>>>>"Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter" is based on a book of the same name. Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but my husband enjoyed the book.
>>>>
>>>>"Cowboys and Aliens" was actually a fun movie, assuming you went into it with no preconceptions.
>>>
>>>That's a high requirement. I tried, for a brief moment, to pretend that I never saw a cowboy movie or that branch of SF flick where they have rubber stuff over their faces.
>>
>>(shrug) I don't think you need to go that far but, as an example, when the latest Godzilla came out people were screaming "That's not Godzilla" because it wasn't a guy in a rubber suit. My husband and I went to see a movie about an irradiated lizard that grew to huge size and tore the living crap out of Manhattan, and that's exactly the movie we saw.
>>
>>We often will rent movies on the 'how bad can it be?' scale (based on critics). Only two, "Inspector Gadget" and the second "Zorro" have been truly that bad.
>>
>>There again, there have been many movies that the critics hated yet the public has liked. Almost to a man, critics panned "John Carter", yet almost every person who went see the movie and wrote on-line about it had almost the same thing to say: "We don't know what movie the critics saw, but it wasn't the one we saw".
>
>My dad took my daughters to "Inspector Gadget" one year when they went to Maine a few days ahead of my wife and me. "You owe me," he said.
>
>I had to look up "John Carter." From the trailer it does not look like my cup of tea but I won't diss it without having seen it.


Hopefully, neither your father nor your daughters were too horribly scarred from "Inspector Gadget". I think I made about 10 minutes of the movie before I said "Oh, HECK no!" and walked away.

"John Carter" is based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs "John Carter of Mars" series of stories.