One thing that blows an otherwise good movie is when the film is set somewhere I know, but filmed somewhere else.
This is more common in made-for-TV movies, which we know suck ass anyway, but they should at least
try, you know? There was a
movie made of the Susan Reinert murder, based on
Joseph Wambaugh's book. His research was good, his description of local stuff was, as I recall, dead on (sorry, pun not intended), but the movie version was made in Canada ... they didn't even try to fake the PA license plates on the cars right. The movie was otherwise well done.
Same for the
Hunt for the Unicorn Killer. Set in Philadelphia, filmed in Toronto.
I've been to Toronto and liked it ... I just never realized that the city was so bland it could pretend to be anywhere. Except Toronto, apparently.
I also have a hard time with movies based on books that I have read and really liked. It's very rare that what made the book wonderful translates well to the screen.
There are a lot of good movies about mental hospitals ... Cuckoo's Nest and Girl, Interrupted, to name two. But every now and again there will be technical details, stuff like, "they're doing the restraint wrong", or "no therapist in their right mind would ever do stupid shit like that" (then I realize that I have berated stupid therapists for doing just that shit, often within the last week or so).
Sometimes even horribly bad movies, though, have a teensy something that cheers me. Even that horrible waste of film called "Blair Witch 2" ... you know that scene in the very beginning? The one in the mental hospital that really doesn't have much to do with the rest of the movie ... the forced feeding? That's a scene for scene remake of a segment from a documentary about a State Hospital in Massachussets called "Titticut Follies", except the one in TF was a real forced feeding of a real patient ... and the orderly who was doing the whole procedure with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, dropping ashes in the patient's face? Really in the documentary.
Doctors demanding wrong dosages of the wrong meds irk me ... which is one of the reasons ER is high on my favorites list ... they get a psychotic patient, they restrain him right, and the doc calls for "Vitamin H".
Not that there are a lot of them, but movies about Suicide Hotlines tend to overdramatize things, even the ones that I
liked.