20 Misleading Movie Titles

Whip It

Sounds Like: A documentary about the history of S&M.

Honey, I Blew Up The Kid

Sounds Like: A rubbernecking, made-for-TV docudrama gleaned from the horrifyingly breezy diary entries of a dead-eyed infanticidal terrorist.

Chariots Of Fire

Sounds Like: The most pant-tighteningly awesome film Ray Harryhausen never animated, crammed to the toga-tops with belching hell-lizards, winged racing carts and blazing skirmishes with chillingly rheumatic armies of the undead.

Killing Zoe

Sounds Like: A skewed black comedy that comes off like a tasteless mash-up of Groundhog Day and Death Becomes Her, in which a murderous husband pays the ultimate price for bumping off his wife - having to do it again and again, only to see her breeze back in and resume criticising his taste in pullovers every single time.

Quills

Sounds Like: The ideal film to take your mum to see on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, because it's got old things in the title. Maybe it's got something to do with the Antiques Roadshow.

Naked Lunch

Sounds Like: Peversely, exactly the sort of film you wouldn't take your mum with you to see. More the sort of thing you'd make a point of sitting down to watch alone, and most probably not at lunchtime. Unless you work nights.

Metalstorm: The Destruction Of Jared-Syn

Sounds Like: An unbelievably awesome movie, in which a futuristic bad dude - called Jared-Syn, a name deserving of destruction if ever we heard one - gets well destructified. By a big cloud of heavy metal music. Yeah!

Fargo

Sounds Like: It should be set, at least for a significant or prolonged chunk of its duration, in or around Fargo, North Dakota.

When In Fact: It isn't. Jerry Lundegaard (William H Macy) lives and works in Minneapolis, where his wife is snatched by kidnappers who drive through Brainerd, Minnesota as cop Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) picks up their trail. They hide out in nearby Moose Lake, and Jerry is finally arrested near Bismarck, ND. Fargo itself 'appears' in just one proper shot - a shot that wasn't actually filmed there.

Million Dollar Baby

Sounds Like: A profoundly horrible comedy involving a scratchcard-winning toddler. Probably one with CGI eyebrows, so it can pull faces to camera despite the fact that nobody else in the scene is aware of the audience. Gah.

Back To The Future Part II

Sounds Like: It might actually involve Marty trying to get, y'know, back to the future...like what he did in the first one, an' that.

When In Fact: He leaps forwards in time, then tries to get back to the present. And then realises he has to go back to the past. And then comes back to the future. For a bit. Because then he has to go way back in time for Part III to start shooting. Not that we give a crap - in place of titular accuracy, we got hoverboards and a freakin' FLYING DELOREAN. In fact, we've found it hard to care about anything since.

The Cider House Rules

Sounds Like: Some ghastly strain of US college 'comedy'. Possibly centred on a group of whooping, date-rapey Alpha Kappa Phi fratboys who for no real reason descend on a small village in Somerset. Hilarity (and beard-growth and puking) ensues.

How To Make An American Quilt

Sounds Like: The sort of thing they made us watch during rainy school lunchtimes, in order to grind any residual naive cheer that bit harder into the icy dining room linoleum.

Free Willy

Sounds Like: We just came bottom of the class in Acting Our Age Studies.

Jurassic Park

Sounds Like: Alright then, so all that Free Willy pointing and giggling was lowbrow, even for us. Time to make amends - and luckily for us, Jurassic Park sounds like a film that might know what it's on about, scientifically speaking. Well, at least if we agree to ignore all that patently ludicrous 'bugs trapped in amber' horse poo.

The Human Stain

Sounds Like: Something a sweaty coach tourist might be caught frantically trying to scrub out of their undercrackers during a restroom stop in an off-colour Farrelly brothers misfire.

Courage Of Lassie

Sounds Like: It might have a certain glossy-coated TV pooch in it. One who's really good at sensing immediately when the local idiot child becomes stuck down a remote disused mine shaft, and working out the quickest route to rescue him without so much as a cursory glance at Google Maps.

Monster's Ball

Sounds Like: We'd like to say a masquerade party held in the underworld, but predictably enough that isn't quite where our minds went first. We jumped straight to tentacled testiculars, and for that we make no apologies. Apart from this one. Sorry.

Brazil

Sounds Like: A sense-overloading carnival documentary with added cocaine peddling, favela-based gun play, and being impoosibly brilliant at football despite (or possibly because of) only ever having kicked around on a nudey beach outside of the World Cup. All aspects of which may contain generous traces of lazy stereotype.

When In Fact: The only reference to Brazil in Terry Gilliam's entire dystopian nightmare adventure is made in the recurring musical motif. Aquarela do Brasil , or 'Watercolour Of Brasil', is a tune made famous in 1939 by composer, football commentator and all-round freaky polymath Ary Barroso - Gilliam's tortured souls frequently hum snatches of the movie's de facto theme as a much-needed method of escapism.

The Constant Gardener

Sounds Like: A harrowing biopic of a flora-obsessed OCD sufferer, compelled by forces beyond his control to till the soil until his fingers really do go green. Gan grene, that is.

The Last Mimzy

Sounds Like: A needlessly offensive reimagining of Children Of Men .