Thanks!
No, that’s not true – “Dynamation” and “Dynarama” were Harryhausen’s names for his “reality sandwich” technique for introducing his stop-motion effects into film of real people, a process he came up with out of necessity because he couldn’t afford either the time r the expense of glass paintings and forced-perspective sets, as they used in King Kong.
"Go-Motion was a computerized blurring technique first used for the animation work (especially the Taun Tauns) in the 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back, a year before ILM used it in Dragonslayer.
Other people did motion-blurring by having the objects in real motion while they exposed the film. Animators David Allen and Jim Danforth used this for wings in the movie Equinox in 1970, and they did something similar with the models of kids on flying bikes for E.T. in 1982
It also contains the first documented use of Orff’s *O Fortuna *in a major motion picture - long before it became a cliche.
I used to watch Time Tunnel on TV in the 70’s. I liked it, but I could never understand how periodically they’d be able to kind of control the tunnel but never get the two guys back to the present.
A year or so ago I got the complete series on DVD. A specail feature on the discs was an updated pilot for a 90’s version of the show. In this version an experiment with the time tunnel has changed history. (there are 48 states, some people that the main protagonist knows are different or don’t exist, etc.). The premise of the show is that the Time Tunnel folks are trying to corect history. It was interesting. I might have to pull that out this weekend and watch it again.
I like the first Lethal Weapon and Lethal Weapon 4, but man, the two in between did not age well. I bought the second one at a discount and tried to watch it, and it was just stupid. I couldn’t get into it, and what seemed edgy and funny twenty years ago just came across as contrived and shallow.
I went out and rented the Miami Vice series a while back. OMG, it’s bad!
Also, chirping in for Billy Jack. It embarrassed me watching it.
I was a young man when I saw it the first run in U.S. theaters. I didn’t like it much at all (Maximilian Schell, and heck, even Roddy McDowall should have sued the movie for defamation), but I thought the whole “hell” thing was the worst of the worst of the extreme horribleness that is The Black Hole. Not only was it a gobsmackingly incompetent and tacky attempt to try to outdo the end of Kubrick’s 2001, it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense even within it’s own context. Where there’s a Hell and a robot Satan, there’s got to be a Heaven and presumably a robot God. If the Black Hole is a passageway to Hell, what’s the passageway to Heaven? I interpreted that scene to have been at least in part a deliberate criticism of science (you know, the tired old Frankenstein bit about how all scientists are prone to play God) and arguably a simultaneous nod to religion.
In that particular inexplicable one-sidedness it was matched by the even worse film, Event Horizon, in which a spaceship that entered a black hole and thus was lost was later returned (by Satan, presumably) to the builders. What made it even worse in my opinion is that it tried desperately to overcome it’s intellectual vapidity and sloppy religious pretensions by covering everything in an unending stream of gratuitous gore. Ick and more ick!
I’m with you there, except that I just saw it for the first time. The stupid!
For those unfamiliar with the plot, an alien comes to Earth and disguises himself with basic prosthetics in order to build a vast, “high-tech” (primarily with a rip-off of Polaroid) financial empire so that he can bring water back to his home planet. Apparently, they only need a glass every half-century or so if the pace of the film is any guide. It was the heyday of stream-of-consciousness film-making (if you can believe there ever was such), and if I had seen it in a theater I would have desperately wished for death after the first half-hour or less. One particularly irritating thing is that he doesn’t bother much with the whole “water” thing and by the end of the movie, he’s still just sitting on his ass.
I DVR’d it and after watching the beginning quarter-hour of wretched awfulness, I challenged myself to sit through the rest out of pure masochism. But I just couldn’t do it without fast-forwarding it mostly at 3-4x speed, stopping occasionally to hear the wretchedly awful dialogue (it’s very difficult to believe they actually used a script). I would argue that it clearly violates the Geneva Conventions.
It’s a bit surprising that David Bowie’s career survived that painfully pretentious film, let alone Buck Henry (I think Rip Torn only survived it because he soon lost his hair and so he could deny he was in it). But I must say that I was extremely thrilled with Bowie’s performance in The Prestige.
When I talked to a (straight) friend about it, the best defense he could come up with was that when he saw it as an adolescent, at least he enjoyed the frequent nudity. But even he regretted he couldn’t fast-forward it.
No, we will not burn him. We will crucify him–on the Tree of Woe!
James Earl Jones adds just the right touch of gravitas to balance out the inherent cheesiness of Conan the Barbarian (which I genuinely enjoy to this day).
If you want truly awful, however, try Conan the Destroyer instead–with Wilt Chamberlain and Grace Jones, as well as the most annoying sidekick (played by Tracey Walter). Painfully bad.
Only Maximilian Schell went to Hell. The good guys passed through a stained-glass tunnel into a sunlit cloudscape.
I agree that Billy Jack has aged badly. But not half as badly as The Trial of Billy Jack.
My favorite part is when he meets his inner self.
A couple of years ago, a friend of ours brought over a DVD of Spaced Invaders, which he’d just bought. Apparently, he’d loved the movie as a kid, thought it was absolutely hilarious, and wanted us all to watch it.
Oy, it got uncomfortable sitting there. Bad, bad movie. And as it went on, you could tell that he was also becoming more and more horribly embarrassed at having subjected us all to something that wasn’t nearly as good as he remembered. Quite awful, in fact.
I just saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars again for the first time since I saw it on TV in the early Seventies. I liked it then, but dear Og, it was bad, bad, bad. Cheesy sets, laughably dated spacecraft, crappy SFX of alien spacecraft moving haltingly through the sky, unnatural metors, and a goofy peasant-like Friday with a bad wig. Ugh.
Excalibur holds up surprisingly well. Loved it in high school, and it’s still really good. Some of the effects are a little cheesy, and I wish they had a bigger budget for the final battle scene, but it’s still a great Arthurian epic with a terrific cast and awesome cinematography. Williamson is the best Merlin evah! Watch out for future stars Gabriel Byrne as Uther, Liam Neeson as Gawain (the knight who charges the Queen with adultery) and Patrick Stewart as Leondegrance.
The Worst Witch. Loved it as a kid, horrified by it as an adult. It’s full of cheesy special effects and bad acting, though it does have cult movie potential. Charlotte Rae, who played Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life, is in it, as well as Tim Curry, who has a hilariously bad musical interlude that I’ll have to look for on YouTube and share.
Well, if the thread is alive:
Recently rented Logan’s Run out of curiosity. I remember being moderately impressed when I saw it as a kid. The only thing that remains impressive is Jenny Agutter. The award-winning special effects are pretty bad in retrospect, but I can live with that (and the 70s hair). The fight scenes are incredibly badly choreographed (having a Sandman chase you is like having a blind guy throw firecrackers at you), and what a lost opportunity when they finally get outside the city and all that remains of civilization is the comic relief, who apparently has survived to a ripe old age by eating copies of the Congressional Record.
Oh: also, don’t design your futuristic shopping-mall domed city so that a single computer problem causes the whole thing to explode. Build in a little redundancy, what dontcha.
Still, Jenny Agutter. And I wouldn’t mind one of Michael York’s diamond-shaped lounging-robe ponchos to relax in while I enjoy my skinny cyclinder of blue liquid every evening.
Labyrinth. Thought it was the greatest movie ever as a kid. A friend gave it to me for Christmas on DVD last year and it was awful - and David Bowie’s crotch bulge is terrifying.
I plowed through the whole thread to say this, only to see I was forestalled. Damn you Gotterfunken!
For me, when I was a kid, six or eight years old, **Batman **was on TV, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, and I was thrilled by it–waiting for the cliff hanger to see if Batman would escape this time!
I saw it again in college and was surprised to discover that it was actually a comedy.
There are definitely movies and TV shows I remember loving as a kid, then rewatched as a adult and was stunned at how godawful they were. “The Black Hole” doesn’t fit the category though. I saw it when I was 12 and hated it even then. I’m amazed to hear anything good about it here, but then some of you were only 10. 
Generally, things I though was good as a kid still hold up just fine for me. About the only exception I can think of was My Favorite Martian, which I really liked a lot, but now looks extremely hammy and unfunny.
Ha Ha, I don’t remember this thread at all. I saw this post and was going to quote on to it and post “This is what I came here to add” when I realized it was already added by ME!
At least I’m consistent.