I like the concept of American Horror Story but the execution always leaves me disappointed. Scream Queens, eh. His dialog is Sharknado bad, not Waters bad.
Hannibal was slow going for me but amaaaaaaahzing in the end I mostly caught onto his vibe by mid-second season.
The second season of American Horror Story (Asylum) was terrific. Steadily downhill after that… stopped watching almost two seasons ago and don’t miss it at all.
Anyway, I may have suggested something I didn’t intend: by complaining about the de-camped nature (or unamusing camp if you prefer) of today’s Trek and Bond, I’m not stating a fondness for camp in general so much as nostalgia for the ways those two franchises used to handle it. In a nutshell, they had an unapologetically cheesy side that usually felt unforced. They had heart.
I couldn’t get into AHS at all. My wife loved it, but I found the whole thing so utterly preposterous (rather than, y’know, scary) that I just kinda hated it.
But I absolutely can’t wait for what Murphy has in store for us next!
Without a doubt, it was “Nightfall” based upon the short scifi story be Isaac Asimov. Highly regarded as possibly the best science fiction story ever written. It starred David Birney and a cast of unknowns. It was so bad, I stayed thinking it HAS to get better. It’s based upon one of my favorite scifi stories.
I was wrong, totally wrong. In not only didn’t get better, it got worse. I should have been tipped off when Asimov’s name didn’t appear anywhere in the credits. I don’t blame him. It was an embarrassment to him and the entire film industry.
I feel like your Tolkein scholar and @nungesser’s Tolkein scholar should now have a debate in some Tolkein journal about the movies…
He’ll fuck it up somehow, I just know it.
Really, more like a fistfight in an alley.
Could very well be, but this is the first project of his that I’m genuinely looking forward to. Plus Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford! This level of bitchy divaness should be squarely in his wheelhouse.
Y’know, I do allow an exception for Amazon Women on the Moon. It’s hit or miss as a send-up of late-night channel-surfing, but the actual fake titular movie that pretends to be a low-budget space adventure like This Island Earth done on an incredibly shoestring budget… man, it’s perfect, right down to the reels aired out of order and missing frames and “there will be no further commercial interruptions.” And Forry Ackerman as the President!
(Plus, the movie brought us Don “No-Soul” Simmons!)
Okay, there really isn’t an exception for that. The movie is really as dumb as a bag of hammers. But I still kinda love it.
The only time I think anyone has made a better intentionally-cheeseball spoof of bad sci-fi was MANT, the movie-within-a-movie in Joe Dante’s Matinee, which I highly recommend to all you mutants, especially the ones old enough to remember the Cold War.
I agree 100%. I love the Rankin-Bass Hobbit movie. It’s 90 minutes of perfection.
And the actual Battle of Five Armies? In this version it takes up all of eighty seconds.
I also absolutely love the music. Hearing the dwarves sing “we must away ere break of day” in the cartoon is, in my opinion, a much more haunting melody than that employed in Howard Shore’s “Misty Mountains Cold.”
I agree with that, too. LOTR is my favorite movie, imperfect as it is. The Hobbit was a relative misfire and waaayyy bloated… but I saw that coming since Jackson’s King Kong, which managed to tell the exact same story in nearly twice the amount of time it took Cooper & Schoedsack in 1933.
Exactly! The Hobbit is supposed to be told from the perspective of Bilbo, just an ordinary Hobbit stepping into a bigger world, so the way the battle is treated in the book and the cartoon is perfect: Bilbo is horrified by war and backs off, and we see it happening from afar. That’s how it should be, rather than essentially get its own live-action movie just for this battle. But I’m 100% okay with having extended, intense action scenes in LotR, as the characters we’re following are leading the battle and deeply involved in it.
Basically I can forgive Amazon Women on the Moon for anything just because of Don Simmons.
How about we add that feature to all academic conferences and make a pay channel to raise funds…?
Probably the worst movie I ever sat through was “Kingpin”, but despite cringing and groaning all the way through, I still kind of enjoyed it.
I only just recently realized that “so bad they’re good” movies are just plain bad to me-- despite having a few kind of hilarious moments “Plan 9 From Outer Space” is just tedious, same for “The Incredibly Strange Creatures…” and pretty much any other cheapo horror film that was patched together in the editing room. For years I had put up with these kinds of movies because I knew people who were into them.
Around the same time I realized I genuinely like a lot of slow, ponderous, “arty” movies that most people can’t take: “The Days Between”, “Stalker”, “Paris, Texas”, “Living (жить)”, “Khadak”, etc., but ironically some Felinni and Bergman films bore me to tears; I think “Satyricon” is the only movie I’ve ever walked out on.
No you have to watch it again, with friends.Friends make the difference for these films.
It is totally an allegory for LGBTQ people being ignored by society at the time.
Incredibly Strange Creatures is well a Ray Dennis Steckler film… and those are nigh unwatchable.
Oh yeah, I get it, the enjoyment isn’t so much from the film itself, but from witnessing the train wreck together. The film is just an excuse for friends to be silly together, there’s value in that.
Oh, my god. Nobody’s mentioned Barbed Wire, correct? And it’s on right now. Absolutely shit.
Is that the one with Gene Autry, or the one with Pola Negri?
You can find 2-D glasses, FYI.
They have either two left lenses or two right lenses, and allow you to watch 3-D movies clearly in 2-D. Apparently they’re mostly for folks with a particular kind of eyesight that disagrees with 3-D glasses, but it’s seems like they’d open up more viewing times for you.
Oh that looked awful in the previews. I should watch it someday. 
