I love Bod Movies. Every Year I have a Bad Film Festival to celebrate laughably bad films. I’ve been doing this since long before MST3K was around. My childhood was warped by old Universal movies and American International Pictures. Growing up near New York helped, since I could get Creature Feature on WNEW and Million Dollar Movie and Supernatural Theater on WOR, and Chiller Theater on WPIX (I think WPIX owned a library of the Bottom of the Barrel stuff, since they showed it so often – Attack of the 50 foot Woman, Voodoo Island, Black Sleep, Plan 9 from Outer Space, the Cape Canaveral Monsters.
Anyway, someone I grew up to be a real scientist and engineer, and I learned early on not to expect anything approaching scientific accuracy from bad monster and exploitation movies. But every now and then they’d surprise me. I’m not talking about good sf movies, like Forbidden Planet, or The Day the Earth Stood Still. You expect good science from a class effort. I’m talking about unexpected accuracy in the lesser breed, or even the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Tales from the Past – a bad anthology series narrated by John Carradine. So bad the IDMB doesn’t even list it under this title. It used a lot of stock footage from Roger Corman movies. Think really bad “Night Gallery” stuff. In one entry, the absent-minded scientist describes his work with birds – and darned if he doesn’t describe a REAL behavioral experiment! I was blown away. It didn’t affect the plot, but I was surprised to find it in there. They quoted the real experiment accurately, too. Maybe they had an issue of Scientific American on the set.
Angry Red Planet– This was advertised as being filmed in “MarsScope”, or something on the original posters, which seems to be heavily solarized film printed on sepia stock. The first Earth Ship to Mars encounters weird things like man-eating plants, a rat-bat-spider, and (as they approach the neon-lit martian city on a rubber raft) a giant amoeba with a rotating eye. The amoeba eats the chubby crewmember and gets the hero by the arm, but the heroine manages to seal the ship and blast off. She faints, of course. When she gets up, she finds that a piece of amoba is stuck to the unconscious hero’s arm, bright green goo slowly eating him. When they get back to Earth, they succeed in removing the amoeba by an unbelievably reasonable method. They don’t use magic formula 7X, or the mystic ray gun. They place the arm next to a piece of fresh tissue. They apply electrical shocks to the arm, making it an unpleasant environment for the ameoba, who shifts over to the friendlier non-shocked tissue.The Heroine, by the way, is the one who comes up with this. So in a cheesy, early 1960s space movie we have a believable method for defeating Space Amoeba devised and implemented by the Female Lead. Amazing!
Not quite the same thing, but I thought the bit in Me, Myself, and Irene, where what’s-his-name’s sons were talking about the “mofo electrons” was pretty clever, funny, and accurate too!
I haven’t seen the movie “The Relic” (1997) but an old friend of mine was one of the scientific advisors. I’d like to think that the science in the movie was therefore pretty good, but “caveat viewer”…the IMDB entry doesn’t look promising.
I’d just like to say that I saw Angry Red Planet twice as a youngster, and both times it scared the bejeezus out of me. The whole colour tone of when they were on Mars and that rotating eye slug thingy really creeped me out.
As for proper science in crappy movies, I have to say that it’s usually the bad science that tips an average movie into a horrible one, so I can’t really recall any that fit in this category. It certainly isn’t in any that used ‘Virtual Reality’ as a theme.
There was a movie I saw on MST3K called Parts: The Clonus Horror (or was it Clonus: The Parts Horror?) about human clones being grown for organ farming purposes. In one scene the main character stumbles upon the “backstory video” that explains how the clones were made. As best as I could tell, this explanation matched up pretty well with the real technique that would eventually be used to produce Dolly.
Actually, I think the science was pretty awful – but I don’t blame your friend. He was stuck with Doug Preston and Lincoln Child’s story.
Don’t get the wrong impression – I loved The Relic – the book more than the movie. I love the idea about a monster roaming through the halls of a thinly-disguised American Museum of Natural History. There’s some slick misdirection, and a nice payoff. But they don’t make it convincing. I bought the sequel, “Reliquary”, and read “Riptide”, which is a fictionalized version of the Oak Island Treasure. DP and LC’s books ar good mindless escapist stuff.
Does TV count?
I was watching an old Banacek where a hologram of a rocket engine was used as a decoy to cover up the fact that the engine was already stolen.
The hologram was accurately represented. They used a laser and mirrors to capture the interference pattern and then placed the film in a large plastic drum. A laser was then used to show the hologram. When the laser was turned off it appeared the the rocket engine had vanished.
While the hologram looked a little too realistic – it probably would not fool anybody in real life – the general depiction of the process and use was spot on.
Compare that to the magic holograms and in Star Trek and (Dare I say it!) Babylon 5.
The old Leonard Nimoy “In Search of” series had an interesting program once on the death of Hitler. Remembering that this program showed “credible” evidence on the existence of UFOs, Nessie, Bigfoot, etc., the program did a very credible job on Hitler’s death. I actually saw this particular program a few years ago for the first time, some months after a “Discovery” program that traced (from Soviet archives) what happened to Hitler’s body starting in May, 1945. “In Search of” had much the same information (and it had been produced over 15 years earlier), although they didn’t go into the multiple buryings. But the info on the identification of the bodies pretty much followed what later Soviet archives said.
I’m sorry, but I must. Does the Mars Direct plan call for habitat modules with large holes in them that let the Martian breeze blow in? Because the module in the movie had one. So much for redemption.
I’d just like to comment on how humorous it is that someone named CalMeacham is commenting on good science in bad movies. Perhaps you can explain how planes turn green midflight?
Angry Red Planet! ANGRY RED PLANET! I’ve been looking for that movie for years, but I couldn’t remember the name! Can you get it on video? Better yet, on DVD? Off to Amzon!
I prefer to think that I take my handle from the CalMeacham of Raymond F. Jones’s original book This Island Earth. The book s finally back in print after many year in limbo, and I heartily recommend it. If you thought that they butchered Heinlein’s Starship Troopers when they filmed it, you would weep over TIE. The book has no lobster-armed mutants, no stupidity about saucer-riding aliens needing humans to develop atomic nergy for them, and no planes turning green in mid-flight. The title makes sense, and so does the Interociter. Worth a read.
This isn’t sci-fi but I did this particular touch of reality really impressed me. In U-571 the american crew aboard the german sub had trouble because:
a) They had trouble because almost nobody could read the labels on the german controls.
b) They couldn’t just hop in and drive it immiediately because nobody was familiar with the design.
Haven’t seen it, but your description sounds just like the scene in Star Trek III when they comandeer the Klingon ship, then Sulu, Chekov and Scotty have to figure out how to drive it!
Well then why the hell didn’t they USE it? The book was great. The movie was stupid. I’ve seen worse monster movies, but it had very little in common with the book. The killing-the-monster scene, for example. :rolleyes: The hero in the book wasn’t even in the movie! :mad:
I have a hard time recognizing good science in a bad movie. What really irritates me is bad science in a movie which is pretending to be good.
I went into Armageddon expecting mindless brain-candy. But the stretchs were just too much even for my suspension of disbelief. Aside from the fact that a bunch of yahoo oil-riggers would make demands of the government before helping them (you’re going to die if you don’t help them, so what’s with the demands?), they made the same mind-numbing mistake which “Deep Impact” made. They approached the bloody asteroid from behind!! It’s a “one chance to save the world” mission and they take the single most dangerous route to get to the thing? Aside from the time they waste by flying around behind it and overtaking it, why not just swing around in front of it and gradually slow down to a nice soft landing?
And I don’t think I’d spend my last moments before The End of the World running around the barn with an American Flag.
Sounds a lot like HORRORS OF THE RED PLANET with John Carradine. I think they used a Russian B&W sci-fi movie and then just tinted the scenes red and tacked on their own wraparound story. But damn, it was bad. Of course, with a John Carradine movie, that usually goes without saying.
Nope. Angry Red Planet had no John Carradine, and it wasn’t weirdly tinted – they made it that way by processing the film weird. Nor was it a Russian flick. I think you have this confused with Creature from a Prehistoric Planet and Planet of Prehistoric Women, which had Carradine and used footage from a Russian sf flick.
