"What do you think, sirs?"

laelaps — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:26:10 +0000

Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment, but I having something of an affinity for cheesy B-movies. I probably acquired the taste during childhood, when Jaws II, III, IV, and most of the Godzilla series would be playing on any given weekend, and even though I would be hard pressed to give any of the movies more than 2 stars out of 5 I do like turning down the lights, grabbing some popcorn, and sitting down to watch something that I know is going to be nearly painfully bad. There are a few exceptions, a few creature features that stand out from the rest (i.e. Alligator, The Host), but by and large the films trigger plenty of unintentional laughs and are best viewed with someone who has a good sense of humor (and if you don't believe me, obviously you've never seen MST3K).

Hence, I have a bit of a proposal for my regular readers. I've been trying to think of a weekly feature for Laelaps for quite a while, ranging from "Fossil Fridays" to featuring a different mammalian carnivore every week, but as I was looking up information for the upcoming Aussie horror film Rogue, I thought I would put my slowly expanding collection of creature flicks to use. There's certainly no shortage of them, the number of killer crocodilian films alone would probably keep me busy for a few months, so every Friday I'll write up a little review of one schlock film or another, mostly focusing on "revenge of nature" type films. In fact, I'll probably start today after I get the chance to watch a stinker called Raptor Island. It's got Lorenzo Lamas of "Renegade" fame in it, so I'm sure it'll be a painful one, and if you want to join in on the discussion the movie is actually available for free online. Apparently the film was followed by a sequel entitled Planet Raptor, but that bit of movie cheese will have to wait for another time.

laelaps Fri, 10/12/2007 - 06:26

Tags

Cheesy Movies

B-movie

cheesy

creature feature

movie

MST3K

Mystery Science Theater 3000

Oh god, Brian. I watched Raptor Island when it was on the SciFi channel. It's so...horrible! But horrible in a very funny way. I think there's an abelisaur in there, so I give it a little bit of credit. I'm gonna have to try "Planet Raptor," and if it ends up being half as cheesy as it sounds (Raptors...IN SPACE!), it should be worth a few chuckles!

I look forward to this feature, though. I love B-movies, too (as you know). The Host was particularly good.

Watching sci-fi channel late at night when they have animal-mutants-movies is one of my guilty pleasures. You will never run out of blogposts-moviereviews if you start watching them all. Wanna start with "Anaconda"?

It's definitely on my list, Bora (as well as the sequel which was even worse). I'll probably start with films I own, though, although most of the films I have in mind are cheap or available through netflix so I'll be able to keep 'em coming. I'm going to try to get Raptor Island up today, and next week I'll probably do Grizzly or Frogs (there's no movie cheese like old movie cheese).

Insects are great - there was one with some kind of parasitoid wasps, using humans as hosts instead of moth caterpillars, on an island. Then, of course, the giant mosquitoes. And various giant Ants and cockroaches (including the one starring Mira Sorvino that played in real theaters when it came out). And I watched recently a two-movie series on a WWII-ear secret military experiment with inserting human genes into shark embryos, resulting in a very intelligent shark eating people around the island and very defensive marines guarding the secret from the shark-researchers....

So much fun! I loved The Host and Alligator! I try and rent a cheesy B movie for every A movie I see. My local video store has a section called "B's and Cheese."

I'm hopin' to see Pterodactyl and Dinocroc soon...

Nice; I actually stopped going out to rent movies and get most of my movie cheese through netflix these days, although every once in a while I'm compelled to buy one. I heard that they're remaking The Host for US audiences, but I don't see the point; the original film has great as it was originally made, and I don't think reworking it is going to improve it. Dragon Wars (D-War) is another story, however, and it might just be the most terrible movie I've ever seen.

Oh, and lest I forget, the MST3K crew is still at it and they've released some new DVDs under the name The Film Crew.