You may commence to pity me now...

Did Jim get called out on an ambulance run? Will we have to wait while his interestingly-mauled neighbor gets taken down to Dartmouth?

All to often it is not.

I see this as the caption to a New Yorker or XKCD cartoon only a scant handful of people Got, but all of them have it hanging where they can see it from their computers.

Unfortunately, there's a bit of a shortage of gratuitous female nudity.

I see this as the caption to a New Yorker or XKCD cartoon only a scant handful of people Got, but all of them have it hanging where they can see it from their computers.

The guy with tats on his face was digging in the Indian Burial Ground (never a good idea). He disturbed the Monster, which then went out gathering DNA samples in a particularly gruesome manner.

But by reading the petroglyphs on the walls in that cave, the guy (and the Beautiful Young Native American Scientist) figure out that the Native Americans all that time ago were faced by the same creature and stopped it by poisoning it with Native Plants and Minerals.

Which leads to the entire uranium thing.

Jane

To the Truck's Grill,
You swerve.
We serve
Nothing but roadkill.

I think Russell Means should have a better agent.

I suspect that, after seeing the script, someone went ohmygod and decided they wouldn't play it straight.

”You’ll take the egg. I’ll rescue the princess.”

This, apparently. And this. I still miss these, though.

I love horror movies but haven't rented many of the "Eight Films to Die For" series (which at this point seems to include at least 16 movies, the way the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy runs to five volumes). Most of them look like the kind of teenagers-and-gore movies I loathe. The one I have seen, and can recommend, is Reincarnation. Like most of the recent Japanese imports it keeps the gore relatively low, and it's a reasonably smart movie that doesn't feel the need to explain everything immediately--although the plot does all make sense in the end. It's sort of entertaining reading the reviews on Amazon, which are all over the place--I think many of the people who bought it must have expected something more like Unearthed.

You got a buck back for each one you sat through.

Plan Nine From Outer Space
Invasion of the Bee Girls
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
They Saved Hitler's Brain

So they're actually up to 24.

Besides that, you're largely right about the content, it seems (link to Wikipedia article on the series).

Even with some serious necking I/we weren't able to sit through more than half of it; and we had no place to continue the necking when we left.

Making Light readers, if they've read Andre Norton juveniles, would at least be able to recognize "Hosteen".

Why yes! As a matter of fact I have. Saw that on shipboard one night. (Being in the Fleet means you see every lousy movie made in a given year.) In the days before VHS and DVD, if a movie was an unwatchable dog it was still Good Enough for Sailors, so the studio could make at least some money on it.

This brings to mind the version of the screenplay for My Little Chickadee that W.C. Fields went over with a sledgehammer: it's in "W.C. Fields: By Himself." The studio sent him a script that featured five minutes of Mae West speaking to a war party in Choctaw. "Bring out your rubber-tired hearses for that one."

It's quite a lot of fun and very well acted.

If ever I come across that endorsement, I'll know to run the other way.

Highlights:
One object has an entire sheet of letraset on it, looking like its labelling.
The flying-over-a-moonscape effect was achieved by rotating a barrel-shaped model of the moonscape.

Whatever works, eh?

Sometimes, I wonder if CGI's limitless possibilities have taken the awe out of SFnal visuals. On the other hand, it means you finally get to see them fully realized, for example Iron Man duking it out with a giant robot. On the other other hand, you get people who think that storytelling won't matter if you throw enough stuff at the viewers and, yes, van Helsing is what I'm referring to.

Serge #37, peach pits and Christopher Plummer — ooh! Watch out for threads crossing.

* Aka† The Battle of Space Station Gamma, Battle Beyond the Stars and assorted variations.
† Should lower-case acronymns take caps at the start of a sentence?

Coincidence? You be the judge!

Erik #41:

Are you maybe thinking of the Profiles in History auction house? They offer some magnificent relics of science fiction film and TV history periodically.

Erik, I hadn't realized this was you! Somehow I'd assumed you spelled your name with a C. (I'm an old friend of Erik's mom, and one of my daughters was born on his birthday).

Carol (of Wild Vine)

More like a horrible train wreck.

Coincidence? You be the judge!

Often when I watch pre-CGI movies, I find myself thinking how attractive, or even just delightfully strange-looking, the special effects are. I don't notice that nearly as often when I'm watching modern movies. Sometimes I wonder whether the limitations of earlier eras sometimes helped push visuals that might otherwise have been easy cliches into the unexpected.

And how can you hate a movie that contains the sentence "you have transgressed into the necropolis of Klex the Malign"?

For example, in Scanners, we go from a guy who is clearly alive and talking and real, to having his head explode on-camera, without a cut.

For me, it's taken some of the wonder out ... the knowledge that some lunatic actually did that. See, for example, the bridge jump from The Man With the Golden Gun (1974).

So, a tricky bit on turbine blades is that there are rows that move, in between ones that don't move, and the moving ones move at supersonic speeds and thus cause shock waves that affect the downstream ones that aren't moving. And setting up sets of turbine blades moving at supersonic speeds in a university research lab is just a little bit out of budget -- not to mention that a lot of what you want to know for testing a computer simulation is "what does a single shock wave do?" The solution my dad came up with was to set up a stationary set of turbine blades in a wind tunnel, set up the shotgun pointing into the side of the wind tunnel a bit upstream, and fire a blank into the wind tunnel while it was running. The blast wave from the shotgun was a quite nice facsimile of the shock wave off of an upstream turbine blade.

It was also useful for a prop at the end of conference talks. "I'll be glad to answer any questions. My grad student [holding the shotgun] will answer any nasty questions."

I'm thinking about different radiation detectors that one could make. Maybe a cloud chamber is the easiest. Quantitative measurement would be difficult, though.

One does, as I learned shortly before the sixth grade science fair, have to get one's mom to drive all over the city looking for a source of dry ice.

If the horror-movie cast happens to include me, they're in luck. I usually carry an electroscope-type pocket dosimeter, and it's always charged.

(If the Beast gets me early in the film, check the right front pants pocket of the corpse.)

Dosimeters are still better, if you happen to own one. Size and shape of a pen. Keep 'em charged every month or two, or keep a charger unit handy.

Needed: shot glass.
High-proof vodka
Rubber balloon
Rubber band
Dry ice
Light source

Pour a shot of vodka. Drink it. Do not wipe out glass. Put rubber balloon tightly across mouth of glass, fixing it in place with rubber band. Set glass on block of dry ice. Shine light through side. Pull up on rubber sheet to lower pressure in the shot glass. Observe tracks in the cloud.

For example, in Scanners, we go from a guy who is clearly alive and talking and real, to having his head explode on-camera, without a cut.

Are you thinking of bald, mustachioed Louis Del Grande, star and co-creator of the wonderful yet obscure Canadian SF series Seeing Things? He appears briefly in Scanners before he explodes.

In fact, I commonly attribute actual, impressive stunts to CGI trickery now, and only feel respect after I've watched a "making of" clip.

On Red Mike's reviews, I regularly read the Starship Troopers review, which in a large way recoups the negative entertainment experience of that cinematic middle finger to my hero. My disappointment was particularly bitter due to the fact that the CGI competence with which the movie was made could have been applied to making the movie *correctly.* And that couldn't have been done before CGI.

I love to watch the efforts I see on Sci-Fi, both for the b-movie joy and for the craptacular special effects. (There's even some rare moments of great work there, but that usually doesn't detract from the entertainment value.)

(I'm a CGI professional, but I don't work in movies or TV.)

That was my other point about CGI. Without it, I doubt that there'd have been a revival of Doctor Who, or that there'd be a Eureka to make me smile just from thinking about it.

You win some.
You lose some.

And I'm no artistic genius. I can't draw a squiggly line.

The wretched quality of some of the monsters I've seen lately is mystifying. Only a ridiculously short schedule can be the excuse for that. Budget CAN'T be the excuse. Google Zbrush and find a gallery to see what hobbyists are doodling around with these days.

While Fire and Ice was the usual SciFi crapfest (though it did have Amy Acker in it), I must say I loved the dragon effects. The Fire Dragon looked like a manta ray (with a viper's head) sculpted out of burning embers. I got a rare goshwow from that! The Ice Dragon was the same shape, but appeared to be sculpted from snow-swept stone.

It was a thin, obvious, stupid story, and Amy Acker and Tom Wisdom were both wasted on it (and no, I don't mean they were drunk during filming, though who could blame them if they were?), but the draconic effects were A+ in my book.

One does wonder about thw yo-yoing quality.

By the way, regarding CGI vs pre-CGI... One only has to look at Star Wars in both versions. The 1977 had one shot I always thought was neat, that of the camera looking up at a stormtrooper astride a big lizard. It was brief, and a still shot, but it was quite evocative. Jump forward to 1997, and we get that same scene showing the lizard sluggishly creeping away, and that probably was done this way because Lucas wanted to show off.

James McDonald @ #52, if you ever, ever get the chance to see this, don't miss it! (My question to the filmmakers at the screening I attended: "Where were your PARENTS??")

Bill Higgins @ #54, pieces of unexposed film? Of course, by the time you get a reading, it's too late.

Marginally on-topic: stuntwork fans might enjoy "Double Dare", the documentary about stuntwomen Jeannie Epper (Wonder Woman) and Zoe Bell (Xena, Kill Bill ).

Strangely enough, Richard O'Brien and Tom Baker are in it as well, although you have to be alert and squint a bit.

"Mystical peach pits"? Please elaborate. I don't care if it's a spoiler, and I'm fairly certain the rest of this scurvy crew don't either.

Whereas in D&D 1 the only shred of enjoyment was provided by a rather nice black and gold doublet hanging on the wall in the background of one scene. You may think I'm kidding, but I'm not.

(Well, okay, I suppose you could say something for the villain's glowing blue lipstick, but shrieks of disbelieving laughter aren't actually *enjoyment* per se.)

You make it sound like Cocteau's Dungeons and Dragons.

...the local wise man decides to send mystical peach pits out into the Universe, where they will home in on good guys who'll come to their rescue.

Why do the peach pits need to be rescued? I envision the aliens wielding a high-power cobbler death ray. You'd think the pits would be in no specific danger, though.

I know I really shouldn't ask, but I just have to: How did the peach pits become mystical? Are the peaches mystical too? Clearly these are not your usual stone fruits. If only my local farmers' market had these Mystical Homing Peaches of Universal Goodness-Seeking...

Because they're being chased by a guy in drag?

In this Star Wars take-off, the peaceful planet of Jillucia has been nearly wiped out by the Gavanas, whose leader takes orders from his mother (played by comic actor Eisei Amamoto in drag) rather than the Emperor. King Kaiba sends out eight Liabe holy seeds, each to be received by a chosen one to defend the Gavanas. Each recipient, ranging from hardened General Garuda to Gavana Prince Hans to young Terrans Meia, Kido, and Aaron all have different reactions to being chosen.

(In that crucifixion scene: Our hero is being crucified at the Villain's Feast (sort of like a combination of an unusual centerpiece and the floor show). The hero is so tough that he manages to pull the nails our of the wood by pure strength of arms-and-shoulders, then, using the nails protruding from the backs of his fists as brass knuckles, punching his way out of the room.)

(I told you it was astounding.)

As Variety said:

Combine beaucoup gore and an atrocity-a-minute action edited in fastpace style. Then, toss in a scantily clad cast of none-too- talented performers mouthing dimwitted dialog and garnish with a touch of medieval gibberish. The result would be something resembling The Sword and the Sorcerer.

The plot is needlessly complicated by a truly lackluster script. Stripped to essentials, which the cast often does in this pseudo epic, Sword is about the retaking by a group of rag-tag medievalists of a once peaceable kingdom sadistically ruled by an evil knight named Cromwell.

Lee Horsley grins a lot as the leader of the rebels, who turns out to be the long-banished son of the old and virtuous king. Simon MacCorkindale grimaces a good deal as a royal pretender.

For trivia fans, Nina Van Pallandt plays the good queen who's dispatched quickly and mercifully since her performance is nothing to boast of.

Joe Bob liked it better:

Numero three-o, last but not least, the re-release of the season, you saw it last year but you couldn't wait for more. "The Sword and the Sorcerer." We're talking rape. We're talking pillage. We're talking Barbarian City. Highlights: This conqueror guy named Cromwell goes to the end of the world to meet this slime glopola man, but when he gets there he says, "How do we know a toad like you even has the power to aid us?" And the slime glopola man calls this girl into the room and concentrates really hard and makes her heart rip out of her chest by ESP. Later this Nautilus guy named Lee Horsley rescues a bimbo who's about to be raped by some drunks. Then she says, "Is your sword for hire?" and he gets this look on his face like, "I hope so." Same old story: she wants him to get her brother out of prison. He says, "OK, but he gets one night in the sack for that. So the rest of the movie is this guy going through dungeons and getting tortured and being in a rat stampeded and getting knocked in the moat and watching this girl get her tongue cut out and seeing a guy get crucified and fight off some snakes--and for what? One night with this bimbo? Not logical. One star off for that.

At least 90 corpses. Mucho snakes. Heads roll. Minimal kung fu. one beast. No motor vehicles. Magician guy with orange fingernails. Three stars.

Hawk the Slayer, after seeing both his father and bride die at the hands of his malevolent brother, Voltan, sets out for revenge and the chance to live up to his title. Tooling himself up with the "mind-sword" and recruiting a motley band of warriors: a giant, a dwarf, a one-armed man with a machine-crossbow and an elf with the fastest bow in the land; Hawk leads the battle against Voltan to free the land from the forces of evil and avenge his loved ones.

Bilbo Bagshot: I was like you once. Blonde hair. Scraggly little beard. Childlike ears. Full of beans, and spunk. I let my principles get in the way of things. I once punched a bloke out once for saying Hawk the Slayer was rubbish.
Tim: Good for you.
Bilbo Bagshot: Yeah, thanks. But that's not the point, Tim. The point is I was defending the fantasy genre with terminal intensity, when what I should have said was "Dad, you're right - but let's give Krull a try, and we'll discuss it later."

I love Spaced.

Not bad enough to be a good B-movie treat, not good enough to recommend...

Still, I have to give them props for doing that well. The worst thing I can say about it is the bloke has to jump through hoops to get his death frisbee, then hardly uses it at all.

(I guess the wizard must have been using a cheapo shapeshifting spell.)

(On its initial release, Bonnie and Clyde was a B movie.)

What more could one ask for?

One could ask for less, but one might just get Ice Pirates, in which Robert Urich sends up Han Solo, and almost loses his 'nads for it. On the other hand, it did have Anjelica Houston, Ron Perlman, and John Carradine, so maybe ... but, no.

James D. Macdonald @ 36

And if it can't pass muster as Good Enough for Sailors, they show it to the Army. I will never forgive one buddy of mine who insisted we not take an evening pass in romantic East New Jersey and instead see the movie show at the base: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Should have been called, "Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right".

CGI has been very good for something totally outside of special effects: animation. At least in the hands of the animators at Pixar; I won't dignify what Dreamworks does by calling it animation.

Not only would animation be impossibly expensive without CGI, there are a lot of things that just wouldn't be done as well because of the control the designer, the character-rigger and the animator have over movement and shading.

But, once again, if there's no story, it doesn't matter how great the technology is. What makes Pixar's movies work is that everything is in the service of the story and the characterization.

The actors were profoundly, visibly uncomfortable. They seemed unable to act, or even display any emotion at all beyond deep embarrassment. I could read their thoughts in their expressions: "Space herpes? Is this what my career has come to?" The scene as written was lowbrow comedy, but it felt like somebody's marriage had just fallen apart at a party, and no one knew where to look.

I had to stop the DVD; it was too painful to watch.

Designers and animators have equally good control over movement and shading in traditional animation.

Wesley @92, 3D animation can output many, *many* channels of bitmap information for each frame so the compositor or editor can endlessly tweak the look of each element by balancing the strength of all those channels. The level of control is surprising. (I have to bite my tongue a little in saying this, but...) This is way better than doing it right in the first place.

Regarding Ice Pirates... You have to take it in the right spirit. My first experience with the film was: "...the frick?! Oh. Okay, now I get it." Then loud guffaws from then on. Of course, I wouldn't want anyone to see me enjoying that sort of thing!

Anyone for "The Beastmaster"? It actually has a good monster in it (wraps you in its skin-covered wings and digests you instantly except for your belt buckle), but I couldn't take it seriously after seeing the hero born from a cow and the tiger painted black with (apparently) shoe polish.

"Are you man enough for Megaforce?"

No, I'm too much man. And, frankly, so is my wife.

Re: The Sword and the Sorcerer - They're making a sequel. Really.

I have three disconnected arguments about this.

1. I'm an amateur cartoonist rather than an animator, so I'm not speaking from authority, but... I think you're underestimating the control a good artist, working by hand, has over his or her work. It really is just as good as the control CG animators have over theirs--not because the traditional artist always does it right in the first place (although it's a joy when that happens), but because it's possible to rework a drawing until it looks right (or, in my case, as close to right as I have the skills to take it), just as it's possible to tweak the settings in 3D animation.

2. That said, it's always better to do it right in the first place. At the very least, it's faster.

3. CG animation's easy corrections are only an advantage if the animation actually needs to be computer generated in the first place. CG animation, traditional animation, and stop-motion animation have different aesthetics, and a lot of traditional animation (whether entirely hand-drawn or computer assisted) couldn't be done CG-style without losing something in translation--I can't imagine a Pixar version of The Triplets of Belleville, for instance. And just as CGI films can do things traditional animation can't, traditional animation can do things that wouldn't work in CG.

The titles of Monsters Inc** are as beautiful a tribute to 1950-60's animation as you'll find. The Incredibles titles are iconic.

And the Woody's Round Up sequence in Toy Story II blows my mind. Did they actually make the puppets and film them, or render it all? I can't tell!

Though Gerry Anderson should have collected on some Four Feather Falls royalties right there...

*I've no doubt that they are composed as much on computer as the rest of the films, but I mean "not in the simulated 3d of the rest of the film".

** Which children and non-US citizens universally render as Monster Sink.

Was that Barry Bostwick in spandex tights and with a big hairdo? I skipped that one, but I do remember the poster.

I've seen worse. That includes the movie's other half of the double bill. Yes, kids, they still had double bills in 1982, but it's no wonder that they died, considering that the other movie was Scott Baio's Zapped. I seem to remember that Scott, after smoking some pot, acquired telekinetic powers that he used to pop the high school bimbo's bra open. It was on the last day of Chicon II and I kept wishing I had instead gone to see Road Warrior instead.

Beastmaster was the first PG-13 movie I ever saw. The only part I remember was the bit with the clothes-stealing ferrets. ('82? Really? Ok, so I was only 8.) It's before I really had opinions on movies, and also somehow I've completely conflated it with Ladyhawke, which... yeah, is a little strange.

(I also couldn't tell you the plot of Star Wars. I saw all three movies in the theater, and the first one came out when I was... 2? 3? Whatever. Somehow seeing them before I understood "plot" broke my ability to ever figure it out, even though I've seen them literally dozens of times since then. Even the Ewok movie.) (Not dozens for the Ewok movie. More times than I'd care to admit, though, including once dubbed into German.)

What?? That's a great film! A classic!

the finale where The Heroes use marriage-magic as an offensive weapon.

-- Marriage as an offensive weapon? That's ridiculous!
-- Clearly, you've never met my wife.
(rimshot)

The dialog is stilted, the plot is lame, Rutger Hauer is no better than he ever is, and Michelle Pfeiffer...

...well, Michelle Pfeiffer is sublime. She always is. Gotta give you Michelle Pfeiffer. (Mouse asks her "Are you flesh or spirit?" and she answers "I am sorrow," which is lame, but she makes it heartbreaking. I love Michelle Pfeiffer.)

Pfieffer... is hit or miss with me.

But it's a swell movie, and I recall going... "That's Rumpole!" to myself. The moon, enh... I've seen a lot worse in movies.

(As for Matthew Broderick and dialect coaches: well, I don't recall that anyone had a French accent in that movie, despite all the French names, so I'm not sure what the problem is...)

Phillipe: We can't eat this bird!
Imperius: What? Oh, God, is it Lent again already?

And I will accept her, with profound gratitude.

...and in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I agree completely with your point 3. In fact, The Triplets of Belleville used at least 3 different animation techniques for different effects: traditional cel, 2D CGI, and 3D CGI. It's just that there's a lot of snark back and forth between, say, stop-motion and CGI animators about how the others' technique is immoral, illegal, and fattening*.

I happen to have a great fondness for silhouette animation, which can be done by hand or CG, and for stop-motion, for which CG is overkill at best. But I like good CGI, and I think it brings things to the party that are hard to do with other techniques. So you use what works for you and what works for the story.

* Henry Selick's remarks about the shark scene in James and the Giant Peach are an example. To hear him tell it, he used CGI for the sharks to make the point that it is a noxious and evil technique.

It's interesting that the remake of Mighty Joe Young, which used CGI, had a cameo by Ray Harryhausen, the champion of stop-motion.

Depends on circumstances. The CGI'd bunnies floating weightless in the BunVac 6000 in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit worked pretty well, and that would have been hard to do anywhere near as well just using the usual Plasticene.

Everything has its uses, which was the point I really wanted to make--I felt as though it was being suggested that CG was an improvement on hand-drawn animation, rather than a new and different technique.

I think the biggest difference between stop motion and 3D CGI is stop motion's subconscious sense of the uncanny--those are inanimate objects on the screen, and they're moving. Which makes it perfect for Jan Svankmajer and the Quay brothers.