well we can't go without mentioning the sequel to Sharknado - airing on SyFy near the end of the month can't we??

kids say the darndest funniest things don't they?

They actually showed an exclusive clip of Sharknado 2 before the show last night.

Well, that's good enough for me! I'll go ahead and add it to my list then. Thanks!

I watched "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" this afternoon. Still enjoyed it, and I plan on watching the 2nd one tonight. But instead of watching it right after, I felt in the mood for "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Pop it in and was like-um, I know that guy. Totally didn't realize (it's been several years since I watched it) Martin Freeman was the main character in both.

You should watch John Carter; it's pretty awesome!

I watched Journey to the Seventh Planet for the B-Movie Challenge this year, and I absolutely love that theme. If I ever get married, it has to be incorporated into the ceremony!

Yesterday, I started rewatching the original Battlestar Galactica. It's been years since I last watched the series, and I still enjoy it. Of course, my feelings for it are a bit tampered by the remake, so the original feels tonally erratic. Most of humanity has been wiped out, and Starbuck is womanizing and wisecracking up a storm. With a few exceptions, we don't really get a sense that anyone is all that changed after seeing most of their loved ones killed and their planets destroyed. I'll be interested how it progresses. It's been so long that I don't remember much about it.

For you doubters out there, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was great!

I watched Special Bulletin, a TV docudrama whose plausibility scared the crap out of me when I saw it on its one and only broadcast on NBC. It fills the slot for "alternate history" because

I'm excited to see it and hope to go to the theater next week! Today, I bought the Tim Burton version in order to get the $8 toward a movie ticket, essentially making the film free!

For the "worst movie ever" category, is this personal taste?

We were excited too. Left work early to catch the 4:00pm show. I bought Platoon to get the same voucher but I didn't use it yet. I used reward points to get in for free and get D-Box seats! They cost about $24 here! I guess I'll have to go again now. Too bad...

I'm lenient, so I say it can be personal taste. Would have replied earlier, but I don't know if the site was down, but I couldn't access DVD Talk all morning.

It's all good, I just signed on now anyway.


Sounds good, thanks. Is there a list out there for future reference? I found the original post, but there wasn't a link to a worst movie site on it or anything.

I'll look.

Here's a list generated with the IMDB Advance search filtering for SF, Feature Film, and the IMDB Bottom 250. You can also filter by "user ratings" to get a specific range.

Here's one from Rotten Tomatoes with SF films having scores of 10-19%. You can reset filters on the search page.

And here's a "Greatest Box-Office Bombs, Disasters, and Flops" page from AMC. It can't be sorted or filtered by genre so you just have to slog through...

Happy hunting!

Thanks! Maybe these could be moved to the first post-that way next year, they're ready to go!

Ok, after looking at the sites, Rotten Tomatoes has lost all creditability with me. How can "Pagemaster" be on the worst movie list? Really? That was an awesome movie! Plus, a personal favorite of mine is "Ice Pirates" which is also on the list. So, double whammy there.

I just got finished watching "Starship Troopers." I'm not sure why I like this one, but I do. It has everything I dislike, yet I like it. Maybe it's the Rue McClanahan cameo that does it, I'm just not sure. (And if anyone needs some checklist marks, this movie counts for like 4 or 5 of them at least!)

I just watched Gravity, and its visual effects are so amazing I somewhat regret not seeing it in the theater, but the last film I saw George Clooney play an astronaut was the dreadful remake of Solaris, so that was enough to keep me away. Apart from the visuals, the story is weak and Sandra Bullock's soliloquies are cringingly bad, so I feel better about skipping the theatrical release.

I ended up using my last wildcard today because assumed that Kick-Ass was a superhero movie. I guess technically it was but there were no real superpowers in it and therefore no real Sci-Fi elements. Has anyone else ever had that experience where you just assume a movie is Sci-Fi or fantasy but it turns out not too be? Maybe we should have a "beware of" list.

Watched G.I. Joe: Retaliation last night. I thought the first film was just bad but I figured I'd give the franchise another chance. The second film was just boring. Oh well, there's always more episodes of The X-Files.

I pretty much stopped using/trusting them long ago. I tend to use the reviews here on DVDTalk, the Roger Ebert Archives (Ebert reveiws only - I'm not ready to trusy the crop of wannabe's currently on his site), and DVD Drive-In.

On that Rotten Tomatoes search engine you'll not find Catwoman on the list (the one I used for "worst movie ever") even though it only got a 9 on the Tomatometer. Curious... It makes me less trusting of them (or at least their site programmers) as I'm sure there are others missing as well.
Yeah... it's fairly serviceable. My biggest problem is I've read the novella on which I thought it was based several times. I found out the title/book was optioned well into script development so they simply overlayed *some* of the book onto the script. All it truly has in common is the title, character names, a *few* isolated incidences, and the general premis of fighting giant bugs. Reportedly, on the commentary it's indicated Verhoeven only read the first few chapters and became both "bored and depressed." It shows in the film. Still, it's a good popcorn type film. I must like it some as I own it and the sequels.

Thanks for the warning! I had Kick-Ass in the queue because of thinking of it as a comic book based super-hero movie.
Yes - on the first movie I watched for this challenge this year, LEGO: The Adventures of Clutch Powers. I watched it with the grandkids and just assumed it had a SF and/or Fantasy genre tag attached because of many of the fantastical portions of the film. When I looked it up on IMDB I found it's "Animation/Action/Adventure/Family." It's a wildcard.

I also thought I'd get to count Despicable Me 2 based on the fantastical goings on. It's my 3 year old granddaughter's current favorite film - "Can we watch 'Be-doe' paw?" - if you've seen it you know that scene: "be-doe, be-doe, be-doe..." IMDB says it is "Animation/Comedy/Family" - really? It's full of SF super-spy type devices and there's a "Mad Scientist" type character. I may wildcard it, too, since I've seen it several times already this month and I'm sure there'll be more viewings...

While I'm not in the mood to watch much sci-fi lately, letting folks know, I still check the thread. Later tonight I'll add the links to the worst movies to the first post.

Gonna watch at least some sci-fi tonight. Don't have anything in particular on tap. Just gonna wing it, and watch whatever strikes my fancy at the time. Some times I think that's the best way to do it.

Watching the live Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I was amused by the closing credits song "T.U.R.T.L.E. Power" and by it's passing-inclusivity of the entire plot...!

It got me thinking about other songs that delve deeply into the actual plot of the film: Queen's "Flash" contains snippets of dialogue that roughly go over the plot of Flash Gordon; Will Smith's "Men in Black" is (by memory) more of a vague overview of what the MIB are and do than a summary of the film, and the Ghostbusters song by Ray Parker Jr. is also more of a rough description of what they do than how the film goes.

Any other songs that do this...?

I enjoyed them. I had the same problem as LG765 mentions upthread with the original - I'd seen enough of it before, and knew the main twist, to be unsurprised and relatively unmoved by the ending... but the journey and the turns were still interesting. The fairly-obvious idea that people in positions of power might lie and cover-up the past to 'protect' people is both very-1984 and arguably very wise.

Similarly, the Earth reaction to the apes in #3 - and the temporal paradoxes involved in the justification - were sadly all too real. Again, the ending was obvious enough that it wasn't surprising, but it was still good. If bleak. I don't understand why what appeared in PotA to just be the passage of time suddenly became a reversible timewarp, but... there was a plot justification, so I didn't mind!

The first sequel, with it's "for some reason, exactly the same thing happens again" basic plot was... very odd. The unmentioned and unexplained underground survivors (two thousand-odd years... undiscovered, unevolved, not all dead from radiation poisoning?) were very weird.


Elements of the Apes movies may actually come halfway close to what I was going to ask about: watching Defiance and Falling Skies, and thinking about all the hundreds of shows and films with their "plucky Earth resistance groups facing up to the evil invading menace of Aliens," I wonder: are there films that show this the other way around..? i.e. A justified agressor, appalled by [humanity's] callous disregard for weapons and willingness to kill their own kind, trying to quash resistance as benignly as possible, because the "resistance" are "terrorists" keen to keep the status-quo of a violent and bad race..?

Starship Troopers is pro-military and pro-invasion, I think, so it comes close. And Apes certainly delve into the "humanity is awful and deserves to be replaced" angle, but are their others? Films that suggest aliens might be right to want to subjugate earth because of the atrocities and mindset displayed by people in charge...?