Bad Show, but . . .

Ever remember seeing something on television or a movie that was kind of terrible, but kind of intriguing at the same time. Sometimes it can be chalked up to youth. Shows that I thought were great when I was nine or ten, somehow didn’t hold up very well once I reached adulthood. One example of this is the Time Tunnel, an Irwin Allen production. In fact, you can pretty much lump all of Irwin Allen’s 1960’s TV shows into this category. But the Time Tunnel looked awesome to my eight or nine year old eyes. I even learned a bit of history along the way. The show left fond reminiscences in my memories. I probably had not seen an episode in thirty years when I rewatched the pilot a couple of years ago. I made some observations: the show really did look good. One thing I will say for Irwin Allen, he pulled out all the stops to make the special effects realistic and the sets were a thing of beauty. Just look at the design of the tunnel itself. It’s fantastic. The other observation is that the stories kind of suck. The two main protagonists are supposed to be scientists, yet they do things that no scientist would ever do and at times they are dumb as posts. I guess it wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered.

When I was about twelve, I started watching a different show: UFO. The special effects looked cheesy even to my 12 year old eyes. Nowhere near as good as the stuff Irwin Allen churned out. I knew it wasn’t great television, but I still kind of liked it. Though I must admit, what my adolescent brain probably liked most about it was Lieutenant Ellis and the other girls in their sexy uniforms. I recently watched some of the old episodes and had to laugh at the ridiculous dialog and occasional overacting, and yes, the special effects look just as bad today as they did back then.

Then we have another category: A show that I saw as an adult and knew it was bad . . . but still kind of liked it in a bizarre twisted frame of mind. A guilty pleasure, if you will. For an example of this, I choose Lifeforce which came out in 1985. This film had a few things going for it: It had some good actors in it. It had excellent special effects including some cool practical effects. It had stirring music by Henry Mancini (no really, it was superb). But then we come to the down side. As I mentioned, there were good actors in it. Unfortunately that does not include the leads. The word ‘wooden’ comes to mind, but I don’t want to insult trees. The lead actress did not even speak English when filming began, and had to learn her lines phonetically. I guess they thought no one would notice, as she spends most of the movie naked. The plot? I think they had a couple of plot ideas and they couldn’t decide which ones to use so they just threw them all in a blender. I can imagine the production team meetings: “Let’s have space vampires. No, maybe make them zombies. No, let’s have an apocalypse story. A love story? A blood bath? Several blood baths? Oh, that astronaut we had in the first scene . . . let’s bring him back near the end of the movie for no reason. Whatever, as long as we have lots of exploding bodies.” I am not saying I would ever buy this movie, nor will I probably even watch it again, but it does hold a sort of weird fascination.

Some movies are so bad that they are good. Lifeforce does not quite make the cut. By that I mean, it is not bad enough. For that you need to look at the movies of Ed Wood and others like him. His magnum opus: Plan Nine from Outer Space, has been voted the worst movie ever made. When I told my son we were going to watch it, he asked me why on earth you would want to watch the worst movie ever made. I said, “just watch. You’ll understand.” Two minutes in, he was rolling on the floor with laughter. See, I am a good father. I taught my son what was important.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).