[QUOTE=mr. jp]
Another vote for Speed. I mean, a woman who is a good driver. How far out is that?
[/QUOTE]
The real problem with Speed is the Bus Jump. Let’s see: the bus drives off the edge of an unfinished freeway - and actually achieves lift! Yes, gravity takes a holiday, and the lack of support under the bus means it flies! If only Leonardo had known …
One of my favourite baaaad science movie moments is in the pretty awful Evolution, starring a post-X Files David Duchovny as a small town professor. On pondering how to defeat the invading alien hoards, DD’s character looks at a periodic chart, which leads him to some pretty WAG-ing. Something along the lines of:
- humans are carbon-based, and
- arsenic is poisonous to humans;
- these aliens are silicon-based, so
- “across one and down two” places on the periodic chart = selenium;
- hence, selenium is equivalently poisonous to these aliens. Leading to the use of Head and Shoulders dandruff shampoo to vanquish the aliens.
Worse: “across one and down two” from silicon is actually antimony.
As a real scientician, I can assure you all that any silicon-based aliens would not find dandruff shampoo particularly explosive.
[QUOTE=araminty]
As a real scientician, I can assure you all that any silicon-based aliens would not find dandruff shampoo particularly explosive.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, it’s so easy to say that from the safety of your carbon-based body …
[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
Alien takes the prize.
[/QUOTE]
Are you ever going to respond to the rebuttals of this stuff?
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
Energy source??? 
:eek: :rolleyes: :dubious: I think it violates all three laws of Thermodynamics.
[/QUOTE]
This is why I was so disappointed by the last two movies. The “humans as batteries” premise was so fatally flawed that there simply had to be another explanation, which would be something incredibly cool and unexpected revealed in one of the sequels…
but no.
What they should have done (the film-makers, not the characters) is explain why the characters don’t simply hop into the suspended animation thingymajigs and flush the air. It’s not like credible reasons couldn’t be found.
[QUOTE=iamthewalrus(:3=]
In this post, Colophon posts a link to the imdb page of Open Water 2, which is a movie thriller about some friends who are out on a sailboat and all jump in for a swim without remembering to put the ladder down. Then they all go crazy and turn on each other until they drown, or something.
From the imdb summary and watching the trailers, this strikes me as so totally stupid, I can only begin to list the reasons why.
[ul][li]It’s a sailboat, which means that, with no one in the boat, it’s got to be anchored, right, or it’d drift away. So they could climb the anchor line.[/li][li]There are like six of them, all athletic, and the preview shows that the deck of the boat is only maybe 5 or 6 feet above the water line. It even shows them making desperate grabs and coming up a foot or two short. C’mon, people. Just get the 4 buff guys to boost one of the 110 lb women up to the deck.[/li][li]They all have swimsuits on. Even with the whispy things that the women are wearing, they could tie them together, throw the line across the bow, and climb up that.[/ul] [/li]
Now, I haven’t actually seen the movie, so it’s possible it’s not quite as dumb as it sounds. But I’m sure (without thinking of them off the top of my head) that there are many others that are. Please share.
[/QUOTE]
I wondered about that, too, but I haven’t seen enough of previews to judge how high above the water the boat is. And with no handholds, it can be difficult to get high enough to climb out on a slick surface.
I wouldn’t condem the movie before I have seen it, because it’s possible they adress these points. Maybe they try and fail.
They recently showed Open Water - about a couple who get left behind on a diving trip because of a counting error. Yes, this shouldn’t happen, it’s stupid not to count twice, and every diver should double-check. But, IMDB says that cases like these happen regularly every year. Humans make errors, and familiarity breeds complacency (that’s why experienced divers often die in circumstances no rookie would die in - the rookies do everything by the book, the exeperienced ones rely on their “have-done-that-a-thousand-times” and cut corners.)
I don’t think T2 was bad - if we ignore the father paradoxon, the movie is still good and exciting.
[QUOTE=araminty]
One of my favourite baaaad science movie moments is in the pretty awful Evolution, starring a post-X Files David Duchovny as a small town professor.
[/QUOTE]
Um, maybe that was a whoosh I missed, but in case not: you know that movie was meant as dumb comedy? I found it very funny despite, no because it was so ridiculous.
[QUOTE=Terrifel]
I can’t remember who said it (and Lord, do I hate repeating unattributed quotes, because they usually turn out to have been coined by Hitler, or Orson Scott Card, or both), but I believe it was an SF author* who observed (paraphrase) “You can ask your audience to accept an impossible thing, but not an improbable one.” The illustration of the principle was a robber trying to crack a safe: it’s acceptable to establish that the safe is guarded by an antimatter bomb that will detonate if the correct code isn’t entered. It isn’t acceptable to have the robber choose the correct combination totally at random. The merely unlikely scenario is the stupider one.
[/QUOTE]
Another example, in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy a string of very unprobable events occur. This would be unacceptable, even for a comedy, if it wasn’t for the impossible “improbability drive”.
[QUOTE=Askance]
The real problem with Speed is the Bus Jump. Let’s see: the bus drives off the edge of an unfinished freeway - and actually achieves lift! Yes, gravity takes a holiday, and the lack of support under the bus means it flies! If only Leonardo had known …
[/QUOTE]
Saw a “science” type show on TV once where they proved that you could jump a bus across a gap in the road if specific criteria were in place - speed of the vehicle, length of gap, and a ramp on the take-off side…
[QUOTE=bluethree]
Sure, but in Alien Nation the aliens crashed to Earth, and the ones who were damaged by salt water weren’t the ones piloting, but rather a slave race…
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, it wasn’t like they were invading on purpose. In fact, in the Alien Nationnovel that I read (which was a continuation of the TV series, not a novelization of the movie), it was “revealed” that the ship was there because it had observed the radio emissions from Earth, and it was going to send a message back to the slavers that Earth had developed intelligent life and should be sterilized, but fortunately for us the slaves rose up and sent the ship into an infinite level of hyperspace while they escaped in an escape ship of some kind and crash landed on earth, and that they weren’t happy about having to come to a place that was 3/4 covered with acid, but it was their only shot at freedom.
[QUOTE=John DiFool]
Not to be confused with the pirate movie The Island (which come to think of it
is also rather improbable: a 17th century pirate society persists for 300 years
virtually unchanged (uncontaminated), and nobody bothers to investigate all these
missing ships either?
[/QUOTE]
That was Peter Benchley, right? I thought that people WERE investigating the missing ships, but they were being blamed on the Mysterious Powers of the Bermuda Triangle.
[QUOTE=Lobelia Overhill]
Saw a “science” type show on TV once where they proved that you could jump a bus across a gap in the road if specific criteria were in place - speed of the vehicle, length of gap, and a ramp on the take-off side…
[/QUOTE]
Of course you can if there’s a ramp. But in Speed the bus managed to leap from a flat section of road, across a gap and onto another flat stretch of road at the same height, with no ramp.
Of course, in real life there actually was a ramp, which was then removed digitally from the finished movie. Which is doubly dumb because you can see the front of the bus go up the ramp with nothing underneath it.
BTW, in the UK, Open Water 2 goes by the name of Adrift. I don’t think it originally had anything to do with the first Open Water movie at all, but it’s being marketed as a sequel in most countries for some reason.
How about these:
The Lost Continent – not the 1950s film mocked by MST3K, or the 1961 George Pal film about Atlantis. This one’s about a Spanish Galleon stuck in the Sargasso Sea for a few centuries, surrounded by Awful Monster Things in the Sargasso (to which they occasional sacrifice someone) and a modern ship that runs into all this. The title’s stupid enough – not only is there no continent, there’s no dry land in this! But the premise is stupid and makes no sense at all. The weiedest image is the guys walking around on the Sargasso Weeds held up by seaweed “snowshoes” and organic balloons.
The Terrornauts – Scientists are kidnapped by a flying saucer and given intelligence tests by robots. Even duller than it sounds, believe it or not. Great poster (which shows a girl being sacrificed by a green alien), which has nothing to do with the movie. Hard to believe this is supposed to be based on a noverl by SF great Murray Leinster.
Star Crystal – “Alien” done on the cheap. A crystal “egg” hatches and chases people around a really fake looking spaceship. The stupid part – I’m about to give away the ending, but, believe me, you won’t want a spoiler box – is that they defeat the alien by converting it to Christianity.
Sphere – I actually used to like some of Michael Crichton’s stuff, way back when. This is a confused mishmash of time travel, deep sea shenanigans, and the old chestnut about “it becomes what you fear the most”, which nobody ever does well.
Do not miss Jabootu’s point-by-point vivisection of this awful film:
http://www.jabootu.com/sphere.htm
From Hell It Came– 1950s amazingly awful film in which a murderer gets reincarnated as a tree, and goes around taking revenge. Imagine if one of those apple trees from The Wizard of Oz really had it in for Dorothy. “Oh, so you don’t like my apples, eh? Let’s see what happens when I pick parts offa you!” The review in the New York Times was, reportedly “…and to Hell it Can Go!” That ought to be true, even if it wasn’t.
Actually, that one’s one of the dumbest premises I’ve ever come up against, to tell you the truth. It beats out aging cosmetic queens getting turned into insect hybrids by royal jelly, or a woman aging rapidly because of taking the wrong pituitary extract, or a guy changed into a one-eyed giant by a valley full of radiation (or an atomic blast), or a guy who gets himself mixed up with a fly in a transporter accident. The fact that a movie like From Hell It Came got made amazes me. Movies don’t just happen after all – they’re proposed and defended and planned and filmed. All of this takes months, giving you plenty of time for reflection. The fact that someone along this chain of events, typing the script, or pitching this to the backers, or filming a guy dressed up in a tree suit and trying not to look clumsy didn’t suddenly stop and say “This is ridiculous! Nobody’s going to sit for ninety minutes watching a movie about a killer tree stump that you can outwalk!” simply amazes me.
Two pages and nobody has mentioned “The Stepford Wives.” Somehow, I think the women’s children and parents might caught on to the fact that they are not real people.
[QUOTE=Antinor01]
I’m guessing you mean movies with stupid premises that attempt to pretend that they aren’t.
I haven’t seen it, but my pick would be Shopgirl. I simply refuse to believe there would be a love triangle between the lovely Claire Danes, the rather cute Jason Schwartzman and…Steven Martin, who is old enough to be their father and nearly old enough to be their grandfather. Sorry, but my disbelief just doesn’t suspend like that.
[/QUOTE]
Give it a chance. I loved it! The reason I found it believable was:
She was broke, Schwartzman was broker than her, she was constantly looking at people with money performing senseless acts of conspicuous spending, and she wanted a little piece of that.
YMMV.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
From Hell It Came– 1950s amazingly awful film in which a murderer gets reincarnated as a tree, and goes around taking revenge. Imagine if one of those apple trees from The Wizard of Oz really had it in for Dorothy. “Oh, so you don’t like my apples, eh? Let’s see what happens when I pick parts offa you!” The review in the New York Times was, reportedly “…and to Hell it Can Go!” That ought to be true, even if it wasn’t.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050414/
Actually, that one’s one of the dumbest premises I’ve ever come up against, to tell you the truth…
[/QUOTE]
Hey, I know that one! You used to watch Lenny Clarke’s Late Show, too, huh? Al though the walking tree was not the spirit of a murderer. It was the spirit of the world’s whitest, wrongly-executed Jamaican prince.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
…It beats out aging cosmetic queens getting turned into insect hybrids by royal jelly…
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
…or a guy changed into a one-eyed giant by a valley full of radiation (or an atomic blast)…
[/QUOTE]
Ah, now, you’re conflating two related movies here. Exposure to an atomic blast turns Lt. Col. Glen Manning into the raging giant, The Amazing Colossal Man. It’s not until the sequel, where he’s discovered holed up in a valley and the radiation has destroyed his body and his brain, that he becomes incoherent and evil, in War of the Colossal Beast You needed to pay a bit more attention during The Creature Double Feature, young man.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Movies don’t just happen after all – they’re proposed and defended and planned and filmed. All of this takes months, giving you plenty of time for reflection. The fact that someone along this chain of events, typing the script, or pitching this to the backers, or filming a guy dressed up in a tree suit and trying not to look clumsy didn’t suddenly stop and say “This is ridiculous! Nobody’s going to sit for ninety minutes watching a movie about a killer tree stump that you can outwalk!” simply amazes me.
[/QUOTE]
Whenever I see a real stinker, I watch the credits to see just how many people could not bring themselves to say, “My God, this is a piece of shit!”
Bzzzt! Sorry, you missed it. But thanks for playing.
I was referring to three movies simulotaneously here. Partly The Amazing Colossal Man, with the lost eye courtesy of the sequel, War of the Colossal BGeast. But mainly I was referring to The Cyclops, a 1957 Bert I. Gordon wonder with awful effects in which a pilot who crashes in a South American valley filled with radiation mutates (as do the local creatures) into a giant. In his case, the skin folds over one eye, which leaves him a Cyclops. His friends come down to rescue him and get a nasty surprise when they find out what’s happened to him. He’s also lost his mind, and tries to eat them. Lon Chaney, Jr. is in it (but not as the Cyclops). It was released as a wide-screen movie, but I’ve only seen it on the small screen. It was a staple of New York’s Channel 11 WPIX “Chiller Theater”, and featured prominently in the opening montage. Elvira “hosted” it on a VHS tape which I never got a chance to see. MST3K could’ve done a real num,ber on this one.
Bzzzt! Sorry, you missed it. But thanks for playing.
I was referring to three movies simulotaneously here. Partly The Amazing Colossal Man, with the lost eye courtesy of the sequel, War of the Colossal BGeast. But mainly I was referring to The Cyclops, a 1957 Bert I. Gordon wonder with awful effects in which a pilot who crashes in a South American valley filled with radiation mutates (as do the local creatures) into a giant. In his case, the skin folds over one eye, which leaves him a Cyclops. His friends come down to rescue him and get a nasty surprise when they find out what’s happened to him. He’s also lost his mind, and tries to eat them. Lon Chaney, Jr. is in it (but not as the Cyclops). It was released as a wide-screen movie, but I’ve only seen it on the small screen. It was a staple of New York’s Channel 11 WPIX “Chiller Theater”, and featured prominently in the opening montage. Elvira “hosted” it on a VHS tape which I never got a chance to see. MST3K could’ve done a real num,ber on this one.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050281/
By the way, a quick look at his IMDB page shows that Duncan “Dean” Parkin played not only The Cyclops, but Russ Manning in War of the Colossal Beast. The man’s movie career consisted entirely of playing oner-eyed giants in Bert I. Gordon movies!
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0662784/
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
You can’t talk about stupid premises and not give first prize to The Matrix.
[/QUOTE]
Eh. Could have been saved. Dig it: Zion… is also inside the computer system. It’s the control. The people in Zion are still asleep… hell, maybe it’s Sims, maybe it’s actually 1990, maybe it’s the last three seconds of Mr. Anderson’s real life in 199x.
See, that’s a much better movie ending.
[QUOTE=Alistair McCello]
That movie was brilliant… that is in the sense that I love really crappy movies that try to take themselves seriously. The complete mockery of every scientific field that it approached was delicious, the utterly predictable cast list (guy with a crayon drawing by his kid? Gee, I think he’ll live.), all delicious.
[/QUOTE]
Jon Rogers thanks you. He always said it was supposed to be more fun than good. Early variant on Snakes on a Plane. Right, Daniel? (Mr. Dorkness moderates a board the writer hangs at.)