B-Movie Night!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Wait, how did The Incredible Shrinking Man get an 88% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes? It consisted of about 20 minutes of stupid plot and then spent the rest of its time padding out the movie with scenes from Castaway: Basement Edition.*

Maybe they got this rating mixed up with the lousy rating they gave Oscar. Fuck you, Oscar is GREAT. Darn critics wouldn't know comedy if it slapped 'em in the face with a fish.

But then, what can I expect from people who'll give a thumbs-up to a movie about a guy's whinily-narrated quest for basement spider cake? You just can't trust someone like that.


DISCUSSION QUESTION: So did these screenwriters from the 50s have a box of magnetic poetry specifically tailored for B-movie filler dialogue? Or did all the masculine manly men back then actually spout long, slightly petulant, buzzword-filled flash floods of bogus philosophy anyway, and it just got translated to the screen?


*Except that I liked Castaway. At least Tom Hanks didn't offer long despondent voiceover monologues. And I seriously doubt our Ken Doll-haired Shrinking Man could make me cry over a volleyball like Tom did.

Comments

[sunshine-shaman.livejournal.com]

Basement spider cake?

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

You're not the only one wondering what the heck she's talking about.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

See below!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

So our tiny hero falls into the basement and gets stuck there, and he must learn to Survive On His Wits. So he finds water from the water heater and a matchbox for a house, but he has no food because he's too stupid to figure out mousetraps. His wife got distracted like three weeks earlier and left some cake on a beam, so he scales the wall to get the cake. But a tarantula has for some reason built a web on the cake, and he has to fight the spider to get any cake. So he kills the spider but it's too late because now he's all delirious and starts rambling about how he is not hungry but the infinite and the infinitesmal are the same thing, and then there are some stock photos of galaxies, and then it's over.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

...what.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Bonus points for their finagling it so that the scraps of cloth he's wearing start to look a lot like a Biblical robe as he shrinks. I have the distinct feeling that, somewhere between the beginning of scripting Adventures In The Basement and the writing of his final Dude, There's A Universe In ALL Of Us soliloquy, there was a bong.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Damn straight Oscar was a great movie! I still rewatch that now and again.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Exactly! How can you not love a movie with lines like "Get the hell outta my atrium!"? Also, Tim Curry is in it, and so anything anyone says after that is invalid.

("Shocking. I would have terminated her immediately." "I can't do that anymore. Best I can do is fire 'er.")