Backward Two

So now I'm stuck on the backward movie thing.

First a quick note to my friends and confidants: I promise not to get as exasperating with this as I was with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (though I still think going from The Electric Company to Bacon and back with no repeats was a genuinely impressive feat).

If you watch a Godzilla movie backward, giant monsters help out with massive urban renewal projects.

If you watch Psycho backward, the hero puts on gender-appropriate clothing, saves a woman from a swamp, helps her shower off and sends her on her way. Grateful for her good fortune, she gives an envelope of money to her boss.

If you watch The Shining backward, Jack Nicholson gets progressively saner and saner until eventually he gets fired from his job as crazy caretaker of a haunted hotel.

If you watch Armageddon backward, Bruce Willis heads a team of rock-building experts who waste millions of dollars putting together a giant meteor just to fling it into deep space.

Someone else already did The Godfather, so I'll do Part Two: Michael's family returns, and decades earlier his dad gives up a life of crime to pursue a career as a grocery clerk.

If you watch Lethal Weapon backward, it's a movie about a couple of cops who start the picture as buddies but gradually come to loathe each other. In the end one goes crazy, the other plans retirement, and a semi-nude woman makes an impressive jump from a broken car all the way up to a penthouse balcony.

If you watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom backward, the "hero" steals a magic stone from some villagers and drags all their children off to work as slaves in a mine. But at least if you're watching the whole series backward the next one will be much better.

And if you watch Frankenstein backward, it's about a doctor who kills his only patient (apparently by electrocuting him), cuts him up, sticks his parts onto other corpses and then buries them.