MetaFilter posts tagged with cult and sciencefiction

Plate of Shrimp

Artw — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:36:22 -0800

It is an apocalypse tale with no doomsday, a punk movie with no concert, a science fiction story with less than ten seconds of aliens - Repo Man: A Lattice of Coincidence, a look back at the 1984 classic film by cult director Alex Cox, whose current project is a crowdfunded adaptation of Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero.

W.D. Richter's "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension"

Egg Shen — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 15:11:32 -0800

... Buckaroo Banzai is paradoxically decades ahead of its time and yet completely of its time; it’s profoundly a movie by, for, and of geeks and nerds at a time before geek/nerd culture was mainstreamed, and a movie whose pre-CG special effects and pre-Computer Age production design were an essential part of its good-natured enthusiasm. What at the time was a hip, modern take on classic SF is now, almost thirty years later, almost indistinguishable from the SF cinema that inspired it in terms of the appeal to modern viewers: the charmingly old-fashioned special effects, and the comparatively innocent earnestness of its tone. - Danny Bowes The "expanded universe" begins with the novelization by screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch and continues with a series of graphic novels by Moonstone Books. Until the RPG ships, you can pass the time with the Scott Adams interactive fiction game.

"What I wanted was to create a prophet"

Artw — Mon, 16 May 2011 22:49:40 -0800

"I wanted to do a movie that would give the people that took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating. I did not want LSD to be taken, I wanted to fabricate the drug's effect." - Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune (previously) is to be the subject of a new documentary.

We’re Tearing the Heart Out of Saturday Night!

zarq — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 21:59:01 -0800

"Let's do those drive-in totals. We have: Nineteen dead bodies (plus fragments). Ten breasts (shame on you, TNT censors). Two zombie breasts. One-hundred twenty-five zombies. Mummy dogs. One-half zombie dog. Ten gallons blood. Brain-eating. Gratuitous embalming. Zombie fu. Nekkid punk-rocker fondue. Gratuitous midget zombie. Torso S&M. One motor vehicle chase (totalled by zombies). Pool cue fu. No aardvarking. Heads roll. Brains roll. Arms roll. Hands roll. Joe Bob says, Check It Out." Only on MonsterVision. On Saturday nights from 1993 to 2000, the TNT network aired MonsterVision, a "drive-in movie" double feature of some of the best (and often the worst) cult and B-movies ever made. Originally guest-hosted by Penn and Teller, the network soon turned the reins over to actor and professional drive-in movie reviewer Joe Bob Briggs (whom some may remember from the Daily Show’s "God Stuff with John Bloom." Briggs was once President of the Trinity Foundation, a Dallas-based religious watchdog group that investigates fraud perpetrated by religious organisations against the public.) Briggs had spent the previous eight years hosting "Joe Bob Brigg's Drive-In Theater," a weekly movie show on The Movie Channel (TMC), which showed cult and B-movies rated using Briggs' unique euphemisms and special system of things to watch for in each film (Drive-In Totals) -- developed during his time as a movie reviewer for the Dallas Times Herald. The show was cancelled after a 490-episode run ("Aardvarking," mentioned above, is Briggs' euphemism for sex.) In grand late-night horror host tradition, Briggs incorporated those elements into his new TNT show: MonsterVision. However, TNT (unlike TMC -- a pay cable channel) censored all the movies they showed, as well as Briggs’ monologues, for television broadcast. And, like “Mystery Science Theatre 3000″ it wasn’t the movies that drew you in but Briggs’ segments, where he’d use his educated, yet at the same time peckerwood humor to ease down the visual crap you were swallowing en mass.
Joe Bob’s Website has hundreds of drive-in movie reviews, from Killer Shrews to Head Cheerleader, Dead Cheerleader, to Piranha 3D and Eight Legs to Love You. "In other words, absolutely no plot to get in the way of the story. My kinda movie." The Youtube playlists linked above include the following full-length Monstervision movies: * The Fog / Transcript * The Funhouse / Transcript * Ice Cream Man * It's Alive * It Lives Again * Jaws 2 * Maximum Overdrive / Transcript * The People Who Live Under the Stairs * Poltergeist / Transcript * Project Metalbeast / Transcript * Return of the Living Dead / Transcript * The Stepfather / Transcript * Swamp Thing / Transcript * They Live! (With guest “Rowdy” Roddy Piper) All available MonsterVision show transcripts (Only 95 are listed.) Also: Pet Shop, in 13 parts: ("This movie is so lame I’m not even gonna embarrass the writers by saying their names on tv: Brent V. Friedman and Mark Goldstein.") 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. MonsterVision Intros * Original * A Christmas Nightmare * Godzilla New Year’s Eve Marathon * Interstitial Montage * MoonsterVision * Small Titles, Big Screams * and... the MonsterVision theme song. (So bad, it's good.) Extras * The Joe Bob Briggs FAQ (Q. What the heck is all this "Fu" stuff? A: The original "kung fu" resulted in the all-purpose suffix, "Fu," meaning "an act of senseless or random violence, usually inflicted on the viewer.") * Onion A/V Club Interview * A list of movies containing commentary tracks by Joe Bob. (Youtube has a clip from Samurai Cop with his commentary.) * Joe Bob on Twitter * Wikipedia * YouTube user hootyhaha has uploaded a number of Joe Bob’s commercial break segments. Also of possible interest: Reason Magazine article by Joe Bob: Kroger Babb’s Roadshow: "How a long-running movie walked the thin line between exploitation and education." It's a lengthy review of a movie from the 50’s: Mom and Dad. (Wikipedia: Kroger Babb)

An Orgy Of Savage Lusts!

fearfulsymmetry — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 04:01:37 -0800

Trailers From Hell. Cult directors (and other industry types) introduce and comment on trailers for cult films. For instance, Allison Anders on Peeping Tom, Rick Baker on The Man Of A Thousand Faces, Joe Dante on Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman, Jack Hill on White Heat, Dan Ireland on The Haunting, Mary Lambert on The Masque Of The Red Death and Edgar Wright on Carnage. (Flash menu and intro unfortunately)

We owe our human condition here to the intervention of insects?

nthdegx — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 08:55:23 -0800

Behind the Dark Door [Google cached copy] might prove a valuable resource to science fiction aficionados, or interesting to fans of quality television drama. It provides insight into the mind of Nigel Kneale, writer of The Quatermass Experiment. Last Saturday's gripping and technically impressive update was based largely on his original scripts, and was the BBC's first live TV drama in more than twenty years. Another chance the pimp David Tennant, The Quatermass Experiment 2005 was much more satisfying than the BBC's other science fiction drama with which Tennant has been linked.