and you’re looking at franchise material here (might as well, it beats more Underworld sequels).

9. The Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison

How this series of books hasn’t been turned into a film yet baffles me (then again, the fact that Hollywood only gave Remo Williams and Doc Savage one shot each a long time ago baffles me as well). Almost like a humorous James Bond in space (if James Bond was a thieving bastard with an intergalactic police force comprised of ex-cons after him, that is), the SSR series is dying for the right people to take a crack at it.

8. New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln by Scott McCloud

McCloud’s 1998 graphic novel wasn’t very well-received at the time, but worth tracking down now, as it’s relevancy is even clearer in a post-Bush world. The storyline is fairly simple – a strange green-hued Honest Abe returns to modern-day Earth, but there’s something very odd about him that only a ten-year old boy who loves history can see.

7. Bone by Jeff Smith

Speaking of comic books, no series has lent itself to cinema more, it seems, than the critically-lauded Bone. What started out as a slightly-bent Disney-ish tale turned full-blown Lord of the Rings by the end. There has been plenty of talk over the years of making films or a television series out of the run, but until it actually happens, it’s staying on my list.

6. Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King

Not counting all of the amateur films based on his work, there have been no less than 70 films and television episodes based on King’s work. Seventy. And there’s at least a half-dozen more in some form of production as we speak. So why is it that 22 years after it was published, no one has attempted to make a film based on the book?  Written with the sole audience of his young daughter in mind, King’s tale of magic and kings has an entirely new audience -  those raised on Harry Potter – to lap it up.

5. Dust by Charles Pellegrino

A wonderfully gruesome little novel, Pellegrino’s Dust is horror at its most ecological. What would happen if one barely-noticed species went extinct suddenly? According to Chuck, who is an actual scientist, a chain reaction could start that would pretty much wipe out life as we know it in a very short amount of time. When something called fungus gnats die off, it seems inconsequential at the time, but soon…well, not so much. With the gnats gone, not only do the fungi this species lived on begin to grow uncontrollably, but those creatures that once preyed upon the gnats have to find new food sources. And up the food chain things go, as we’re treated to demises more unsettling than any zombie film.

4. The Mighty Thor by Walt Simonson

Simonson’s run as writer and penciler for Thor in the mid-1980s has yet to be equalled, all these years later. And as great as a lot of that run is (Frog Thor! Beta Ray Bill!) one arc in particular stands out among others as something just begging to be adapted into a huge Peter Jackson-ish epic: Ragnarok. You could even remove anything pertaining to Earth and humans (and by extention all the other superheroes and whatnot), leaving it just the Asgardians, with Thor and Odin taking on Surtur, and it would still be an awesome spectacle.

3. Dinosaurs Attack by Topps

Okay, I’m cheating here a bit, as Dinosaurs Attack! wasn’t a book or even a comic, but rather a trading card set based on the idea of repeating the legendary Mars Attacks! set. Still, what we have here is an idea that, if done right, could be amazingly violent. The concept behind the cards was that time portals started opening up across the globe, allowing very vicious and very hungry dinos to enter the modern world. There would be no cute little dino baby that tagged along with the good guy kids as they stopped the bloodless rampage. No, what we had here was every type of giant lizard you could think of going apeshit on humanity. Zombies are played out, it’s time to give another species or two a chance to taste man’s flesh.

2. anything by H.P. Lovecraft

I don’t care what it is, just make it and – and this is the important part, kids – make it FAITHFUL to the stories. We’ve seen dozens of movies claiming to be based on this man’s work, but the truth is almost none of them do anything but take the barest bones of the plot, if that even, and slap his name above the title of low-budget crapfests. I don’t care about how his monsters are so monstrous that they couldn’t be given life on a movie screen – that’s bull to me. There’s got to be someone out there that can take The Colour Out of Space or Call of Cthulhu and turn it into something even grumpy ol’ HPL would be proud of.

1. Bunnicula by James and Deborah Howe

Yeah, there was a lame cartoon special in the 1970s based on the first book in this series, but it doesn’t count to me. For those unfamiliar with this character and series, it’s based around a mild-mannered bunny named Bunnicula (named so by his owners after finding him at a theater that was showing Dracula). However, Harold the dog and Chester the cat aren’t so sure that the new rabbit is all it seems to be and become convinced it’s a vampire. Funny and spooky at the same time, it’s the sort of kids book that I dearly miss in this day and age of Captain Underpants and books about butts going psycho.