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found footage
Posts Tagged “
Camp
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eradicating camp
Ever since the first cheesy monster or goofy robot leered out from the cover of a pulpy magazine, science fiction has struggled to shake off a certain tinge of campiness. No matter how hard creators may try to tell cool stories, that slightly ironic silliness is always lurking just outside the frame. And there will always be science fiction which takes those little hints of camp and amplifies them a million-fold. A little campiness may be fun to get stoned and giggle at, but it also stands in the way of telling amazing tales about the impact of technology on humans. Here's a rulebook for rooting out the campiness from science fiction.
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21 Ways To Eradicate Campiness From Science Fiction
Ever since the first cheesy monster or goofy robot leered out from the cover of a pulpy magazine, science fiction has struggled to shake off a certain tinge of campiness. No matter how hard creators may try to tell cool stories, that slightly ironic silliness is always lurking just outside the frame. And there will always be science fiction which takes those little hints of camp and amplifies them a million-fold. A little campiness may be fun to get stoned and giggle at, but it also stands in the way of telling amazing tales about the impact of technology on humans. Here's a rulebook for rooting out the campiness from science fiction.
More »
found footage
Aliens Have Cool Light Shows, But The Government Has Better Drugs
People are always so optimistic in B-movies. Like in this sequence from 1954's Killers From Space, when they inject Peter Graves with truth serum and then the colonel says, "Oh, he'll make sense now!" — right before Graves launches into his crazy yarn about googly-eyed Groucho-browed monsters from outer space who brought him back from the dead. And showed him uncanny atomic calculations on the back of TV dinner foil. And made him watch a long montage about clouds and flames and cities in space, and daisies and ... wha, huh? Sorry, the drugs started wearing off. More »
found footage
Hello! I Will Do The Flying Motorcycle Dance For You!
It's so hard to choose just one awesome moment from 1982's Megaforce to feature. There's the Persis Khambatta battle simulator sequence, the "Endless Love"-tinged skydiving sequence, and most of all, the 20 minute battle between tanks, airplanes, motorcycles and dune buggies, where the motorcycles have anti-tank rocket launchers. But the flying motorcycle scene, which haunted the dreams of Trey Parker and Matt Stone until they copied it in Team America World Police, has to win out. The awesomely coiffed guy dances on his flying bike! Weirdly, our copy of Megaforce is in Italian. We have no idea how that happened.
doomsday review
Doomsday: Total Nonsense -- But Awesome!
There are Serbian dog-food commercials that would have made more sense to me than Doomsday, the quarantined-country-reverts-to-barbarism epic that opens today. It starts out as an engaging action-horror blend with a nice touch of future dystopia (and huge servings of gore), and then slowly unravels until the ending is basically pure Dada. We just saw it. Click through for the whole brain-shredding carnage [spoilers ahead]. More »
torchwood recap
Torchwood: Too Much Crying, Not Enough Shagging
Wow. I could have chosen any one of the 500 cheesy soap opera moments from last night's episode of the BBC's alien-hunting show Torchwood, and then made fun of it for five paragraphs. But any show that can pull off such a spot-on riff on Peter Jackson's Dead Alive pretty much gets a free pass from me. (It does lose points by having Captain Jack reference the wrong movie right afterwards. WTF?) This scene was almost enough to make me forgive the rest of the episode. Almost. More »
poll
What Do You Look For In Science Fiction?
Science fiction is really a jumble sale of about twenty different genres. We use the term "science fiction" to label a whole range of material, from space opera to near-future dystopias. But what really matters is what you get out of reading or watching it. What do you look for in your science fiction? Click through to vote. More »
found footage
The Best Little Mad Max Clone In Texas
When Mad-Maxian bikers team up with riot cops with lion badges to attack your little town, what are you going to do? You're pretty much screwed. That's the message of 2020 Texas Gladiators, a post-apocalyptic action movie filmed in Italy. (You know it's Texas because they occasionally write "TEXAS" in big letters on the buildings.) This scene strikes me as a more scifi, but much cheaper, version of the Ravenwood stand-off from post-nuclear-disaster show Jericho. Click through to learn more. More »
flash gordon
"All Mongo All The Time"
Flash Gordon producer Peter Hume says he's heard the millions of complaints about his show, and plans to set things right. In a recent press conference, he said:The two big complaints were Ming isn't strong enough or mean enough, and that it's not enough Mongo. We're all Mongo all the time now.He also played the "pity us for our tiny budget" card, whining that Flash Gordon only has one-fifth the budget of its SciFi Channel sister show Battlestar Galactica. Then he ranted incoherently about Chuck, one of the only science fiction shows whose ratings have been going steadily up this season. More »
