The Desert Mermaid

Last night the family watched The Sound of Music again. Every time I watch that movie, I am stunned by how damn good it is.

Tonight my mom, my sister, and I watched the High School Musical Rifftrax.

I was also stunned by this movie, but for an entirely different reason. Ye gods. I had heard it was bad, but I had NO IDEA.

I’m going to watch The Sound of Music again, just to get the taste out of my mouth.


FUN FACT: According to High School Musical, I live in Albuquerque!

The high school location they filmed at really is called East High, but after it got revamped for the movie, it got an unofficial new name: Disney High. Utah: Standing In For Your State Since The Dawn Of Hollywood.

Hey, guys! Check it out! I totally had a birthday—and I got treasure to prove it! And now, here on my journal, I am going to share it with you!

First, check out this—the most fortuitous birthday card ever. My co-worker was absolutely thrilled to find it.



( Swag!  )

Bonus photos! Check out how my peppers are doing!



These are no ordinary peppers, my friends! These are GOTH PEPPERS. These are the kinds of bell peppers that sit around writing poetry about bleeding black rose petals from alabaster skin into a lake of tears or driving nails into Kewpie dolls to add atmosphere to their velvet-draped bedrooms. “Purple Beauties,” they’re called, but they’re working their damndest with what nature can give them to be the deep black of despairing, endless night.



I am dying to find out what they taste like.

For the past week or so, acrossthelake, i_blaze_the, and I have been debating the worst possible movie done by any iteration of MST3k. They are torn between Manos: The Hands of Fate—a movie that, like The Last Airbender, manages to be bad in every possible category* and Monster A Go-Go, a Frankenstein’s monster of a movie stitched together from the dead corpses of three different movies** and brought back not to life, but to a state of undeath so gruesome that the movie actually commits suicide at the end rather than try to wrap up the story.

I’d add to these The Creeping Terror, which is like Monster A Go-Go except you just wish there was no monster, and The Castle of Fu Manchu, which did have yellowface and also has the distinction of being the only MST I refuse to watch twice. But hands down the worst damn movie I’ve ever seen, no question at all, is Legacy of Blood, taken on by Cinematic Titanic in a riff that matched the Charge of the Light Brigade for both heroism and overall success.

I could enumerate all of the awfulnesses of this movie—the drive-thru quality sound, the lighting that only manages to be bright when the movie accidentally gives away its big reveal before—well, before the big reveal—the loathsome characters, the loathsomely creepy content, the loathsome acting, etc.. However, you could say that of a lot of movies. This one is unique, though, because while you hate this movie, this movie hates you back. Much as Manos or Monster A Go-Go or The Creeping Terror or even possibly Fu Manchu were awful, none of them was actively trying to put you off your dinner. Legacy is. Every single scene, by accident or design, manages to make me want to throw up a little. It is not badly entertaining. It doesn’t even contain that certain level of charm that comes from the really awful execution of something trying to be good. This movie is a fucking troll.

You may see acrossthelake’s rebuttal in the comments. I also invite you to submit your reasons why the movie you hate the most is, in fact, worse than Legacy of Blood.*** But remember that whatever movie you submit will have to be worse than the image of some ham-faced greaseball creep trying to mount his insane sister while their electrocuted in-laws lie gently smoldering in their bed and the guy with the people-skin lamp enjoys some delicious ham from a plate that recently had a severed head on it. I dare ya to top that. Go ahead on.


*I actually am willing to give Manos the favorable comparison here, because it at least had the excuses of low budget, bad/nonexistent source material, and lack of willful racism in what you could politely call its “casting.” (I know, it was whitewashed, but on the plus side it wasn’t yellowface.) TLA had a giant budget and excellent source material, but it was stubbornly racist and still failed miserably.

**i_blaze_the’s metaphor.

***Right now we are going to nip your automatic response of The Human Centipede in the bud, because while the movie’s premise makes me do the DDD: DO NOT WANT face every single time I think of it, it did supply me with the unprecedented entertainment of watching squirming movie reviewers trying to gently break said premise to their readers.

For the past week or so my brother and I have been going through our collection Rifftrax, which means that tonight I saw the Matrix sequels all the way through for the first time.* And now, my friends, I finally can appreciate the full genius of the Brothers Wachowski.

I mean, up till I saw the sequels, I didn’t even think it was possible to have a movie more stupid and irritating than The Matrix. And yet, right around the time that god damn French fucker from the second movie showed up AGAIN in the third and then everyone queued up a 90-minute action sequence while Neo and the Oracle entered Round 2,038 of Free Will/Destiny Dialogue Ping-Pong, I found myself longing for the comparably airtight premise, engaging characterizations, profound philosophy, and artful dialogue of the first. I was even missing the bright cheery greenish grey of the filter from that one.

Now I understand why people keep insisting that the first one isn’t a bad movie. Compared to the sequels, it isn’t!

M. Night Shyamalan may want to take note of this technique if they ever let him back onto a movie lot. Unless this has been his clever plan from the very beginning, too.


*The Matrix is just one of the many movies/franchises I refuse to see without some sort of snark commentary track. Others include 300, Eragon, and Twilight. I’m not sure I can bring myself to watch Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen even with the Rifftrax. They’d have to toss in special appearances by the entire Cinematic Titanic crew, and maybe a Nerf gun I could shoot at the TV, before I even considered the offer.

I hereby wish to declare that Ray Harryhausen does AWESOME DVD commentaries. I now want every commentary to include at least one old man who doesn’t remember anything about production and can’t bring himself to believe that anybody cares about it, anyway.

The film is 20 Million Miles to Earth, which for a lousy B-movie actually has some decent 50’s effects—courtesy Ray, who made a pretty nifty stop-motion monster for it. The monster even manages to look like it’s interacting with the people and everything.* And for the 50th anniversary DVD they got a mostly-dead Ray to sit down (via satellite) with some less-dead special effects artists and commentate. The other guys—including Dennis Muren, who is an effects wizard himself**—all kind of understand DVD commentaries and ask interesting leading questions that give Ray an opportunity to impart his Moviemaster Wisdom.

Ray, on the other hand, is fuckin’ 87 years old and made the movie fifty years ago, when nobody in the audience cared much about The Making Of This Movie, and thus he is eminently practical and unromantic when he hasn’t forgotten what happened:

DENNIS***: So, Ray! Why did you decide to set this movie in Rome?

RAY: I wanted to take a trip to Italy.

---

DENNIS: You know, we have all noticed that your interestingly lifelike models tend to have bent elbows. This lends them a strangely inhuman look. Was that a conscious trademark?

RAY: Actually, I just didn’t want to have to animate swinging arms.

---

DENNIS: How did you come up with this particular design for the spaceship, Ray?

RAY: I looked at some pictures of rockets, and came up with this one.

---

Ray is also totally fascinated by the colorization process (“Amazing that those computers can make the color follow the moving people!”) and thinks it’s great that they’re doing this commentary via satellite from London and Berkeley respectively and yet “it sounds like we’re all in the same room!” Movie Magic strikes again!

(Also, for the record, that monster he made was adorable. I think it was its droopy mustache.)


*As opposed to most B-movies I’ve seen, in which the monster is either Some Guy In A Rubber Suit or a process shot of an iguana or a tarantula or something.

**Industrial Light and Magic, yo. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Terminator …

***Or somebody. There were a couple of other guys, but I didn’t catch the names.

Great Moments In B-Movie Science!

In Terror From The Year 5000, a crazy scientist builds a time machine that transports stuff from The Future to Now—and in order to prove this, he sends one of the Future Things to another scientist who determines that the artifact is indeed from 3000 years in the future.

He does this by carbon dating.

Think about it, won’t you?

Hey there! Are you a prepubescent girl wondering about the strange and confusing changes you’re going through? Do you need the most useless, incomplete, and patronizing advice possible? Well, look no further: the 1950’s is there for you. For example, did you know you get chills and catch cold if you go swimming the first couple of days of your period?

Other highlights: completely pointless drawing of the left hip as part of the lesson, an ‘ukulele, the assertion that it’s more important than ever to look your best on your period,* Giant Death Pads and The Contraption They Hook Up To, and the creepiest single line ever delivered by a 50's educational film dad. Dude, that is a high bar.

Also, I’m assuming they’re all human, but every single person in this film acts strangely enough that they sail into Uncanny Valley.

I want to say, it's not actually as terrible as it could be for one of these shorts. At least you get the basics.

And yes, I found this because the Rifftrax dudes took on this short, which was howlingly funny even though they did skip the actual sex ed lesson. Buncha prudes.


*That’s not even anathema to my own thinking. That’s just inexplicable.

-I think I’m falling back into Middle Earth. Torn World has me wandering the realms of fantasy worldbuilding, and now I’m getting urges to read and watch Tolkien again, and my own little hobbity halflingy characters—the wizard, the pirate, and the explorer—are starting to clamor after a couple years of dormancy.

-Another sign of impending nerdness: I bought my first ever set of polyhedral dice at the Nerd Store today! I am about as good at RP gaming as I seem to be at collaborative worldbuilding, but I am extremely good at sitting in on a campaign and heckling, and I do love me some D&D culture and aesthetic. I’m gonna see if I can’t do some fancy stuff with wire wrapping. Geek jewelry!

-And lastly in the nerd news, I finally downloaded Cinematic Titanic’s Legacy of Blood, and Frank Conniff just totally went Meta-TV’s Frank, so life is good. Why wasn’t Josh Weinstein this entertaining back in ’89? (And good god, this is the most godawful fucked up movie I’ve ever seen. It’s bad when “Howbout a Nazi craft project?” seems like it’d be a welcome addition to the story.)

-Editing. It’s everywhere. All the time. There is nothing but editing and the occasional blog break. Back to editing I go.

Signs that I have been in fandom too long:

In the Star Trek (2009) Rifftrax, when Mike Nelson follows up Baby Spock’s little speech about “Whatever our lives were before Nero changed the timeline” with “We could all be GAY now!”, my thoughts were as follows:

1. How is that different?
2. Oh. He is probably being all ironical and shit, because how can this Enterprise crew know that originally …
3. God dammit.

Actually, as far as Kirk’n’Spock goes, this is only a sign that I have seen the original series. But extending it to the rest of them may be a bit of a stretch.

It is gratifying to know I'm not the only one who spotted Spock Prime's dentures. I guess two hundred years of lousy teeth caught up with him.

Also, the answer to the question “Why is Baby McCoy on the bridge?” is: Spock Prime told them to just let the poor doc have a chair, because McCoy Prime’s got a little folding chair set up in the turbolift so he can pop right out and inject comments* whenever necessary. I should think that was obvious.


*Or sometimes injections.

Went to Haroon’s today to stare at a couple of AWESOME HATS—and also on the off-chance that my friend the MSTie salesgirl would be there.

Unfortunately for the other customers, she was, so what ensued was an extremely squeaky fangirl session wherein we discussed the best way to see episodes that aren’t commercially available,* best host segments, how our friends and family members are concerned for us, etc..

I also invited her along to this. And it’s just occurred to me—ain’t the future great?—that, since this is a nice nationwide event, I can invite all you nerds in the US along, too!

So! August 20th—that’s a Thursday—anyone else up for a rousing theatrical production of Plan 9 From Outer Space, now with special Mike, Crow, and Servo Bill, and Kevin commentary? You bet you are. You bet I am, because I have never actually seen Plan 9, which makes me a terrible bad movie lover. It could be fun!

Or it could be, y’know, a really bad movie. But that’s the whole point, innit?

PS: There will be a short. God damn, I love me some shorts.


*MSTies have a particularly weird attitude toward copyrights. We like the show, so a lot of us want to give the Brains money for it. However, due to the complicated copyright laws involved in producing a show that consists of a bunch of other people’s movies, many of the episodes aren’t available in either syndication or on DVD. This is unacceptable, because dammit, we want to watch—and we also know that, without piracy, the show wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. So we still circulate the tapes.