Don’t you just hate it when your well-intentioned scientific breakthrough goes haywire?

Here you are, trying to cure cancer or build a better robotic vacuum cleaner — and suddenly, you’ve got super-pandemics, reanimated dinosaurs and time-traveling Terminators running around, making a mess.

It’s frustrating, to say the least.

Americans have always bought into the idea of self-improvement through technology, and our real-life mad scientists tend to get it right more often than not. But there has always been a lingering undercurrent of uneasiness, evident in much of our science fiction. While our iPods may not be ready to rise up and enslave us quite yet, we did invent the atom bomb. And while many of life’s problems can be solved by perfecting technology, you can’t perfect human nature.

This week’s opening of “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” puts yet another spin on this eternal philosophical dilemma. A a pair of well-meaning genetic engineers (John Lithgow and James Franco) create a super-intelligent ape, Caesar, who uses that intelligence to begin an uprising against mankind.

Caesar is trouble, no doubt. But he’s hardly the first Hollywood science project to turn on its creators. Here are a few of the classics:

‘Frankenstein’ (1931)

Hypothesis: Henry Frankenstein wants to make the dead walk. He fashions a new being out of pieces of exhumed corpses.

Variable: Being dead is relatively stress-free — you just sit there and decompose. Living — especially as a giant, stinky (deodorant doesn’t do much for that corpse-y smell), man-made monstrosity — is much trickier.

Results: Pitchforks, torches, villagers, et cetera.

‘Soylent Green’ (1973)

Hypothesis: In an impoverished, overpopulated future, where regular food is scarce and getting scarcer, people still have to eat.

Variable: The Soylent Corporation has a new food product. Luckily, they’re allowed to fudge the ingredients list on the packaging.

Results: “Soylent Green is … (gasp!)”

‘Blade Runner’ (1982)

Hypothesis: In 2019, genetically engineered organic robots called “replicants,” which are almost indistinguishable from humans, are built for dangerous, menial or sex work on off-world colonies. They’re banned on Earth, and it’s Harrison Ford’s job to hunt down the unruly ones who end up in Los Angeles.

Variable: Human or not, replicants just want to be loved. And not killed.

Results: Nobody knows who’s alive, and whose family tree includes Nintendo cartridges and VHS tapes.

‘Re-Animator: (1985)

Hypothesis: Who doesn’t wish they could bring the dead back to life• A medical student brings his dead professor back to the land of the living in this underrated H.P. Lovecraft-based comic horror classic.

Variable: Dead people who don’t stay dead tend to make other (living) people dead. Also, office politics in academia can be brutal.

Results: Gore. Then, more gore.

‘The Fly’ (1986)

Hypothesis: Jeff Goldblum plays is a scientist of questionable ethics, working in the much-derided field of “matter transportation,” who really wants to impress a sexy reporter played by Geena Davis.

Variable: While testing his teleportation device, he doesn’t notice a common housefly has entered one of his transmission booths.

Results: He becomes a horrifying man-fly hybrid, illustrated with director David Cronenberg’s signature flesh-rending enthusiasm.

‘Jurassic Park’ (1993)

Hypothesis: What if you went on a safari, and instead of giraffes and hippos, there were T-Rexes and velociraptors• A prehistoric theme park is built on a remote island with real dinosaurs, cloned from prehistoric DNA trapped in amber.

Variable: They’re dinosaurs! Prehistoric killing machines, bigger than a building, with dense jungle to hide in. How could this possibly go wrong• Results: Most of the first group of tourists gets eaten — the lucky ones in one bite.

‘Hulk’ (2003)

Hypothesis: Bruce Banner, a scientific researcher, is working with gamma radiation and Nanomeds, tiny devices that are supposed to heal wounds (but usually kill their subjects).

Variable: Lab accident. Oops! Look out for those gamma rays …

Results: Whenever he becomes angry, he gets huge, turns green and smashes everything in sight.

‘The Terminator’ — ‘Terminator Salvation’ (1984-2009)

Hypothesis: Human scientists engineer a hyper-intelligent system to take the fallible “human element” out of Cold War-era nuclear defense. Said system, Skynet, gains sentience, instinct for self-preservation and destroys humanity in a preemptive strike. Then Skynet invents killer robots, time travel and Arnold Schwarzenegger to wipe out the survivors.

Variable: The machines — don’t trust ’em. Don’t turn your back on that Roomba.

Results: Aside from the killer-robot apocalypse thing, it appears that time travel enables an infinite amount of possible lousy sequels, which we may only be partly through. Be afraid.

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