Life Imitates SF

I've clearly never visited the Uncanny Valley because I am not creeped out by this at all. And what's more, it's Danish. Will someone please make a Philip K. Dick robot that looks this good?

Via.

2000s SF film

Silent Warnings, 2003, USA   DIRECTED BY CHRISTIAN McINTIRE
A direct descendant – or perhaps clone is a better word – of M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, right down to the country house alongside a cornfield. The one memorable thing about this film is the opening sequence in which Stephen Baldwin plays a farmer who's clearly lost it, barricading himself indoors against aliens hiding in his fields. It's a decent sequence that deliberately imitates The X-Files for style and is then followed by an X-Files-lite title sequence. The movie really begins when a group of six college kids renovating the wrecked old farmhouse get drawn into discovering crop circles and the truth about the aliens. There's some chemistry between them, and Billy Zane makes a cool if unlikely Sheriff. So what goes wrong here, and where? While it keeps up the dark atmosphere well enough it's hard to pinpoint why it doesn't work other than the way it's clearly so derivative of bigger and better stuff, while frequently getting distracted into showing off its eye-candy cast. The biggest problem of all is how the aliens look cheap enough to have been done in the CGI artist's lunch break because they're laughably unconvincing. Scripted over just four days and filmed in Bulgaria over twelve, the film cost under a million dollars yet has that requisite Sci-Fi Channel made-for-TV feel about it, which at least ensures a certain level of quality yet it can't prevent the end result being rather forgettable. And there's also one important thing missing: an ending – how this film resolves itself is pretty lame at best.

1960s film

Space-Thing, 1968, USA   DIRECTED BY BYRON MABE
I don't go out of my way to look for sexploitation movies; while I recognise their niche in genre history I find they're rarely worth watching. Space-Thing, however, is most certainly worth watching, in fact it may even be required viewing because of its widely recognised place at (or at the very least, near) the bottom of the tall pile of stuff that invariably gets labelled 'bad science fiction'. No one, not even its producer David F. Friedman (who died last month) calls this movie good, in fact Friedman claimed it "makes Plan 9 From Outer Space look like Citizen Kane" and "is without a doubt the worst science fiction movie ever made, I mean ever, ever, ever". He was also proud of it as being his most commercially successful film. Thankfully Friedman never made another SF movie, preferring to switch genres to avoid repeating himself, and he also believes Space-Thing was the very first SF sexploitation film (and Barbarella came along just a month later). His intention was to send up the genre and not particularly lovingly, and depicts a science fiction-obsessed man dreaming of being an alien who finds himself under human disguise on board a spacecraft, full of oversexed lesbians led by the whip-wielding Captain Mother. He then dutifully sets out to learn the human ways of lovemaking. One small claim to fame is that Space-Thing showcases the first ever appearance in a movie of the USS Enterprise: Friedman needed a couple of spaceships so bought toy models at a local store without ever having seen something called Star Trek.

So why is this the worst ever? Because it seriously looks like it had a budget of around $100 (and Friedman didn't credit the actresses with their real names as this meant they'd be asking for more money); because the tone is typically leering and it doesn't even try to be shocking, offensive or even make you think; because it's intention was clearly to not only ridicule (I have no problem with that) but at the same time to somehow cheapen the genre. It doesn't so much insult the viewer's intelligence as bypass it altogether, and the end result is completely bland and unstimulating. If you overlook the softcore angle it's still possible to enjoy this in a post-modern sense in the same way you can still enjoy Robot Monster, but, you know, at least Robot Monster was funny. This is indeed the z-grade nadir of all science fiction films, but if it could exhibit any kind of post-modern self-awareness at all it wouldn't give a damn either way.

(Cross-posted with cult_movie)