Iterating on Light and Dark

I like all sorts of sci-fi.  Not just because I grew up on things like Knight Rider and Star Trek.  Science Fiction plays towards my nerdy tendencies - the likes of which I can’t pretend to hide given the fact that I have so many blogs, work in the Internet industry, prefer riding scooters more than motorcycles (and sold my last motorcycle), and have a Wii, PS3, PS2, DS, and PSP sitting on my home theater right now.

No, I’m a nerd, and I like scifi.  Hell, look at my DVR list:

• Fringe
• Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles
• Dollhouse
• Battlestar Galactica

But, that’s not really much a confession these days - hell, tons of people like scifi related things.  The real confession here is that I like SciFi Original Movies.  I know, I know, but hear me out…So normally they’re pretty terrible.  Actually, in general they’re pretty terrible.  My interest (nay, moving towards a light obsession) started probably started half a year ago with Aztec Rex.  Yes, this is a movie about exactly what you think it’s about - Cortez and his crew are in Aztec Mexico, being attacked by a giant Tyrannosaurus Rex.  I know it sounds terrible, and frankly it is, but it’s the kind of terrible that just plain amuses me.  It’s solidly in the “camp”…  camp…  but at the same time, it tries to engage the things people seem most interested in seeing in their movies:

• Crazy monster special effects
• A fear of the unknown - mysterious things out of our control during an uncertain time (this is why sci fi became such a big thing in the late 40s - early 50s during such tumultuous times)
• Cute girls in peril (like this needs explaining) who manage to show their strength and save themselves
• Triumph over “evil”.  Sometimes that’s the monsters, sometimes it’s the people.

SciFi Original Movies are amusing because they take all of those things, wrap them up in ridiculous situations that let you (generally) shut off your mind in a way that I can appreciate.  It’s akin to “the chick flick”, which I actually don’t hate as much as you’d guess.  In fact I find them moderately amusing, if anything because again - it presents a “fantasy” that you can disconnect from and not really worry too much about heavy cerebral involvement.

All that said, there are bad SciFi Original Movies - ones that go beyond the obvious brain-dead tripe and wander right into a special kind of terrible that no one realistically can take interest in.  And unfortunately there’s been a slew of them.  Most recently, “Planet Raptor” really hurt my soul.  It had a few random things going for it:

• Had some “big” names like Vanessa Angel, Ted Raimi, and to a lesser extent, Musetta Vander
• It has dinosaurs
• It has space (or, at least, a planet - on which resides raptors of some form)

You put those together and you’d expect something halfway decent.  This was not the case.  Unfortunately, all of the money clearly went to procuring Vanessa Angel (and maybe a little to Ted Raimi), and absolutely none of it went to post-production.  If the script weren’t bad enough (Vanessa Angel’s character randomly knows how to speak some an alien bug language?), the acting was quite possibly the worst I’d seen this side of community theater, the editing was sloppy (there was even a random Tyrannosaur in the movie that never showed up for more than 2 seconds, with no explanation), but the raptor “effects” were clearly made by “graduates” of the Academy of Art, San Francisco, in between drugs, coffee, and finals schedules.

Example (please note the random, out of place “Tyrannosaur”):

This makes me sad.  Not that the “movie” had really good chances in general - the premise is beyond ludicrous - it was mostly that they could have tried a little harder to make it actually watchable: to allow a person to shut off their brain for an hour and a half and eat their popcorn in peace.  Lo, the impression the viewer gets is that no one making the movie cared.  As a result, the viewer doesn’t care.

Now, this is not the case for two (dare I say) great SciFi “Original” Movies.  (That last time I put the quotes around “original” because I know SciFi has a habit of re-branding other direct-to-video movies as their own - anyone know “Mansquito” aka “Mosquito Man”?)  These were “Splinter” and “Wyvern”, both of which were well acted with very little in the way of “famous people” - the production value was high, good cinematography, good direction, good editing, good pacing.  Granted, this is all “good” in the sense that they’re between most high-budget TV shows and most Hollywood movies, but this metric is a far cry from Planet Raptor and its plodding pacing and past-borderline childish script. They cared, in a way that was reflected not by just pulling a few “names” but more about telling a fun story.  Planet Raptor was about marketing and marketing alone.  That doesn’t make a good movie, and in a genre like Science Fiction, you need it to be good to help move past the stigma surrounding it.

There’s a reason for the stigma.  Science Fiction can definitely be bad - as a genre it’s almost more apt to be bad than anything else since it deals entirely with the imaginary and the fanciful, in a way that’s more reminiscent of a 15 year old’s imagination than an adult’s.  It can be entertaining, though, and often times the most enjoyable films are the ones that were made by people trying to attract viewers by presenting something enjoyable to watch rather than trying to entice people to watch with an overpaid (and probably under-deserving) C or B list actor / actress.  I’m not ashamed to say that I like Science Fiction, or SciFi Original Movies, as long as the guiding principle behind them is enjoyability, not marketing.