Commander USA’s Groovie Movies

“Commander USA. soaring super hero, Legion of Decency, retired.”

The year was 1985, basic cable television in the form we now know it was still crawling towards its teenage years, and an eight-year-old USA Network decided to start the new year off with a new Saturday afternoon show. The USA Network had access to more quality films and programming than your average local UHF channel, but, despite this advantage, their access to films was still a wee bit higher on the ratio of the stinkers vs the great films out there. As such, the early day weekend blocks were often showcasing the not even close to being the best in science fiction and horror on the USA Network; a common thing with many early basic cable channels.

Possible Remakes that Could Actually Be Good

A lot of people treat the word “remake” attached to a project as an automatic sign of a bad product. Some people- often people not realizing that some of their favorite movies are remakes –will also greet the news of remakes with declarations about how remakes are automatically inferior to the originals or are automatically devoid of any level genius or originality. One of my favorite remakes, 1986’s The Fly, is a film that puts a lie to both of these statements.

Admittedly, many remakes can be horrible. Typically, bad remakes come about because someone somewhere in a studio in Hollywood wants to remake or reboot a popular film or TV franchise just to try to jump back onto a money train. There’s often seemingly very little love or passion for the original versions, and some great deal less thought seems to be put into executing a new version thanks to the laziness of thinking everyone will just know what they’re supposed to know once the movie starts. There’s also an issue created when the original property is a hugely popular film or franchise with generations of fans. Of course, one way to get around that last bit is to let people who love the less than well-loved films get a shot at doing some remakes or reboots based on those. 

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A Thanksgiving Turkey – The Last Dinosaur (1977)

So, we so far served you up two turkeys this month. We’ve given you The Ghost Galleon, but, at best, that’s a minor bird. It may be the film where it was obvious that the Blind Dead franchise was heading off the rails, but it’s still a hugely enjoyable horror film with an absolutely amazing looking threat in the Blind Dead themselves. We then gave you The Bermuda Depths, a much larger bird by far. Despite its saving graces, it is certainly deserving of the label ‘Turkey’ and then some. This week, we give you a giant, prehistoric turkey in the form of The Last Dinosaur.

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They’re Not Bad, They Were Just Filmed That Way- The Loch Ness Horror (1981)

A film so bad it’s good. Well, goodish. Stick your head in over at Needless Things and check out what happens when a bath toy goes bad in Scotland!

Check it out here!

They’re Not Bad. They Were Just Filmed That Way: The Keep

Wow…

You know, one of the staples of much of the 70’s and 80’s entertainment industry, be it in books, television, or movies, was showcasing the rampant drug culture of the time. One of the subjects that the entertainment industry liked to showcase from time to time as suffering from these insane levels of drug and alcohol abuse was in fact the entertainment industry itself. You would get depictions of everyone from the lowliest starlet wannabe to the most powerful Hollywood exec drunkenly snorting enough cocaine to kill anyone not named Hunter S. Thompson.

Sometimes they really overdid it. You would look in utter disbelief at the TV screen or the pages of your book while thinking that it was insane how much they were overplaying it. There was just no way that the drug and alcohol use was that bad in Hollywood, you would think to yourself, as there would simply have been no way that the place could have functioned if it had been that badly screwed up. Then, occasionally, you come across a product from that era of Hollywood’s history where you find yourself thinking that they might have just been underplaying exactly how insanely coked out of their minds everybody really was. The Keep is one of those films.

They’re Not Bad. They Were Just Filmed That Way: The Brainiac

These are the movies that, while still kind of good in their own special way, didn’t quite live up to the expectations of the creators involved. As such, they might be best enjoyed only after copious amounts of your favorite adult beverage has been consumed. Yes, these are the films that are so bad that they’re good(ish) and enjoyable for how spectacularly they failed to live up to their potential.

Today we look at The Brainiac.

Oh, calm down. It’s not that bad. Well, it’s not entirely that bad.