h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Mission to Mars" (2000) was about a second mission going to rescue the first mission...Right. Outbound to Mars, at LEAST an 8 month trip out (depending on where Mars' orbital position is relative to Earth, it could be MUCH more), even if they have the second ship on the pad...

I never saw Pulp Fiction, so have no clue who you're talking about. It had Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, Don cheadle and Connie Nielson. It was a Brian De Palma film.

Harrumph....

SC

Dr Who vs. Q; please.......Q for sure. I never, never got the whole Dr. Who thing and stopped trying the minute it was the blond guy; at least the disheveled guy with the brown hair was buyable. My dad loved the show to pieces (and it was on after Thomas the Tank Engine) so I watched afew but I vividly remember after seeing one with these huge spiders. It terrified me. Which is shameful today because I remember it and they were really cheesy; probably the precursor scene to Harry Potter's spider thing; also the LOTR movie spider thing...what is it with spiders anyway?

Ah no, the film I'm talking about was called Stranded...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283015/

You've not seen Pulp Fiction? My sympathies

Orcus, save your sympathy! I don't feel the need to see Pulp Fiction.

Blame it on growing up in Detroit... we didn't need to see films about mobsters, they frequently ended up in the local papers.

SC

Ah but it is good I feel in a thread dedicated to pap films, one should at least strive to occasionally watch a good one.

For example I watched Lost in Translation last night, a refreshingly good film.
It's a film about two insomniacs and we were thanking our lucky stars we never suffer from that, so ironically I couldn't get a wink of sleep afterwards Hence my posting all the way from the UK at ungodly hours of the morning

Why are we on to other genres.I thought this was about SF films?

I've watched a loooootttttt of bad SF in my time.The very worst have to be the new erotic sf films being shown on the SciFi channel.Soft porn SF!!Total trash.

Incog.

No need to ask you what you think of "Barbarella", then!

SC

Barbarella just made me laugh hysterically

Incog.

Does Zardoz count? The 1974 film with Sean Connery in it? Although I should think he'd rather forget about it!
Opinion seems to be split on whether it is just completely different and unclassifiable or plain old cr*p! Either way, it's certainly wierd!

No mention yet for Lost in Space? The longest two hours ever.
It's the ultimate in bungled join-the-dots film-making:
the awful love interest between Matt Le Blanc and Heather Graham
The cute cgi muppet with merchandising potential
Gary Oldman chewing the sets until he's mercifully computer generated out of the frame
Leaden pace in place of atmosphere or character development
And worst of all it thinks it's clever because there's a mashed up story about time paradoxes buried somewhere under all the bilge.

But I thought Mars Attacks! was a witty satire on the genre so what would I know?

Ictoan, I have to thank you SOOOOO much. I had managed to clean Zardoz out of my memory banks, and now, there it is again!

I wonder, will it take another ten years to re-eradicate?

SC

P.S. -- I am the proud owner of the DVD of "Killers from Space", 1954, directed by W. Lee Wilder (Billy Wilder's less famous brother) and starring a young (and not-yet-savvy-to-scripts-to-be-turned-down)
Peter Graves! Got it for an upcoming "Bad SF Movie Clip Night" with my space group.

UG! i hate the matrix!!! it was soo cheezy! but i think mars atttacks was just cheezy enough to be funny and independance day was so uttery stupid it was funny too
cheers
ford

Gotta agree on "Independence Day"...

However, I am watching (well, listening anyway) "Star Trek IV" on the telly right now. No matter what anyone else thinks, so there!

(Jarring to think how many of the people in that film are now dead...).

SC

I just didn't get Mars Attacks. Perhaps it's because I've never watches all the 50s alien movies it is reported to refer to, but I didn't smile once from beginning to end.

I dunno about Star Trek IV. I rather thought that it was the second best Trek film. Wrath of Khan is first, of course.

But Star Trek V.... please, no. It's just dire. And it ends with Shatner singing 'Row, row, row your boat'. In what mad world would that be considered a good ending to anything?


Geggs

hehe, row row row your boat!
cheers
ford

Not the end of a movie, maybe -- more like the end of the world!

SC

i feel lie going river rafting right now!
cheers
ford

I seem to remember that the closing lines of the Star Trek films got increasingly lame as the original cast went on. Luckily, the TNG crew had more sense.
By way of a link, Jonathan Frakes played Will Riker in TNG, and directed both First Contact and Insurrection. He also directed the dire recent Thunderbirds film.

Ok... here are MY votes for dumbest.

1. Armageddon: For a movie with SUCH a large budget and made with the help of NASA for Pete's sake, why did it go so far out of its way to MUCK UP the SCIENCE??? The movie is full of things that anyone with a seventh grade science education would call B.S. on such as fires on an airless asteroid, aerobanking a shuttle in space, and my personal favourite... that whole idiotic scene with the dual docking with the 'russian space station'... they had to spin the station up BEFORE they docked for some convoluted reason .. Ok.. fine, I don't buy it, but fine... once you've done that you have a great opportunity to show a very neat and cheap special effect of the two crews climbing ladders toward each other... no, instead they just show the two crews WALKING toward each other... HEY GUYS!! GRAVITY IS BEHIND YOU!!!

Seriously I can't watch this movie around others... they won't let me, I keep b****ing about the stupidity.

2. Godzilla: Ok... seriously... why mess up a great monster? For less than 1/10th the budget of the American disaster of a movie, Toho came out with Godzilla 2000 and proved no digital effect can ever replace the cinematic magic of a guy in a rubber suit.

3. Total Recall: A mishmash of stories from a great writer turned into swill. One note... If you do find yourself in the near vacuum on the Martian surface... your eyes do not bulge out of your head... they may boil and you'll have embolisms... Ok.. fine even if they did they wouldn't just pop back in after the atmosphere is replaced and you wouldn't get up and walk around no matter how long you sat there and caught your breath.

4. Battlefield Earth: Yea, I agree.. L. Ron Hubbard, 'nuff said. Ok. one more thing, Ok... it's a thousand years in the future, I can see how one might believe that that Miniature golf course dinosaur might be a monster... But I can't believe that a putter would survive for use as a club... OH WAIT! This is the best part... Freeze frame and you will see that it's NOT A PUTTER!... It looks to be a 5 iron.. ON A PUTT-PUTT COURSE???.... Wasn't there someone on the set that knew the difference?... Oh, wait... Travolta was in charge.

5. Star Wars Phantom Menace/ Attack of the Clones/ Revenge of the Sith: Even though the last one hasn't been released yet, we all know it will suck. It took Lucas a lot of work, but with Jar-Jar he got people to stop bit**ing about the Ewoks. Midiclorians/mitochondria... what was wrong with a mystical Force... It didn't need some pseudoscientific explanation... it was better without it, which is why I'm sure we never heard about midichlorians again in ep. II. And just because you have the digital graphics to make Yoda bounce around like one of Yuen Wu Ping's hong kong fighters doesn't mean you should... When the emperor fought Luke and Vader in RotJ, he didn't need to do back flips. Yoda shouldn't have NEEDED to do back flips either.


Ok... I feel much better now.