If you dabble in the movie reviewing business long enough, you’re bound to formulate a few opinions that are, shall we say, not quite Geek Orthodox. Today we’ve asked our staff to share their cinematic hot takes that are sure to rankle a few thin-skinned souls:

Sitting Duck: If you were to listen to the average Cowboy Bebop fan, you’d think that the Spike/Vicious/Julia backstory and the five episodes that focus on it possess some of the most brilliant storytelling ever committed to animation cels. And I don’t get it. At all. “Blah,” “uninspired,” and “occasionally cliché” are phrases that more readily come to mind.

I imagine part of it is that, of the core characters, Spike is my least favorite. (To head off any flame responses, I don’t hate Spike. It’s just that if I were to rank the characters in order of preference, he would come in last.) The other is that Vicious is a one-dimensional thug who just happens to wear a sharp suit and carries a cool sword. Except calling him that is an insult to other one-dimensional thugs, who put in a lot of hard work to develop their singular dimensions. The fact that Vicious and Julia were listed as appearing in all ten episodes of the live action series further discouraged me from renewing my Netflix subscription.

At the last Christmas gathering, I asked my brother-in-law (who introduced me to Cowboy Bebop) what the big deal was. But apparently it mystifies him just as much as it does me. While it’s nice to know that I’m not alone in my opinion, it doesn’t help in aiding me in comprehending this inexplicable phenomenon.

Now for something that’ll chafe some hinders, but it needs to be said. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is a soulless husk that just happens to have a nice paint job. While the visuals may be eyepopping and individual scenes are hilarious, it proves to be less than the sum of its parts, forming into what amounts to a Chinatown knockoff.

In a What Might Have Been? scenario, sometimes I like to imagine how it could have been a more faithful adaptation of the book. That’s right, this had originally been a book. Though the only things retained were some character names and one line of dialogue. For instance, Eddie’s hostility towards Toons came not from a tragic past but garden variety bigotry. I’ll acknowledge how this might have been too much for moviegoers of the day to swallow, and such a film would not have been a box office smash. But it was unique and deserved to have its story told.

Forget it, Eddie, it’s Toontown.

Al: The Harry Potter movies are bad adaptations, and the problems go waaaaay beyond “DIDJA PUT YA NAME IN THE GOBLET OF FIYAH?” All of eight of them are boring, badly paced, and poorly acted. Different installments do a better or worse job of explaining the plot, but NONE ever capture what makes the books compelling and what gets people excited about the world. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is also a pretty poor film, but it has more magic and whimsy in ten minutes than HP managed to fit into 16+ hours. It’s a shame that a world as bright and vibrant as HP is still trapped 15 years later in the narrow vision of that film franchise.

Also, I think Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is wildly underrated. I missed 100% of the subtext when I was younger, but I feel like it was a surprising, bold way to sequelize the original movie. I care about these characters more than probably any other Nightmare cast. I love that Freddy is still trying to be scary. Remove your expectations of what a Nightmare film is “supposed to be,” and I think it holds up as a really strong entry.

Justin: I seem to greatly like many franchise sequels that are roundly dismissed and spat upon as disappointing failures or franchise black sheep. RoboCop 2? Batman Returns? Predator 2 (or The Predator, for that matter)? Temple of Doom? Ghostbusters 2? Alien Covenant? Terminator Dark Fate? Yeah, I unironically dig them. They’re not perfect, but I get pretty cranky how pop culture has judged them unworthy entries and only fit for mockery and scorn.

I think a lot of the derision comes from people upset that some of these movies dared to be different in some way, shape, or form instead of slavishly copying the original. So I’ll be over having fun while the internet tells me I’m a fool for liking such things.

On the negative side of the opinion spectrum, I think James Cameron’s Avatar series is an incredible waste of talent and hype. It’s empty, pandering eye candy that left no real cultural footprint, and it should move aside for far more creative and imaginative scifi movies. You know, like the ones he USED to make.

Anthony: Well, my most unpopular opinion overall all is that horse meat is flippin’ delicious, but I don’t eat red meat anymore (doesn’t agree with my blood pressure) so you can all stop doing whatever that gesture you just did was supposed to mean. However, my unpopular MOVIE opinion: Raiders of the Lost Ark is highly overrated, and not that enjoyable a movie.

And I say that as someone who watched it back in the early 1980s, before Arnold started promising to come back and Danny Glover kept declaring himself too old. I always understood it was meant to be an homage to B-movies of the 1950s by being a B-movie, but I always thought it was boring. Indy himself was not so much an anti-hero as a passive aggressive annoying one, stuck in an overlong snooze fest with pacing issues. Which is a bit why I was surprised by all the hatred toward Crystal Skull, as if no one remembered the original was not that good to begin with. Yes, nuking the fridge was ridiculous, but also friggin’ hilarious AND perfectly in sync with the tone of the franchise, unless you think ghosts coming out of God’s treasure chest to melt people’s faces, all around Karen Allen being tied up in lingerie, was peak cinematic genius.

The ONE credit I always did and always will give the movie is the amazing moment when Indy responds to a sword challenge with a gun. Heroic conventions used to be that the hero responds by trying to match his opponent with the same weapon, but Doctor Jones shows how little f*cks he gives by ignoring conventions and dispatching the challenger in the manner one would swat a housefly. That one moment set the tone for years of action movies to follow and revolutionized what heroes can and cannot do onscreen.

And if it’s any consolation, I must have watched Last Crusade a dozen times, THAT one I absolutely loved.

Drake: Honestly, this question’s a tough one since I don’t keep up with what the popular movie opinions are these days, which means I have no idea what ideas might be unpopular. But if you’ll allow me to go back a few decades I will make the argument that the 1982 Conan the Barbarian, while being a very good sword & sorcery flick, is not a good Conan movie.

Now, granted, it’s a fun flick that brings to life some great elements from the pulpy fiction its based on. We have giant snakes, evil sorcerers, daring thieves and menacing warriors duking it out in ancient kingdoms and mysterious caves, and a suitable amount of R-rated carnage results. Good stuff! Unfortunately, the weak point is Conan himself. As portrayed in the movie, Conan is a fairly passive figure who really needs to be told what to do. Raised as a slave, he has to be physically kicked out of his cage as an adult because he’s supposedly so wild and untamable.

And let’s just stop right there. Conan, the literary character created by Robert E. Howard, was no man’s slave. Cimmerians, of which Conan was one, were in fact considered far too wild and dangerous to be enslaved, and were thus given wide berth by surrounding nations. In fact, one of the mightiest kingdoms, Aquilonia (which Conan eventually ruled), tried to annex part of southern Cimmeria and built a fort called Venarium to stake their claim. The various tribes of the Cimmerians, united against a common threat, sacked Venarium, killed everyone in the fort and then burned it to the ground. One of the Cimmerians involved in that slaughter was a young Conan, who was about 16 at the time. Fierce and battle-tested, it wasn’t long before the young Cimmerian left his homeland and began his exploration of the civilized world. And that exploration saw him raiding the southern coastline as a feared pirate, leading armies in frenzied battle and engaging in brutal banditry among other things. A comic book superhero, Conan was not.

The Conan of the film has none of the fire and primal fury of the literary character. Nor is he physically similar to the real Conan, who was a large, powerful man, but also an intimidating one who was often described as very agile, resembling a great cat rather than a lumbering bear. And that’s not really Schwarzenegger’s fault; he was picked for the role and did his best with it. But he lacked the inherent danger of Conan, a character whose innate barbarism set him well apart from those he met in his travels. To be fair, few actors could really pull off the part, but giving the film Conan a weak background of “got big pushing a grain mill around, killed some stuff as a pit fighter and then got kicked out into the world” did no one any favors. It’s not a horrible backstory for Generic S&S Film Hero, but for Conan? Eh, it’s pretty bad.