   |
|
meets Verb: e.g., “A Perfect Murder” (1998) is a film in which “Dial M for Murder” (1954) meets “Wall Street” (1987). Adjective: e.g., “A Perfect Murder” is a meets movie. Definition: Verb: To meld the plots and/or iconic characters of two or more successful movies.. Adjective: A movie that melds the plots and/or iconic characters of two or more successful movies usually of different genres. History: The term originated with the 1940s Universal films “Abbott & Costello meet Frankenstein,” (1948), “Abbott & Costello meet the Mummy,” (1955), etc. It meant a movie that combines iconic characters of different genres. The definition would expand to include combining plots of different movies—so much so that meets was satirized in the movie “The Player” (1992) by characters pitching movie ideas such as “’Out of Africa’ meets ‘Pretty Woman’” and “’Ghost’ meets ‘The Manchurian Candidate.’”
A more recent meets film is “Identity” (2003), in which “And Then There Were None” (1945) meets “American Psycho” (2000). Here 10 people are stranded by a storm at a motel, where an unknown killer begins murdering them one by one. However, we finally learn that all 10 people are personalities in the mind of a lunatic suffering from dissociative identity disorder and that the killings were only a delusion.
|
An early example is the “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977), a movie that has been described as “’From Russia With Love’ meets ‘Silver Streak.’” In “Silver Streak” (1976), Gene Wilder becomes entangled with criminals while traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago to attend his sister’s wedding. Attempts to kill Wilder cause him to eject from the speeding train three times only to surprise the criminals by reappearing. In one scene, Wilder is pursued by thug Richard Kiel to the top of the train, where Wilder kills Kiel with a spear gun, then is carried off the train by an overhanging signal pole. In “The Spy Who Loved Me,” Kiel again is a thug, this time pursuing James Bond. However, it is Kiel, not Bond, who is repeatedly presumed dispatched—first by being buried in a crashed van, next by being thrown from a speeding train, and finally by crashing through the roof of house in a car—only to reappear to the surprise of Bond.