May 18, 2003

Late Nite Teevee Follies

The conspiracy to keep me from liking teevee continues apace: last night, afflicted with my usual insomnia (when two glasses of wine and an antihistamine don't do anything to knock me out I think that qualifies as insomnia) I lay in bed and flipped channels on my bedroom teevee. Since the bedroom set isn't hooked up directly to the box, I don't get all the channels, but I do get Scifi on it. Last night there were back-to-back made-for-Scifi offerings. I left versions of the following in the comments to this post of Michele's on bad movies, but I was so proud of them (har har) I thought I'd offer them to all five of my readers:

Speaking of awful movies, do tv movie series count? I'm thinking of something the Scifi channel has started playing called "The Deathlands." It's some post-Apocalyptic crapola filmed all in orange. I guess it's to convince us that in the future all our cyan filters will have been destroyed. Best line so far, from former porn star Traci Lords: "Die, Mutie bitch!" ("Mutie" as in "mutant" -- mutant meaning you have long red hair and look smashing in a ragged leather minidress.) There's also a hero with an eyepatch.

Right after that thing was over the next movie on Scifi was something called "The Apocalypse." It was some sort of thing set in outer space. It featured that chick from Sex, Lies, and Videotape (the bad sister) playing a crazy woman in a space ship whose dialogue consisted of the soliloquies from Hamlet, and Sandra Bernhard playing a captain of a space ship. I would have watched the whole rancid thing but I needed to sleep, and I haven't hooked the videotape machine up to the cable. (This was also filmed all through some sort of rust-colored filter. Are they having budget problems at the Scifi channel? They can't seem to afford to use the entire color spectrum.)

Posted by Andrea Harris at May 18, 2003 10:54 AM
Comments

I caught a piece of "Deathlands" last night too. At first I thought it might have been an old movie or something because one of the characters looked like Orson Welles had just run head-on into a Weed Eater.

Then I looked in the TV Guide for a description but there wasn't one. I figured, "They're ashamed to tell anyone what it's about." And I resumed channel surfing.

Posted by: McGehee at May 18, 2003 at 12:37 PM

The Sci-Fi channel has some of the greatest wacky stuff on the teevee, but they ruin it for me by having commercial breaks that are as long as the parts where they play the actual movie. I can't tell you the number of times I've fallen asleep in an SF commercial, only to wake up to an exercise program.

Posted by: Scott Chaffin at May 18, 2003 at 06:57 PM

Tell me about it. And the commercials are the same ones every time.

Posted by: Andrea Harris at May 18, 2003 at 10:34 PM

Well, dearies, SCI-FI is owned by Vivendi Univesal, and Vivendi is mostly French. You can look at their Board of Directors here. The French haven't had a real science fiction writer since Verne, who often seems to have wished he were anything but French.

Posted by: Jack at May 19, 2003 at 09:05 AM

Pierre Boulle doesn't count?

Posted by: Eric Pobirs at May 19, 2003 at 02:26 PM

Well, I don't know how Planet of the Apes is considered as Littrichoor...

Posted by: Andrea Harris at May 19, 2003 at 09:45 PM