Fun with Movie Titles

Spend enough time in a video store in Japan, and you'll notice that the names for American movies can be very different from their familiar US titles. Most often the English title is just written phonetically in Japanese, although it is sometimes shortened or modified to be easier to understand. For example, the Tom Clancy thriller The Sum of All Fears doesn't really roll off the tongue in Japanese, so it was changed to "Total Fears." Similarly, John Travolta's Domestic Disturbance sounded better to Japanese ears as "Domestic Fear." And the Harrison Ford / Brad Pitt IRA drama The Devil's Own simply became "Devil."

Denzel Washington's 2003 action film Out of Time was called "Time Limit" here, but apparently nothing was wrong with the name itself because "Out of Time" is what they're calling the new Wesley Snipes action film Hard Luck (which also goes by the name Nine Lives, just to make things more confusing).

Last year's airline thriller Red Eye was released in Japan as "Panic Flight." A shameless attempt to ride the coat-tails of Jodie Foster's Panic Room? The Japanese distributors of Flightplan must have been furious.

The strangest one I've seen recently is the Broken Lizard slasher-comedy Club Dread. In Japanese they dropped the pun for the generic "Mystery Tour," and the packaging gives no indication that the film is a comedy. Not that I found it terribly funny, but anyone looking for a serious horror film is likely to be even more disappointed.

For the 2002 film Like Mike someone got clever and came up with their own pun - "Dribble X." Bonus points for synergizing a crappy sports-comedy franchise with a crappy action movie franchise.

Other classic examples include the Ralph Macchio Karate Kid series, which was known here as "Best Kid."

And the 1991 Keanu Reeves / Patrick Swayze undercover surf-cop drama Point Break, which was cryptically named "Heart Blue."

But my all-time favorite still has to be the 1987 Shelley Long / Bette Midler "comedy" Outrageous Fortune. Nothing fancy, just good old-fashioned truth in advertising. The Japanese title, "うるさい女たち," translates as "The Annoying Women."