I just watched “Mega Python vs. Gatoroid” on the syfy channel. It was, at every level, a horrible, horrible movie. Well, it was produced by “The Asylum” (what who done brung us such masterpieces as “Sharktopus” and “Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus”), so you *know* going in that the writing is going to suck, the acting is going to suck and the special effects are going to suck. They certainly outdid themselves on that score with this one… the special effects were especially crappy, so much so that I think they may have been *intentionally* made that bad.
Some movies are so bad that they are entertaining, such as “Plan 9 From Outer Space” or “Battlefield Earth.” But most “Asylum” movies are just bad, virtually unwatchably so. But this time, it was actually a hoot, and kept distracting me from the work I was doing (building up a hydrocal mold backing for the X-42 project). The fact that this gem “starred” former teen singers Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, who have both aged really well IMO, may have contributed to that. The two have diverged greatly in shape… Gibson is stick-thin, Tiffany could give Christina Hendricks a run for her money.
Still, I can’t quite tell if it’s “so bad it’s good” yet. There is only one thing to do: bring MST3K back and set Mike and the Bots to work on this.
13 Responses to “So bad it’s… good? Bad? I just can’t tell anymore…”
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sciffie network ? Didn’t they used to show science fiction on that channel?
You need to be careful Scott, you can now be sued for a negative review like that. especially if it was actually positive !
-Gar.
No, you gotta keep up with the times. It’s now called “SyFy”, which apparently means that they don’t have to show actual science fiction any more. Last time I checked that were running “wrasslin” on Friday nights. I’m still pissed that they canceled “Farscape” (I got a long memory). They do have some absolute crap for “Made for SyFy” movies, but every once in a while one is so bad that it’s entertaining. However, this happens far too infrequently and mostly they’re just bad. With the conclusion of BSG they’re left with the latest StarGate spin off and Caprica, both of which have gotten off to a very slow start.
The thing I can never figure out is the way they keep screwing around with their series schedules. It’s almost like they’re trying to kill them off.
> Last time I checked that were running “wrasslin” on Friday nights.
And they’ll soon start airing *cooking* shows, in the form of “Marcel’s Quantum Kitchen,” by some chef from “Top Chef.”
Oy.
Old Codger Mode: “I can remember when MTV used to show music videos…”
> With the conclusion of BSG they’re left with the latest StarGate spin off and Caprica, both of which have gotten off to a very slow start.
And both of which have been cancelled. The last Caprica episodes aired a few weeks back; SG:U has aired the first half of season 2, with the second half to air sometime this year, but there’ll be no season 3.
Now that you brought that up I am old enough to remember when MTV
had nothing on but music videos all day..24/7.
I saw the pairing of “Sharktopus” and “Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus” at Wal-Mart. Now I gotta buy them!
When we got cable in 1981 I watched MTV for a couple of hours a day. I also had a new daughter. My wife asked why I was watching, and I told her it was so I’d know what her teachers were thinking when she got to middle school. I told her it was the same thing as Nazi-watching in 1932. Maybe that’s why she divorced me?
I have to admit I enjoyed Sanctuary for a while. The last (third) season wasn’t up to the moderate standards of the first two but I’ll probably give it another try.
There is always The Walking Dead on AMC. I’m a sucker for a zombie series.
Wow, I didn’t realize Caprica had been canceled. Not surprised, it was awful slow. I had some hopes for it when it was announced, though it did sound a little too soap operay (which turned out to be it’s biggest weakness).
I actually thought they had a fairly good idea for SG:U, but the execution was just very poor. I thought they might pull that one out of the ditch, but I guess not.
Oh well, does SyFy have any serial science fiction programs left?
If their was truth in advertising I think SyFy would have to change its name.
Yes to Parabarbarian above! So far “The Walking Dead” is very good! And I’m a guy that has never gotten into a “zombie show” before.
The trick on that one is will they be able to keep up the level they’ve established without having to reveal too much too soon.
> does SyFy have any serial science fiction programs left?
Eureka (awesomeness)
Sanctuary (meh)
Warehouse 13 (so-so)
Caprica: sloooooooooow. And a letdown for the target audience. Going from space battles to space-less family turmoil? Feh.
SG:U: I thought the show was generally excellent. Atlantis was a copy of SG1 in terms of characters and tone; SG:U was a wholly different show, far more serious, and far darker.
Eureka is the only show I catch regularly. The rest of the stuff SyFy shows is shit. The idiots in charge of that channel have really dorked things up.
This I know has nothing to do with the SyFy channel or cable, but what was
the name of the short run series that has to do with a detective that gets
run over by an SUV and wakes up @30 years in the past. I remember one
thing reeally haunting about it besides meeting himself as a kid is the fact that he is also in New York City and turns around to find that of course the World Trade Center is still standing.
Probably “Life On Mars,” yet another show that was originally British and then “adapted” to US TV. I understand that in the original Brit version, the main character was actually in a coma dying, and dreamed the whole series; in the US version, he was actually an astronaut going to Mars and put into some VR simulation, or some damned thing.
As for being spooked by the World Trade Center, nothing beats the last scene of the season one finale for “Fringe.”
Gotta say, I find it hard to get overly enthusiastic over Eureka, Sanctuary, or Warehouse Thirteen. I’m definitely rank them in the order you have them with Warehouse 13 being the worse, I really don’t care for that one at all. Eureka I did like at first but it seemed to get stuck in a runt (some advanced technology runs amok, they solve the problem at the last moment with some out of the box thinking from Sheriff Carter, all is well, roll credits). They may have found a way to break out of that as I haven’t watched it in a good year or so. Maybe it’s better now and I’ll have to give it a second chance.
Likewise, Sanctuary started off “ok”, but then it just got goofy to me. I find it pretty unwatchable now.
Warehouse 13 just never did it for me.
SciFi killed one of the best science fiction shows years ago in Farscape. They pretty much screwed it over by constantly changing its show day and timeslot and they tended to take long hiatuses, with in one case over a year between the end of a season and the start of the new season. And, they didn’t re-run it in the interim so you just kinda forgot where they left off by the time the new season started. It was almost like they were trying to kill it.
BSG I thought was very good overall (and remembering the first BSG from the 1970’s I had pretty low expectations). The second season on “New Caprica” was pretty lame and was an obvious detour taken so the show could be “relevant” and make commentary on the War on Terror and the Iraq war. Really, except for a few items that get referenced later in the series you could pretty much skip the whole “New Caprica” season and loose very little continuity. This seems to be a common theme with TV shows, the quality goes down when they decide to get on a soapbox and preach. But, later seasons redeemed the series and I was pretty satisfied overall. Some didn’t like the series conclusion and I could see their point, but I didn’t think it was terrible.
The StarGate shows were pretty good but I would put them just below Farscape and BSG. They weren’t bad though, and I’d regularly watch them. Like I said earlier, I think SG:U was a good concept but it plodded along too slowly at times and some of the character conflicts weren’t entirely convincing (since they were so irrational). But, all in all I give it good marks. You’d think with the loss of Caprica and their other serial science fiction shows being a little on the weak side that SyFy would have refocused attention on SG:U, made a few needed tweaks to get it back on track and made it their current flagship series. Obviously they thought differently.
A couple of years ago they did have a mini series that was considered as a possible regular serial show – “The Lost Room”. I thought that one had some promise but it just didn’t get the viewers needed to take it to a regular series. It did have some interesting concepts, but I think the mini series had too many characters in it, which made it difficult for the average viewer to keep track of what was going on.
SyFy really seems adrift at the moment, unless they’ve got a fantastic sci-fi series waiting in the wings that we don’t know about, it sounds like they are due for a serious shakeup in management.