Polite Dissent

I’ve noticed that the Fox Movie Channel has been showing some good classic science-fiction movies Friday night. OK, that’s an overstatement: the movies aren’t always good, but they’re always watchable.

Last week it was Fantastic Voyage, which was the second science-fiction movie I ever saw (Star Wars would be the first). For those of you unfamiliar with the plot: After an assassination attempt, a famous diplomat has developed a clot in his brain that will soon prove lethal. A team of scientists are miniaturized and they have one hour to pilot a microscopic submarine through the man’s body to reach and destory the clot. And there’s Raquel Welch in a bikini.

• Looking at the IMDB article (linked above), I notice that the story for Fantastic Voyage was written by Jerome Bixby, probably best known for one of the creepiest Twilight Zone episodes ever, “It’s A Good Life.”
• Further trivia: both Fantastic Voyage and “It’s A Good Life” have been parodied in the Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror (XV and II, respectively)

This week it was Damnation Alley. I was flipping through the channels, and as soon as I saw the armored RV with the triangularly-stacked triple wheels I knew what movie it was. What more could you want in a movie? There are bad special effects (a “green sky” which ends a few inches above the scenery), armor-plated man-eating cockroaches, a pre-Airwolf mullet-haired Jan Michael Vincent, George Peppard (affecting a horrible southern accent), and Paul Winfield (who of course dies, as Winfield always does in any sci-fi movie or TV show). It’s definitely not a great movie, or even a good movie, or probably even a mediocre movie. It’s a bad movie. But it revels in its badness and that’s what makes it so watchable (and the man-eating cockroaches). You want a plot? Survivors of a nuclear attack on the US make their way from the west coast to the east coast in an armored RV.

• My wife, born and raised in Las Vegas, wanted me to point out that the scenes supposedly filmed in Las Vegas were instead filmed in Prim, Nevada. This is evident when you notice the slot machines the guys are playing all say “Primadonna Casino.”

Sunday, I settled in to watch the Midsomer Murders marathon on the Biography Channel. Midsomer Murders is one of the better British mystery series that pop up from time to time on PBS or A&E. All the episodes take place in the same part of the English countryside and all follow a fairly similar plot. There’s a flashback showing a murder years before, then the story picks up in one of the small Midsomer towns. There’s a slow build: a murder, another murder, and then a third. Usually, there’s some sort of sexual theme underlying the story, from adultery to incest, and then at the end of the episode, there’s a race in time to stop the murderer from killing again. The writers understand this formula, and play against it often enough to keep the stories interesting.
The second episode yesterday was one I hadn’t seen before, “Judgement Day.” In addition to the usual cast, one of the cast was Orlando Bloom. This of course interested my wife immensely, so I had to laugh when he was quickly skewered on a pitchfork — guess it prepared him for the critical reaction to his last two movies.