Aside from your very good comments, the thing that bothered me is, if you take the movie at face value, 50 million people must have died during that earthquake. It would be the biggest disaster since the Flood*. The effects would be felt for decades. But, hey, as long as Mr. Rock’s kid is OK, happy ending!
*didn’t actually happen
Currently watching Robo Vampire on Roku’s B-Movie TV. There is no “robo vampire” in the movie but there is a “robocop” of sorts(in fact, the movie posters and video package depiction steal an image of “Robocop”, but the actual character looks nothing like him). There is dialog that explains how he was made, of course:
The director was “Joe Livingstone” (aka Godfrey Ho), and the writer was “William Palmer” (aka Godfrey Ho).
Completely stupid, but fun:
Caveman with Ringo Starr. Think of a “Quest for Fire” where the producer didn’t even try to be serious. The IMDB page even has a translation key to the caveman-speak.
The very first movie (to my knowledge) to show a dinosaur penis.
Veteran comedic actor Jack Guilford mistakenly rubs against a T. rex penis, causing the stop-motion dinosaur unexpected bliss.
The T-Rex falling off the cliff was the funniest thing I’d seen in years. Waving his tiny little arms to try and keep balance.
I read the book a couple of times decades ago. LRH didn’t write anything quite this stupid. I haven’t watched the movie, but the book had humans learning alien technology through a powerful learning device that shoved knowledge directly into the brain. They then used almost exclusively alien technology, with the exception of some firearms that were packed in grease (they make their own cartridges), and some salvaged nuclear bombs, which I think they had to mine uranium to make usable again. I’m not going to read it again to find out.
Agreed - John Carter was pretty faithful to the first three books (haircuts and JC being a Highlander1 aside). It was a good, fun sword and sandals movie.
1 - Shut up, if you’re immortal, you’re a Highlander. I don’t make the rules.
I’m not quite sure if I’m understanding you, but in the original books, John Carter was a Highlander. Quoting Wikipedia’s article on him:
In the opening pages of A Princess of Mars, it is revealed that Carter can remember no childhood, having always been a man of about thirty years old. Many generations have known him as “Uncle Jack,” but he always lived to see them grow old and die, while he remained young.
As to the movie, I personally thought it was stupid, but no stupider than a lot of action-adventure movies that got a better reception.
Exactly. I do not think Carter was a Highlander in the movie.
Ah. My hazy memory was that the framing story with Carter’s funeral and tomb on Earth was in the present day, but looking at the Wiki plot summary, apparently it was in 1881. And unlike the book, there’s no explicit mention of him being unusually long-lived or uncannily youthful.
By Hollywood rules, I suppose a mortal Civil War veteran could still look like a 30ish Taylor Kitsch in 1881. But even a 30ish Taylor Kitsch looked pretty young. I think there’s at least an implication that he’s unusually youthful and long-lived, and there’s nothing I recall that contradicts him being a Highlander.
And anyway, the immortality in Burroughs’ original is pretty random and orthogonal to the plot. It seemed to me like he’s unusually long-lived just as a handwave for how he could be a cavalry officer in the Civil War and still be a youthful adventurer in Burroughs’ present of 1912. But I’ve only read the first book. Was it a more important plot point or character trait than I’m remembering, or it did it become more important in later books?
In the first book Carter is pretty hazy about his past, and seems as if he’s virtually immortal (a la Highlander, although there’s nothing to connect him with the Scottish Highlands), but nothing ever come of this in the series.
Edgar Rice Burroughs did like his long-lived characters, though, as many writers of pop fiction and comic strips do (Look at Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, perpetually in their 50s and 30s, regardless of whether to story appeared in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s; or the 90s, if you count Goldsborough) Tarzan, after all, was supposed to be born about 1888, fought in WWI and in WWII and kept on going after that, with Frtitz Leiber’s authorized novel depicting him going strong in the 1960s.
The novel Tarzan’s Quest involved pills that gave immortality, and at the end of the novel Tarzan takes one (as Philip Jose Farmer pointed out in Tarzan Alive!) In Tarzan and the Foreign Legion, written in 1947, Tarzan claims that he was granted extended life by a witch doctor whose life he saved.
I seem to be on a roll lately.
Avoid: Odd Thomas, which is a cross between GhostTown and every single formulaic suspense crime thriller.
Well, those are pretty much all characters that had a set age when they first appeared, then just didn’t really age in real time. Just like Spider-Man* or the Simpsons, they’re perpetually the same as when they first appeared. It’s interesting that Tarzan actually addressed that in-universe; mostly, it just gets ignored.
John Carter, on the other hand, is presented in-universe from his first appearance as being explicitly extremely long-lived if not actually immortal. And as you confirm, it doesn’t even really seem to be for any particular reason, either in-universe or at the meta-level. Which seems to be to be a bit different than a character in a formulaic novel series or comic strip just not aging out of their icon role. But this discussion is now veering far from the thread’s original topic.
I personally don’t think glossing over Carter’s quasi-immortality in the movie adaptation was one of the reasons that was a stupid movie, but YMMV.
*Spider-Man actually has aged in the mainstream Marvel universe, from a high-school student to, last I knew, a grad student. But it took him a loooong time to get through school…
He didn’t have much time for school due to the time needed to maintain a swinging lifestyle…
I haven’t actually seen Meteor Moon, but I just now read a description:
When a meteor crashes into the moon and shifts its axis, Earth’s gravity pulls the moon into the path of the planet. Now, a group of scientists must figure out how to stop the moon from hitting the earth before it’s too late.
It sounds like the cast of Space Cowboys and Armageddon need to suit up for another mission.
I just watched the new Tom and Jerry movie. Yes, I watched the whole thing. I’m usually good about finding something good about any movie, but there is nothing good about this movie. It starts with hip hop pigeons, and just goes downhill from there. I recently watched Piranha, and that was much more entertaining. It’s in the “so bad it’s good” category.
From Dusk till Dawn, like a slap in the face that vampire twist, irritated the hell out of me.
From Variety:
"A deliriously trashy, exuberantly vulgar, lavishly appointed exploitation picture, this weird combo of road-kill movie and martial-arts vampire gorefest is made to order for the stimulation of teenage boys."
Sounds pretty good to me!
Here’s one that I don’t think has been mentioned. I saw this at a science fiction convention years ago
Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead
The synopsis doesn’t begin to do it justice. There’s no other scene like the attack of the Ass Zombies. Instead of all groping hand and open mouths, they attack ass first.
This doesn’t belong in the “My Favorite Zombie Movie” thread, by any means.
OK wait, are we including TV movies too? Because if so then there was the one that stated with people in Moscow, London, New York and Los Angeles are simultaneously watching the Moon explode. It got worst from there.