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Tuesday, September 28, 2010



Bless you, i09. I linked a contextually-appropriate blog entry on a UFO thread, and your readership has delivered! It has been a record-breaking day for my little puddle next to the Great Blog Sea. I hope that you enjoyed your visit, and will come back .
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Your Aardvark horrified his wife and Number-Two-Son on Saturday night by turning on Sharktopus, the SyFy channel's much-ballyhooed movie. (I am amused...Blogger thinks "SyFy is mis-spelled. Imagine that.)
Roger Corman's schlockfest was precisely as dreadful as we had dreaded with bated breath.
I will not bother with the script...it's about a sharktopus, after all. The CG effects are precisely what you should expect from a SyFy Saturday night feature. The lighting and surface detail of the shark head reminded me of nothing less than a Lego shark. No. Mega-Blox. The effects artists were apparently unfamiliar with continuity as a cinematic concept. From shot to shot, the critter would be wet, then dry, then wet, with no intervening dunking. The logic of this bio-engineered beastie defies apprehension: a shark's head, with octopus arms behind. Octopus arms with blades on the ends that it knows how to use. AND, it can walk on its arms on dry land, swarming up trees and architecture with no obvious need for sharkish gill-breathing.

Why would anyone make a thing like that?

Having spent a measurable portion of my life seeing it, I believe that Corman owes me summat. "Roger", himself sez, "Roger, have I got a story for you! A manic-depressive bio-engineer with too many hyphens in his life cobbles together the Octo-Shark, a cephalopod with a great white shark-head grafted onto each arm. It'll be COLOSSAL, I tells ya...."

Shouting while ducking the goons applying the straitjacket "DID I MENTION THE NARWHAL HORNS...?!"

5 comments:

Mrs. Pilgrim said...

You need to see "Devilfish" as riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000. It's...bad.

The Aardvark said...

Ohhhhhh, Mrs. P.

You bring a tear to mine eye. So good to hear trom you. I pray all is well with you and your family.

I am also amazed that you commented on THIS entry....

Michael W said...

Frankly, I think you should get a medal for actually sitting through the sort of movies that crop up on Syfy. For me, Life's too short.

The Aardvark said...

Medal, or straitjacket? Naaah, I don't waste much time on SyFy movies. I would as soon go brown-water rafting in the NYC sewers, this being appropriate since SyFy is the conduit through which Canada pumps its tax-subsidized effluent. to us.

I have always had a weakness for Roger Corman's schlock, though. Technology will never keep pace with his strange vision.

Have you ever seen the Fantastic Four movie he produced? "Nuff said.

Michael W said...

Yes, I saw Corman's Fantastic Four movie (a good lot of it available on YouTube, which is my second favorite source of video entertainment). I, too, appreciate Corman (the man is an unrecognized genius), but I'll remember him for better things than that (although admittedly I preferred Joseph Culp's Doctor Doom to Julian McMahon's. And I preferred Joseph Sirola, from the 60s animated series, to the both of them).