The best (?) and worst (!) Sci-Fi Channel Movies

Cafe Society
1

Having nothing better to do, I’m watching The Insatiable this evening. The vampire-ette is sorta cute, and the scene where Harry buys a rabbit is an interesting twist. The fake Doors music when the Vietnam Vet tells his tale made me laugh out loud. I suppose it deserves it’s 5.6 IMDB rating.

SFC has quite a stable of cheesy, made-for-cable, something-less-than B movies. With that in mind, I pose two questions: will any of you admit to watching them; and which ones do you find amusing, semi-decent, or a total waste of time?

2

They’re all wastes of time…but I like 'em. :slight_smile: They’re definitely grade-Q movies, though.

3

I enjoyed Mega Snake. It was bad, but in a good kind of way. And it had Michael Shanks in it (I will watch almost anything that has Michael Shanks). This was the made-for-Sci-Fi movie that featured “Feedback,” the winner of the first season of “Who Wants to Be a Superhero?” Some of the snake effects were fun, and the whole thing was almost on the edge of being a spoof. The worst thing about the movie: Feedback got about two minutes of air time. This guy was robbed.

4

The most recent Dune adaptations were Sci-Fi Channel, weren’t they? Those might in the running for best.

5

The Black Hole was howlingly funny… if you’re famliar with St. Louis. The Science Center becomes a secret, high-tech laboratory that is studying black holes. One of which gets out of hand, and an electricty monster comes through. Which goes on a rampage through the South Side. While the city is evacuated, because the black hole has fallen into the earth and it’s going to eat St. Louis and half the US – except that the military will nuke the city first to stop that. And stuff.

My lord, it was wretched. But hilarious to watch for places I know (“Hey, Steve’s house is going to get eaten by the electricity monster! I’ll have to call him…”)

Mansquito was pretty wretched. And Love Boat: Chupacabra, too. Or whatever that was called.

6

Well, I think Bloodrayne, which was on this evening, has to be in the running for worst. And I looked at that guy and said “Nah, Ben Kingsley wouldn’t be in anything this wretched, now would he?” To make matters worse, there was a sequel!

7

This is awesome. I was about to launch this same thread!

Some of these are the very movies I was talking about the in the Bad Movie thread; enjoyable schlock. These are kind of a favorite genre among the staff of my video store; we tend to watch all of them when they come out.

As far as we’ve been able to determine, the master director of this genre is Tibor Takacs, with such stellar titles to his credit as *Ice Spiders, Megasnake, *and my personal favorite, Mansquito.

As mentioned above, *Megasnake *is indeed enjoyable. One of the store favorites is Blood Monkey, but this may be mostly because of, first, the title, probably the best title of the year, in any genre, and the fact that in Blood Monkey F. Murray Abraham (we call him “F”) performs an awesome, gory, camp-Shakespearean death scene, with poorly anchored, wiggling wooden spikes sticking out of him. Truly one of the greatest acting accomplishments of the year.

*Insatiable *is pretty good–Michael Biehn as a Vietnam Vet slash Vampire tracker in a wheelchair. Kaw, like *Insatiable *starring the reigning leading man of this genre, Sean Patrick Flanery, is watchable, but shouldn’t be near the top of your list. It’s basically The Birds as done as a SciFi Original; even stars Rod Taylor as the town’s old Doc.

(A related genre is the schlocky horror films put out by Lions Gate. I’ll probably start a thread on them, but meanwhile you all need to rush out and buy or rent *Mulberry St. *, the awesomest quasi-zombie movie since 28 Days Later. It’s the only movie of the bunch so far that is actually good, on its own merits, beyond the camp factor. Tooth and Nail is mostly unwatchable, but it does feature a post-apocalyptic Michael Madsen, dressed in ripped animal skins, strolling down the hallways of an abandoned hospital in leisurely pursuit of a screaming female, and whistling “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” with his Elvis hair perfect. Awesome. And Borderland, the other halfway decent film of the bunch, features Samwise Gamgee getting hacked to pieces by a machete.)

8

You beat me to it. I quit recording it and the sequel about Billy the Kid. :rolleyes:

9

That was just a bad movie that gets played on sci-fi though, I think the OP wants movies the Sci-Fi channel actually has a hand in making, such as the ones listed by Lissner. They are basically all B-movie monster flicks, none of which are good by the usual definition, but if you like cheesy monster flicks (the last one I saw had gargoyles fighting Nazi’s, which I thought was pretty cool), they can be fun.

Basically the only ones I can think of that were any good were the BSG movie (which later spawned the series) and Dune and its sequel, though I think both of those were technically mini-series.

ETA: wiki has a list of Sci-Fi Channel original movies, even reading the titles is kind of fun.

10

Any and all movies shown on SFC are fair game here. I started the thread with straight-to-cable flicks in mind, though.
ETA: “Chupacabra: Dark Seas”? :stuck_out_tongue:

11

The Sci-Fi Channel Mark O’ Mediocrity-Bruce Boxleitner as “the authority figure.”

12

That’s the name. No wonder we refer to it as “Love Boat: Chupacabra,” which is a much better title.

13

Thanks for the list. I have seen an unfortunately large number of those. I’ll nominate Man with the Screaming Brain as the bestest, because it has Bruce Campbell. I fear most of them are trying to be serious.

14

There was one last year sometime that I twittered as I watched it - something about the moon having been hit by a meteor and pieces of it coming off toward earth? Another one the same day had the earth heating up for some reason - there was a scene where the gas tanks in cars were spontaneously exploding.
Both were incredibly bad, but funny enough to watch that I just kept watching.

15

I watched that one! It was quite hilariously bad. There was one about Bruce Campbell as leader of a group of Spacemen that land in the woods and have to fight off giant insect overlords. That one was just too cheesy to be enjoyed.

But I always liked to watch the “Ticks” movie (with Carlton from Fresh Prince of Bell Air as a junkie!), and there’s a couple others that’ll catch my eye at times.

Dune if it was for the Sci-Fi was probably the best thing on there though.

16

To be fair, Bloodrayne wasn’t an original Sci-Fi movie…it was made by Uwe Boll and actually originally came out in theaters. As to why Sci-Fi decided to air that utter piece of crap I’ll never know.

This isn’t an original Sci-Fi movie either, but my friend and I caught Sci-Fi airing the movie King of the Lost World. It’s basically a horrible B-movie rip-off of King Kong and we watched it simply because it was such a train wreck from start to finish. I would recommend seriously avoiding any contact with this movie whatsoever. To give you an example of how bad this movie is, at the end of the movie one of the characters…

[spoiler]…has to manually detonate a nuclear bomb by getting within 300 ft. of the bomb and then hitting the remote.

Yeah…that’s right, you guessed it…he survives.[/spoiler]

Spoilered in case somebody actually cares about the end.

17

Oh, that must be Journey to the Center of the Earth. Who knew Peter FOnda needed the money? We could have taken up a collection.

18

Actually wait, the BEST movie i can think of on the sci-fi channel:

the entire TREMORS series- that stuff was GENIUS! The best stuff Sci-Fi ever did (As i think 1 or two of them were made just for Sci-fi).

19

Ahh… Tremors Quite possibly one of the greatest camp series of all time. It is extremely quoteable, and the concepts translate well.

Ex: Nashiitashii and I were in the car driving home from an afternoon out and I was trying to explain to her what an Ant-Lion is. Since she couldn’t grasp the concept due to my poor explanation, the following exchange took place:

AL: It’s a bug larvae that lives in the sand and snaps up ant in a little pit it digs, like a Graboid.

N: A Graboid?

AL: You know, a tremor.

N: Oh! (laughter)…(deadpan serious): Do they turn into Ass-blasters?

Al: :dubious:

N: Well?

Al: :smack: (hilarity ensues, and eventually I explain to her what they turn into.)

20

I had to admire Boa vs. Python just for the unassailable logic that, if you’ve got a giant, mutant man-eating snake on the loose, what you need is another giant mutant man-eating snake to go after it.

In the Script Frenzy competition, I’m currently working on a Sci-Fi Channel-worthy script involving oversized genetically engineered flightless aquatic avians.